Just then, who should arrive but Mrs. Neville, in a great state of excitement, and, as usual, fanning herself with her hat.
“What do you think, Captain Niel? The prisoners have come in, and I heard one of the Boers in charge say that he had a pass signed by the Boer general for some English people, and that he was coming over to see about them presently. Who can it be?”
“It is for us,” said Jess quickly. “We are going home. I saw Hans Coetzee yesterday, and begged him to try and get us a pass, and I suppose he has.”
“My word! going to get out: well, you are lucky! Let me sit down and write a letter to my great-uncle at the Cape. You must post it when you can. He is ninety-four, and rather soft, but I dare say he will like to hear from me,” and she hurried into the house to give her aged relative—who, by the way, laboured under the impression that she was still a little girl of four years of age—as minute an account of the siege of Pretoria as time would allow.
“Well, John, you had better tell Mouti to put the horses in. We shall have to start presently,” said Jess.
“Ay,” he said, pulling his beard thoughtfully, “I suppose that we shall;” adding, by way of an afterthought, “Are you glad to go?”
“No,” she said, with a sudden flash of passion and a stamp of the foot. Then she turned and entered the house again.
“Mouti,” said John to the Zulu, who was lounging about in a way characteristic of that intelligent but unindustrious race, “inspan the horses. We are going back to Mooifontein.”
“Koos!” said the Zulu unconcernedly, and started on the errand as though it were the most everyday occurrence to drive off home out of a closely beleaguered town. That is another beauty of the Zulu race: you cannot astonish them. No doubt they consider that extraordinary mixture of wisdom and insanity, the white man, to be capable du tout, as the agnostic French critic said in despair of the prophet Zerubbabel.
John stood and watched the inspanning absently. In truth, he, too, was conscious of a sensation of regret. He felt ashamed of himself for it, but there it was; he was sorry to leave the place. For the last week or so he had been living in a dream, and everything outside that dream was blurred, indistinct as a landscape in a fog. He knew the objects were there, but he could not quite appreciate their relative size and position. The only real thing was his dream; all else was as vague as those far-off people and events that we lose in infancy and find again in old age.