“Was he? Oh yes,” said the diplomatic Piet, in a tone as though by now only politely interested in the subject. But the while he was, to all outward appearances, turning the photograph round and round listlessly, but in reality scrutinising it keenly, now obliquely from the top corner, now sideways. “How long did you say you had been engaged, Aletta?”
“Just over two months,” answered the girl, her eyes brightening.
“Ach! he isn’t listening to you at all, Aletta,” struck in the partner of Piet’s joys and sorrows, looking up from her book. “He has forgotten all about Mr Kershaw by this time, and is thinking over the last political move. What did you say his name was—Mr Kershaw’s, I mean?”
“Colvin. It’s a family surname turned into a Christian name. Oh, and such a joke, Anna! You should have heard Tant’ Plessis on that very thing,” And she proceeded to narrate how that perverse old relative had insisted on saddling upon her fiancé a historic Protestant Reformer of the sixteenth-century for grandfather. Piet fairly shouted with mirth.
“Old Tant’ Katrina! Ja, she was a kwaai vrouw!” he cried. “I have good reason to remember her. When we were young ones, at Rondavel, the other side Heilbron, she would come and stop there for any time. She was always saying we didn’t get enough strop and worrying the Ou’ Baas to give us more. He only laughed at her—and one day she wanted to give us some herself. But we wouldn’t take it. We snatched the strop from her and ran away. But we had to spend a week dodging her. She had got a broomstick then. She shied it at us one day, and hit my brother Sarel—the one that is in Bremersdorp now—over the leg. He couldn’t walk straight for about six months after. Then she and the Ou’ Baas had words, and she cleared out Ja, she was a kwaai vrouw. And now she is with Stephanus! Well, well. But Aletta, what did she say to your being engaged to an Englishman?”
“Oh, she consoled herself that his grandfather was the great Calvinus,” answered Aletta, breaking into a peal of laughter over the recollection. “Mynheer had said so: that was enough for her.”
A few days after this Colvin arrived in person, and then it seemed to Aletta that she had nothing left to wish for. But he would not allow her to give him all her time exclusively. She had certain social calls upon it, and, in justice to her entertainers, these must not be set aside. Piet Plessis had been the first to notice this, and was capable of appreciating it, for he himself was astonished at the brightening effect the presence of Aletta had shed within his home.
“Did I not tell you,” she would cry triumphantly, “that this Englishman was not like other Englishmen?”
And Piet would laughingly agree.