"He don' seem not just the right thing to-day, sir, with missus's compulments," grinned the girl, wildly elated by her momentary distinction.
To her intense delight, this last sally caused a giggle among the loafers. She edged nearer to the barbed wire fencing, to prolong this truly delightful conversation; and for a minute or two, idiotic questions and answers pattered across the farm boundary, while Bert's brow grew blacker and blacker.
Suddenly a silence, instant and deep, fell on the gathering. The Kaffir girl scuttled behind a shed with noiseless celerity. From the door of the farm issued two people—Tante Wilma, the Englishman's Boer wife, and striding beside her corpulent bulk, the slim, energetic figure of Carol Mayne, the English mission priest in charge of the station. Tante Wilma wore her most repulsive expression, her sandy eyebrows lowering over her cunning little eyes. Ten years ago she had been a handsome woman, in a redundant style; but six children and an invalid husband had reduced her form to shapelessness and her temper to rags and tatters.
She hated the English cleric, and could not bear that he should come and see her husband. The Boer Predikant would have sat and sympathised with her over his coffee for a couple of hours after his professional visit to the sick man. Carol Mayne never seemed to have an adequate idea of the importance of this woman, who owned half Slabbert's Poort, and had married her English overseer, a widower with a little girl of his own.
She was evidently accompanying the young man from the house much against her will. About half way across the yard, becoming perhaps aware of the audience at the gate, the clergyman halted, just out of earshot. He seemed earnestly recommending some particular course of conduct to Mrs. Lutwyche, who stood sullenly before him, hostility in every line of her coarse face.
The group of men at the gate dropped away silently, singly or in pairs, avoiding the parson; and Bert was left alone, his sullen scowl fixed upon the house, as though willing it to render up the face he had stood there for hours longing to see.
After a while, Mr. Mayne, having finished his colloquy with Tante Wilma, lifted his hat with that unconscious English University manner which had piqued her in her husband, but which now she hated as only the ignorant can hate the thing that they can never understand. The young Englishman's parting salutation, delivered so entirely as a matter of course, belonged to an order of things which, had she been able, Tante Wilma would have destroyed, ravaged, trampled under her gross feet.
She stood glowering upon him as he made straight for the gate by which Bert still lounged. And she was pleased to note that the young man made no effort to open it for his passage.
"Good evening, Mestaer!" said Mr. Mayne, as he reached the gate. "How's the world treating you?"
"I'm —— if I care how it treats me," was the engaging response.