Aletta: A Tale of the Boer Invasion

“You have been in the Transvaal lately, I hear, Miss Wenlock?”

“Not quite lately; not for a year. I have some relations in Johannesburg, and was stopping with them.”

“Ah! I have some there too. I may be going up there soon, but have never been. It is a very wonderful place, is it not?”

“Oh, yes. Miles ahead of any other in South Africa. It hasn’t got the Sleepy Hollow sort of look all these other musty old places have. English capital and energy have put it in the forefront.”

This was no sort of remark to make under the circumstances, and herein was another instance of May’s lack of breeding which would now and again crop up. It may have been that she was stung by a new discovery which had been brought home to her with the first utterance. This “ugly Dutch girl” had a beautiful voice, soft, well modulated, thoroughly refined.

It was a time when people were wont to rave at and wrangle with each other over the rights and wrongs of the political situation then nearly at its most acute stage, on far less challenge than May’s tone and words implied. This Dutch girl, however, did nothing of the kind. She went on talking pleasantly as though no such remark had been made – asking questions about the place under discussion, and seeming to take a vivid interest in the answers. Poor May felt very small, very inferior. She was honest enough to own to herself that she had transgressed against the laws of good breeding, and to admire the other’s self-possession and ready tact, though, as constituting another attraction, she loved not the possessor of these qualities any the more.

Then Frank and Jan went out to smoke a pipe or two together, and talk shop, and about sport, and the latest rumours from the Transvaal – though this guardedly. The girls, left behind, were chatting, and looking at things, notably some English fashion papers which May had got out. Then they, too, took a stroll out to look at May’s fowl-houses, and finally all met at dinner.

There was no lack of conversation. Aletta was telling them about her experiences at the capital – where none of her hearers, save Frank, had ever been – moved thereto by many questions from Mrs Wenlock, and all the good times she had been having – balls, and bicycle picnics, and Government House receptions, and dances on board one or other of the warships at Simonstown. May, listening with vivid interest, almost forgot her ill-humour, only failing where she was reminded of it by envy. That was the sort of life her own soul hankered after, instead of being stuck away on a dismal up-country farm. That was life – this stagnation. Yet could she at that moment have been offered her choice, whether she would be there or here, she would have elected to remain where she was.

“I thought Cape Town a beastly place,” declared Frank. “Nothing on earth to do there, and they wanted me to wear a bell-topper hat on Sunday.”

Aletta broke into one of her whole-hearted laughs.

“That’s the best definition I’ve ever heard,” she said. “No, really, I shall have to tell it to some of them next time I am down there again – if ever I am.”

“It’s true, all the same,” persisted Frank, looking remarkably pleased with himself and the consciousness of having said a good thing. But his mother told him he was talking nonsense, and proceeded with her cross-examination of Aletta. Had she seen the Governor, and was he like his portraits? and so on.

Oh, yes, she had seen him pretty often. Spoken to him? He had once or twice, in a kindly conventional way, spoken to her, but she was certain he would not know her from Eve if he were to see her again. There were so many people he had to talk to in the same way at officially social functions. But the point in this qualification was lost upon her questioner, whose honest middle-class soul swelled with a congenial respect for one who had actually talked with the Governor.

“Hallo! by George, there’s someone coming!” exclaimed Frank, as the raucous coughs of the one decrepit cur whose acquaintance we have already made, together with a sound of hoofs, gave notice of the fact. “Wonder who it is?”

May looked up quickly, a whole world of eager expectancy, of forestalled disappointment in her glance. And as she did so she met the eyes of Aletta.

Chapter Thirteen.

Two Verdicts and some Rancour

“Hallo, Colvin!” cried Frank, going out on the stoep. “Why, man, we had begun to think you were dead.”

“So?” said Colvin Kershaw, who was busy loosening the girths preparatory to off-saddling. “Whose cart is that, Frank? Looks like Stephanus’.”

“It is.”

“Is he here then?”

“No; only the girls.”

“Which of them?”

“All three.”

“Oh – . No, don’t have him put in the camp,” as a Hottentot came up to take the horse. “Just knee-halter him, and let him run. He can pick up enough round the house.”

As he entered, and greeted the girls, a subtle instinct told him that two of them were watching each other and him. May’s reception of him was somewhat brusque and rather too studiously off-handed. He read her face like the page of a book. She, keenly observant, noticed that he greeted the other three with the easy friendliness of people who know each other well, but without the faintest difference of tone or inflection in talking to each and all of them.

“Why, Mr Kershaw, we were thinking you were dead,” said Mrs Wenlock, in her cordial, breezy way. “It is a long time since we saw you last.”

“So Frank was saying, Mrs Wenlock. But I am not. Death has not given me a call yet.”

None there knew how very near truth their jesting words came – save one. One knew it, and with her Colvin, for the life of him, could not help exchanging a look. It was an exchange, and, swiftly as it flashed between them in its fulness of meaning, it did not go unobserved – by one.

“Hallo, Colvin, you’ve got your rifle along this time,” cried Frank, through the open window, who was examining the piece. “Why, I thought you never carried anything but a shot-gun down here.”

“I don’t generally. But I might be going up into the Wildschutsberg,” and again he brought his eyes round to those of Aletta. “Now and then you get a long shot at a reebok up there.”

“Why, this is the same old gun you had up in Matabeleland,” went on Frank, sighting the weapon and pointing and recovering it. “Nothing like these Lee-Metfords with the Martini block. By George, Miss De la Rey, how he used to make the niggers skip in the Matopos with this same pea-shooter!”

“Yes?” said Aletta, brightly, with simulated interest, but with a dire chill at her heart. What if this weapon should come to be pointed at others than dark-skinned barbarians, and that soon? Truth to tell for some occult reason the patriotic enthusiasm had cooled a little of late.

“Adrian had one of the new guns round at our place the other day,” said Jan. “A Mauser. He said it would shoot three miles. It is wonderful. I can hardly believe it.”

“Well, try a shot or two out of that, Jan,” said Colvin. “Only leave a few cartridges, in case I should come in for a good chance, riding along.”

Jan did – making some excellent practice, at ant-heaps scattered at varying distances over the veldt. Then his sisters declared that he had better see about inspanning, for it was time they were getting home.

“I shall have to be moving soon myself,” said Colvin. “I want to be in Schalkburg to-night.”

“In Schalkburg?” echoed Mrs Wenlock. “Why, you are in a hurry – and we haven’t seen you for such a time.”

“Yes; it’s a pity. But I have to do some business there first thing in the morning, so it’s as well to get there over-night.”

“I thought you said you might be going up to the Wildschutsberg,” said Aletta, with a spice of mischief. “Isn’t that rather a long way round?”

“It is rather. Only in the opposite direction. But I won’t go that way.”

And then, the cart being inspanned, they exchanged farewells. The handclasp between Colvin and Aletta was not one fraction more prolonged than that which he exchanged with the other two girls – if anything shorter. May, watching, could not but admit this, but did not know whether to feel relieved or not.

“So that is ‘the only English girl’!” said Aletta to herself as they drove off. “Old Tant’ Plessis was both right and wrong. They are not engaged, but still there is a sort of something between them, and that something is all, or nearly all, on her side. She would not make him happy, either – or be happy with him. She is pretty, very pretty, but common. She is gusty-tempered, has no self-command, and would be horribly jealous. No. She could never make him happy.”

Those whom she had left, however, were at that very moment formulating their opinions upon her, but aloud.

“What a nice girl Aletta has grown into!” Mrs Wenlock was saying. “She used to be shy and awkward, and nothing to look at, before she went away, and now she’s so bright, and smart, and stylish, and almost pretty. It’s wonderful what her stay at Cape Town has done for her.”

“I don’t think she’s pretty at all,” said May decisively. “I call her ugly.”

“No, I’ll be hanged if she’s ugly,” said Frank.

“No, indeed,” agreed his mother; “look what pretty hair she has, and pretty hands, and then her manner is so delightful. And there is such a stylish look about her, too! Don’t you agree with me, Mr Kershaw?”

“Yes; I do,” was the reply, made as evenly as though the subject under discussion had been Andrina or Condaas, or any other girl in the district.

“Well, I think she’s a horrid girl,” persisted May. “Style, indeed? What you call style, I call ‘side.’ She puts on a kind of condescending, talk-down-to-you sort of manner. These Dutch girls,” with withering emphasis on the national adjective, “are that way. They go away from home for a little and come back as stuck-up as they can be. That one is too grand for anything – in her own estimation. A horrid, stuck-up thing.”