P. de Wet. The country is lost.
Mrs. v. Niekerk. No, the country is not lost. You are masters for the moment wherever your camps stand. Elsewhere the burghers do what they like and go wherever they choose.
P. de Wet. Wait a bit, till the 200,000 men who are still to come from England are here, and the blockhouses which are to be built from town to town are completed.—Aunt, do tell the burghers what I now tell to you—All is lost. Do tell the burghers so.
Mrs. v. Niekerk. I will not do so. Besides, it would be in vain.
Involuntarily she thought of days gone by, when the man who now stood before her came to her house under conditions so entirely different. "Oh Piet," she said, "have we not prayed together, you and I, in our prayer-meetings, in this very house, that is now being turned into a heap of ruins? Alas! the image which I then saw in you, I see no more. You have forsaken God."
"No," he said; "all of you have done that. And as regards prayer-meetings, every Sunday we do that.... But the consciences of the burghers who are still fighting have become seared."
The house was destroyed; where the doors and windows were, yawning openings gaped. The beams were sawn down, a partition wall thrown down, and the roof fell in,—all this in the presence of Mrs. van Niekerk and Piet de Wet.
The poor woman then went to an outer storehouse, but the English would not allow her to remain there, and she took refuge in a miserable hut used for storing dry cow-dung for fuel.
But on the following day she had to move out of there too, as the enemy said they needed the place to fire from. And so she and her daughter were now stranded on her own premises without the least protection from wind or weather.
But this did not last long. The English ordered her and her daughter to get into a waggon, saying that they would take her to Kroonstad. This, however, they did not do; but informed her on the road, that they would leave her with a woman, and in the afternoon made her alight at the house of Field-Cornet Thys de Beer.