Among these still trusting ones was Conrad Marais. Strongly urged by Hans and Considine, he consented to begin life anew in the old home, and went vigorously to work with his stout sons.
But he had barely begun to get the place into something like order when a shell was sent into the colony, which created almost as much dismay as if it had been the precursor of another Kafir invasion.
Conrad was seated in a friend’s house in Somerset when the said shell exploded. It came in the form of a newspaper paragraph. He looked surprised on reading the first line or two; then a dark frown settled on his face, which, as he read on, became pale, while his compressed lips twitched with suppressed passion.
Finishing the paragraph, he crushed the newspaper up in his hand, and, thrusting it into his pocket, hastened to the stable, where he saddled his horse. Leaping on its back as if he had been a youth of twenty, he drove the spur into its flanks and galloped away at full speed—away over the dusty road leading from Somerset to the hills: away over the ridge that separates it from the level country beyond; and away over the brown karroo, until at last, covered with dust and flecked with foam, he drew up at his own door and burst in upon the family. They were concluding their evening meal.
“Read that!” he cried, flinging down the paper, throwing himself into a chair, and bringing his fist down on the table with a crash that set cups and glasses dancing.
“There!” he added, pointing to the paragraph, as Hans took up the paper—“that despatch from Lord Glenelg—the British Colonial Secretary—at the top of the column. Read it aloud, boy.”
Hans read as follows:—
“‘In the conduct which was pursued towards the Kafir nation by the colonists and the public authorities of the colony, through a long series of years, the Kafirs had ample justification of the late war; they had to resent, and endeavour justly, though impotently, to avenge a series of encroachments; they had a perfect right to hazard the experiment, however hopeless, of extorting by force that redress which they could not expect otherwise to obtain, and the claim of sovereignty over the new province must be renounced. It rests upon a conquest resulting from a war in which, as far as I am at present enabled to judge, the original justice is on the side of the conquered, not of the victorious party.’”
“Mark that!” cried Conrad, starting to his feet when Hans had finished, and speaking loud, as if he were addressing the assembled colony instead of the amazed members of his own family,—“mark that: ‘the claim of sovereignty over the new province must be renounced.’ So it seems that the Kafirs are not only to be patted on the back for having acted the part of cattle-lifters for years, but are to be invited back to their old haunts to begin the work over again and necessitate another war.”
He stopped abruptly, as if to check words that ought not to be uttered. There was a momentary silence in the group as they looked at each other. It was broken by Conrad saying to his youngest son, in a voice of forced calmness—