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 of tabac and 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 am maar better here,” he said slowly. “I can maar see the scoundrels.”
“Fi! my poor Poppa! what does it then do for you, but? Only makes your blood turn more and more.”