Chapter Seven.Progress.Old Nick Retief sat on his stoep gazing at the six thousand morgen of naked veld that constituted his share of the world, and there was trouble in his eagle-like gaze. He had the peculiar Boer eye, a vague light-blue feature sheathed with puckered skin, capable of seeing a tremendous distance, and apparently always searching for sheep in some far-off bush.His undulating acres were composed for the most part of pasturage and poor pasturage at that. The rocky soil just escaped being “sour veld,” but was grey with rhenoster bush and dotted by countless yellow patches of stink-boschie. Sugar-bush too, that signal of unfertile land was more plentiful than propitious. Only about one hundred morgen were sufficiently rich to produce forage for the beasts, and there were no fruit lands except for an orchard of ancient apricot trees, and a little orange grove that nestled in a sheltered kloof near the river.A poor enough place from the point of view of the wealthy Paarl or Worcester-district farmers with their vineyards of rich black soil and river pasturage. But to Nick Retief it had no parallel among the beauty spots of the earth.On the sun-baked, wind-swept farm, bare of trees except for a line of blue gums before the house, a few clusters of pomegranate, and an oldkameeldorndown by the goat kraal—the big blonde old Boer had been bred and reared, and in turn had bred and reared his family. After his brooding inarticulate fashion, he loved its bareness and bleakness, the wide loneliness of it, and above all the deep silences that from day to day were unbroken save by the purling of the river, the voices of his “boys” busy at their tasks, or the lowing of homing cattle.He had never seen the sea, this old Boer of the back-veld, though (as the crow flew) it broke against the coast not more than eighty miles away. The purple mountains had no call for him, nor the busy town any lure like the lure of this unsheltered, whitewashed homestead on the flat-lands. In him still brooded something of the spirit of the old Voor-trekkers who trekked for the love of getting away from their fellow-men, and pitched their homes on the open plain with water at their backs and a vast emptiness before them; and to those who broke uninvited upon the silences or intruded on the empty plain, woe betided!That was the trouble with old Nick Retief. Someone was threatening to intrude on his land and break the spell of its silent loneliness. But it was not an enemy whom he could pot at from behind his laagered waggons, nor a dozen enemies. It was the Government of his country, bent on the business of laying down steel rails that would enable locomotive-engines to tear screaming and belching, back and forth between the Transvaal and the Cape. And ever since he had got the news of it, Nick had cursed the “slegtéGovernment of red necks” on his rising up and at his lying down, and always his slow-moving brain pondered heavily on how he could outwit it and prevent the abominable outrage.He did not approve of trains, and considered it his duty as a good Boer to resist such inventions of the Devil to the last ditch. He would give them a good fight if they were looking for it, thoseslegté skepsels! It was his land not theirs, and right was on his side. He would prove that to them, and win out in the fight, even if it took everyone of the thousand golden sovereigns covered over with loose bran and hidden in a paraffin tin under his wife’s bed. Never should they have his permission to come digging and blasting within a few hundred yards of his stoep! The thought was enough to make his wife, old Tanta Christina, turn in her grave over there by theklompjeof pomegranates, and bring the two tall sons who rested beside her forth to join in the fray with theverdommederetceteras.The first intimation he had received of the evil business was an official letter informing him that the Government had decided that the railway must pass through his land, and requiring him to appoint a valuer to meet and agree with the official valuer as to compensation. To this old Nick had written, or caused to be written—for he was one of those old-time Boers whose literary accomplishments went no further than the ability to sign his name with a laboured flourish—an infuriated reply, rejecting the Government, its valuers, and all that pertained unto the scheme. A second letter from Cape Town decorated with many red seals, contained an official proposal to buy the property known as “Jackalsfontein,” and an inquiry as to what price its owner set upon said property. The reply to this was brief to rudeness. The farm was not in the market and its owner was not selling at any price.To-day had come the third letter, a frigid document, firm and arrogant as only Governments secure in unlimited power dare be—and the burden of it was that whether the owner of Jackalsfontein liked it or not the Government was going to run a railway across his land. The survey work would proceed, and if Mr Retief objected he was at liberty to seek redress in the courts of his country. It was over this letter that the old man sat brooding in the morning sunshine, eyes on the distant sheep, one gnarled, knobbly hand lying clenched on the arm of his chair, the other hanging straight down almost touching the ground, thumb in the bowl of his pipe. His immense bulk of brawn and fat was clothed in garments cut and sewn by the fingers long since peacefully at rest beneath the pomegranates. The trousers were as two enormous drain pipes that hung suspended from above his middle in the straight lines abhorred of Nature; circling round his generous waist they sprayed out in a wide V over his stomach where the two top buttons failed to collaborate with the buttonholes. His short but roomy coat could easily have accommodated a second man of his size, and over his cotton shirt he wore instead of waistcoat his flowing beard—a tangled grey-brown affair tousled by many a south easter, and somewhat recalling certain lines of Edward Lear’s:“It is as I feared,Two cocks and a hen, one owl and a wren,Have all made their home in my beard!”On his feet were home-made veld-schoens of raw-hide, “breyed” to the softness of suède with toes cut square as the nose of a punt.From within the house could be heard at intervals a little snatch of song, like the chirp of a cheerful bird flying from bough to bough. At last in the doorway appeared Chrissie Retief, daughter and only remaining child of the family, a blithe good-looking girl between eighteen and twenty years of age. She addressed her father in thetaalspeaking reproachfully:“Ach! Sis, Pa! you still fretting there over that old Government letter?”He turned his vague ruminating eyes on her.“The dogs shall never bring their stink-machines across my land.”“What canyoudo then, my poor Poppa? Theywillbring them here, and you can’t do anything. You can’t shoot them with a gun, or throw them with a stone.”“I will fight them with the law—if it takes my last pound,” muttered Nick.“What’s the good? They will win in the end, Governments always do,” said Chrissie who had been to school at Paarl, and knew a few things.“We’ll see. I’ll go to Piquetberg to-morrow and talk to old Frickie de Villiers. He’s aslim kerel, and ought to be able tovernuckthem if anyone can. What is the use of my tin full of money if I can’t get the better of the dogs?”“Ach toch! What’s the good of fretting your blood then, Pa? Let them make their old railway. We shall see something then, but.”“Allemagtage! Are you a child of mine?” the old man roared. His vague eyes were suddenly fierce and full of fire. But Chrissie was not of the kidney to be intimidated even by her father. She turned away with a trill of laughter, finger on lip, to listen to a bird that had just perched on a branch of the kameeldorn and was calling out in three high insistent notes:“Bock-bock-mackeerie! Bock-bock-mackeerie!”It was the South African whip-poor-will whose cry heralds the arrival of strangers.“The bock-mackeerie!” cried Chrissie ecstatically.She was young enough to be keen for excitement in any shape or form and would not have objected to making coffee ten times a day for passing strangers. Anything that broke the monotony of life at Jackalsfontein was welcome to her. She put her hand across her eyes, blue as forget-me-nots, and looked into the distance, hoping for the sight of an approaching Cape cart. The roundness of her upraised arm strained the seams of her cotton sleeve, and a pretty curve from bust to waist and waist to heel was visible if there had been any eye to admire it. Her print dress was badly cut and the pattern faded from much banging on river stones. But there is nothing so difficult to hide as a good figure. Chrissie had got hers from riding astride, bareback, on young fillies and calves, and swimming in the river. The physical-culture mistress at Paarl had put a finishing touch by teaching her the value of poise and controlled muscles. Small wonder that the solitude of Jackalsfontein did not appeal to her as much as to her father. She was still in the romping, young-animal stage when she needed other young creatures to romp with. It was a dull life for the girl.“I see something, Pa! There is something coming,” she cried suddenly, and gave a skip of excitement.“Ach!” The old man spat scornfully, took from his pocket a stumpy bit of rolled tobacco, pitch-black in colour, and began to cut it into shreds using the palm of his hand for the operation. The stoep table was dark with tobacco juice and roughened by innumerable tiny cuts from this very business of tobacco cutting; but he always used his hand when he was preoccupied.His vague eyes had long ago, at three miles’ distance, distinguished that which Chrissie now descried crawling up the sloping land in clouds of red dust.“A flock of sheep,” she reported, “about fifty.—Some goats—Eight cows, two little calves, three mules—”“A herd of rubbish belonging to thatpat-looper(Road-footer) Carol Uys, sure as a gun,” grunted old man Retief.“It looks like his Kaffir Jim driving them,” Chrissie agreed. “And there is a man on horseback coming up behind.”“Thepat-looperhimself no doubt. Coming to try and sell his broken-down beasts to me.”“Ach! Pa, you know you got the red heifer from him, and that pair of mules Farnie Roos offered you 30 pounds for last week.”“Maar! They were not worth 30 pounds when I took them from Carol Uys.”“No, and you did not give him 30 pounds for them! Sis, Pa, you must be fair, then, but!”Chrissie’s eye was sparkling. She could not keep her feet still. She was entranced at the prospect of seeing Carol Uys, who was one of her suitors. He was the least prosperous of them, and her father was always crying out upon him, for apat-looperbecause he had to augment his poor income by going about and doing a little cattle dealing, but she liked him better than Piet van der Merwe, or big Farnie Roos. She was not in love with any of them, but she was very much in love with love and life, was Chrissie, and could not help a little bubble of pleasure welling up from her heart and escaping from her lips in a girlish laugh as she turned back into the house. A jolly-out-of-doors, healthy girl, chock-full of animal spirits and laughter and fun. One of the kind that old mother Nature has her eye on for purposes of her own!It was dark and cool inside the house, for Jackalsfontein, as in all decent Boer farms, had every door and window closed tight at six in the morning and not opened again until six in the evening, this being the Boer method of keeping out the scorching heat of summer. And a very good method too.In her bedroom, Chrissie proceeded to tidy her crisp blonde hair which was always perfectly tidy, and tie a broad piece of blue ribbon round her neck in such fashion that a fascinating bow was under her hair and the two ends of it stuck out behind each ear making her eyes look so much bluer that they resembled two bits of radiant sky studding her merry face. For some time she meditated over a large silver locket with a flying crane engraved on it, and containing a tin-type photo of her mother. She usually wore this on Sundays, suspended by a black ribbon round her neck, and was aware that it lent greatchicto her appearance.In the end, she decided not to wear it upon this occasion for fear her father should notice and ask her in front of Carol why she had it on. Not for the world would she have had Carol think that she titivated herself for him.At length, the sound of wheels grating in front of the house made her fly from her glass to the kitchen on the business of preparing coffee for the new-comer. For no matter how unwelcome the caller at a Boer house may be, he is always offered the hospitality of the country—a cup of coffee.With her own hands, Chrissie set out the bright tin beakers on the table of theEat-kammer, and piled high a plate of sweet hard rusks. Then opening the front door, she stepped once more into the sunshine.And, after all, it was not Carol Uys who stood there mopping the beads from his brow with a white handkerchief, and talking to old man Retief. It was a stranger with that red burn on his face and neck which only Britishers seem to achieve in the South African climate, and which long ago won for them the nick-name of “rooi-neks.”At the sight of him, Chrissie became shy and stood poised on one foot like a bird ready to take wing. It seemed she had arrived at an unpropitious moment. The old man’s eyes were suffused with blood and his fist lay on the table as though he had just banged it down there. His jaw stuck out aggressively. The stranger’s jaw also stuck out, but his hazel eyes had a cool, collected stare in them. This he transferred to Chrissie and removed his hat with the usual Dutch greeting.“Dag Mevrow.”She responded, and poised herself on the other foot for a change. After a moment, as old Retief put his pipe in his mouth and made no attempt at an introduction, the stranger continued, speaking with an air of quiet assurance to which her various Boer swains had not accustomed Chrissie.“Miss Retief?”She nodded.“My name is Richard Braddon and I am the engineer in charge of the railway-laying party. I’m trying to persuade your father that it is of no use kicking against the Government. He’d far better let us go about the business quietly.”“And I tell you you had better save your breath,” snorted Nick, “and keep off my land or I’ll blow you off from the barrel of my old Mauser.”The young man’s red skin grew a shade redder, but he smiled dryly:“I’m afraid I’ll have to risk that, Mr Retief, when the time comes.”Chrissie secretly approved the I-don’t-give-a-damn-for-you-and-your-old-Mauser way in which he said it. That was something to say to old Nick Retief all the same! She turned on her father now expostulating:“Foy toch, Poppa! It is not his fault, then. He has to do what the Government tells him, but!”“I’m not going to have the stink-engines on my land,” repeated Nick.“Well,” said Braddon pleasantly. “Let’s leave it at that. I’m camped out on Diepner’s land now beyond the river but we may get orders to start the bridge any time—and then the rails on this side—I only want you to be reasonable, Mr Retief, and realise that it isn’t our fault.”Nick rolled a blood-suffused eye on him.“You start on my land, that’s all,” he said with heavy significance.A minute later, he let out a terrific roar that shook the rafters of the verandah above him and was addressed to the native who had recently arrived with the sheep and cows.“What is the matter with you, you base-born son of a baboon, that you put your master’s scabby, leprous sheep into my calves’ kraal when I told you they were to go into that one down by the sluit?”Following this furious inquiry he arose and betook himself to the kraal, leaving Chrissie and Braddon together.“Will you drink coffee?” she asked.“Thank you, I’d like some very much.”She opened the door and went to fetch the beakers and rusks out on the stoep table. Braddon immediately bestirred himself to her assistance, proving himself still further unlike her several swains, for among the more ignorant class of Boers it is the affair of the women to wait upon men as upon the lords of the earth.Afterwards, the two sat down by the table and waited for the old man. Braddon made polite conversation. He felt no embarrassment, but neither did he feel much interest. He had met Dutch girls before and they had not “gone to his head” or to his heart either. Their complexions were invariably good, but as conversationalists they were draggy.“It must be dull for you living out here,” he remarked pleasantly.“Oh, no,” she answered smiling, “there is plenty of work to do on the farm.”He liked that spirit and understood it.“I know. When one is working time flies, doesn’t it? But there are occasional dull hours in the evenings I find.”“What do you do then?” she asked.“Oh, study a bit and read the newspaper when I have one, and write home sometimes—and think a lot.”“What do you think about?” pursued Chrissie.“Oh, I don’t know—work, and my people at home, there’s always something.”He examined her with a shade more interest. She was not so draggy after all, this Dutch girl. Certainly he had known them duller.“What doyouthink about?” he asked with a quizzical smile.“I think about the people who come to the farm,” said Chrissie simply.He looked up as if at a call. It was not so much her words, in fact, he was not surewhatit was that gave him a mental jump, but the impression was as startling as if she had taken a little hammer and hit a nail into him hard, only that no pain attached to the proceeding. She had risen, and was busying herself with the coffee-pot. He became aware for the first time of charming contours that could not be concealed by an old print frock. Also, that she moved better than most girls of her class; that her hair was becomingly done; and that the ribbon round her throat lent an added note of colour to her eyes. A glint came into his own eye, but Chrissie’s face was as demure as the face of a Greuze milkmaid. It is to be feared, however, that her heart was less naïve than her remark. The fact is, Chrissie was a natural-born flirt and knew perfectly well what she was about. She sugared the coffee with eyelashes brushing her cheek, biting her under-lip a little as if that helped to concentrate her attention on the task. Certainly it gave Braddon an opportunity of observing how white and even were those same teeth. Her nails too were daintily trimmed. Indeed she was a surprise he had never expected to find at Jackalsfontein, and what he could not understand waswhythe fact was only just dawning upon him. Certainly she was quite unlike all the other girls he had met on his trips into outlying districts. He wondered what had made him think she would be draggy.The strap of a case he wore slung round his shoulders chafed him and he unbuckled it and put a camera beside him on the table. Chrissie’s glance immediately seized on it.“You take photographs?”“Yes—do you?”She shook her head, her accomplishments did not run to that.“I only wish I could.”“I could soon teach you.”She laughed and blushed a little, leaning her round face on one shapely hand. He thought what a jolly picture she would make and the thought was father to the desire.“Will you let me take a photograph of you?”“Yes,” she said eagerly. “Quickly, before Poppa comes back.”It was the work of an instant. He snapped twice in case of a failure, then closed the camera and put it away.“Will you send me one?”“Or bring it, if you will allow me. I am only a few miles off.”Chrissie made no response to this but looked into her coffee cup as though it were a crystal ball in which she could read the future.“I am sorry Mr Retief should feel so badly about the railway,” said Braddon at last. “It’s got to come whether he likes it or not.”“That’s what I tell him.”“You are not against us then, Miss Retief?”Old Nick lumbering back to his chair perhaps prevented her from expressing any opinion on the matter, but she slid Braddon a blue glance that seemed to be an answer to several things besides his question. The old man, who had not recovered his temper, continued to smoke in gloomy silence like a smouldering fire ready to burst into flame at the least puff of wind. Braddon made an effort at conciliation by proffering an inquiry or two as to farming affairs generally, but met with no marked success.“How goes it with the sheep, Oom?” Oom Nick glowered at him for some time before grunting a response.“The sheep are abeetjethin.”Braddon essayed another throw.“How goes it with the land?”After a long silence.“The land is abeetjedry.”This was melancholy. Braddon, about to conclude with the usual polite query: “How goes it with the wife?” caught a swift glance from Chrissie and was reminded that he had heard of the old man being a widower of long standing.“How goes it with the fruit?” he ventured instead.“The fruit is abeetjebehind-time.”Nick looked gloomily towards his apricot orchard. Chrissie having piloted Braddon past a bad place was now smiling down her retroussé nose. He was considering the matter of moving on when someone else entered upon the scene. Old Retief had seen the Cape cart coming long since but, according to his wont, said nothing. The others were too much occupied with their own thoughts to notice anything, until the dust of Carol Uys’s trap blew over them from the loose ground in front of the stoep.“Dag, Oom!”“Dag, Carol!”The thin long-legged young Boer descended from his cart, fastened the pole of it to a staple driven into one of the blue-gum trees and came up the stoep steps. He was a pleasant-faced fellow about six feet three inches in height but of rather slight build. Chrissie had always liked his gentle eyes and gentle ways inherited from some far-off Huguenot ancestor, but to-day she noticed for the first time that he walked flat-footed and that the toe of one of his shoes pointed east and the other west. For the first time too she was not impatient at her father’s off-hand, rather scornful manner of greeting him. Old Retief despised the Uys clan, lock, stock, and barrel, because they were bad farmers. In fact though they lived on farms they were no farmers at all. Everyone knew it. An Uys farm was always farthest away from the markets and always pushed away in the corner of some mountainous kloof where the grazing was sour for the beasts and the land would grow nothing. Naturally there was nothing for the sons of such a farmer to do to make ends meet but take to transport riding or cattle dealing. And the truth was that the Uys taste lay that way—that was what old Retief had against them. They were horsey men, fonder of the road than the roof-tree, men who would sooner ride a hundred miles to deal for a pair of goats than do one day’s work at the tail of a plough. Retief despised such shiftless wanderers and wanted nothing of the sort for a son-in-law. Wherefore Carol Uys was none too welcome at Jackalsfontein. However, the handshaking that ensued was hearty enough and Chrissie, with heightened colour, poured coffee for the new-comer, and fresh cups all round.“Well? What broken-down old crocks have you got with you to-day, Carol?” asked the old man grimly.Uys waved his hand at the two handsome bays with black manes and tails, harnessed to the cart.“Look then! They speak for themselves, Oom. As smart a pair of Cape horses as you will see from here to Johannesburg. The very thing to drive Miss Chrissie tokerkwith on Sunday.”Needless to say Retief had passed a shrewd eye over them long since and come to his own conclusions. His business now was to conceal those conclusions, which happened to be favourable, behind a contemptuous smile and such sarcasm as he could muster. No very great amount!“I’m not on the look-out for grandparents for those I have to take Chrissie to church with already!” he remarked.“Ah! Oom Nick must not make jokes about those bays,” expostulated Carol seriously. “They are Clan-William horses—three-year olds. Why, they haven’t whistled yet (cut their baby-teeth). Oompie can look in their mouths and see.”“Mastag! It is hard enough to see them at all, they are somaar(thin)!”Carol aggrieved, turned to Chrissie.“No one could call themmaar. It is a dry season and I haven’t been able to get them much forage by the way, but no one can call themmaar.”“How much do you want for them?” asked Braddon.“Sixty pounds apiece, not a sixpence less,” declared Carol. “Don’t you think I’m right, Miss Chrissie?”Chrissie, with her father’s eye on her, knew better than to respond.“Hundred and twenty the pair! A stiff price,” remarked the engineer.“Not too stiff. Oom Nick knows the value of a good horse and is able to pay it,” said Carol firmly. He may have been no farmer but he knew his business as a horse-seller.“Their feet are too soft for this veld,” grumbled old Retief.“Not a bit of it, Oom. Clan-William horses are hard-veld horses—iron feet and mouths of velvet. You know it good enough.”“Well, and what’s the matter with my own horses that I drive tokerkevery Sunday?” asked Nick Retief aggressively.“Oom, they are not bad horses. I’m not saying they are bad horses, but they are five years old and don’t match—you know they don’t match. One has got abless(white blaze down forehead) and the other has a white foot.”This hit the old man hard. That bless and white foot had been his bane for many a day.“Oompie mustn’t drive to church like that any longer,” said Carol decisively. “It is unlucky.”“Ah! unlucky? I am unlucky enough,” glowered Oom Nick and reflected awhile in his beard while Carol drank more coffee and looked at Chrissie with his brown eyes which became very gentle and shy the moment he was not discussing horses. Chrissie inquired for his mother and sisters and brothers, naming each separately. Braddon tattooed the table, bored and vaguely irritated. At last, the old man got up and went down to the horses and began examining them minutely from mouth to hoof, jeering all the time and expostulating with Uys who had followed him.The engineer and Chrissie left alone sat a long time in silence apparently listening to the haggling and jeering below them, but in reality listening to queer little drumlike sounds going on within themselves.“May I bring you the photo when it is finished?” Braddon said at last in a low voice.She laughed her little bubbling laugh.“You see how it is with Poppa—he does not like the railway.”He looked at her steadily.“You mean I will not be welcome here?”“Poppawill not welcome you,” said Chrissie with the Greuze look. “Have another cup of coffee?”Her father and Uys were returning to the stoep. Evidently some arrangement had been come to, but they were still haggling.“Come on, Oom, you don’t want that red ox, now, it will pair with one I have and that will let you off another five pounds. Then I will take your old bays for 55 pounds and you will have only to pay me 40 pounds cash.”“Forty cash!” complained Nick. “It is too much.”“No, no, Uncle. It is not too much—you know that good enough. I couldn’t sell for less, even to Miss Chrissie’s father.”He looked with his shy brown eyes at the girl and she smiled back. Braddon got up quickly.“Well, I must go. Good-bye, Oom.”The old man scowled at him but shook hands.“Good-day,kerel.”“Good-day, Miss Retief.”“Good-day, Mr Braddon.”Perhaps some subtle message passed from her hand to his for his eyes cleared. He went down from the stoep, untied his horse, and mounted. It was a good horse and he sat on it as only a born rider can sit. If Chrissie’s good figure could not be hidden neither could Braddon’s horsemanship, and that is an accomplishment which Boer girls, in common with most other girls, admire. He was well aware of Chrissie’s glance fixed upon him as he rode away, swaying easily and gracefully in his saddle. He was not quite sure why the fact was so pleasing to him, but he whistled a gay little air, and the world looked a good place to him, and life much more attractive than it had looked an hour ago.Six months later, Nick Retief sat again on his stoep gazing with sombre eyes before him. At a casual glance all seemed unchanged, but a trained observer would have detected two profound differences: the landscape was no longer naked, and the old Boer had grown markedly older.His beard and hair showed great patches of white amidst their shaggy sandiness, the old eyes were bloodshot and full of strain, the folds of skin sheathing them reddened and weary. It was the sight they looked upon that made them weary: a line of tents not five hundred yards from the stoep, some tin shanties, huge piles of sleepers and rails, and a trail of pitched-up rocks and yellowy-grey earth. The gangers were at work on the business of bridging the Kat River and laying the railway line across Jackalsfontein.The old veld eyes that stared at that hated sight had seen many strange things since the morning when Braddon made his first appearance at Jackalsfontein. At last they had looked upon the sea, and the ships upon it, and the men that go in the ships; upon tram-cars and hansom cabs and streets crowded with fashionable women. Incidentally they had seen the inside of a Law Court, not once but many times.On six several occasions Nick had donned his black stove-pipe hat and driven the Clan-William bays acquired from Carol Uys to Piquetberg and been accompanied from thence to Cape Town by Frickie de Villiers theslim. But all the sights his eyes had there beheld brought him no solace, nor a passing thrill of interest. He had been at grapples with the Government; absorbed in the great fight to keep silent and naked the acres that he loved. And the Government had defeated him. The railway had come!Money had flowed like water, and it was not Government money. Little was now left of the original 2000 pounds that once had lain snug in the paraffin tin under the bed of the defunct Mrs Retief. To drag a case from the ordinary courts to the Supreme Court of the land and from thence to appeal to the House of Assembly does not cost nothing. Neither do the services of suchslimones of the earth as Frickie de Villiers, and a firm of Cape Town solicitors (who were Frickie’s cousins) and, finally, an eminent Q.C. (who was Frickie’s uncle) cost nothing. Nothing costs nothing when it comes to meddling with the law. Nick knew this now to his cost. Knew too that governments can be vindictive as well as arrogant. He had never heard of such a person as Lord Chesterfield, but of one Chesterfieldism at least he was now in a position to prove the truth:“Never quarrel with large bodies or societies:Individuals sometimes forgive; societies never do.”Instead of awarding him the compensation originally suggested for Jackalsfontein the Government had set a fresh brace of men to the task of assessment, with disastrous results for Nick. These officials, practical men with no fantastic illusions about the value of rock veld, rhenoster shrub, and stink-boschie, had written Jackalsfontein down for the poorest kind of cattle land. Such land is dirt-cheap in South Africa, and the Government was well within its rights in paying for it at dirt-cheap rates. What was worse, it would pay for no more than was absolutely needed to lay a narrow track of steel rails. The land that lay on either side of the fenced-off track, Nick was informed he could keep. That these wire fences would cut the farm in two thereby lessening its value, and that the nearest crossing gates were to be erected three miles away, was Nick’s misfortune, part of the reward he had reaped for “quarrelling with large bodies.”At any rate, it was all over now. Nick had eaten and drunk of Justice, grace had been said, and it was finished. The iron heel of the Law had him down in the dust. Nothing more for the old farmer to do but sit in the sunshine and watch the ridge of pitched-up earth creep over his land. His eyes were weary, but his heart was like a red-hot stone in his side.He no longer worked. The management of the farm had devolved entirely on Chrissie, and though she was no fool, the burden of care and responsibility weighed heavily on her shoulders.So absorbed was the old man in this business of watching that he appeared to have forgotten everything else. He came out in the dawn and sat through the unsheltered day in his reimpje chair. Sometimes even after night-fall he sat on, staring through the darkness until the camp lights died out and all was wrapped in silence. Then he would lift up his great bulk and shamble heavily to bed.And with each day his bulk seemed to grow greater. It was not a wasting sickness, this sickness he had of hate and rage. Chrissie noticed on the day of his last return from Cape Town, that he had assumed a curious resemblance to her mother in the latter stages of her illness. Old Tanta Christina had died of dropsy, and the girl sometimes wondered sadly whether the same disease, common amongst Boers, would snatch away her father. But though he grew swollen and visibly stouter there was none of the transparent whiteness which accompanies dropsy. Rather his colouring was red and purple, almost as if a fire, flaming within, boiled the very blood in his veins, bloating out his body and blearing his eyes. There were hours when Chrissie had a childish fear that he would burst. These were usually the hours when the gangers were at work with dynamite.For the engineer and his gang were not finding the affair of bridging the river and laying the rails across Jackalsfontein any too easy to accomplish. The rocks, concerning whose presence the valuers had been so explicit, justified their existence by appearing in places where they could best have been dispensed with. Dynamiting went on three times a day, and three times a day men fled in every direction for shelter. Once, during the first days they ran to the farm, but no more than once. The grim man sitting so quiet in his armchair frightened them. There was something awe-inspiring about that big figure and the sombre, vigilant glance of the bloodshot eyes. A superstitious Irish navvy declared that the farmer possessed the evil eye and had put the black curse of Ballyshane on them all.It is true that an extraordinary number of accidents had distinguished the rail-laying operations since Diepner’s land had been left for Retief’s. Scarcely a day passed without witnessing the sight of a trolley carrying off some injured ganger to the Cape Town Hospital.Those in charge too, had experienced trouble. Three different engineers had come and gone since the commencement of the bridge. First, Braddon, after waiting for two months on the Diepner side of the river, had barely settled his men on the Retief side, when he went down with enteric and had to be trollied off to the old Somerset Hospital at Cape Town. The next man broke his leg three weeks after taking charge. The third got blood-poisoning from a veld sore. A temporary man, put in charge, was called away to Kimberley by the sudden death of his wife. Now Braddon, after a long and slow convalescence, was back again.He and Chrissie had met only twice since the date of their first acquaintance. One afternoon he had ridden over with the prints of her photograph in his pocket. Old Retief was away on his first visit to Cape Town, and a girl friend from Piquetberg had come to keep Chrissie company in her father’s absence. It happened that some folk from a neighbouring farm were also visiting Jackalsfontein, and there was rather a large gathering in the bigEat-kammer. The girls, merry asmossiesin the corn, entertained their guests with coffee and cookies and there was a great deal of laughing. Mart Lategan, the Piquetberg girl, was of the giggling, hoydenish type, and if Chrissie had shown herself of the same inclination the party might have developed into rather a rowdy affair. It is easy in out-of-the-way places on the veld where there are no particular standards of conduct and the climate insidiously slackens the moral and physical muscles, to pass from unrestrained laughter to the broad jokes that distinguish social intercourse amongst the less cultivated Boers.But about Chrissie Retief there was a new and quiet dignity that toned down the noisy humour of the others, and kept a certain sweet quality in the atmosphere, like a fresh breeze blowing through the room. It seemed as though in her father’s absence she felt the honour of the house upon her shoulders, and must carry it carefully. Braddon’s eye rested often on her, and though hardly any conversation passed between them that was not common with, and to, the others, their glances sometimes crossed, blended, and ended in each other’s eyes. Just before he left, they were alone for a moment, and Braddon was able to produce the photographs. She went red with pleasure, looking quickly from one pose to the other.“Is that me, then? My! how nice I look!”“Not nearly nice enough for you. All your lovely colouring is lost,” he said, looking at her rosy cheek.“Ach! sis, toch, Mr Braddon, you just say those things,” she murmured, casting down her lashes.“They are true though.”“Are these both for me?” she asked shyly.“Yes, but I have taken the liberty of keeping a print of each for myself. I hope you don’t mind?”How could she mind? But she said with her Greuze air:“I can’t think why you should want them!”“I will tell you some day,” was his last word to her, and he rode away with a smile on his lips.The next time they had encountered out riding. Chrissie, taking a canter in the cool of the afternoon on one of the Clan-William bays, met him returning from a long day of acquiring stores in Piquetberg.He was hot and tired and thirsty and filled with weariness; but after a few moments in her company remembered none of these things. It was as if a tree had sprung up by the wayside, with a seat beside it to rest on, and a well of cool spring water for refreshment. There was something so alive, yet restful and assuaging about the girl. The wind had beaten a bright colour into her face, health and vitality showed in every line of her, and she was brimming over with that quality which he had recognised at their first meeting and which had turned him from a casual caller into a man who would come again. The thing had been inexplicable to him then and it was still so; but it remained a fact. It was as intangible as spirit, yet the lure of coquetry and curves and things physical was queerly mixed up with it; loyalty, and strength, and tenderness; and a certain hardness of purpose, and a hint of her father’s vague shrewdness as his eye searched the bush for far-off sheep; and more than a hint of his dogged obstinacy and love of a fight.Braddon came of a good class of people and had known in his own country many charming girls, most of them prettier, cleverer, and far more cultivated than Chrissie. Yet in her he divined this something which they had lacked. Some fire burned in her of which no spark had gleamed in them. What he didnotknow was that he had met in Chrissie one of those subtle combinations of sweetheart-wife-and-mother which old Nature specially breeds in big wide open countries where she needs strong, hardy, lusty children to people her empty spaces. He only knew when he rode away from Chrissie Retief that day that he loved her and meant to do all he could to get her for his own.But before they met again much was to happen. During the next few weeks, the old man’s cause was clearly lost though litigation still dragged on, and orders came to Braddon to commence operations at Jackalsfontein. The political situation provided a further complication for it was 1899 and there were rumours of war in the air. The relation between Boer and Briton had long been acutely strained, but the strain was now approaching cracking-point. Negotiations between England and the Transvaal were still going forward, but it was clear that a break-down in them could be expected at any time, and the Boers, fighters by nature and inclination, and longing for another turn-up with the ancient enemy, were praying for that break-down to come. A feeling of hostility between the two races exhibited itself all over the country and in every relation of life. Braddon was aware of it when he went into Piquetberg or had any dealing with the farmers, and it betrayed itself in constant rows between his men, who though they were mostly “coloured,” took sides, and were prepared to fight for their opinions. The skilled mechanics were white men and all Britishers except for a couple of half-Dutch colonials.Braddon was a good deal worried about Chrissie, and what attitude her father would take up in the event of his being required to accept an Englishman as his son-in-law; but fate postponed the problem for him, for a time at least, by laying her hand (with typhoid fever in it) upon him and tucking him safely away in hospital for a couple of months. Now he was back. Chrissie had not seen him with her eyes, but she knew very well that he was there.The door opened now and she came out and stood looking sadly at her father. She too had subtly changed. Some of the bubbling youth was gone out of her; the shadows in the gay forget-me-not eyes had grown deeper; her lips tipped downwards at the corners.The coming war between Boer and Briton had already thrown its shadow on her spirit; and too, the gloom of her father’s lost law-case enveloped her as it did all else at the farm. She knew he was a ruined man, with nothing in the world but a couple of hundred pounds, and the farm reduced to half its value. She was no longer the catch of the neighbourhood from a marriageable point of view. The two thousand pounds to which, as her father’s only living child, she had been heiress was gone in litigation, leaving her just like any other poor back-veld farmer’s daughter, a girl who must take the best husband she could get. Not that that worried her. It was her father’s changed habit and appearance that frightened her. She looked at him now with sorrowful eyes.“Ach! my lieber fader, don’t let it turn your blood like that, then!”She often made that remark to him, and he never took any notice, never even removed his eyes from the land, though his hand would sometimes mechanically search in his coat pocket for the stumpy roll oftabacand penknife.“Won’t you come in, Poppa? The sun is toch so hot out here for you!”The front of the house in fact lay bathed in the full flood of noon-day heat. No shade of flickering blue-gum leaves sheltered it now, for the old man had cut down the row of trees level with the stoep so that no obstacle should impede a clear vision of the dirty work going forward.“No what, I ammaarbetter here,” he said slowly. “I canmaarsee the scoundrels.”“Fi! my poor Poppa! what does it then do for you, but? Only makes your blood turn more and more.”“Chrissie,” he said solemnly. “My blood is turned already. I feel strange in the stomach and in the head since that Judge—” He shook a great fist in the direction of the railway workings. It seemed to her that ever since that morning his hand had strangely increased in size.“Poppa you are swelling up!” she said in awestruck tones.“Ja, I am not myself,” he muttered dully. “It is those stink-machines—and that cursed Judge.”She sighed. It was nearly two months since the final edict had been given against him, yet here was his mind still travelling back and forth on the thing as though it had happened yesterday! The world had stood still for him! She let her gaze follow the same direction as his, putting up her hand to shelter her eyes from the glare. At the camp not more than four hundred yards away the men could be seen moving about. Some trolley loads of machinery had just come in, and the gangers were swarming over them like ants; pulling at and handing down sleepers, rails, and great steel girders. A figure dressed in white ducks came out of a tent and directed the scene. At the sight of his straight back and easy walk a little wave of colour curved into the girl’s cheek. Suddenly as if moved by machinery the red-shirted, grey-legged men all ran together, converging in a cluster about one spot. Some of them stooped down, others leaned over the stoopers to look at what lay on the ground. Chrissie held her breath until she saw the white-clothed man waving the others off. It was one of the red-shirted labourers who lay so still on the ground.“There has been an accident!” she said aloud, looking at her father.“There will be many an accident before it is finished,” he muttered darkly. “God is on my side. He will make them pay with blood.”“Maar, Poppey, it is not the fault of those poor men! They have to earn their living, but,” she expostulated. “Look, they are carrying him to a tent—now they are—” She broke off and stayed watching. It was plain that Braddon was giving certain instructions. He pointed towards the farm, and the men looked that way, but shook their heads and hung back. Then Braddon himself started for the farm with long swinging paces. The colour waned out of Chrissie’s face, leaving her very pale.“Poppa, the engineer is coming here—you remember him?”“Ja, I remember therooi-nekgood enough.”They stayed in silence then, until Braddon reached the stoep. His eyes and Chrissie’s met for a moment as he stood with his hat off, but it was Retief whom he addressed.“We have had an accident, Oom, and by bad luck not a drop of brandy in the camp. Can you let us have a little? Enough to keep the man going until we get him into hospital.”“I have brandy but not for you,” was the surly response.Braddon reddened angrily, but he knew the old man’s trouble, and strove to be patient.“Oom, it is not for me. The poor fellow’s leg is broken in two places. I ask you in common humanity.”“That talk is no good here. You will get no brandy of mine.”“Sis, Poppey, then—” put in Chrissie in soft remonstrance. But Poppey turned on her bellowing like a wounded bull.“Is this my house or yours?Mastag! Do I keep brandy to pour down the throats ofrooi-nekswho steal my land?”Braddon who had been standing with his hat off now replaced it and turned away. It was only too clear that he was wasting time. But he threw one Parthian shot over his shoulder.“As a matter of fact it is a Dutchman who is hurt. A decent young fellow, too, of the same name as your own.” He walked away.“How can you be so cruel, Poppa, then?” cried the girl turning fiercely on her father, her eyes bright with tears and anger.Receiving no answer she ran into the house, emerging three minutes later with a cappie on her head and a bottle in her hand. Defiantly she stood before her father.“I am going to take him the brandy. You can beat me if you will, but I shall take the brandy.”The old man looked at her with terrible eyes but spake no word.“He is one of us—a Retief—a Boer! It would be a shame on us if we let him perhaps die of his sufferings.”For an instant longer, she paused, her foot on the step, waiting for some relenting word from him, but he spake nothing. So she ran down the steps and across the veld after Braddon. He had already reached the camp before she caught him up, and another man was saddling a horse to ride to Diepner’s, some three miles off.“Here is the brandy,” said Chrissie breathlessly, touching his arm just as he was about to enter the tent where the injured man lay. She was very white for all her running. Braddon took the bottle from her with grateful words, and would have kept her hand, but she drew back coldly.“I cannot shake hands with my father’s enemies. It is only because the man is a Boer, like ourselves, that I have come.”The Englishman, intensely chagrined, stood staring at her a moment. Then he said abruptly:“Wait one moment while I give Retief a dose. Do not go. I must speak to you.”While she stood hesitating, he disappeared into the tent, returning almost immediately.“Come, I will walk back with you.”“I don’t require your escort,” she said rudely. “I am on my father’s ground.”Nevertheless, he walked beside her as she moved quickly away.“Chrissie!” he said quietly. “What has all this trouble about the land and about war to do with you and me?”She did not answer, only walked faster.“I am only an employee of the Government,” he continued. “How is it my fault if they take your father’s land?”“I do not say that it is your fault,” she said. “But it turns you into his enemy—and mine.”“And yours?” he repeated reproachfully, “I thought you were more just than that!”“I am the daughter of a Boer.”“And I am an Englishman. But that does not prevent me from loving you.”He caught hold of her hands and made her stand still. They had reached a spot where the pomegranates hid them from view of the stoep.“Do you hear, Chrissie? I love you, and I want to marry you.”“Marry an Englishman?” she cried violently. “Never. It would break my father’s heart—and mine too.” With a quick movement she wrenched her hands away and fled from him. He turned very pale and stood staring after her, his mouth set in a grim line.Returned to the stoep, Chrissie found Carol Uys seated there talking to her father. It transpired that they had already arranged a deal by which Carol was to take back the pair of bays (with a mule thrown in) at the same price as he had sold. The old man said he no longer needed them to take him tokerk. He would never enter akerkagain he avowed.Carol and Chrissie shook hands and she went indoors where he presently followed her, for old Retief had fallen once more into absorbed reverie.“Chrissie,” said the young Dutchman, “the war will soon be on now. Old Oom Paul Kruger has defied therooi-neks, and we are to fight.”“Yes, Carol,” said she, listlessly arranging the coffee cups.“I shall be off on commands, at the first call.”“You think there will be fighting in this district too?”“If there isn’t, I shall make for the Transvaal.”The girl fell into a moment’s brooding silence.“War is horrible!” she said slowly.“Horrible, yes,maarafterwards we shall be the baases, and call our country our own.”“I am not sure, Carol; they say these English are good fighters.”“Mastag! and what about the Boers? We will show them, you wait a little.”After another silence, he spoke again in a different voice.“Chrissie—”Looking up she saw his bashful purpose in his eyes, and strove to avoid the issue.“Do you see how sick my Poppa is, Carol?”“Yes, I am sorry, Chrissie, he is very sick. This trouble with the railway has turned his blood, I’m afraid.”“God knows what will happen if he does not shake it off! my poor old Poppa, it will kill him.” Tears sprang to her eyes and her hands trembled amidst the crockery. Carol seized one and held it fast.“Do not fret, Chrissie, I will take care of you, if you will let me. You know I love you and want to marry you. I have already asked Oom Nick and he has given his consent. Will you marry me, Chrissie?”A bitter little smile twisted her lips. It seemed she had grown suddenly very desirable, since two men, within an hour, should ask her in marriage!“I do not love you, Carol,” she said quietly. His face fell.“I used to think, Chrissie—but lately you are so changed.”“Yes, I am changed,” she answered staring out through the open door, to the tents away by the river. “Iamchanged, Carol. I wish I were not a Boer maisie.”He did not understand this, but it sounded like treason, and he rebuked it.“But youarea Boer maisie, Chrissie. And you must not forget it.”“No, I shall never forget it,” she said slowly, “and because of it I will marry you, if you still wish it, Carol. I do not love you, but I will be a good wife to you.”“Oh, thank you, thank you, my Chrissie. I too will be a good man to you. You will see.”The list of killed and injured on the railway workings continued, and by the time the bridge of the Kat River was nearing completion and the line across Jackalsfontein almost laid, it made heavy reading for some wives and mothers, and a Government whose business it was to compensate them. The annoying part of the matter was that there were no shoulders upon which blame for the chapter of accidents could justly be laid. “Acts of Providence” cannot be quarrelled with. Though why “the Hand of God” should have fallen so heavily upon that special part of the line was incomprehensible to the gangers, who were inclined to insinuate that Lucifer (aided by a certain strange and monstrous-looking old man who sat eternally watching from his stoep) had more to do with the matter.Nick Retief’s armchair no longer accommodated him. The large oak and leather settle from the kitchen had been brought out and in its broad seat he sat daily, his great head sunk on his breast, staring with blue eyes grown dim. He was now enormously swollen and of an extraordinary vivid colour. Rage and bitter anger had so poisoned his nature that it seemed, even as Chrissie in her simple way expressed it, as if his blood had “turned” or decomposed in his veins. Yet, despite its grotesqueness, there was something heart-rendingly pathetic in the figure of this old-time Boer who had fought to defeat Progress and been defeated instead.He had to be helped to bed now, with Chrissie on one side and Shangaan Jim, his oldest Kaffir boy, supporting him on the other. But there came a night when they could not lead him to his bed; his bulk had so much increased during the day that it was in vain to try and pass him through the front door. Chrissie burst into tears.“Oh! foy toch, my poor Poppey, what are we to do now?”“Bring out my mattress. I will sleep here where I can see my land,” said the old man.So they brought out his mattress, and he went to bed on the stoep. Shangaan Jim sat by him through the night, and, long after she had retired, Chrissie could hear his mumbling voice relating with manyclicksand ejaculations tales of when he had worked in the mines at the Diamond Fields.The next day at Nick Retief’s command the big iron and brass bedstead in which his wife had died was set up on the stoep. He slept in it, and again Shangaan Jim stayed by him relating strange stories. The morning after, the old man did not rise from his bed; only called to them to bring many pillows, and prop him up, so that he could see.“It is nearly finished,” he muttered staring across the blue-gum stumps that now were bursting into great clusters of silvery blue leaves, “and I am nearly finished too.”The two thin lines of steel glittering under the moonbeams had, in fact, almost reached the eastern boundary-line of Jackalsfontein. Soon the old man’s eyes would be pained no longer by the piles of wood and steel, the tents and paraphernalia of the camp. Shangaan Jim brought the news that all would be removed next day. Chrissie found him whispering by the bedside as the sun went down, and wondered to see a smile on her father’s face for the first time in many months—if that strange distortion of bloated and discoloured flesh could be called a smile?“Shall I come sit by you to-night for a while, Poppey?” she asked, leaning tenderly over him. “And let Shangaan go to his hut?”“Yes,” he said, “let Shangaan go.” He looked up at the big Kaffir, and Chrissie fancied she saw a glance of some significance pass between them, but thought she must be mistaken.At any rate, Shangaan Jim went away, and she sat talking to her father for a long while, listening preciously to every broken muttered word that fell from him, for she was well aware that the end was near.He spoke of her marriage with Piet. It was not such a marriage as he had hoped for her. One of thosepat-loopingUyses! But still, Piet was a good fellow, and the only one of her suitors who had remained faithful, now that the money was all gone! Piet would be a good husband, but she must look after the farm, or he would be robbed and lose it, and have to retire to the back lands and the bad veld like all the Uys clan who were bad managers, though they were good men. He made her promise that she would marry Piet soon, so that when the war broke out she could follow him to the field if need be.“As your mother would have followed me,” he said, and looked up at the pale still face of his child. For, in proportion to his great increase of colour and stature she had grown whiter and thinner. Grief for his condition and some other secret sorrow brought tears to wet her pillow many a night, underlined her eyes, and carved faint hollows in her cheeks. Bubbling youth was quite gone out of Chrissie.As the night wore on, the old man, stirring and turning on his pillows, grew more restless. He panted and gasped and some strange excitement seemed tormenting him, making him roll and struggle like a great helpless beetle. And always he strained to keep his head high on the pillows so that he might stare, and stare across the land. Sometimes he held his breath and seemed to be listening.It must have been near midnight when a tremendous explosion shook the earth, breaking every pane of glass in the windows behind them, rattling the old farmhouse as though it were made of reeds, and crashing and booming across the empty veld like the crack of doom.Suddenly, down by the workers’ encampment, flames sprang up and cries and groans were heard. Chrissie, recovered from her first shock of terror and amazement, sprang up.“Father!” she cried, then stood still staring. The old man was sitting up in bed, his eyes alight with a dreadful fire.“Now, I can die in peace,” he shouted. “Jim knew what to do with their dynamite tent! Good boy, Jim! Didn’t I warn them that I would blow them off, if they came meddling with my land?”With a great shout of laughter that rang across the veld like a bell, he fell back upon his pillows. There was a terrible gurgling sound in his throat, and all was still.One long look at the dead face, then Chrissie ran down the steps and sprang across the veld. Men’s forms were moving hither and thither, carrying the dead and wounded away from the raging flames. Groans resounded everywhere, and there were bitter cries for water. To one suchcry, in a voice she knew, Chrissie flew like an arrow from a bow.She found him lying where the explosion had thrown him, far down the river bank, shattered, broken, dying; and when she had given him water, she kissed his lips, and baring her breast let his head lie there, sobbing out his life’s blood against her heart.
Old Nick Retief sat on his stoep gazing at the six thousand morgen of naked veld that constituted his share of the world, and there was trouble in his eagle-like gaze. He had the peculiar Boer eye, a vague light-blue feature sheathed with puckered skin, capable of seeing a tremendous distance, and apparently always searching for sheep in some far-off bush.
His undulating acres were composed for the most part of pasturage and poor pasturage at that. The rocky soil just escaped being “sour veld,” but was grey with rhenoster bush and dotted by countless yellow patches of stink-boschie. Sugar-bush too, that signal of unfertile land was more plentiful than propitious. Only about one hundred morgen were sufficiently rich to produce forage for the beasts, and there were no fruit lands except for an orchard of ancient apricot trees, and a little orange grove that nestled in a sheltered kloof near the river.
A poor enough place from the point of view of the wealthy Paarl or Worcester-district farmers with their vineyards of rich black soil and river pasturage. But to Nick Retief it had no parallel among the beauty spots of the earth.
On the sun-baked, wind-swept farm, bare of trees except for a line of blue gums before the house, a few clusters of pomegranate, and an oldkameeldorndown by the goat kraal—the big blonde old Boer had been bred and reared, and in turn had bred and reared his family. After his brooding inarticulate fashion, he loved its bareness and bleakness, the wide loneliness of it, and above all the deep silences that from day to day were unbroken save by the purling of the river, the voices of his “boys” busy at their tasks, or the lowing of homing cattle.
He had never seen the sea, this old Boer of the back-veld, though (as the crow flew) it broke against the coast not more than eighty miles away. The purple mountains had no call for him, nor the busy town any lure like the lure of this unsheltered, whitewashed homestead on the flat-lands. In him still brooded something of the spirit of the old Voor-trekkers who trekked for the love of getting away from their fellow-men, and pitched their homes on the open plain with water at their backs and a vast emptiness before them; and to those who broke uninvited upon the silences or intruded on the empty plain, woe betided!
That was the trouble with old Nick Retief. Someone was threatening to intrude on his land and break the spell of its silent loneliness. But it was not an enemy whom he could pot at from behind his laagered waggons, nor a dozen enemies. It was the Government of his country, bent on the business of laying down steel rails that would enable locomotive-engines to tear screaming and belching, back and forth between the Transvaal and the Cape. And ever since he had got the news of it, Nick had cursed the “slegtéGovernment of red necks” on his rising up and at his lying down, and always his slow-moving brain pondered heavily on how he could outwit it and prevent the abominable outrage.
He did not approve of trains, and considered it his duty as a good Boer to resist such inventions of the Devil to the last ditch. He would give them a good fight if they were looking for it, thoseslegté skepsels! It was his land not theirs, and right was on his side. He would prove that to them, and win out in the fight, even if it took everyone of the thousand golden sovereigns covered over with loose bran and hidden in a paraffin tin under his wife’s bed. Never should they have his permission to come digging and blasting within a few hundred yards of his stoep! The thought was enough to make his wife, old Tanta Christina, turn in her grave over there by theklompjeof pomegranates, and bring the two tall sons who rested beside her forth to join in the fray with theverdommederetceteras.
The first intimation he had received of the evil business was an official letter informing him that the Government had decided that the railway must pass through his land, and requiring him to appoint a valuer to meet and agree with the official valuer as to compensation. To this old Nick had written, or caused to be written—for he was one of those old-time Boers whose literary accomplishments went no further than the ability to sign his name with a laboured flourish—an infuriated reply, rejecting the Government, its valuers, and all that pertained unto the scheme. A second letter from Cape Town decorated with many red seals, contained an official proposal to buy the property known as “Jackalsfontein,” and an inquiry as to what price its owner set upon said property. The reply to this was brief to rudeness. The farm was not in the market and its owner was not selling at any price.
To-day had come the third letter, a frigid document, firm and arrogant as only Governments secure in unlimited power dare be—and the burden of it was that whether the owner of Jackalsfontein liked it or not the Government was going to run a railway across his land. The survey work would proceed, and if Mr Retief objected he was at liberty to seek redress in the courts of his country. It was over this letter that the old man sat brooding in the morning sunshine, eyes on the distant sheep, one gnarled, knobbly hand lying clenched on the arm of his chair, the other hanging straight down almost touching the ground, thumb in the bowl of his pipe. His immense bulk of brawn and fat was clothed in garments cut and sewn by the fingers long since peacefully at rest beneath the pomegranates. The trousers were as two enormous drain pipes that hung suspended from above his middle in the straight lines abhorred of Nature; circling round his generous waist they sprayed out in a wide V over his stomach where the two top buttons failed to collaborate with the buttonholes. His short but roomy coat could easily have accommodated a second man of his size, and over his cotton shirt he wore instead of waistcoat his flowing beard—a tangled grey-brown affair tousled by many a south easter, and somewhat recalling certain lines of Edward Lear’s:
“It is as I feared,Two cocks and a hen, one owl and a wren,Have all made their home in my beard!”
“It is as I feared,Two cocks and a hen, one owl and a wren,Have all made their home in my beard!”
On his feet were home-made veld-schoens of raw-hide, “breyed” to the softness of suède with toes cut square as the nose of a punt.
From within the house could be heard at intervals a little snatch of song, like the chirp of a cheerful bird flying from bough to bough. At last in the doorway appeared Chrissie Retief, daughter and only remaining child of the family, a blithe good-looking girl between eighteen and twenty years of age. She addressed her father in thetaalspeaking reproachfully:
“Ach! Sis, Pa! you still fretting there over that old Government letter?”
He turned his vague ruminating eyes on her.
“The dogs shall never bring their stink-machines across my land.”
“What canyoudo then, my poor Poppa? Theywillbring them here, and you can’t do anything. You can’t shoot them with a gun, or throw them with a stone.”
“I will fight them with the law—if it takes my last pound,” muttered Nick.
“What’s the good? They will win in the end, Governments always do,” said Chrissie who had been to school at Paarl, and knew a few things.
“We’ll see. I’ll go to Piquetberg to-morrow and talk to old Frickie de Villiers. He’s aslim kerel, and ought to be able tovernuckthem if anyone can. What is the use of my tin full of money if I can’t get the better of the dogs?”
“Ach toch! What’s the good of fretting your blood then, Pa? Let them make their old railway. We shall see something then, but.”
“Allemagtage! Are you a child of mine?” the old man roared. His vague eyes were suddenly fierce and full of fire. But Chrissie was not of the kidney to be intimidated even by her father. She turned away with a trill of laughter, finger on lip, to listen to a bird that had just perched on a branch of the kameeldorn and was calling out in three high insistent notes:
“Bock-bock-mackeerie! Bock-bock-mackeerie!”
It was the South African whip-poor-will whose cry heralds the arrival of strangers.
“The bock-mackeerie!” cried Chrissie ecstatically.
She was young enough to be keen for excitement in any shape or form and would not have objected to making coffee ten times a day for passing strangers. Anything that broke the monotony of life at Jackalsfontein was welcome to her. She put her hand across her eyes, blue as forget-me-nots, and looked into the distance, hoping for the sight of an approaching Cape cart. The roundness of her upraised arm strained the seams of her cotton sleeve, and a pretty curve from bust to waist and waist to heel was visible if there had been any eye to admire it. Her print dress was badly cut and the pattern faded from much banging on river stones. But there is nothing so difficult to hide as a good figure. Chrissie had got hers from riding astride, bareback, on young fillies and calves, and swimming in the river. The physical-culture mistress at Paarl had put a finishing touch by teaching her the value of poise and controlled muscles. Small wonder that the solitude of Jackalsfontein did not appeal to her as much as to her father. She was still in the romping, young-animal stage when she needed other young creatures to romp with. It was a dull life for the girl.
“I see something, Pa! There is something coming,” she cried suddenly, and gave a skip of excitement.
“Ach!” The old man spat scornfully, took from his pocket a stumpy bit of rolled tobacco, pitch-black in colour, and began to cut it into shreds using the palm of his hand for the operation. The stoep table was dark with tobacco juice and roughened by innumerable tiny cuts from this very business of tobacco cutting; but he always used his hand when he was preoccupied.
His vague eyes had long ago, at three miles’ distance, distinguished that which Chrissie now descried crawling up the sloping land in clouds of red dust.
“A flock of sheep,” she reported, “about fifty.—Some goats—Eight cows, two little calves, three mules—”
“A herd of rubbish belonging to thatpat-looper(Road-footer) Carol Uys, sure as a gun,” grunted old man Retief.
“It looks like his Kaffir Jim driving them,” Chrissie agreed. “And there is a man on horseback coming up behind.”
“Thepat-looperhimself no doubt. Coming to try and sell his broken-down beasts to me.”
“Ach! Pa, you know you got the red heifer from him, and that pair of mules Farnie Roos offered you 30 pounds for last week.”
“Maar! They were not worth 30 pounds when I took them from Carol Uys.”
“No, and you did not give him 30 pounds for them! Sis, Pa, you must be fair, then, but!”
Chrissie’s eye was sparkling. She could not keep her feet still. She was entranced at the prospect of seeing Carol Uys, who was one of her suitors. He was the least prosperous of them, and her father was always crying out upon him, for apat-looperbecause he had to augment his poor income by going about and doing a little cattle dealing, but she liked him better than Piet van der Merwe, or big Farnie Roos. She was not in love with any of them, but she was very much in love with love and life, was Chrissie, and could not help a little bubble of pleasure welling up from her heart and escaping from her lips in a girlish laugh as she turned back into the house. A jolly-out-of-doors, healthy girl, chock-full of animal spirits and laughter and fun. One of the kind that old mother Nature has her eye on for purposes of her own!
It was dark and cool inside the house, for Jackalsfontein, as in all decent Boer farms, had every door and window closed tight at six in the morning and not opened again until six in the evening, this being the Boer method of keeping out the scorching heat of summer. And a very good method too.
In her bedroom, Chrissie proceeded to tidy her crisp blonde hair which was always perfectly tidy, and tie a broad piece of blue ribbon round her neck in such fashion that a fascinating bow was under her hair and the two ends of it stuck out behind each ear making her eyes look so much bluer that they resembled two bits of radiant sky studding her merry face. For some time she meditated over a large silver locket with a flying crane engraved on it, and containing a tin-type photo of her mother. She usually wore this on Sundays, suspended by a black ribbon round her neck, and was aware that it lent greatchicto her appearance.
In the end, she decided not to wear it upon this occasion for fear her father should notice and ask her in front of Carol why she had it on. Not for the world would she have had Carol think that she titivated herself for him.
At length, the sound of wheels grating in front of the house made her fly from her glass to the kitchen on the business of preparing coffee for the new-comer. For no matter how unwelcome the caller at a Boer house may be, he is always offered the hospitality of the country—a cup of coffee.
With her own hands, Chrissie set out the bright tin beakers on the table of theEat-kammer, and piled high a plate of sweet hard rusks. Then opening the front door, she stepped once more into the sunshine.
And, after all, it was not Carol Uys who stood there mopping the beads from his brow with a white handkerchief, and talking to old man Retief. It was a stranger with that red burn on his face and neck which only Britishers seem to achieve in the South African climate, and which long ago won for them the nick-name of “rooi-neks.”
At the sight of him, Chrissie became shy and stood poised on one foot like a bird ready to take wing. It seemed she had arrived at an unpropitious moment. The old man’s eyes were suffused with blood and his fist lay on the table as though he had just banged it down there. His jaw stuck out aggressively. The stranger’s jaw also stuck out, but his hazel eyes had a cool, collected stare in them. This he transferred to Chrissie and removed his hat with the usual Dutch greeting.
“Dag Mevrow.”
She responded, and poised herself on the other foot for a change. After a moment, as old Retief put his pipe in his mouth and made no attempt at an introduction, the stranger continued, speaking with an air of quiet assurance to which her various Boer swains had not accustomed Chrissie.
“Miss Retief?”
She nodded.
“My name is Richard Braddon and I am the engineer in charge of the railway-laying party. I’m trying to persuade your father that it is of no use kicking against the Government. He’d far better let us go about the business quietly.”
“And I tell you you had better save your breath,” snorted Nick, “and keep off my land or I’ll blow you off from the barrel of my old Mauser.”
The young man’s red skin grew a shade redder, but he smiled dryly:
“I’m afraid I’ll have to risk that, Mr Retief, when the time comes.”
Chrissie secretly approved the I-don’t-give-a-damn-for-you-and-your-old-Mauser way in which he said it. That was something to say to old Nick Retief all the same! She turned on her father now expostulating:
“Foy toch, Poppa! It is not his fault, then. He has to do what the Government tells him, but!”
“I’m not going to have the stink-engines on my land,” repeated Nick.
“Well,” said Braddon pleasantly. “Let’s leave it at that. I’m camped out on Diepner’s land now beyond the river but we may get orders to start the bridge any time—and then the rails on this side—I only want you to be reasonable, Mr Retief, and realise that it isn’t our fault.”
Nick rolled a blood-suffused eye on him.
“You start on my land, that’s all,” he said with heavy significance.
A minute later, he let out a terrific roar that shook the rafters of the verandah above him and was addressed to the native who had recently arrived with the sheep and cows.
“What is the matter with you, you base-born son of a baboon, that you put your master’s scabby, leprous sheep into my calves’ kraal when I told you they were to go into that one down by the sluit?”
Following this furious inquiry he arose and betook himself to the kraal, leaving Chrissie and Braddon together.
“Will you drink coffee?” she asked.
“Thank you, I’d like some very much.”
She opened the door and went to fetch the beakers and rusks out on the stoep table. Braddon immediately bestirred himself to her assistance, proving himself still further unlike her several swains, for among the more ignorant class of Boers it is the affair of the women to wait upon men as upon the lords of the earth.
Afterwards, the two sat down by the table and waited for the old man. Braddon made polite conversation. He felt no embarrassment, but neither did he feel much interest. He had met Dutch girls before and they had not “gone to his head” or to his heart either. Their complexions were invariably good, but as conversationalists they were draggy.
“It must be dull for you living out here,” he remarked pleasantly.
“Oh, no,” she answered smiling, “there is plenty of work to do on the farm.”
He liked that spirit and understood it.
“I know. When one is working time flies, doesn’t it? But there are occasional dull hours in the evenings I find.”
“What do you do then?” she asked.
“Oh, study a bit and read the newspaper when I have one, and write home sometimes—and think a lot.”
“What do you think about?” pursued Chrissie.
“Oh, I don’t know—work, and my people at home, there’s always something.”
He examined her with a shade more interest. She was not so draggy after all, this Dutch girl. Certainly he had known them duller.
“What doyouthink about?” he asked with a quizzical smile.
“I think about the people who come to the farm,” said Chrissie simply.
He looked up as if at a call. It was not so much her words, in fact, he was not surewhatit was that gave him a mental jump, but the impression was as startling as if she had taken a little hammer and hit a nail into him hard, only that no pain attached to the proceeding. She had risen, and was busying herself with the coffee-pot. He became aware for the first time of charming contours that could not be concealed by an old print frock. Also, that she moved better than most girls of her class; that her hair was becomingly done; and that the ribbon round her throat lent an added note of colour to her eyes. A glint came into his own eye, but Chrissie’s face was as demure as the face of a Greuze milkmaid. It is to be feared, however, that her heart was less naïve than her remark. The fact is, Chrissie was a natural-born flirt and knew perfectly well what she was about. She sugared the coffee with eyelashes brushing her cheek, biting her under-lip a little as if that helped to concentrate her attention on the task. Certainly it gave Braddon an opportunity of observing how white and even were those same teeth. Her nails too were daintily trimmed. Indeed she was a surprise he had never expected to find at Jackalsfontein, and what he could not understand waswhythe fact was only just dawning upon him. Certainly she was quite unlike all the other girls he had met on his trips into outlying districts. He wondered what had made him think she would be draggy.
The strap of a case he wore slung round his shoulders chafed him and he unbuckled it and put a camera beside him on the table. Chrissie’s glance immediately seized on it.
“You take photographs?”
“Yes—do you?”
She shook her head, her accomplishments did not run to that.
“I only wish I could.”
“I could soon teach you.”
She laughed and blushed a little, leaning her round face on one shapely hand. He thought what a jolly picture she would make and the thought was father to the desire.
“Will you let me take a photograph of you?”
“Yes,” she said eagerly. “Quickly, before Poppa comes back.”
It was the work of an instant. He snapped twice in case of a failure, then closed the camera and put it away.
“Will you send me one?”
“Or bring it, if you will allow me. I am only a few miles off.”
Chrissie made no response to this but looked into her coffee cup as though it were a crystal ball in which she could read the future.
“I am sorry Mr Retief should feel so badly about the railway,” said Braddon at last. “It’s got to come whether he likes it or not.”
“That’s what I tell him.”
“You are not against us then, Miss Retief?”
Old Nick lumbering back to his chair perhaps prevented her from expressing any opinion on the matter, but she slid Braddon a blue glance that seemed to be an answer to several things besides his question. The old man, who had not recovered his temper, continued to smoke in gloomy silence like a smouldering fire ready to burst into flame at the least puff of wind. Braddon made an effort at conciliation by proffering an inquiry or two as to farming affairs generally, but met with no marked success.
“How goes it with the sheep, Oom?” Oom Nick glowered at him for some time before grunting a response.
“The sheep are abeetjethin.”
Braddon essayed another throw.
“How goes it with the land?”
After a long silence.
“The land is abeetjedry.”
This was melancholy. Braddon, about to conclude with the usual polite query: “How goes it with the wife?” caught a swift glance from Chrissie and was reminded that he had heard of the old man being a widower of long standing.
“How goes it with the fruit?” he ventured instead.
“The fruit is abeetjebehind-time.”
Nick looked gloomily towards his apricot orchard. Chrissie having piloted Braddon past a bad place was now smiling down her retroussé nose. He was considering the matter of moving on when someone else entered upon the scene. Old Retief had seen the Cape cart coming long since but, according to his wont, said nothing. The others were too much occupied with their own thoughts to notice anything, until the dust of Carol Uys’s trap blew over them from the loose ground in front of the stoep.
“Dag, Oom!”
“Dag, Carol!”
The thin long-legged young Boer descended from his cart, fastened the pole of it to a staple driven into one of the blue-gum trees and came up the stoep steps. He was a pleasant-faced fellow about six feet three inches in height but of rather slight build. Chrissie had always liked his gentle eyes and gentle ways inherited from some far-off Huguenot ancestor, but to-day she noticed for the first time that he walked flat-footed and that the toe of one of his shoes pointed east and the other west. For the first time too she was not impatient at her father’s off-hand, rather scornful manner of greeting him. Old Retief despised the Uys clan, lock, stock, and barrel, because they were bad farmers. In fact though they lived on farms they were no farmers at all. Everyone knew it. An Uys farm was always farthest away from the markets and always pushed away in the corner of some mountainous kloof where the grazing was sour for the beasts and the land would grow nothing. Naturally there was nothing for the sons of such a farmer to do to make ends meet but take to transport riding or cattle dealing. And the truth was that the Uys taste lay that way—that was what old Retief had against them. They were horsey men, fonder of the road than the roof-tree, men who would sooner ride a hundred miles to deal for a pair of goats than do one day’s work at the tail of a plough. Retief despised such shiftless wanderers and wanted nothing of the sort for a son-in-law. Wherefore Carol Uys was none too welcome at Jackalsfontein. However, the handshaking that ensued was hearty enough and Chrissie, with heightened colour, poured coffee for the new-comer, and fresh cups all round.
“Well? What broken-down old crocks have you got with you to-day, Carol?” asked the old man grimly.
Uys waved his hand at the two handsome bays with black manes and tails, harnessed to the cart.
“Look then! They speak for themselves, Oom. As smart a pair of Cape horses as you will see from here to Johannesburg. The very thing to drive Miss Chrissie tokerkwith on Sunday.”
Needless to say Retief had passed a shrewd eye over them long since and come to his own conclusions. His business now was to conceal those conclusions, which happened to be favourable, behind a contemptuous smile and such sarcasm as he could muster. No very great amount!
“I’m not on the look-out for grandparents for those I have to take Chrissie to church with already!” he remarked.
“Ah! Oom Nick must not make jokes about those bays,” expostulated Carol seriously. “They are Clan-William horses—three-year olds. Why, they haven’t whistled yet (cut their baby-teeth). Oompie can look in their mouths and see.”
“Mastag! It is hard enough to see them at all, they are somaar(thin)!”
Carol aggrieved, turned to Chrissie.
“No one could call themmaar. It is a dry season and I haven’t been able to get them much forage by the way, but no one can call themmaar.”
“How much do you want for them?” asked Braddon.
“Sixty pounds apiece, not a sixpence less,” declared Carol. “Don’t you think I’m right, Miss Chrissie?”
Chrissie, with her father’s eye on her, knew better than to respond.
“Hundred and twenty the pair! A stiff price,” remarked the engineer.
“Not too stiff. Oom Nick knows the value of a good horse and is able to pay it,” said Carol firmly. He may have been no farmer but he knew his business as a horse-seller.
“Their feet are too soft for this veld,” grumbled old Retief.
“Not a bit of it, Oom. Clan-William horses are hard-veld horses—iron feet and mouths of velvet. You know it good enough.”
“Well, and what’s the matter with my own horses that I drive tokerkevery Sunday?” asked Nick Retief aggressively.
“Oom, they are not bad horses. I’m not saying they are bad horses, but they are five years old and don’t match—you know they don’t match. One has got abless(white blaze down forehead) and the other has a white foot.”
This hit the old man hard. That bless and white foot had been his bane for many a day.
“Oompie mustn’t drive to church like that any longer,” said Carol decisively. “It is unlucky.”
“Ah! unlucky? I am unlucky enough,” glowered Oom Nick and reflected awhile in his beard while Carol drank more coffee and looked at Chrissie with his brown eyes which became very gentle and shy the moment he was not discussing horses. Chrissie inquired for his mother and sisters and brothers, naming each separately. Braddon tattooed the table, bored and vaguely irritated. At last, the old man got up and went down to the horses and began examining them minutely from mouth to hoof, jeering all the time and expostulating with Uys who had followed him.
The engineer and Chrissie left alone sat a long time in silence apparently listening to the haggling and jeering below them, but in reality listening to queer little drumlike sounds going on within themselves.
“May I bring you the photo when it is finished?” Braddon said at last in a low voice.
She laughed her little bubbling laugh.
“You see how it is with Poppa—he does not like the railway.”
He looked at her steadily.
“You mean I will not be welcome here?”
“Poppawill not welcome you,” said Chrissie with the Greuze look. “Have another cup of coffee?”
Her father and Uys were returning to the stoep. Evidently some arrangement had been come to, but they were still haggling.
“Come on, Oom, you don’t want that red ox, now, it will pair with one I have and that will let you off another five pounds. Then I will take your old bays for 55 pounds and you will have only to pay me 40 pounds cash.”
“Forty cash!” complained Nick. “It is too much.”
“No, no, Uncle. It is not too much—you know that good enough. I couldn’t sell for less, even to Miss Chrissie’s father.”
He looked with his shy brown eyes at the girl and she smiled back. Braddon got up quickly.
“Well, I must go. Good-bye, Oom.”
The old man scowled at him but shook hands.
“Good-day,kerel.”
“Good-day, Miss Retief.”
“Good-day, Mr Braddon.”
Perhaps some subtle message passed from her hand to his for his eyes cleared. He went down from the stoep, untied his horse, and mounted. It was a good horse and he sat on it as only a born rider can sit. If Chrissie’s good figure could not be hidden neither could Braddon’s horsemanship, and that is an accomplishment which Boer girls, in common with most other girls, admire. He was well aware of Chrissie’s glance fixed upon him as he rode away, swaying easily and gracefully in his saddle. He was not quite sure why the fact was so pleasing to him, but he whistled a gay little air, and the world looked a good place to him, and life much more attractive than it had looked an hour ago.
Six months later, Nick Retief sat again on his stoep gazing with sombre eyes before him. At a casual glance all seemed unchanged, but a trained observer would have detected two profound differences: the landscape was no longer naked, and the old Boer had grown markedly older.
His beard and hair showed great patches of white amidst their shaggy sandiness, the old eyes were bloodshot and full of strain, the folds of skin sheathing them reddened and weary. It was the sight they looked upon that made them weary: a line of tents not five hundred yards from the stoep, some tin shanties, huge piles of sleepers and rails, and a trail of pitched-up rocks and yellowy-grey earth. The gangers were at work on the business of bridging the Kat River and laying the railway line across Jackalsfontein.
The old veld eyes that stared at that hated sight had seen many strange things since the morning when Braddon made his first appearance at Jackalsfontein. At last they had looked upon the sea, and the ships upon it, and the men that go in the ships; upon tram-cars and hansom cabs and streets crowded with fashionable women. Incidentally they had seen the inside of a Law Court, not once but many times.
On six several occasions Nick had donned his black stove-pipe hat and driven the Clan-William bays acquired from Carol Uys to Piquetberg and been accompanied from thence to Cape Town by Frickie de Villiers theslim. But all the sights his eyes had there beheld brought him no solace, nor a passing thrill of interest. He had been at grapples with the Government; absorbed in the great fight to keep silent and naked the acres that he loved. And the Government had defeated him. The railway had come!
Money had flowed like water, and it was not Government money. Little was now left of the original 2000 pounds that once had lain snug in the paraffin tin under the bed of the defunct Mrs Retief. To drag a case from the ordinary courts to the Supreme Court of the land and from thence to appeal to the House of Assembly does not cost nothing. Neither do the services of suchslimones of the earth as Frickie de Villiers, and a firm of Cape Town solicitors (who were Frickie’s cousins) and, finally, an eminent Q.C. (who was Frickie’s uncle) cost nothing. Nothing costs nothing when it comes to meddling with the law. Nick knew this now to his cost. Knew too that governments can be vindictive as well as arrogant. He had never heard of such a person as Lord Chesterfield, but of one Chesterfieldism at least he was now in a position to prove the truth:
“Never quarrel with large bodies or societies:Individuals sometimes forgive; societies never do.”
“Never quarrel with large bodies or societies:Individuals sometimes forgive; societies never do.”
Instead of awarding him the compensation originally suggested for Jackalsfontein the Government had set a fresh brace of men to the task of assessment, with disastrous results for Nick. These officials, practical men with no fantastic illusions about the value of rock veld, rhenoster shrub, and stink-boschie, had written Jackalsfontein down for the poorest kind of cattle land. Such land is dirt-cheap in South Africa, and the Government was well within its rights in paying for it at dirt-cheap rates. What was worse, it would pay for no more than was absolutely needed to lay a narrow track of steel rails. The land that lay on either side of the fenced-off track, Nick was informed he could keep. That these wire fences would cut the farm in two thereby lessening its value, and that the nearest crossing gates were to be erected three miles away, was Nick’s misfortune, part of the reward he had reaped for “quarrelling with large bodies.”
At any rate, it was all over now. Nick had eaten and drunk of Justice, grace had been said, and it was finished. The iron heel of the Law had him down in the dust. Nothing more for the old farmer to do but sit in the sunshine and watch the ridge of pitched-up earth creep over his land. His eyes were weary, but his heart was like a red-hot stone in his side.
He no longer worked. The management of the farm had devolved entirely on Chrissie, and though she was no fool, the burden of care and responsibility weighed heavily on her shoulders.
So absorbed was the old man in this business of watching that he appeared to have forgotten everything else. He came out in the dawn and sat through the unsheltered day in his reimpje chair. Sometimes even after night-fall he sat on, staring through the darkness until the camp lights died out and all was wrapped in silence. Then he would lift up his great bulk and shamble heavily to bed.
And with each day his bulk seemed to grow greater. It was not a wasting sickness, this sickness he had of hate and rage. Chrissie noticed on the day of his last return from Cape Town, that he had assumed a curious resemblance to her mother in the latter stages of her illness. Old Tanta Christina had died of dropsy, and the girl sometimes wondered sadly whether the same disease, common amongst Boers, would snatch away her father. But though he grew swollen and visibly stouter there was none of the transparent whiteness which accompanies dropsy. Rather his colouring was red and purple, almost as if a fire, flaming within, boiled the very blood in his veins, bloating out his body and blearing his eyes. There were hours when Chrissie had a childish fear that he would burst. These were usually the hours when the gangers were at work with dynamite.
For the engineer and his gang were not finding the affair of bridging the river and laying the rails across Jackalsfontein any too easy to accomplish. The rocks, concerning whose presence the valuers had been so explicit, justified their existence by appearing in places where they could best have been dispensed with. Dynamiting went on three times a day, and three times a day men fled in every direction for shelter. Once, during the first days they ran to the farm, but no more than once. The grim man sitting so quiet in his armchair frightened them. There was something awe-inspiring about that big figure and the sombre, vigilant glance of the bloodshot eyes. A superstitious Irish navvy declared that the farmer possessed the evil eye and had put the black curse of Ballyshane on them all.
It is true that an extraordinary number of accidents had distinguished the rail-laying operations since Diepner’s land had been left for Retief’s. Scarcely a day passed without witnessing the sight of a trolley carrying off some injured ganger to the Cape Town Hospital.
Those in charge too, had experienced trouble. Three different engineers had come and gone since the commencement of the bridge. First, Braddon, after waiting for two months on the Diepner side of the river, had barely settled his men on the Retief side, when he went down with enteric and had to be trollied off to the old Somerset Hospital at Cape Town. The next man broke his leg three weeks after taking charge. The third got blood-poisoning from a veld sore. A temporary man, put in charge, was called away to Kimberley by the sudden death of his wife. Now Braddon, after a long and slow convalescence, was back again.
He and Chrissie had met only twice since the date of their first acquaintance. One afternoon he had ridden over with the prints of her photograph in his pocket. Old Retief was away on his first visit to Cape Town, and a girl friend from Piquetberg had come to keep Chrissie company in her father’s absence. It happened that some folk from a neighbouring farm were also visiting Jackalsfontein, and there was rather a large gathering in the bigEat-kammer. The girls, merry asmossiesin the corn, entertained their guests with coffee and cookies and there was a great deal of laughing. Mart Lategan, the Piquetberg girl, was of the giggling, hoydenish type, and if Chrissie had shown herself of the same inclination the party might have developed into rather a rowdy affair. It is easy in out-of-the-way places on the veld where there are no particular standards of conduct and the climate insidiously slackens the moral and physical muscles, to pass from unrestrained laughter to the broad jokes that distinguish social intercourse amongst the less cultivated Boers.
But about Chrissie Retief there was a new and quiet dignity that toned down the noisy humour of the others, and kept a certain sweet quality in the atmosphere, like a fresh breeze blowing through the room. It seemed as though in her father’s absence she felt the honour of the house upon her shoulders, and must carry it carefully. Braddon’s eye rested often on her, and though hardly any conversation passed between them that was not common with, and to, the others, their glances sometimes crossed, blended, and ended in each other’s eyes. Just before he left, they were alone for a moment, and Braddon was able to produce the photographs. She went red with pleasure, looking quickly from one pose to the other.
“Is that me, then? My! how nice I look!”
“Not nearly nice enough for you. All your lovely colouring is lost,” he said, looking at her rosy cheek.
“Ach! sis, toch, Mr Braddon, you just say those things,” she murmured, casting down her lashes.
“They are true though.”
“Are these both for me?” she asked shyly.
“Yes, but I have taken the liberty of keeping a print of each for myself. I hope you don’t mind?”
How could she mind? But she said with her Greuze air:
“I can’t think why you should want them!”
“I will tell you some day,” was his last word to her, and he rode away with a smile on his lips.
The next time they had encountered out riding. Chrissie, taking a canter in the cool of the afternoon on one of the Clan-William bays, met him returning from a long day of acquiring stores in Piquetberg.
He was hot and tired and thirsty and filled with weariness; but after a few moments in her company remembered none of these things. It was as if a tree had sprung up by the wayside, with a seat beside it to rest on, and a well of cool spring water for refreshment. There was something so alive, yet restful and assuaging about the girl. The wind had beaten a bright colour into her face, health and vitality showed in every line of her, and she was brimming over with that quality which he had recognised at their first meeting and which had turned him from a casual caller into a man who would come again. The thing had been inexplicable to him then and it was still so; but it remained a fact. It was as intangible as spirit, yet the lure of coquetry and curves and things physical was queerly mixed up with it; loyalty, and strength, and tenderness; and a certain hardness of purpose, and a hint of her father’s vague shrewdness as his eye searched the bush for far-off sheep; and more than a hint of his dogged obstinacy and love of a fight.
Braddon came of a good class of people and had known in his own country many charming girls, most of them prettier, cleverer, and far more cultivated than Chrissie. Yet in her he divined this something which they had lacked. Some fire burned in her of which no spark had gleamed in them. What he didnotknow was that he had met in Chrissie one of those subtle combinations of sweetheart-wife-and-mother which old Nature specially breeds in big wide open countries where she needs strong, hardy, lusty children to people her empty spaces. He only knew when he rode away from Chrissie Retief that day that he loved her and meant to do all he could to get her for his own.
But before they met again much was to happen. During the next few weeks, the old man’s cause was clearly lost though litigation still dragged on, and orders came to Braddon to commence operations at Jackalsfontein. The political situation provided a further complication for it was 1899 and there were rumours of war in the air. The relation between Boer and Briton had long been acutely strained, but the strain was now approaching cracking-point. Negotiations between England and the Transvaal were still going forward, but it was clear that a break-down in them could be expected at any time, and the Boers, fighters by nature and inclination, and longing for another turn-up with the ancient enemy, were praying for that break-down to come. A feeling of hostility between the two races exhibited itself all over the country and in every relation of life. Braddon was aware of it when he went into Piquetberg or had any dealing with the farmers, and it betrayed itself in constant rows between his men, who though they were mostly “coloured,” took sides, and were prepared to fight for their opinions. The skilled mechanics were white men and all Britishers except for a couple of half-Dutch colonials.
Braddon was a good deal worried about Chrissie, and what attitude her father would take up in the event of his being required to accept an Englishman as his son-in-law; but fate postponed the problem for him, for a time at least, by laying her hand (with typhoid fever in it) upon him and tucking him safely away in hospital for a couple of months. Now he was back. Chrissie had not seen him with her eyes, but she knew very well that he was there.
The door opened now and she came out and stood looking sadly at her father. She too had subtly changed. Some of the bubbling youth was gone out of her; the shadows in the gay forget-me-not eyes had grown deeper; her lips tipped downwards at the corners.
The coming war between Boer and Briton had already thrown its shadow on her spirit; and too, the gloom of her father’s lost law-case enveloped her as it did all else at the farm. She knew he was a ruined man, with nothing in the world but a couple of hundred pounds, and the farm reduced to half its value. She was no longer the catch of the neighbourhood from a marriageable point of view. The two thousand pounds to which, as her father’s only living child, she had been heiress was gone in litigation, leaving her just like any other poor back-veld farmer’s daughter, a girl who must take the best husband she could get. Not that that worried her. It was her father’s changed habit and appearance that frightened her. She looked at him now with sorrowful eyes.
“Ach! my lieber fader, don’t let it turn your blood like that, then!”
She often made that remark to him, and he never took any notice, never even removed his eyes from the land, though his hand would sometimes mechanically search in his coat pocket for the stumpy roll oftabacand penknife.
“Won’t you come in, Poppa? The sun is toch so hot out here for you!”
The front of the house in fact lay bathed in the full flood of noon-day heat. No shade of flickering blue-gum leaves sheltered it now, for the old man had cut down the row of trees level with the stoep so that no obstacle should impede a clear vision of the dirty work going forward.
“No what, I ammaarbetter here,” he said slowly. “I canmaarsee the scoundrels.”
“Fi! my poor Poppa! what does it then do for you, but? Only makes your blood turn more and more.”
“Chrissie,” he said solemnly. “My blood is turned already. I feel strange in the stomach and in the head since that Judge—” He shook a great fist in the direction of the railway workings. It seemed to her that ever since that morning his hand had strangely increased in size.
“Poppa you are swelling up!” she said in awestruck tones.
“Ja, I am not myself,” he muttered dully. “It is those stink-machines—and that cursed Judge.”
She sighed. It was nearly two months since the final edict had been given against him, yet here was his mind still travelling back and forth on the thing as though it had happened yesterday! The world had stood still for him! She let her gaze follow the same direction as his, putting up her hand to shelter her eyes from the glare. At the camp not more than four hundred yards away the men could be seen moving about. Some trolley loads of machinery had just come in, and the gangers were swarming over them like ants; pulling at and handing down sleepers, rails, and great steel girders. A figure dressed in white ducks came out of a tent and directed the scene. At the sight of his straight back and easy walk a little wave of colour curved into the girl’s cheek. Suddenly as if moved by machinery the red-shirted, grey-legged men all ran together, converging in a cluster about one spot. Some of them stooped down, others leaned over the stoopers to look at what lay on the ground. Chrissie held her breath until she saw the white-clothed man waving the others off. It was one of the red-shirted labourers who lay so still on the ground.
“There has been an accident!” she said aloud, looking at her father.
“There will be many an accident before it is finished,” he muttered darkly. “God is on my side. He will make them pay with blood.”
“Maar, Poppey, it is not the fault of those poor men! They have to earn their living, but,” she expostulated. “Look, they are carrying him to a tent—now they are—” She broke off and stayed watching. It was plain that Braddon was giving certain instructions. He pointed towards the farm, and the men looked that way, but shook their heads and hung back. Then Braddon himself started for the farm with long swinging paces. The colour waned out of Chrissie’s face, leaving her very pale.
“Poppa, the engineer is coming here—you remember him?”
“Ja, I remember therooi-nekgood enough.”
They stayed in silence then, until Braddon reached the stoep. His eyes and Chrissie’s met for a moment as he stood with his hat off, but it was Retief whom he addressed.
“We have had an accident, Oom, and by bad luck not a drop of brandy in the camp. Can you let us have a little? Enough to keep the man going until we get him into hospital.”
“I have brandy but not for you,” was the surly response.
Braddon reddened angrily, but he knew the old man’s trouble, and strove to be patient.
“Oom, it is not for me. The poor fellow’s leg is broken in two places. I ask you in common humanity.”
“That talk is no good here. You will get no brandy of mine.”
“Sis, Poppey, then—” put in Chrissie in soft remonstrance. But Poppey turned on her bellowing like a wounded bull.
“Is this my house or yours?Mastag! Do I keep brandy to pour down the throats ofrooi-nekswho steal my land?”
Braddon who had been standing with his hat off now replaced it and turned away. It was only too clear that he was wasting time. But he threw one Parthian shot over his shoulder.
“As a matter of fact it is a Dutchman who is hurt. A decent young fellow, too, of the same name as your own.” He walked away.
“How can you be so cruel, Poppa, then?” cried the girl turning fiercely on her father, her eyes bright with tears and anger.
Receiving no answer she ran into the house, emerging three minutes later with a cappie on her head and a bottle in her hand. Defiantly she stood before her father.
“I am going to take him the brandy. You can beat me if you will, but I shall take the brandy.”
The old man looked at her with terrible eyes but spake no word.
“He is one of us—a Retief—a Boer! It would be a shame on us if we let him perhaps die of his sufferings.”
For an instant longer, she paused, her foot on the step, waiting for some relenting word from him, but he spake nothing. So she ran down the steps and across the veld after Braddon. He had already reached the camp before she caught him up, and another man was saddling a horse to ride to Diepner’s, some three miles off.
“Here is the brandy,” said Chrissie breathlessly, touching his arm just as he was about to enter the tent where the injured man lay. She was very white for all her running. Braddon took the bottle from her with grateful words, and would have kept her hand, but she drew back coldly.
“I cannot shake hands with my father’s enemies. It is only because the man is a Boer, like ourselves, that I have come.”
The Englishman, intensely chagrined, stood staring at her a moment. Then he said abruptly:
“Wait one moment while I give Retief a dose. Do not go. I must speak to you.”
While she stood hesitating, he disappeared into the tent, returning almost immediately.
“Come, I will walk back with you.”
“I don’t require your escort,” she said rudely. “I am on my father’s ground.”
Nevertheless, he walked beside her as she moved quickly away.
“Chrissie!” he said quietly. “What has all this trouble about the land and about war to do with you and me?”
She did not answer, only walked faster.
“I am only an employee of the Government,” he continued. “How is it my fault if they take your father’s land?”
“I do not say that it is your fault,” she said. “But it turns you into his enemy—and mine.”
“And yours?” he repeated reproachfully, “I thought you were more just than that!”
“I am the daughter of a Boer.”
“And I am an Englishman. But that does not prevent me from loving you.”
He caught hold of her hands and made her stand still. They had reached a spot where the pomegranates hid them from view of the stoep.
“Do you hear, Chrissie? I love you, and I want to marry you.”
“Marry an Englishman?” she cried violently. “Never. It would break my father’s heart—and mine too.” With a quick movement she wrenched her hands away and fled from him. He turned very pale and stood staring after her, his mouth set in a grim line.
Returned to the stoep, Chrissie found Carol Uys seated there talking to her father. It transpired that they had already arranged a deal by which Carol was to take back the pair of bays (with a mule thrown in) at the same price as he had sold. The old man said he no longer needed them to take him tokerk. He would never enter akerkagain he avowed.
Carol and Chrissie shook hands and she went indoors where he presently followed her, for old Retief had fallen once more into absorbed reverie.
“Chrissie,” said the young Dutchman, “the war will soon be on now. Old Oom Paul Kruger has defied therooi-neks, and we are to fight.”
“Yes, Carol,” said she, listlessly arranging the coffee cups.
“I shall be off on commands, at the first call.”
“You think there will be fighting in this district too?”
“If there isn’t, I shall make for the Transvaal.”
The girl fell into a moment’s brooding silence.
“War is horrible!” she said slowly.
“Horrible, yes,maarafterwards we shall be the baases, and call our country our own.”
“I am not sure, Carol; they say these English are good fighters.”
“Mastag! and what about the Boers? We will show them, you wait a little.”
After another silence, he spoke again in a different voice.
“Chrissie—”
Looking up she saw his bashful purpose in his eyes, and strove to avoid the issue.
“Do you see how sick my Poppa is, Carol?”
“Yes, I am sorry, Chrissie, he is very sick. This trouble with the railway has turned his blood, I’m afraid.”
“God knows what will happen if he does not shake it off! my poor old Poppa, it will kill him.” Tears sprang to her eyes and her hands trembled amidst the crockery. Carol seized one and held it fast.
“Do not fret, Chrissie, I will take care of you, if you will let me. You know I love you and want to marry you. I have already asked Oom Nick and he has given his consent. Will you marry me, Chrissie?”
A bitter little smile twisted her lips. It seemed she had grown suddenly very desirable, since two men, within an hour, should ask her in marriage!
“I do not love you, Carol,” she said quietly. His face fell.
“I used to think, Chrissie—but lately you are so changed.”
“Yes, I am changed,” she answered staring out through the open door, to the tents away by the river. “Iamchanged, Carol. I wish I were not a Boer maisie.”
He did not understand this, but it sounded like treason, and he rebuked it.
“But youarea Boer maisie, Chrissie. And you must not forget it.”
“No, I shall never forget it,” she said slowly, “and because of it I will marry you, if you still wish it, Carol. I do not love you, but I will be a good wife to you.”
“Oh, thank you, thank you, my Chrissie. I too will be a good man to you. You will see.”
The list of killed and injured on the railway workings continued, and by the time the bridge of the Kat River was nearing completion and the line across Jackalsfontein almost laid, it made heavy reading for some wives and mothers, and a Government whose business it was to compensate them. The annoying part of the matter was that there were no shoulders upon which blame for the chapter of accidents could justly be laid. “Acts of Providence” cannot be quarrelled with. Though why “the Hand of God” should have fallen so heavily upon that special part of the line was incomprehensible to the gangers, who were inclined to insinuate that Lucifer (aided by a certain strange and monstrous-looking old man who sat eternally watching from his stoep) had more to do with the matter.
Nick Retief’s armchair no longer accommodated him. The large oak and leather settle from the kitchen had been brought out and in its broad seat he sat daily, his great head sunk on his breast, staring with blue eyes grown dim. He was now enormously swollen and of an extraordinary vivid colour. Rage and bitter anger had so poisoned his nature that it seemed, even as Chrissie in her simple way expressed it, as if his blood had “turned” or decomposed in his veins. Yet, despite its grotesqueness, there was something heart-rendingly pathetic in the figure of this old-time Boer who had fought to defeat Progress and been defeated instead.
He had to be helped to bed now, with Chrissie on one side and Shangaan Jim, his oldest Kaffir boy, supporting him on the other. But there came a night when they could not lead him to his bed; his bulk had so much increased during the day that it was in vain to try and pass him through the front door. Chrissie burst into tears.
“Oh! foy toch, my poor Poppey, what are we to do now?”
“Bring out my mattress. I will sleep here where I can see my land,” said the old man.
So they brought out his mattress, and he went to bed on the stoep. Shangaan Jim sat by him through the night, and, long after she had retired, Chrissie could hear his mumbling voice relating with manyclicksand ejaculations tales of when he had worked in the mines at the Diamond Fields.
The next day at Nick Retief’s command the big iron and brass bedstead in which his wife had died was set up on the stoep. He slept in it, and again Shangaan Jim stayed by him relating strange stories. The morning after, the old man did not rise from his bed; only called to them to bring many pillows, and prop him up, so that he could see.
“It is nearly finished,” he muttered staring across the blue-gum stumps that now were bursting into great clusters of silvery blue leaves, “and I am nearly finished too.”
The two thin lines of steel glittering under the moonbeams had, in fact, almost reached the eastern boundary-line of Jackalsfontein. Soon the old man’s eyes would be pained no longer by the piles of wood and steel, the tents and paraphernalia of the camp. Shangaan Jim brought the news that all would be removed next day. Chrissie found him whispering by the bedside as the sun went down, and wondered to see a smile on her father’s face for the first time in many months—if that strange distortion of bloated and discoloured flesh could be called a smile?
“Shall I come sit by you to-night for a while, Poppey?” she asked, leaning tenderly over him. “And let Shangaan go to his hut?”
“Yes,” he said, “let Shangaan go.” He looked up at the big Kaffir, and Chrissie fancied she saw a glance of some significance pass between them, but thought she must be mistaken.
At any rate, Shangaan Jim went away, and she sat talking to her father for a long while, listening preciously to every broken muttered word that fell from him, for she was well aware that the end was near.
He spoke of her marriage with Piet. It was not such a marriage as he had hoped for her. One of thosepat-loopingUyses! But still, Piet was a good fellow, and the only one of her suitors who had remained faithful, now that the money was all gone! Piet would be a good husband, but she must look after the farm, or he would be robbed and lose it, and have to retire to the back lands and the bad veld like all the Uys clan who were bad managers, though they were good men. He made her promise that she would marry Piet soon, so that when the war broke out she could follow him to the field if need be.
“As your mother would have followed me,” he said, and looked up at the pale still face of his child. For, in proportion to his great increase of colour and stature she had grown whiter and thinner. Grief for his condition and some other secret sorrow brought tears to wet her pillow many a night, underlined her eyes, and carved faint hollows in her cheeks. Bubbling youth was quite gone out of Chrissie.
As the night wore on, the old man, stirring and turning on his pillows, grew more restless. He panted and gasped and some strange excitement seemed tormenting him, making him roll and struggle like a great helpless beetle. And always he strained to keep his head high on the pillows so that he might stare, and stare across the land. Sometimes he held his breath and seemed to be listening.
It must have been near midnight when a tremendous explosion shook the earth, breaking every pane of glass in the windows behind them, rattling the old farmhouse as though it were made of reeds, and crashing and booming across the empty veld like the crack of doom.
Suddenly, down by the workers’ encampment, flames sprang up and cries and groans were heard. Chrissie, recovered from her first shock of terror and amazement, sprang up.
“Father!” she cried, then stood still staring. The old man was sitting up in bed, his eyes alight with a dreadful fire.
“Now, I can die in peace,” he shouted. “Jim knew what to do with their dynamite tent! Good boy, Jim! Didn’t I warn them that I would blow them off, if they came meddling with my land?”
With a great shout of laughter that rang across the veld like a bell, he fell back upon his pillows. There was a terrible gurgling sound in his throat, and all was still.
One long look at the dead face, then Chrissie ran down the steps and sprang across the veld. Men’s forms were moving hither and thither, carrying the dead and wounded away from the raging flames. Groans resounded everywhere, and there were bitter cries for water. To one suchcry, in a voice she knew, Chrissie flew like an arrow from a bow.
She found him lying where the explosion had thrown him, far down the river bank, shattered, broken, dying; and when she had given him water, she kissed his lips, and baring her breast let his head lie there, sobbing out his life’s blood against her heart.