“No!” he said clearly and firmly, “I bar Aimée.”
“She is rather a little reptile,” said Aimée’s aunt.
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 old kameeldorn down 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.