Aletta Part 6

The blue eyes were very soft as they met his. A wave of feeling swept over the man. Looking at her in her winning, inviting beauty as she sat there, an overwhelming impulse came upon him to claim her--to take her for his own. Why should he not? He knew that it lay entirely with him.

He made a movement to rise. In another moment she would be in his arms, and he would be pouring words of pa.s.sion and tenderness into her ear. The door opened.

"Haven't those two come in yet?" said Mrs Wenlock briskly, as she re-entered, and quietly resumed her seat, thus unconsciously affecting a momentous crisis in two lives. Was it for good or for ill? We shall see.

Note 1. "You d--d Englishman! Be quiet. I'll knock your head off just now."

Note 2.

"Oom Paul is riding on a pig-- He falls off and hurts himself, Then climbs up and rides away--"

A nonsensical bit of popular doggerel. In Dutch it makes a jingling rhyme.

CHAPTER SIX.

COLVIN MAKES A DISCOVERY.

"Gert."

"Baas?"

"Saddle up Aasvogel after breakfast. I am going over to Krantz Kop."

Thus Colvin Kershaw to his henchman, Gert Bondelzwart. The latter was a b.a.s.t.a.r.d Griqua--an elderly man, of good height and powerful build. He had taken part in the Langeberg rising, but had been "slim" enough to slip away just in time, and had contrived to put a large section of country between himself and the scene of his former misdeeds. At this man Colvin's neighbours looked askew. He had "schelm" writ large all over his yellow personality, they declared. Colvin himself thought them likely to be right; but then Gert suited him. He was a good servant, and had never given him any trouble. Moreover, he had an idea that the fellow had, for some unaccountable reason, conceived an attachment for himself. Anyway, he did not choose to part with him to please anybody.

"Did you hear what I said, Gert?"

"_Ja_, sir."

"Then why the devil don't you answer, and go and do what I tell you, instead of standing there shaking your silly head as if a bee had stung you in the ear?"

"Krantz Kop is up at the far end of the _berg_, sir. Boer _menschen_ up there very _kwaai_."

"Well? What's that to you? I didn't say I wanted an after-rider."

"Gideon Roux very _schelm_ Boer, sir. Strange things happen at Krantz Kop."

"Oh, go away, Gert. Get in Aasvogel from the camp--no, he's still in the stable. Well, give him another bundle, so long."

"What am I to ride, sir?"

"You to ride? Confound you, I said I didn't want an after-rider."

"I would like to go with Baas."

Something about the persistency of the man struck Colvin. This yellow-skinned henchman of his was a wonderful fellow, and there was precious little he didn't know. Well, he would take him.

"You can go then, Gert. You'll have to ride Pansy, and she's in a camp full of _kwaai_ birds. Cobus and the others can help get her out--but hurry up, for I don't want to be kept waiting."

Colvin turned into his house and sat down to his solitary breakfast, waited upon by Gert's wife, a middle-aged well-looking woman, as neat in her attire and person as the table arrangements were scrupulously clean and well served; a very jewel of a housekeeper, he was wont to declare, for a miserable bachelor establishment in the Karroo. The house itself was of no great pretensions--being merely a type of a not very well-to-do farmer's residence--it having just pa.s.sed out of the possession of that cla.s.s of Boer. But there was plenty of room in it, and it could easily be improved, if its present owner made up his mind to remain on in it. And, indeed, it was a matter not very far from foreign to the question of improving and remaining on in it that was occupying the said owner's mind as he sat alone at breakfast that morning.

How would May Wenlock look in her bright, sweet freshness, making a second at that solitary table? Her personality seemed to be creeping more and more into his life. Why did he not ask her to share it, the more so that he had no doubt as to what the answer would be? He was not a conceited man, but he was a fairly experienced and clear-sighted one, and would have been a born fool had he failed to perceive that the girl was more than partial to him.

Propinquity--that is, opportunity--has much to answer for. They had been thrown together a great deal, for have we not said that he had spent some time with the Wenlocks while looking about for a farm of his own? Moreover, he had come there handicapped by a kind of spurious heroic glamour, in that he was supposed to have saved Frank's life on one occasion in the Matopo Hills, what time they were hotly pressed by the Matabele, and that rash youth had chosen to hang back when he should have been retiring with the column. He had collected half a dozen volunteers and brought him out just in time. To his own mind it had been all in the day's work, but others had seen fit to make a great deal more of it than it seemed to deserve. Of course the girl had begun by making a sort of hero of him. Again, he himself personally was the kind of man that women take to--cultured, travelled, well-bred, and full of _savoir vivre_. It would have been strange if, considering the life the girl led, the few men she saw, of her own nationality at least--for although several of the young Dutch men around were both well-looking and well educated, she could not take to them--she should come to think a great deal of her brother's friend, and their only English neighbour.

Hence the intimacy that had grown and ripened between them.

Now he sat there thinking everything out. How near he had been only the evening before last to asking her to share his life! A fraction of a moment more would have done it, but for the interruption--timely or otherwise. Which was it? He loved her--how indeed could he help doing so, when in addition to all her attractions she was always so sweet and lovable to him? But he was not _in love_ with her. He had pa.s.sed the age for "falling in love;" had reached that wherein men become wholesomely critical. May Wenlock _as_ May Wenlock was one personality--and a very charming and alluring personality at that May Wenlock with a proprietary interest, and a legally signed and sealed vested right in himself, was another. He had not been slow to descry in her a very strong spice of natural temper and wilfulness; and although now her demeanour towards himself was invariably sweet and winning, would it always be so? And this was a side of the picture which did not allure.

Propinquity! He had seen repeated instances, of the results of this, had even experienced some. The girl or, woman who "could not live without you" to-day might be voting you a bore of the first water by this time next year, or even earlier. Personally he had never felt disposed to find fault with this development. It cut both ways, as often as not in point of fact, his experience told him. But on one occasion, long years ago, it had not. He had been hard hit, and the process had left a bruise, a scar, not readily obliterated. Now, however, applying the recollection of that case to this, he decided that the symptoms were wanting. He was not in love with May, much as her presence appealed to him, and yet the consciousness of what he knew his presence meant to her afforded him a gratification he would not have been human had he not experienced.

Preferentially, too, he was not inclined to embark in matrimony. He had seen too much of it--too many instances of the weary humdrum chain thus riveted, the welding together of two lives into a deteriorating round of petty frictions which it furnished. But in this instance there was a still greater and, to his mind, more fatal bar. With all the advantages, the free and easy social code, and republican waiving of social distinctions which colonial life afforded, the fact remained that the Wenlocks were some little way from being his social equals. And he was a great believer in birth and breeding. In which connection he could not but admit to himself that the mere fact of the interruption by Mrs Wenlock of their _tete-a-tete_ the other evening had jarred less upon him than a something in her tone and speech when effecting it.

More uneasily still, he was constrained to admit that he had on certain rare occasions detected manifestations of lack of breeding in May herself, such indeed as he had never traced a sign of, at any time or under any circ.u.mstances, in the De la Rey girls for instance, or in any member of that family. And yet Stepha.n.u.s de la Rey was "only a Boer."

At this juncture the sound of horse hoofs outside cut short his meditations. The morning air was fresh and keen, and Aasvogel, a tall, deep-shouldered iron-grey, having been stabled for some days, gave him plenty to take care of when first mounted. But Colvin was fond of riding, so presently, letting out the powerful animal for all he wanted over the wide Karroo plains, a sense of keen joyous exhilaration scattered all serious thought to the four winds of heaven.

Soon the plain was left behind, giving way to a steep, rugged mountain-road winding between the spurs. Higher and higher it led, overhung by craggy cliffs, resonant with the shrill scream of the _dasje_ and the loud hoa.r.s.e bark of the sentinel baboon.

"Look there, Baas," said Gert Bondelzwart, pointing to a cleft which ran up into a krantz where the slope ended not very high overhead. "That is where Gideon Roux shot a Kafir. He is a _schelm_ Boer is Gideon Roux."

"Was it during the war?"

"_Nee, nee_, sir. The Kafir had come to take away a girl Gideon Roux had on his place. Gideon did not want her to go, but the Kafir insisted--said he had been sent by her people to fetch her. So Gideon had him tied to the waggon-wheel and thrashed him with an _agter os sjambok_, till he should promise not to ask for the girl any more. He would not; so Gideon left him tied up all night, promising him some more sjambok in the morning. But by then the Kafir had managed to get loose.

He hadn't much start, though, and they hunted him with dogs. He tried to hide in that hole there, but Gideon and Herma.n.u.s Delport they called to him to come out. He wouldn't. He had climbed on a rock inside to escape the dogs and was afraid to move. So they shot him dead."

"When was this, Gert, and what did they do with the body?"

"About three years ago, Baas, or it might have been four. Do with the body? _Maagtig_, sir! There are holes and pits in these mountains where you or I might conveniently disappear and never be heard of again."

"Are you cooking up a yam, Gert, just to pa.s.s the time; for don't you know that in this country you can't shoot even a Kafir and stow him comfortably away without being tried for murder and hanged?"

The man shook his head, with a very humorous look upon his yellow face.

It bordered almost upon amused contempt.

"It can be done, sir, and it was done. All the country knows it.

Gideon Roux and Herma.n.u.s Delport only laugh. Not a man in the Wildschutsberg or the Rooi-Ruggensberg would dare accuse them, or dare come forward to give evidence. _Nee_, sir, not a man, white, brown, or black. There are very _schelm_ Boers in these mountains, and whoever tried to stir up that affair his life would not be worth a tickey. They would shoot him as they did the Kafir."

Colvin reined in his horse to the slowest of foot-paces, and stared at the cleft as though struck with an idea.

"Have you ever been into that hole, Gert?"

"_Nee_, sir."

"Then how do you know there is a rock in there the Kafir could jump on to escape Gideon Roux's dogs?"