Aletta Part 15

"May, where are you? May?" shouted Frank, in stentorian tones. "Oh, there you are. Here's a whole crowd coming down into the drift. Looks like the De la Reys. They'll be here in a minute."

"I wish they'd be somewhere else in a minute, then," muttered May to herself with a frown that quite transformed the pretty, winning face within the ample white _kapje_.

Frank's surmise proved correct. The occupants of the cart were the three De la Rey girls and their brother Jan. As they drove up Mrs Wenlock came out in a flutter of excitement and welcome.

"How good of you to come over!" she said. "I am so glad to see you. We don't get many visitors just now. Why, Aletta, I should hardly have known you. My, but you must have been away quite a long time. I suppose you have been having grand times down at the Cape. And how tall you have grown! Well, I always say it does a girl good to send her about among folks and to see a little of the world. Let's see, I don't think you and my May have ever met. She was not with us when we first came up."

May, who had already been exchanging greetings with the other girls, now turned to this one.

"No, we haven't," she said. "How do you do, Miss De la Rey?" And as the two clasped hands each was mentally reading the other.

"What a figure!" thought May to herself. "How easily and with what unconscious grace she moves! I wish I had it instead of being fat and dumpy"--which she wasn't--"and beautifully dressed, yet quite plainly.

Well, she isn't pretty, that's one thing. Oh no, she isn't in the least pretty."

"So this is 'the only English girl,'" Aletta was thinking. "She is pretty. Yes, mother was right, she is very, very pretty. Those blue eyes--like Table Bay when the sun shines on it at noon--I wish I had them. And the gold of her hair, and her beautiful colouring. I do believe old Tant' Plessis must be right. Frank, too, has improved since I saw him. He has grown quite good-looking."

The said Frank, having shouted ineffectually for one of the boys, presumably away on some other business, was helping Jan to outspan.

"Well, Jan," said Mrs Wenlock as they all went inside, "you have been a long time bringing your sister over to see us."

"Andrina and I have only just got back ourselves, Mrs Wenlock," struck in Condaas. "Aletta has had a lot to do at home. And we have had old Tant' Plessis there and ever so many people."

"Ever so many people. Yes, I think you have had some people you would have been better without, if report speaks true," replied Mrs Wenlock, shaking a finger at the speaker with a good-humoured laugh. "There are those who come a long way to breed sedition and discontent and differences among folks who are quite happy and contented. We quite thought you had deserted us nowadays because we were English."

Mrs Wenlock, you see, was one of those good souls who pride themselves on speaking their minds--in this case an utterly tactless operation. A momentary frost lay upon the whole party. But the situation was relieved by the readiness of Aletta.

"Why, Mrs Wenlock, you are forgetting that there is some English blood in us," she said.

"To be sure I was, child. And your father, although there is no English in him, he is a man for whom I have the greatest regard. He is the last man to listen to agitators and sedition-mongers--of that I am quite sure. How is he, by the way, and your mother?" They rea.s.sured her as to the perfect state of health and well-being enjoyed by both parents, which had the effect of leading the conversation away from a very delicate subject. May, the while, had been out of the room to see about getting tea ready, and now returned in time to hear the following:--

"Why don't you bring your gun over, Frank?" Jan was saying. "Man, there is a fine lot of guinea-fowl down along the river--if Colvin has left any, that is. _Maagtig_, but he is fond of shooting birds. One _klompje_ down on the _draai_ by the white rock had nearly sixty birds in it, and now there are nine. Colvin has shot all the rest.

Guinea-fowl are not easy to get at, you know. There are other _klompjes_, but he will do the same with them, so you had better be quick or there will be none left."

"He must have been shooting a lot at your place, Jan."

"He has. Rather. He comes over nearly every other day to have a shoot.

Why, we shall soon have hardly anything left if he goes on at that rate. But the season will soon be over now. Not that we care much about season or no season if we want a buck to eat."

"Tut-tut, Jan! What's that you're saying? And your father Field-cornet, too!" struck in Mrs Wenlock.

May, who was presiding at the tea-tray, hearing this apparently harmless dialogue, felt it to be just about all she could do to restrain the ugly frown which threatened to cloud her face. "He comes over nearly every other day," Jan had said, yet he had not been near them for about three weeks, or close upon it--not, indeed, since that evening he and Frank had returned from Schalkburg together. He had never been away from them so long as that since he had been settled on his own farm, nor anything like it. What _did_ it mean? What was the attraction? The sport?

Well, the sport wasn't bad at Spring Holt. No--a darker thought gripped her mind and heart, making her miserable. The time corresponded, within a day or two, to that of Aletta's return. Well, what then? Surely she was tormenting herself unnecessarily. Surely she could hold her own against a Dutch girl--an ugly Dutch girl--she added spitefully to herself. But just then, as she was discharging her duties of deputy hostess mechanically while thus thinking, the voice of the "ugly Dutch girl" broke in upon her broodings, with a remark addressed to herself.

"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 circ.u.mstances, 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 const.i.tuting 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--b.a.l.l.s, 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-cla.s.s 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 Stepha.n.u.s'."

"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.