The inmates of Annerley have retired to their rest. The whole household seems hushed in the deepest repose; but Frankfort is seated with a packet before him, which he longs, yet dreads, to open.
He tears the seal away, and the sight of Eleanor Lyle’s handwriting makes his heart beat—he can hear it in the silence of the midnight hour.
But we must first see how sped the convicts.
Chapter Eleven.
The Torture.
It was in the month of December, 18—, that Lee and Martin Gray established themselves as traders at Umlala’s kraal, in Kafirland. The reader has been given to understand that Lee had no intention of domesticating himself with the savages, albeit he adapted himself at once to the customs of the tribe, persuading the chief and his councillors that he had been induced to join them from a desire to better his condition, as well as aid and advise them in their plans and operations against the colony. He was too well acquainted with the Kafir character to attempt to impose on them by professing disinterested motives, for on these he knew they would place no reliance; but by fixing himself as a trader among them, he could in the first place bide his time for carrying out his intentions of joining the Dutch; and while doing so, lay up a fund for future pecuniary wants or emergencies. To Brennard it was his interest to be a faithful agent. To do Lee justice, he had no thought of fraud in money matters, and from the traders to the eastward he easily gathered intelligence of the Dutch farmers’ movements, from the districts of Natal, and beyond the Draakberg, to an appointed spot between the branches of the Orange River, where a general gathering of emigrant Boers was to take place previous to treking in a body to Orichstad, a settlement beyond the 25th degree of south latitude, and therefore considered by them as not subject to the British Government.
With an air of good faith, he opened a correspondence in cipher with Brennard, who, at his suggestion, placed an agent on the Stormberg mountains, and thus increased his contraband traffic by disposing of arms and ammunition to the Boers, who, assisted by these traitors, grew sanguine in their hopes and determined in their preparations. So blind, indeed, was the colonial government to the real state of affairs, that wagons containing guns actually passed the outskirts of the frontier garrisons, on their way to the Modder and Bilt River settlements, while smaller arms were landed at the Umtata, and conveyed to a dépôt at the foot of the northern extremity of the Stormberg mountains.
The Dutch soon felt the influence of a master mind at work. A secret communication was set on foot between Lee and the rebel leader; but Lee was cautious in his policy, since, to be suspected by the Kafirs as anything but a trader, would be to draw down attention from the missionaries, who were, when permitted, in communication with the tribes most distant from the colony. Those within the border were becoming every day more lawless. It was said by some of these teachers, in after times, that they had had an idea of some men of suspicious character living among Umlala’s people; but having no tangible proof of their existence, having only the word of Kafir spies to depend on, they could take no steps in the matter, either by offering advice to the Kafirs, near whom the poor missionaries and their families were living in dread and peril of their lives, or by giving information to the authorities, who were too remote to act.