The old lady snorted.
“You look like driving anybody out of the country, Theunis Venter, even the English. You’d be afraid to lie behind an antheap waiting to shoot rooi-baatjes for fear of spoiling that pretty waistcoat of yours”—looking him up and down contemptuously. “And his tight riding-breeches—oh!—oh! wouldn’t they split? And the rings! And yet you don’t look like an Englishman, Theunis, not even in your grand English clothes.”
A roar of applause and derision from that section of her hearers which had not enjoyed the advantage of a South African College education and a parent with advanced ideas and generous bank-balance greeted the old woman’s scoffing words.
“Ja, Ja, Theunis, that is just what the Patriot said,” they chorussed. But the young fellow looked sulky—very much so. He was one of that type of young Boer who no longer thinks it the mark of a man and a patriot to sleep in his clothes and wear his hat in the house. Nor was he the only one of that type there present. Others took his side, and hurled corresponding gibes at the conservative party, and the uproar became simply deafening, all talking and bellowing at once.
But if it be imagined that this turn of affairs caused the slightest uneasiness or alarm to the fair sex as there represented, the notion can be dismissed forthwith. There was a twinkle of mirth in the old lady’s eyes which belied the sardonic droop of her mouth, and as for the girls they looked as placid and unconcerned as though some thirty odd infuriated males were not bawling the very house down within a couple of yards of them.
“There—there!” sang out Vrouw Grobbelaar when she had had enough of it. “Make not such a row, for dear Heaven’s sake! Theunis, you are not such a bad sort of boy after all, for all your trimmed moustache and English clothes. Hendrina, give him a soepje—that is to say, if he does not turn up his nose at the good liquor his father drank before him. I’m told that the English get drunk on stuff made from smoked wood, down in Cape Town. Only one, though—I won’t encourage young men to drink, but the night is cold, and he has a long way to ride. After all, it isn’t his fault they tried to make an Englishman of him.”
Boer brandy, when pure and well matured, is about the best liquor in the world, and this was the best of its kind; wherefore under its influence, aided by the smiles of the ministering Hendrina, the youth’s ruffled feathers were soon smoothed down, and three or four of his sympathisers claiming to join in the privilege, good-humour was restored and plenty of mirth and good-fellowship prevailed before they separated for their long ride home over the moonlit veldt; for Boers are by nature sociable folk among themselves, and the younger ones, at any rate, addicted to chaff and practical joking.
In the other room, where refreshment had been taken in for their physical weal, sat the more serious-minded.
“Jan,” said Andries Botma, turning to his host, “where is Stephanus De la Rey? Is he sick?”
“No!”