Aletta laughed, but not quite in the same whole-hearted way she usually did. There was something in the look of this man, standing there, easy, good-humoured, smiling, which seemed to strike her. She had been favourably impressed with him the evening before, when he had not shown externally to the best advantage, and, whatever cheap ethicists may propound to the contrary, externals and impressions go very much hand in hand. Now he was clad in his own clothes, not in scratch garments many sizes too wide for him. As she had just been telling her mother, she had seen at a glance that he was thoroughbred; now he looked more so than ever.
“Oh yes, he can—sometimes,” she said. “You know, I like the English of a certain sort, though I detest those of another.”
“Well, why do you bear down upon me singing an aggressive war-song—at me? At me, of course.”
“Was I?”
“You know you were. You were rubbing in Bronker’s Spruit, and Ingogo, and Majuba, and all that.”
“It’s rather chilly after the rain,” she said, looking around with a shiver. “But it is going to be a lovely day.”
Her irrelevant prediction was true enough. Not a cloud remained in the sky, which was deepening more and more to its vivid daylight blue, as the sun, just rising over a great ironstone krantz which crested the range beyond the river, flooded the wide valley, dissipating the faint mist engendered by the night’s moisture, and causing the raindrops still lingering on the Karroo bushes and scattered mimosa to scintillate like the purest diamonds. Birds twittered among the willows by the dam, and in the quince hedges, and away over the wide veldt, the cock koorhaans answered each other in their shrill, barking crow, as though rejoicing in the glowing splendour of the newly-born day.
“Yes, I think it is,” he answered. “But, to come back to what we were saying. I don’t think that ‘Volkslied’ is much of a song, you know. For instance, ‘Van Kaffer, Brit, of Jingo-kliek’ is a pretty good sample of doggerel. Then, again, the whole thing is a little too pietistic for ordinary use. The tune is a fine one, but the words—well, they are a trifle poor.”
“Are they? Oh yes—and what about ‘God Save the Queen’? Isn’t that just as pietistic? And ‘Confound their politics, frustrate their knavish tricks’—how is that for doggerel, eh?” And, firing up with her subject, Aletta’s face became quite animated, and the colour rushed over it in such wise as to render it very attractive—at least, so thought the onlooker, and secretly rejoiced in the situation, enjoying it hugely.
“H’m, well, perhaps. But, doesn’t it strike you, Miss De la Rey, that you are wasting your cartridges by blazing them into me? Why, I am more than half of your way of thinking already. Ask your father if I am not.”