“Well, dear,” she said at last, “you are not going to marry him, and so there is an end of it. You can’t detest the man more than I do. I have watched him for years,” she went on, with rising anger, “and I tell you that Frank Muller is a liar and a traitor. That man would betray his own father if he thought it to his interest to do so. He hates uncle—I am sure he does, although he pretends to be so fond of him. I am certain that he has tried often and often to stir up the Boers against him. Old Hans Coetzee told me that he denounced him to the Veld-Cornet as an uitlander and a verdomde Engelsmann about two years before the annexation, and tried to get him to persuade the Landrost to report him as a law-breaker to the Raad; while all the time he was pretending to be so friendly. Then in the Sikukuni war it was Frank Muller who caused them to commandeer uncle’s two best waggons and spans. He gave none himself, nothing but a couple of bags of meal. He is a wicked fellow, Bessie, and a dangerous fellow; but he has more brains and more power about him than any man in the Transvaal, and you will have to be very careful, or he will do us all a bad turn.”
“Ah!” said Bessie; “well, he can’t do much now that the country is English.”
“I am not so sure of that. I am not so sure that the country is going to stop English. You laugh at me for reading the home papers, but I see things there that make me doubtful. The other party is in power now in England, and one does not know what they may do; you heard what uncle said to-night. They might give us up to the Boers. You must remember that we far-away people are only the counters with which they play their game.”
“Nonsense, Jess,” said Bessie indignantly. “Englishmen are not like that. When they say a thing, they stick to it.”
“They used to, you mean,” answered Jess with a shrug, and got up from her chair to go to bed.
Bessie began to fidget her white feet over one another.
“Stop a bit, Jess dear,” she said. “I want to speak to you about something else.”
Jess sat or rather dropped back into her chair, and her pale face turned paler than ever; but Bessie blushed very red and hesitated.
“It’s about Captain Niel,” she said at length.
“Oh,” answered Jess with a little laugh, and her voice sounded cold and strange in her own ears. “Has he been following Frank Muller’s example, and proposing to you too?”