Petrus Johannes Stephanus Gerhardus Du Plessis, commonly known to his
kinsfolk and acquaintance and to the crowd at large as Piet Plessis, was
a high official in not the least important department of the Transvaal
Civil Service.
Born in the Free State, and educated--well educated--in Holland, he
combined the _slim_ qualities of the Boer with the shrewd, technical,
worldly-wisdom of the Hollander. He was now of middle age and somewhat
portly of person, and withal a jolly, genial Dutchman, whose ringing
laugh and jovial manner conveyed the idea of open-hearted frankness to
the last degree. Those who ran away with that impression had their
education in character-studying to complete. For all his apparent
open-heartedness, Piet Plessis was never known by word or wink to "give
away" anything. And he could have given away some "things" of a very
strange and startling nature had he so chosen.
Did a transport rider bringing up loads of Government goods from the
Swaziland border succumb to the indiscretion of peeping into certain of
the cases, and subsequently babble thereon in his cups, it was not
strange that he should be murdered by his own Kafirs on the return
journey, because that sort of thing does happen sometimes, though not
often. Was the dead body of a mysterious foreigner found one morning in
the Grand Stand on the racecourse at Johannesburg, the hand grasping a
revolver pointed at the heart, through which was a neatly drilled
bullet-hole, with no burn of powder about the clothing? This was not
strange, for does not everybody know that the hand of a dead person will
sometimes grasp an object tightly for hours after death--though not
often? And doctors will sometimes disagree, though not often? Did a
prominent member of the Upper Raad, who owned a chattering wife, make an
over-protracted sojourn in the Cape Peninsula for the benefit of the
lady's health? That too was not strange, for it happens sometimes. And
if Piet Plessis' private office had very thick walls and double doors--
padded--this was not strange either, for is not the climate of the
Transvaal fairly bleak during quite half the year? On many an incident,
strange, suspicious, or startling--or all three, had his acquaintance
striven to pump Piet Plessis--in club, or bar, or society drawing-room;
but they might as well have expected to dig sovereigns out of the
billiard cues in the one or real ten-year-old out of the "special
Scotch" bottles in the other, or the precise ages of any three ladies of
a middle time of life in the third. Tact and readiness of resource are
highly important official ingredients. Piet Plessis possessed both to a
consummate degree, which may have had to do with the fact that he was
now a very important official indeed.
Piet Plessis and Stephanus De la Rey were second cousins. It is
significant of the wide ramifications through which relationship extends
among the Dutch inhabitants of South Africa, that the high Transvaal
official and the well-to-do Cape Colony Boer should be so near akin.
They had hardly seen each other for some years, but intercourse between
them had been renewed in the shape of a cordial invitation to Aletta to
come up and spend some time in the Transvaal.
The girl was delighted. Her patriotic enthusiasm, though somewhat
sobered down of late, yielding to more personal and individual
considerations, was not dead by any means. To visit Pretoria under the
auspices of one who knew all the secrets of the Government, opened out
before her unbounded possibilities in the way of a vivid daily interest
at that critical period. She pictured herself in the confidence of her
kinsman, and he was in the confidence of the President. What would she
not hear!--what would she not know! But, as a preliminary, she little
knew her kinsman aforesaid.
But Piet while keeping his own secrets and those of the President to
himself, gave her a welcome that left nothing to be desired. So, too,
did his wife, a quiet woman, half-way through the thirties, rather
good-looking, but retiring and domesticated--not at all the sort of wife
for a public man, declared his acquaintance; wherein they were wrong,
for Mrs Plessis made all the better hostess, in that she cared nothing
for state affairs, desiring only to be left to look after her household
in peace and quietness. Piet, himself, moreover had good reason to
prefer her that way, inasmuch as he could seek the repose of his
domestic circle without being harried by all sorts of questions he had
no intention of answering.
He received the news of Aletta's engagement with a burst of genial
laughter, evoked less by reason of the fact itself than by the
particulars thereof.
"So, Aletta?" he said. "An Englishman! And that is the culmination of
all your exuberant patriotism, is it? An Englishman? Well, it might be
worse. You might have got taken by one of those _rooi-baatje_
officers--so many of you girls down at the Cape seem to go mad on them.
Bah, they are too often an impecunious lot, all debts and gold
stripe"--(the reader must bear in mind that racial animus was at its
highest tension, and that the speaker was a Transvaal official). "You
should see them a few years later, as I have seen them, with very little
half-pay and very large family, living cheap at some wretched Belgian
town. Still--an Englishman!"
"But there are Englishmen and Englishmen, Cousin Piet," returned Aletta,
laughing as one could afford to do who was supremely conscious that the
laugh was all on her own side. "Wait till you see this one. He is not
in the least like the rest."
"Oh no. Of course not. How could he be, if your choice has fallen upon
him? Well, well. We thought we could have done much better for you up
here, but you have taken the bit between your teeth so there's an end of
it. Is he coming up here, then?"
"Yes, in a day or two. He came with me as far as Bloemfontein--wouldn't
come all the way yet--thought I had better have a little while alone
with you and Anna, so that we might get sort of acquainted. You see, we
hardly know each other yet."
"Why, I feel that we rather do already, Aletta," replied her kinsman
heartily, for he was charmed with her taking manner and general
appearance. He had expected her to prove presentable, if a bit shy.
But there was nothing of the latter about her. What an acquisition she
would be to that unpretentious but pretty house of his just outside
Pretoria!
And in it Aletta was destined to pass some very happy days. To begin
with, the capital of the principal Dutch Republic stood to her as a kind
of Mecca, viewed in the light of her former lofty ideals; to others, of
course, it was just a pretty, leafy little town, nestling between its
surrounding hills. Brother officials of Piet's would often come to the
house--men who hitherto had been but names to her; genial, highly
cultured gentlemen, differing pole-wide from the black-browed conspiring
Guy Fawkes--such as the Colonial papers had delighted in painting them.
Uitlanders too, with a grievance of course, would frequently show up:
jolly, jovial, well-to-do looking, grievance and all; and at first it
fairly puzzled her to note on what excellent terms they appeared to
stand with their theoretical tyrants and oppressors. Sometimes, too,
she got more than a passing glimpse of the President himself. Here
again she failed to identify the perfidious ogre she had so often seen
portrayed, both in type and pencil, by the newspapers aforesaid. Nay,
more, she was even heretical enough to wonder whether if that
personality, with all its shrewd intelligence, had been on the English
side, ample tribute would not have been paid even to the outward aspect
of the man--so far only described to be held up to repulsion and
ridicule--the strong face, the impassive reticence, wherein alone lay a
world of diplomatic might--the long stern record of pioneer,
_voortrekker_, leader of men; the opening up of wild uncivilised lands--
bearing a man's part in wresting the wilderness from the inheritance of
savagery to render it the heritage of posterity, and the unwavering
fixity of purpose wherewith he had devoted every energy to preserving it
for his own people and their children's children. If her sojourn in
Cape Town had been a liberal education to Aletta, truly Pretoria
constituted a worthy continuation of the same.
"Now look at that, Piet," she said, a day or two after her arrival,
exhibiting an excellent portrait of her _fiance_. "Didn't I tell you
there were Englishmen _and_ Englishmen. Now, this one is not like the
rest. Is he?"
"No. I don't know that he is," replied Piet Plessis, scanning the
likeness intently. But to himself he was saying, "_So_! I must have a
few inquiries made. I have seen that worthy before. Oh yes, I have."
But to her, "So he has been a neighbour of yours the last year or so,
Aletta?"
"Yes. He was already settled down on his own place some time before I
came home."
"Was he? Never went off it, I suppose?"
"No"--wonderingly. "He has been there since he came back from Rhodesia,
he and Frank Wenlock together. At least, he was looking out for a farm
at first, while he was staying with the Wenlocks. Then he got one and
hasn't been off it since."
"Not?"
"No--except to go into Schalkburg now and then, or to come and see us."
"Oh yes. To come and see you?" rejoined Piet, jocosely. "Hasn't been
up here at all of late, eh?"
"He has been up here before, but not lately, not within the last year.
I think longer, because he served through the Matabele rising. But he
was up in Rhodesia some little while after that."
"Was he? Oh yes," said the diplomatic Piet, in a tone as though by now
only politely interested in the subject. But the while he was, to all
outward appearances, turning the photograph round and round listlessly,
but in reality scrutinising it keenly, now obliquely from the top
corner, now sideways. "How long did you say you had been engaged,
Aletta?"
"Just over two months," answered the girl, her eyes brightening.
"_Ach_! he isn't listening to you at all, Aletta," struck in the partner
of Piet's joys and sorrows, looking up from her book. "He has forgotten
all about Mr Kershaw by this time, and is thinking over the last
political move. What did you say his name was--Mr Kershaw's, I mean?"
"Colvin. It's a family surname turned into a Christian name. Oh, and
such a joke, Anna! You should have heard Tant' Plessis on that very
thing," And she proceeded to narrate how that perverse old relative had
insisted on saddling upon her _fiance_ a historic Protestant Reformer of
the sixteenth-century for grandfather. Piet fairly shouted with mirth.
"Old Tant' Katrina! _Ja_, she was a _kwaai vrouw_!" he cried. "I have
good reason to remember her. When we were young ones, at Rondavel, the
other side Heilbron, she would come and stop there for any time. She
was always saying we didn't get enough _strop_ and worrying the _Ou'
Baas_ to give us more. He only laughed at her--and one day she wanted
to give us some herself. But we wouldn't take it. We snatched the
_strop_ from her and ran away. But we had to spend a week dodging her.
She had got a broomstick then. She shied it at us one day, and hit my
brother Sarel--the one that is in Bremersdorp now--over the leg. He
couldn't walk straight for about six months after. Then she and the
_Ou' Baas_ had words, and she cleared out _Ja_, she _was_ a _kwaai
vrouw_. And now she is with Stephanus! Well, well. But Aletta, what
did she say to your being engaged to an Englishman?"
"Oh, she consoled herself that his grandfather was the great Calvinus,"
answered Aletta, breaking into a peal of laughter over the recollection.
"Mynheer had said so: that was enough for her."
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A few days after this Colvin arrived in person, and then it seemed to
Aletta that she had nothing left to wish for. But he would not allow
her to give him all her time exclusively. She had certain social calls
upon it, and, in justice to her entertainers, these must not be set
aside. Piet Plessis had been the first to notice this, and was capable
of appreciating it, for he himself was astonished at the brightening
effect the presence of Aletta had shed within his home.
"Did I not tell you," she would cry triumphantly, "that this Englishman
was not like other Englishmen?"
And Piet would laughingly agree.
Colvin himself did not fail to note the pride and delight wherewith she
would "produce" him--as he put it--to every fresh batch of people whose
acquaintance he made. Once or twice he took her to task for it.
"You know, darling," he would say, with a lurking amusement in his eyes,
"it is not `up to date' to show feeling. You ought, for instance, to
appear just languidly tolerant of my presence at all--rather as if I
were of no account in the world's scheme except to fetch and carry."
"Oh, ought I?" she would answer. "Well, when I see you want me to, I
will try and begin."
Those were happy days--for these two at any rate. For those outside the
enchanted portal they were days of dark anxiety; yet on the surface
little of this appeared. People came and went as usual. To judge from
the ordinary manner of Piet Plessis, no one would have suspected the
mind of that inscrutable official to be working and scheming to its
utmost capacity. He was a good deal away from home, returning late, or
not at all, and then with a cheerful breezy apology for the calls upon
his time entailed by a confoundedly serious political outlook. But he
had at once made Colvin free of the house, and the latter was grateful
for the quiet uninterrupted retreat thus afforded from the turmoil of
excitement and wild talk outside; and not the least happy hours were
those he spent in the cool, bosky garden, while Aletta sat at her work,
and talked to him, and they grew to know each other more and more, and
every day served but to deepen their mutual understanding, and love, and
appreciation. So the days wore on, and then from the bright, halcyon
blue, now constituting the lives of the twain, the bolt fell, and the
name thereof was written in but three letters--lurid letters traced in
blood--
War!
Yes, the storm had burst at last. The preliminary clouding over, the
flashes and mutterings, distant but drawing nearer, had culminated in a
great and terrible outburst, in the thunder roar of cannon along nearly
a thousand miles of border. The historical "ultimatum" had been
delivered. The land which but few years ago, comparatively speaking,
had been inhabited, and that hot too thickly, by a population of
primitive farmers, had thrown down the gauntlet in the face of the
valour and wealth and boundless resource of the Empire on which the sun
never sets. And the challenge had been met in the only possible way,
and once more two Christian and civilised races were shedding each
other's blood like water, while countless swarms of dark-skinned and
savage heathen stood by and looked on.