CHAPTER XI[ToC]
PRISONER OF WAR
How the routine of life at Harmony was broken in upon by news "from the front" that April month in 1901, I shall endeavour to relate.
Hansie coming home one morning from a shopping expedition, found her mother in a state of suppressed excitement.
Everything was as much as possible "suppressed" in those days—goodness only knows why, for surely it would have been better for the nervous and highly strung mind if an occasional outburst could have been permitted. Hansie suffered from the same complaint, and had to pay most dearly in after years for the suppression of her deepest feelings.
There is a Dutch saying which forcibly expresses that condition of tense self-control under circumstances of a particularly trying nature. We say we are "living on our nerves," and that describes the case better than anything I have ever heard.
Our heroines, like so many other sorely tried women in South Africa, were "living on their nerves," those wise, understanding nerves, so knowing and so delicate, which form the stronghold of the human frame.
The external symptoms of this state were only known by those who lived in close and constant intercourse with one another. Hansie therefore knew, by an inflection in her mother's voice, that something out of the way had happened when she said:
"I have had a note from General Maxwell."