“Well, I rode off next day, and by the merest chance shot two zwart-wit-pens quite early, and came into camp again at noon. As I rode up, I heard piercing shrieks and howls, and cries for mercy, which I knew could come only from Klein Pierre. Then I turned a corner of the scherm (camp fence), and saw at once what was up. Almighty! Although I was startled and surprised, I could scarcely help laughing. There was Pierre Cellois, tied up to our wagon-wheel; all the native servants standing round, and the vrouw, very red and angry, flogging away at the fellow’s back with a good sjambok (whip) of sea-cow hide.
“I jumped off my horse, and ran up to the group. ‘Anna! Anna!’ I cried, ‘what in the Heer God’s name are you doing?’
“The vrouw, I can tell you, was mad with anger. She turned upon me, threw down the sjambok, and said, ‘If you hadn’t been a fool, Cornelis, with no more than half an eye, this need never have happened. This little baboon fellow has insulted me grossly. He came up to me, put his arm round my waist, as I sat in my chair, and kissed me upon the mouth. And so I have had him tied up by the boys, and flogged him. Now do you finish with him.’
“Well, I was pretty angry—angry at being scolded before all the boys, and angry at this little scoundrel’s impudence, and so I picked up the sjambok, and gave him half a dozen or so for myself. Then I had him untied, and let him go, and bade him inspan and trek at once before worse happened.
“Almighty! how mad the fellow was. He cried, he screamed, he wanted to fight me with pistols. But I just sat on my wagon-box, with my gun on my knees, and bade him be off. Well, he trekked in an hour—my boys helped him to inspan the oxen—and we never saw him again. I heard that he went down to Mooi River Dorp (Potchefstrom) and lodged a complaint with Martinus Wessels Pretorius, our commandant, and wanted satisfaction, and threatened a war, and all sorts of things. But, bless you, old Pretorius knew a thing or two. He got the true story from the Frenchman’s Hottentots, and just packed him off south of the Vaal River, and he passed, as I heard, to the old colony, and so home to France. That is the story of the vrouw’s little Frenchman; the vrouw, yonder, will tell you if it is true or no.”
The old lady, as Cornelis finished speaking, stood just within the doorway of the house, looking up into the star-spangled sky. She turned towards us; her grave old face, as she did so, lit up by the lamp-light from within. “My Frenchman!” she answered, with a look of strong contempt. “It is an old tale, that, which had better been left untold. I hate the name of Frenchman. I come of Huguenot blood myself, Meneer,” she continued, addressing me, “my father was a Joubert. The Huguenots, I trust, were a very different people. Sooner than think myself akin to such a race as that little dressed-up baviaan (baboon) my husband has been telling you of, I would disown my own blood. But, indeed, though some of us have Huguenot names, we are all good Dutchmen in South Africa nowadays. You English and we, Meneer, are not always the best of friends; but at least you are men, and not apes in clothes like Pierre Cellois. Come in now, and have a soupje (A drink) before you go to bed.”
Pierre Cellois, as I happened to learn since, has long been dust. He became a shining light in his own country, wrote a book, and is still referred to as “that great explorer and hunter.”
Stout Cornelis Van Vuuren and his good vrouw, too, have lain for some years in their quiet graves. I sometimes wonder if they and the little Frenchman have met and settled their differences in the silent land.