“What, in hell,” he asked desperately, “shall I do with myself? I don’t even speak Dutch.”
“Nor write it?” Holman asked, without looking at him.
“Haven’t any knowledge at all of the fool lingo. You might as reasonably expect me to talk in Kaffir.”
“I’m not expecting anything,” was the response. “But I thought you might have picked up a few words—some fellows show a surprising facility in acquiring the taal. But it’s not important. The Dutch mostly speak English. The Kriges do, anyhow. Mrs Krige is, as a matter of fact, English by birth.”
“Come, that’s better,” Matheson said complacently. “It constitutes a link. I’ll know how to talk to a fellow-countrywoman.”
“I wouldn’t insist too much on the point of nationality,” the other threw in with a note of caution in his tones. “She’s Dutch now, and so are all her children.”
“In law, yes,” Matheson agreed. “There are kids, then?”
“Oh! they are all grown up. It is her son you are going to see. The old man died years ago.”
He changed the subject with some abruptness, and spoke of his own arrangements, and planned their next meeting. He would wait in Johannesburg; Matheson, when he turned up, would discover him in one of the usual haunts. They could then square their account finally. And if there was any little service that it lay in his power to do the other, he would be glad to be called upon to perform the same.
Later, when he was seated in the train, Matheson recalled this tentative promise and the peculiar emphasis of its utterance; and it occurred to him that Holman inclined to exaggerate the service he was rendering. He leaned back in a corner of the compartment, which he had to himself, and thought over things. The importance of this trumpery party intrigue was assuming disproportionate dimensions. The flicker of doubt in his mind developed steadily, while he sat staring from the window at the changing scenery, pondering the matter deeply. He did not altogether believe the reasons Holman had alleged in explanation of the secrecy of the mission and the need for caution. His talk of overthrowing the government hadn’t rung true. Moreover, men don’t attempt the overthrow of governments by stealth; that is usually a noisy business which revels in publicity and insists upon the limelight. There was something behind it all, something which had not transpired, which conceivably might never transpire so far as he was concerned.