Perils in the Transvaal and Zululand Part 33

"I say, George," said Margetts, "shouldn't you like to see the courtship?"

"Well," answered Rivers with a smile, "I must say I should. But of course that is impossible."

"No, it is not," rejoined the other. "Look here: the big dresser runs right through the wall, and there is a cupboard behind that communicates with it, through the cracks in the door you can see everything that pa.s.ses."

"Wouldn't Thyrza dislike it?" suggested George.

"No. I'll be bound she would be as much amused as we are. It isn't as though she cared a straw for him."

"Well, that is not unlikely," rejoined Rivers. "Come along then. I must own I am curious to see it."

"Creep in here," said Margetts, opening a door in the wall, "and mind you don't make any noise. There are some holes in the dresser through which we shall be able to see."

Almost as he spoke, the door of the parlour opened, and Thyrza was seen standing on the threshold, with the bit of candle in one hand and a match-box in the other. She proceeded to light the former, and placed it in an empty candlestick on the table, and then seated herself--not, as her swain had probably hoped, on the large heavy, wooden-legged sofa which ran along one side of the table, but in the large arm-chair, usually occupied by her mother.

Rudolf, though somewhat disappointed at the position thus taken up, glanced, nevertheless, with approbation at the bit of candle provided, which, in his view of the matter, intimated that the lady was not disposed to abridge the length of the interview. He seated himself in a chair, as near as he could contrive to his inamorata, and looked admiringly at her.

"I say," he said, after a silence of some ten minutes or so,--"I say, I think you are very nice. I admire you greatly."

"You are very obliging," said Thyrza demurely.

There was another pause, after which Rudolf spoke again.

"I say, I mean to come over here very often to see you."

"Indeed?" replied Thyrza with a glance at the candle. Alas! not a quarter of it had yet been expended.

"You don't dislike me, do you, Miss Rivers?" inquired her suitor, after a third and still longer interval.

"I don't know why I should," was the answer.

Deriving some confidence, apparently, from this extremely guarded expression of opinion, Rudolf made a further venture.

"I should like to give you a kiss," he said.

Not meeting with any response, and proceeding perhaps on that most delusive of all proverbs, that silence gives consent, he rose from his place and leaned over her chair, out of which she started with very evident alarm. Believing this to be only feigned reluctance, he pressed forward to urge his entreaty, when suddenly there came a loud explosion.

The candle flew all to pieces out of the socket, scattering the tallow in all directions, and the room was left in complete darkness. George and Margetts could hear Thyrza making her escape through the door, while the unlucky lover, wiping the grease from his clothes, made his way to the stable, and rode off as fast as his horse could carry him.

"Redgy, you villain!" exclaimed George, after they had retreated to their room and given vent to their laughter,--"Redgy, you villain, that was your doing!"

"It was the plug of gunpowder, not I," pleaded Redgy. "Mrs Rivers oughtn't to have left the candle all that time on Thyrza's dressing-table."

"Did Thyrza know anything of the trick?" asked George.

"On my honour, she did not."

"Well, it is a good job we are going to-morrow, or there might be a serious row about this."

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO.

It was a Sunday evening late in December, about nine months after the departure of George Rivers and his friend from Umtongo. George, who wore a suit of clerical black, had just returned from a long ride to Spielman's Vley, where he had pa.s.sed the day. He was now a deacon, having been ordained by the Bishop of Praetoria a month or two previously. The weather was delicious, but very warm, and George was glad to sit down by his friend's side in a charming little summer-house which they had built under the shade of a tall eucalyptus planted by Mr Rogers when he first came to the Transvaal, forty years before.

"Well, George, what sort of a congregation had you?" inquired Margetts; "and how did you get on with your sermon?"

"I had a very good congregation," was the reply. "The farmer who bought Spielman's Vley of my stepfather is an Englishman, an emigrant from a Berkshire village. He and his wife and grown-up children were all there, and so were nearly all the farm-servants whom he had brought with him. He told me very earnestly how it delighted him to hear the Church service. It was like a voice from Old England, he said, and he couldn't tell me how glad they all were that a clergyman would come over from Umvalosa every alternate Sunday now, instead of once a month."

"And I daresay, when he was in Berkshire, he didn't think much of the Church service," suggested Margetts.

"No, he often didn't go, he told me, and cared very little for it when he did. And it was the same with his labourers. They seldom miss the service here. Well, it is to be hoped that they will not come to neglect it again, now it is once more within their reach."

"But how about the 'natives' service'?" asked Redgy. "Could you get on with that?"

"I am afraid I made a good many blunders," said Rivers, "especially in the sermon. However, nothing but practice will set that right."

"You think an interpreter doesn't answer?"

"No, I am pretty sure it doesn't. You know what Lambert told us about his interpreter, when he first went to preach to the Kaffirs in the Knysna."

"No, I didn't hear the story."

"Lambert said he was puzzled how to address them, when it occurred to him that 'Children of the Forest' was a t.i.tle that would be sure to take their fancy, and he accordingly began his discourse to them in that way.

He thought he had done it rather well, until one of his friends, who had heard him, and who was a good Kaffir scholar, told him that the interpreter had rendered his 'Children of the Forest' as 'Little men of big sticks.' That story determined me never, anyhow, to employ an interpreter."

Redgy laughed. "I think you are right," he said, "and your Kaffir certainly improves. By-the-bye, did you see Hardy? His house is only seven or eight miles off from Spielman's Vley, and I am told he always goes over when there is service there."

"I believe he does, but he was not there to-day. Mr Bacon told me he had gone to Durban--went about a week ago."

"Indeed. Do you know what took him there?"

"I fancy he was sent for to make some report of the state of things in this neighbourhood. You know he now holds an official position of some importance."

"Yes, which you might have had if you had liked it, George. He has the credit of having given them warning at Rorke's Drift in time to prepare themselves for the defence of the place. But it was you who brought them that information."

"I did not want the post, Redgy; and, if I had, Hardy was the person really ent.i.tled to it. I did not know the way from Isandhlwana to Rorke's Drift, and could not have found it. And to say the truth, I should not have thought of the garrison at Rorke's Drift, if he had not reminded me of it. No, he fully deserved his appointment, and I am heartily glad he got it. But I believe, when he gets to Durban, he will warn the Government that the Transvaal is not merely in a condition of discontent and disloyalty, but on the verge of an armed outbreak."

"Do you think it goes so far as that, George? An armed outbreak means a war with England, remember. What possible hope can they have in succeeding in that?"

"No reasonable hope, of course. The hundredth part of England's power would be enough to crush them. I don't suppose the Boers could bring 5000 men into the field, and England could easily send five times that number, or twenty times that number, if she chose. The Boers have but little discipline or material of war, or knowledge of strategy. England is a first-rate power in all those respects. It would be as absolute madness for the Transvaal to go to war with England, as it would be for a terrier dog to provoke a lion to fight with it. But, however great the madness, it does not follow that they will not do it."

"What can induce them?"

"Their profound ignorance of the relative strength of the two countries.

I was talking with a Boer of some intelligence, who, I found, really believed that Holland was one of the Great Powers in Europe--the equal, if not the superior of England. He knew nothing of history, apparently, since the times of Van Trompe and Admiral Blake. He fancied Isandhlwana had only been redeemed by a desperate and exhausting effort, which would make it impossible for us to engage in any other war for a generation to come. The accidental circ.u.mstance that a quant.i.ty of newly-coined money had been sent out here to pay the troops was enough to convince him that England was bankrupt, and driven to expend its last guinea. People who know no more than that of the true state of things may perpetrate any act of folly."

"No doubt, George; and I daresay also they argued that the disasters at Isandhlwana and Intombe proved that the English were not so formidable in the field as their own troops had always been. They had repeatedly fought these Zulus, remember, and always with complete success."

"Exactly; no doubt they did, and do, so argue. They were always on their guard, and we were taken off ours, and that made all the difference. But though the Dutch might practise their rude tactics with success on the natives, they will hardly get the English to approach them and be shot down after the same fashion. That is reckoning rather too much on even an Englishman's contempt for his enemy. But they mean mischief, these Boers. They are flocking down this way from all parts of the Transvaal. Whom do you think I saw to-day, of all people in the world?"