Jess by H. Rider Haggard (big screen ebook reader .txt) 📖

On the following Monday, John, taking Jantje to drive him, departed in a rough Scotch cart, to which were harnessed two of the best horses at Mooifontein, to shoot buck at Hans Coetzee's.

He reached the place at about half-past eight, and concluded, from the fact of the presence of several carts and horses, that he was not the only guest. Indeed, the first person whom he saw as the cart pulled up was his late enemy, Frank Muller.

"Kek (look), Baas," said Jantje, "there is Baas Frank talking to his servant Hendrik, that ugly Basutu with one eye."

John, as may be imagined, was not best pleased at this meeting. He had always disliked the man, and since Muller's conduct on the previous Friday, and Jantje's story of the dark deed of blood in which he had been the principal actor, positively he loathed the sight of him. He jumped out of the cart, and was going to walk round to the back of the house in order to avoid him, when Muller, suddenly seeming to become aware of his presence, advanced to meet him with the utmost cordiality.

"How do you do, Captain?" he said, holding out his hand, which John just touched. "So you have come to shoot buck with Oom Coetzee; going to show us Transvaalers how do to it, eh? There, Captain, don't look as stiff as a rifle barrel. I know what you are thinking of; that little business at Wakkerstroom on Friday, is it not? Well, now, I tell you what it is, I was in the wrong, and I am not afraid to say so as between man and man. I had had a glass, that was the fact, and did not quite know what I was about. We have got to live as neighbours here, so let us forget all about it and be brothers again. I never bear malice, not I. It is not the Lord's will that we should bear malice. Hit out from the shoulder, I say, and then forget all about it. If it hadn't been for that little monkey," he added, jerking his thumb in the direction of Jantje, who was holding the horses' heads, "it would never have happened, and it is not nice that two Christians should quarrel about such as he."

Muller jerked out this long speech in a succession of sentences, something as a schoolboy repeats a hardly learnt lesson, fidgeting his feet and letting his restless eyes travel about the ground as he spoke. It was evident to John, who stood quite still and listened to it in icy silence, that his address was by no means extemporary; clearly it had been composed for the occasion.

"I do not wish to quarrel with anybody, Meinheer Muller," he answered at length. "I never do quarrel unless it is forced on me, and then," he added grimly, "I do my best to make it unpleasant for my enemy. The other day you attacked first my servant and then myself. I am glad that you now see that this was an improper thing to do, and, so far as I am concerned, there is an end of the matter," and he turned to enter the house.

Muller accompanied him as far as where Jantje was standing at the horses' heads. Here he stopped, and, putting his hand in his pocket, took out a two-shilling piece and threw it to the Hottentot, calling to him to catch it.

Jantje was holding the horses with one hand. In the other he held his stick--a long walking kerrie that he always carried, the same on which he had shown Bessie the notches. In order to secure the piece of money he dropped the stick, and Muller's quick eye catching sight of the notches beneath the knob, he stooped down, picked it up, and examined it.

"What do these mean, boy?" he asked, pointing to the line of big and little notches, some of which had evidently been cut years ago.

Jantje touched his hat, spat upon the "Scotchman," as the natives of that part of Africa call a two-shilling piece,[*] and pocketed it before he answered. The fact that the giver had murdered all his near relations did not make the gift less desirable in his eyes. Hottentot moral sense is not very elevated.

[*] Because once upon a time a Scotchman made a great impression on the simple native mind in Natal by palming off some thousands of florins among them at the nominal value of half a crown.

"No, Baas," he said with a curious grin, "that is how I reckon. If anybody beats Jantje, Jantje cuts a notch upon the stick, and every night before he goes to sleep he looks at it and says, 'One day you will strike that man twice who struck you once,' and so on, Baas. Look, what a line of them there are, Baas. One day I shall pay them all back again, Baas Frank."

Muller abruptly dropped the stick, and followed John towards the house. It was a much better building than the Boers generally indulge in, and the sitting-room, though innocent of flooring--unless clay and cowdung mixed can be called a floor--was more or less covered with mats made of springbuck skins. In the centre of the room stood a table made of the pretty buckenhout wood, which has the appearance of having been industriously pricked all over with a darning-needle, and round it were chairs and couches of stinkwood, and seated with rimpis or strips of hide.

In one big chair at the end of the room, busily employed in doing nothing, sat Tanta (Aunt) Coetzee, the wife of Old Hans, a large and weighty woman, who evidently had once been rather handsome; and on the couches were some half-dozen Boers, their rifles in their hands or between their knees.

It struck John as he entered that some of these did not seem best pleased to see him, and he thought he heard one young fellow, with a hang-dog expression of face, mutter something about the "damned Englishman" to his neighbour rather more loudly than was necessary to convey his sentiments. However, old Coetzee came forward to greet him heartily enough, and called to his daughters--two fine girls, very smartly dressed for Dutch women--to give the Captain a cup of coffee. Then John made the rounds after the Boer fashion, and beginning with the old lady in the chair, received a lymphatic shake of the hand from every single soul in the room. They did not rise--it is not customary to do so--they merely extended their paws, all of them more or less damp, and muttered the mystic monosyllable "Daag," short for good-day. It is a very trying ceremony till one gets used to it, and John pulled up panting, to be presented with a cup of hot coffee that he did not want, but which it would be rude not to drink.

"The Captain is the rooibaatje?" said the old lady "Aunt" Coetzee interrogatively, and yet with the certainty of one who states a fact.

John signified that he was.

"What does the Captain come to the 'land' for? Is it to spy?"

The whole audience listened attentively to their hostess's question, then turned their heads to listen for the answer.

"No. I have come to farm with Silas Croft."

There was a general smile of incredulity. Could a rooibaatje farm? Certainly not.

"There are three thousand men in the British army," announced the old vrouw oracularly, and casting a severe glance at the wolf in sheep's clothing, the man of blood who pretended to farm.

Everybody looked at John again, and awaited his answer in dead silence.

"There are more than a hundred thousand men in the regular British army, and as many more in the Indian army, and twice as many more volunteers," he said, in a rather irritated voice.

This statement also was received with the most discouraging incredulity.

"There are three thousand men in the British army," repeated the old lady, in a tone of certainty that was positively crushing.

"Yah, yah!" chimed in some of the younger men in chorus.

"There are three thousand men in the British army," she repeated for the third time in triumph. "If the Captain says that there are more he lies. It is natural that he should lie about his own army. My grandfather's brother was at Cape Town in the time of Governor Smith, and he saw the whole British army. He counted them; there were exactly three thousand. I say that there are three thousand men in the British army."

"Yah, yah!" said the chorus; and John gazed at this terrible person in bland exasperation.

"How many men do you command in the British army?" she interrogated after a solemn pause.

"A hundred," said John sharply.

"Girl," said the old woman, addressing one of her daughters, "you have been to school and can reckon. How many times does one hundred go into three thousand?"

The young lady addressed giggled confusedly, and looked for assistance to a sardonic Boer whom she was going to marry, who shook his head sadly, indicating thereby that these were mysteries into which it was not well to pry. Thrown on her own resources, she plunged into the recesses of an intricate calculation, in which her fingers played a considerable part, and finally, with an air of triumph, announced that it went twenty-six times exactly.

"Yah, yah!" said the chorus, "it goes twenty-six times exactly."

"The Captain," said the oracular old lady, who was rapidly driving John mad, "commands a twenty-sixth part of the British army, and he says that he comes here to farm with Uncle Silas Croft. He says," she went on, with withering contempt, "that he comes here to farm when he commands a twenty-sixth part of the British army. It is evident that he lies."

"Yah, yah!" said the chorus.

"It is natural that he should lie!" she continued; "all Englishmen lie, especially the rooibaatje Englishmen, but he should not lie so badly. It must vex the dear Lord to hear a man lie so badly, even though he be an Englishman and a rooibaatje."

At this point John burst from the house, and swore frantically to himself as soon as he was outside. It is to be hoped that he was forgiven, for the provocation was not small. It is not pleasant to be universally set down not only as a leugenaar (liar), but as one of the very feeblest order.

In another minute old Hans Coetzee came out and patted him warmly on the shoulder, in a way that seemed to say that, whatever others might think of the insufficiency of his powers of falsehood, he, for one, quite appreciated them, and announced that it was time to be moving.

Accordingly the party climbed into their carts or on to their shooting-horses, as the case might be, and started. Frank Muller, John noticed, was mounted as usual on his fine black horse. After driving for more than half an hour along an indefinite kind of waggon track, the leading cart, in which were old Hans Coetzee himself, a Malay driver, and a coloured Cape boy, turned to the left across the open veldt, and the others followed in turn. This went on for some time, till at last they reached the crest of a rise that commanded a large sweep of open country, and here Hans halted and held up his hand,