"I understand," he said. She went on:
"We would have helped the child if we could have reached her; but it was not possible. If she had run away and taken refuge with us, and the men had followed her, I do not think we should have given her up for any threats of theirs, or even for threats carried out in action."
"I know you never would have."
She made the slight gesture with her hand that put all inferred praise aside.
"The waggons of the emigrants were no longer in sight,one morning when we inspanned. They had headed south as if for the Diamond Mines, and we were trekking west...." There was a slight hesitation, and her lashes flickered, then she took up her story. "Perhaps we were a hundred and fifty miles from Gueldersdorp, perhaps more, when we came upon what we believed at first to be the dead body of a young girl, almost a child, lying among the karroo bush, face downwards, upon the sand. She had been cruelly beaten with the sjambok—she bears the scars of that terrible ill-usage to-day.... We judged that she had fainted and fallen from one of the emigrants' trek-waggons. Months afterwards, when her wounds were healed"—her steady lips quivered slightly—"and she had recovered from an attack of brain-fever brought on by alarm and anxiety and the ill-usage, she told me that she had run away from people who were cruel to her—from a man who——"
"This distresses you. I am grieved——"
He noted the sickness of horror in her face, and the starting of innumerable little shining points of moisture on her white, broad forehead and about her lips. She drew out her handkerchief and wiped them away with a hand that shook a little.
"I have very little more to say. She was quite crushed and broken by cruelty and ill-usage. No native child could have been more ignorant—she could not even tell us her name when we asked it. She probably had never had one. And Father Wix, who is our Convent Chaplain, and has charge of the Catholic Mission here, baptised her at my instance, giving her two names that were dear to me in that old life that I left behind so long ago. She is Lynette Mildare.... Are you surprised that in seven years a young creature so neglected should have become what you see? Those powers were inherent in her which training can but develop. We found in her great natural capacity, an intelligence keen and quick, a taste naturally refined, a sweet and gentle disposition, a pure and loving heart——" Her voice broke. Her eyes were blinded by a sudden rush of tears. She moved her hand as though to say: "There is no more to tell."
"You shut the door upon my hope," he said.
It was to her veritably as though the gates of her owndeed clashed behind her with the closing of the sentence. For she had stated the absolute truth, and yet left much untold. She saw disappointment and reluctant conviction in his face, coupled with an immense faith in her that stung her to an agony of shame and self-reproach. What had she suppressed?
Nothing, but that the waggons of the emigrants had turned south for Diamond Town a fortnight before the finding of that lost lamb upon the veld. And her scrupulous habit of truth, her crystal honour, her keen, clear judgment no less than her rigorous habit of self-examination, told her that the half-truth was no better than falsehood, and that she, Christ's Bride and Mary's Daughter, had deliberately deceived this man.
Yet for his own sake, was it not best that he should never know the truth! And for the sake of Richard's daughter, was it not her sacred maternal duty to shield that dearest one from shame? She steeled herself with that as he bared his head before her.
"Ma'am, you have more than honoured me with your confidence, and I need not say that it is sacred in my eyes, and shall be kept inviolate. And for the rest——"
"Reverend Mother," sounded from below.
"They are calling us," she said, as though awakened from a dream.
"May I take you down?"
He offered his arm with deference, and she touching it lightly, they went down together. Lynette came to them laughing, a cup in either hand, her aides-de-camp following with plates that held the siege apology for bread and butter and familiar-looking cubes of something....
"Thank you, Miss Mildare. What have you here, Beau? Cake, upon my word! Or is it a delusion born of long and painful abstinence from any form of pastry?"
"Cake it is, sir, and thundering good cake," proclaimed Beauvayse. "Made from Sister Tobias's special siege recipe, without candied peel or plums or carraways, or any of theother what-do-you-call-'ems that go into the ordinary article. Go in and win, sir. I've had three whacks. Haven't I, Miss Mildare?"
He spoke with the infectious enjoyment of a schoolboy, and Lynette's laugh, sweet and gay as a thrush's sudden trill of melody, answered:
"I think you have had four."
She flushed as she met the Colonel's eyes, reading in them masculine appreciation of her delicate, vivid beauty, and put her freed hand into the lean palm he held out, saying, with a shy, sweet smile that lifted one corner of the sensitive mouth higher than the other:
"I didn't come to say How do you do? before, because I saw you were busy talking to Mother." Her quick glance read something amiss in another face. "Mother, how tired you look! Please bring that little camp-stool, Mr. Fraithorn. Oh, thank you, Dr. Saxham; that one with arms is more comfortable. Colonel, we're all under your command. Won't you please order the Mother to sit down and rest? She will be so tired to-morrow. Dearest, you know you will."
She took the Mother's hand, confidently, caressingly. The end of the thin black veil, that was shabby now, and had darns in many places, was wafted across her face by a vagrant puff of cooled air from the river, and she kissed it, bringing the tears very near the deep, sad eyes that looked at her, and then turned away. Saxham, in default of any excuse for lingering near her, went back to Lady Hannah, who had been diligently mining in him with the pick and shovel of Our Special Correspondent, and getting nothing out, and sat himself doggedly upon a stone beside her.
"That is a sweet girl." She nibbled bannock, sparsely margarined, and sipped her sugarless, milkless tea, sitting on a little bushy knoll, warranted free from puff-adders and tarantulas. Saxham answered stiffly:
"Many people here seem to be under—the same impression."
"Don't you share it? Don't you think her sweet?"
"I have seen young ladies who were—less deserving of the adjective."
Lady Hannah jangled a triumphant laugh. She wore the tailored garb the average Englishwoman looks best in,at home and abroad, an alpaca coat and skirt of cool grey; what the American belle terms a "shirt-waist" with pearl studs, and a big grey hat with a voluminous blue silk veil. Her small face was smaller than ever, but her eyes were as round and as bright as a mouse's or a bird's, and her talk was full of glitter and vivacity.
"'Praise from Dr. Saxham.' ... If I were a man," she declared, "I shouldperdre la bouleover that girl. I don't wonder where she gets her lovely manners from, with such a model of grace and good breeding as Biddy Bawne before her eyes, but I do ask how she came by that type of beauty? And Biddy——"
"Biddy?" repeated Saxham, at a loss.
Her laugh shrilled out.
"I forgot. She is the Reverend Mother-Superior of the Convent to all of you. But I was at school with her, and I can't forget she used to be Biddy. She was one of the great girls, and I was a sprat of ten, but she condescended to let me adore her, and I did, like everybody else. To be adored is hermétier. The Sisters swear by her, and that girl worships the ground under her feet. If I had a daughter I should like her to look at me in that way—heart in her eyes, don't you know, and what eyes! Topaz-coloured, aren't they? She has no conversation, of course.Ihadn't at her age—nineteen or twenty, if I am any guesser. What she will be at thirty, if she don't go off! That little Greek head, and all those waves of rusty-coloured hair. Quite wonderful! And her hands and feet and skin—marvellous! And that small-boned slenderness of build that is so perfectly enchanting. Paquin would delight to dress her. And"—her jangling laugh rang out, waking echoes from hollow places—"it looks—do you know?—it looks as though he would get the chance."
"Why does it?" demanded Saxham, turning his square face full upon Lady Hannah, and lowering his heavy brows.
"Mercy upon us, Doctor, do you want me to be definite and literal? Can't you do as I do, and use your eyes?" Her own round, sparkling black ones were full of provocation. "They look as if they could see rather farther into a mud wall than most people's. Please get me one of those peaches. No, I won't have a plate. I am beginning tofind out that most of the things Society regards as indispensable can be done without. I'm beginning to revert to Primitive Simplicity. Isn't there a prehistoricflairabout most of us? If there isn't, there ought to be. For what are we from week-end to week-end but grimy male and female Troglodytes, eating minced horse and fried locusts in underground burrows by the light of paraffin lamps! Another peach.... Thanks. Can't you see those dear things, the Sisters, gathering them by lantern-light, and being shelled by Brounckers' German gunners. Wretches! Beasts! Horrors!"
"I hope," said Saxham, with rather heavy irony, "that you acquainted them with your opinion of them while you had the opportunity?"
She gaily flipped him with the loose tan gloves she had drawn off. Her bangles clashed, and her eyes snapped sparks under the brim of her hat, whose feathers nodded and swished, and her jangling laugh brought more echoes from the high banks.
"Ha, ha, ha! Do you know, Doctor, I call that thoroughly nasty—to remind me, on such a fine day too, of the Frightful Fiasco. When my own husband hasn't ventured to breathe a hint even.... Do you know, when he rode out to meet me with the Escort, all he said was, 'Hullo, old lady; is that you? The Chief wants to know if you'll peck with us at six, and I told him I thought you'd be agreeable.' And when we met,he—— Why do handkerchiefs invariably hide when people want to sneeze behind them?" She found the ridiculous little square of filmy embroidered cambric, and blew her thin little nose, and furtively whisked away a tear-drop. "He never moved a muscle; Just shook hands in his kind, hearty way, and began to tell the news of the town.... Never, by look or word or sign, helped to rub in what a beetle-headed idiot I'd been." She gulped. "I could have put my head down on the tablecloth and cried gallons"—she blew her nose again—"knowing 'd lost him a rook at least. For, of course, that flabby Slabberts creature counted for something in the game, or Brounckers wouldn't have wanted him. And Captain—my Captain!..." She threw a sparkling eye-dart tipped with remorseful brine at the spare, soldierly figureand the lean, purposeful face. "If you were to say to me this minute, 'Hannah Wrynche, jump off the end of that high rock-bluff there, down on those uncommonly nasty-looking stones below,' I vow I'd do it!"
Saxham's blue eyes were kind. Here was a fellow hero-worshipper.
"I believe you would do it, and—that he believes it too."
She tapped him on the sleeve with the long cherry-wood stick of her white green-lined umbrella.
"Thank you. But don't get to making a habit of saying charming things, because the rôle of Bruin suits you. Your Society women-patients used to enjoy being bullied, tremendously, I remember. We're made like that." Her shrill laugh came again. "Tosauter à pieds jointson people who are used to being deferred to, or made much of, is the best way to command their cordial gratitude and sincere esteem, isn't it? Don't all you successful professional men know that?"
"The days of my professional successes are past and gone," said Saxham, "and my very name must be strange in the ears of the men and women who were my patients. It is natural and reasonable that when a man falls out of the race, he should be forgotten—at least, I hold it so."
"You have a patient not very far away who lauds you to the skies." Lady Hannah indicated the slender pepper-and-salt clad figure of Julius Fraithorn with the cherry-wood umbrella-stick. "You know his father, the Bishop of H——? Such a dear little trotty old man, with the kind of rosy, withered-apple face that suggests a dear little trotty old woman, disguised in an episcopal apron and gaiters, and with funny little bits of white fur glued on here and there for whiskers and eyebrows. We met him with Mrs. Fraithorn at the Hôtel Schwert at Appenbad one June. Do you know Appenbad? Views divine: such miles of eye-flight over the Lake of Constance and the Rhine Valley. To quote Bingo, who suffered hideously from the whey-cure, every prospect pleases, and only man is bile—and woman, too, if seeing black spots in showers like smuts in a London fog, only sailing up instead of coming down, means a disturbed gastric system. I'm not sure now that the Bishop did not mention your name.Can he have done so, or am I hashing things? Do set my mind at rest?"
Saxham said with stiffness:
"It would be possible that the Bishop would remember me. I operated on him for the removal of the appendix in 18—"
"If you had taken away his Ritualistic prejudices at the same time, you would have made his wife a happy woman. Her soul yearns for incense and vestments, candles, and acolytes, and most of all for her boy. Well, she will thank you herself for him one day, Doctor." The little dry hand, glittering with magnificent rings, touched Saxham's gently. "In the meantime let a woman who hasn't got a son shake hands with you for her."
"You make too much of that affair." Saxham took the offered hand. It pressed his kindly, and the little lady went on:
"You're still a prophet in your own country, you know, though it pleases you to make yourself out a—a kind of medical Rip Van Winkle. In June last year—when I did not guess that I should ever know you—I heard a woman say: 'If Owen had been here, the child wouldn't have died.' And the woman was your sister-in-law, Mrs. David Saxham."
Saxham's blue eyes shot her a steely look. The wings of his mobile nostrils quivered as he drew quickened breath. He waited, with his obstinate under-lip thrust out, for the rest. If he did not fully grasp the real and genuine kindliness that prompted the little woman, at least he did her the justice of not shutting her up as an impudent chatterbox. She went on, a little nervously:
"I don't think I ever mentioned to you before that I had met your brother and his wife? She is still a very attractive person, but—it is not the type to wear well, and the boy's death cut them both up terribly."
"There was a boy—who died?"
"In the spring of last year. Of—meningitis, I think his mother said, and she declared over and over that if you had been there, you would have saved him."
"At least, I should have done my best."
She had turned her eyes away in telling him, or she would have seen the relief in his face. He understoodnow why his mother's trustees had prompted the solicitors' advertisement. He was his nephew's heir, under the late Mrs. Saxham's will. Seven thousand in Consols and Home Rails, and the little freehold property in North Wales, that brought in, when the house was let, about one hundred and fifty pounds a year, counted as wealth to a man who had possessed nothing. He lifted his square head and threw back his heavy shoulders with the air of one from whom a heavy burden has been taken. His vivid eyes lightened, his heavy brows smoothed out their puckers, and the tense lines about his lips relaxed. His own words came back to him:
"The Past is done with. Why should not the Future be fair?"
He knew, as he looked towards Lynette Mildare, who personified the Future for him, and his mood changed. He had loved her without hope. Now a faint grey began to show in the blackness of his mental horizon. It might be a false dawn, but what a lightening of the heavy heart—what a leap of the stagnant blood—answered to it! He was no longer penniless. He had never loved money or thirsted for estate, but the thought of that sum of seven thousand pounds solidly invested, and the house that stood in its walled garden on the cliffs at Herion, looking out on the wild, tumbling grey-white waters of Nantavon Bay, was dear to him.
Plas Bendigaid had been a Convent once. Its grey, stone-tiled, steep-pitched roof and solid walls of massive stone had sheltered his mother's infancy and girlhood. Perhaps they might cover a lovelier head, and echo to the voices of his wife and his children. He gave sweet fancies the rein, as Lady Hannah chattered beside him. He dreamed of that Future that might be fair, even as he filled up the little lady's pauses with "Yes's" and "No's."
Love at first sight. He had laughed the possibility to scorn, in other days, holding the passion to be the sober child of propinquity, sympathy, consonance of ideas, similar tastes, and pursuits, and fanned into flame, after due time to kindle, by the appearance of a rival.
A rival! He laughed silently, grimly, remembering theresentful, jealous impulse that had prompted his interruption when the boyish, handsome face of Beauvayse had leaned so near to hers, and the blush that dyed her white-rose cheeks had answered, no doubt, to some hackneyed, stereotyped, garrison compliment.
He had seen them together since then: once crossing the veld from the Women's Laager on foot, in the company of the Mother-Superior; once here beside the river, under the chaperonage of all the Sisters; once in the Market Square, and always the sight had roused in him the same intolerable resentment and gnawing pain that rankled in him now as he watched them.
What was Beauvayse whispering, so close to the delicate little ear that nestled under the red-brown hair-waves? Something that set his grey-green eyes gleaming dangerously, and lifted the wings of the fine nostrils, and opened the boldly-curved mouth in audacious laughter, under the short golden hairs of the clipped moustache. Somehow that laughter stung Saxham. His muscular hand gripped the old hunting-crop that he carried by habit even when he did not ride, and his black brows were thunderous as he vainly tried to listen to the little woman who chattered beside him.
"Look about you," she bade him, putting up her tortoiseshell-rimmed eyeglasses as though she were in a picture-gallery or at a theatre. "Wouldn't the ordinary unimaginative person suppose that Love would be the last flower to blossom in the soil of this battered little bit of debatable ground? But we know better. So does Miss Wiercke, the German oculist's daughter, and so does that tallow-candle-locked young man who plays the harmonium at the Catholic Church. And that other pretty girl—I don't know her name—who used to keep the book-registers at the Public Library. She is going to marry that young mining-engineer—a Cornishman, judging by his blue eyes and black hair—do you happen to be Cornish, too?—next Sunday. And the uncertainty about living till then or any time after Monday morning will make quite a commonplace wedding into something tremendously romantic. But you don't even pretend to look when you're told. Aha!" she cried; "I've caught you. You were watching another pair of lovers—the couple I kept for the last."
"Not at all," said Saxham, inexpressibly wearied by the voluble little woman's discourse. Ignoring the conventional disclaimer, Lady Hannah went on:
"They're in the early stage—the First Act of the dear old play. Pretty to watch, isn't it? Though it makes one feel chilly and grown old, as Browning or somebody says. Only the other day one was tipping that boy at Eton, and he looking such a Fourth of June darling as you never saw, got up in duck trousers and a braided blue jacket, and a straw hat with a wreath of white and crimson Banksia roses round it for the Procession of Boats. And now"—she sighed drolly—"he's a long-legged Lieutenant of Hussars, with a lady-killing reputation. Though, in the present instance, I'm ready to back my opinion that the biter is fairly bit. What regiments of women will tear their hair—real or the other thing—when Beau becomes a Benedick."
Saxham saw red, but he gave no sign. She turned down her little thumb with a twinkle of triumph.
"Habet!And I'm not sorry he has got it badly. Hisleitmotifin the music-play has been 'See the Conquering Hero' up to now; one isn't sorry to see one's sex avenged. But oneissorry for Mary Fraithorn's boy." She indicated the Chaplain with a twirl of her eyeglasses. "She used to visit him with the Sisters when he was ill, and, of course, he has been bowled over. Butil n'a pas un radis, unless the Bishop comes round, and don't you think that little Greek head of hers is aware that a great deal of money goes with the Foltlebarre title, and that the family diamonds would suit it to a marvel?"
Saxham said gratingly, and with a hostile look:
"Do you infer that Miss Mildare is vain and mercenary?"
"Good mercy, my dear man!" she screamed; "don't pounce. I infer nothing, except that Miss Mildare happens to be a live girl, with eyes and the gift of charm, and that the young men are attracted to her as naturally as drones to a honey-pot. Also, that, if she's wise, she will dispose of her honey to the best advantage." Her beady bright eyes snapped suddenly at Saxham, and her small face broke up into laughter. "Ha, ha, ha! Why, I do believe ..." She screamed at him triumphantly. "You, too! You'vesuccumbed. She carries your scalp at her pretty waist with the rest of 'em. How perfectly delightful!"
Possibly Saxham had always been a bear, as her little ladyship had stated, but the last five years had certainly scraped off whatever social veneer had adhered to his manners. The power of facial self-control, the common tact that would have carried things off with a laugh and a jest, were his no longer, if he had ever possessed them. He got upon his feet and stood before the woman whose six ounces less of brain-matter had been counterbalanced by so large an allowance of intuition, dumbly furious with her, and so unspeakably savage with himself for not being able to hide his anger and annoyance that, as he stood before her with his hulking shoulders hunched and his square, black head sullenly lowered, and his eyes blazing under their heavy brows, he suggested to Lady Hannah's nimble wit and travelled experience the undeniable analogy between a chaffed and irate Doctor and a baited Spanish bull, goaded by the stab of the gaudy paper-flagged dart in his thick neck, and bewildered by the subsequent explosion of the cracker. He only wanted a tail to lash, she mentally said, and had pigeon-holed the joke for Bingo when it became none.
"Do, please, forgive me!... What you must think of me!..." she began contritely.
Repentance gave place to resentment. Saxham, without even an abrupt inclination of the head, had swung about and left her. She saw the heavily-shouldered, muscularly-built figure crossing the drift a little way down, stepping from boulder to boulder with those curiously small, neat feet, twirling his old horn-handled hunting-crop as he went, with a decidedly vicious swish of the doubled thong. Now he was knee-deep in the reeds of the north shore; now he was climbing the bank. A black-and-white crow flew up heavily, and was lost among the intertwining branches of the oaks and the blue-gums, and a cloud of finches and linnets rose as the covert of tree-fern and cactus and tall grass, knitted with thorny-stemmed creeper, received him and swallowed him. She saw by the shaking of the foliage that he turned up the stream, and then no more of him. Feather-headed idiot that she had been! Inconsiderate wretch! How, in Heaven's name, after reminding the manof the perfidy of that underbredpasséelittle person with the passion for French novels and sulphonal tabloids, who had thrown the Doctor over, years before, in favour of his brother the Dragoon—how could she have charged him with being a victim to the charms of another young woman? If Mrs. David's desertion rankled still, as no doubt it did, there being no accounting for masculine taste, he would, of course, resent the accusation almost as an insult. Men were such Conservatives in love. And, besides, she had just been telling him about the child. She loathed herself for having perpetrated such a blunder. Saxham had murdered politeness by quitting her abruptly; but hadn't she deserved the snub? She deserved snubbing. She would go, for the health of her soul, and talk to dearest Biddy, who always made you feel even smaller than you had thought yourself before.
She stood up, shaking the sand-grams and grass-burrs from her dress and the folds of the white umbrella. It was nearing six o'clock. The heat was lessening, and the pale turquoise sky overhead was flecked and dappled with little puffs of rosy cloud, bulking in size and deepening in colour to the westward, where their upper edges were pure gold. And the river looked like a stream of liquid honey, upon which giant rose-leaves had been scattered, and a breeze was stirring in the grasses and among the leaves. The Sisters were busily repacking their baskets. Little Miss Wiercke, and her lank-haired young organist, sat under a bush, gazing in each other's eyes with the happy fatuity of lovers in the second stage, while the young lady who had kept the registers at the Public Library was teaching her Cornish mining-engineer to wash up cups and saucers in a tin basin—a process which resulted in the entanglement of fingers of different sexes, and made Sister Tobias pause over her task of wiping crockery to shake her head and laugh.
Little Miss Wiercke was to lose her lank-haired organist a few days later, the prevalent complaint of shrapnelitis carrying him off. And the girl who screamed coquettishly as the mining-engineer amorously squeezed her wet fingers under the soapsuds was shortly to be represented in the Cornishman's memory by another white cross in the Cemetery, a trunk full of pathetic feminine fripperies, anda wedding-ring that had been worn barely two months. But they did not know this, and they were happy. We should never love or laugh if we knew.
Two other people had passed along the path that ran by the margin of the sand and reed-patches, and were lost to sight. Lady Hannah glanced towards the Mother-Superior, who was being gracious to Captain Bingo and the Chaplain, and hoped Biddy would not miss the owner of the little Greek head and the enchanting willowy figure quite yet.
Nuns were frightfully scrupulous and gimlet-eyed where their charges were concerned. And certainly, if young people never got away together withoutqu'il ne vous en déplaise!there would be fewer engagements. And Biddy must know that it was a Heaven-sent chance for the girl.
The Foltlebarres had sat too long on thorns to grumble at Beau's marrying a girl without adot, who was not only lovely enough to set Society screaming over her, but modest and a lady. Up to the present his tendency had been to exalt Beauty above Breed, and personal attractiveness above moral immaculateness.
As in the most recent case of that taking but extremely terrible little person with the toothy, photographic smile, Miss Lessie Lavigne of the Jollity Theatre, the affair with whom might be counted, it was to be hoped, as the last furrow of a heavy sowing of wild oats. As this would be a matchd'égal à égal—in point of blood and education, at any rate—certainly the Foltlebarres would have reason to bless their stars.
Somebody came over to her just then, saying:
"Bingo seems in excellent spirits."
She looked, a little apprehensively, across to where the Mother Superior and the wistful-eyed, pepper-and-salt-clad Chaplain were patiently listening to the recital of one of Bingo's stock anecdotes.
"What is he telling the Reverend Mother?" Her tone was anxious. "I do hope not that story about the unwashed Boer and the cake of soap!"
"Don't be alarmed. It's a recent and completely harmless anecdote about the despatch-runner from Diamond Town who got in this morning."
Her eyes sparkled.
"Really ...? And with news worth having?"
"Mr. Casey might be disposed to think so."
"Who is Mr. Casey?"
"That's a question nobody can answer satisfactorily."
"But is the intelligence absolutely useless to anybody who doesn't happen to be Mr. Casey?" she insisted.
"Not unless they happened to be deeply interested in Mrs. Casey."
"There is a Mrs. Casey, then?"
"So says the man who travelled two hundred miles to bring her letters and the message that she is, as Mr. Micawber would put it,in statu quo."
"I understand." The bright black eyes were compassionate. "She has written to her husband—she doesn't know that he has been killed——"
"Nor do we. As far as we can ascertain, the garrison has never included a Casey."
"Then you think——"
"I think"—he glanced aside as a stentorian bellow of laughter reached them—"that, judging by what I hear, Bingo has got to the soapy story."
She frowned anxiously.
"Bingo ought to remember that nuns aren't ordinary women. I shall have to go and gag him." She took a dubious step.
"Why? The Reverend Mother does not seem at all shocked, and Fraithorn is evidently amused." He added, as Bingo's rapturous enjoyment of his own anecdote reached the stamping and eye-mopping stage: "And undoubtedly Bingo is happy."
"He has got out of hand lately. One can't keep a husband in a proper state of subjection who may be brought home to one a corpse at any hour of the day." Her laugh jangled harshly, and broke in the middle. "The soil of Gueldersdorp being so uncommonly favourable just now to the production of weeds of the widow's description."
"It grows other things." His eyes were very kind. "Brave, helpful, unselfish women, for instance."
"There is one!"
She indicated the tall, black-robed figure of the Mother with a quick gesture of her little jewelled hand.
"And here is another." He touched her sleeve lightly with a finger-tip.
"Brave.... Helpful." Her voice was choky. "Do you think I shall ever forget the hindrance I have been to you? Didn't I lose you your Boer spy?"
"Granted you did." His moustache curved cheerfully at the corners. "But that's Ancient History, and look what you brought back!"
"A unit of the despised majority who is thoroughly convinced of her own superfluousness. Hannah Wrynche, with the conceit so completely taken out of her that she feels, say, like a deflated balloon; Hannah Wrynche, who believed herself born to be a War Correspondent, and has come down to scribbling gossipy paragraphs for a little siege newspaper printed in a damp cellar."
He laughed.
"Collectors will pay fancy prices for copies of that same little siege newspaper, at auctions yet to be."
"I've thought of that," she confessed. "But, oh! I could make it so much more spicy if you'd only give me a freer hand."
His hazel eyes had a smile in them. "I know you think me an editorial martinet."
"You blue-pencil out of my poor paragraphs everything that's interesting."
"No personalities shall be published in a paper I control."
"The Reading Public adore personalities and puerilities."
"They can go to theDaily Whalefor them, then."
"Isn't that rather a personal remark?"
"Let me say that if you are occasionally personal, you are never, under any circumstances, anything but clever."
"Thank you. But, oh! the difference between what I am and what I aspired to be!"
"And, ah! the difference between what I have done and what I meant to do!" he said.
Her black eyes flashed. "You have never really felt it. Achievement with you has never hit below the mark. You, of all men living, are least fitted to enter into the rueful regrets and dismal disillusions of a Hannah Wrynche."
"Hannah Wrynche, who is content to do a woman's work and fill a woman's place; Hannah Wrynche, who hasatoned for a moment of ambitious—shall I say imprudence?—splendidly and nobly, has no reason to be rueful or regretful. Don't shake your head. Do you think I don't know what you are doing, day after day, to help and cheer those poor fellows at the Convalescent Hospital?"
Her eyes were full of tears. "You make too much of my poor efforts. You underestimate the effect of praise from you."
"I said very little in the last cipher despatch that got through to Colonel Rickson at Malamye, but what I did say was very much to the purpose, believe me."
She gasped, staring at him with circular eyes of incredulity. "You've mentioned—me—in your despatches.Me?"
"Just so!" he said, and left her groping for the ridiculous little gossamer handkerchief to dry the tears of pride and gratitude that were tumbling down her cheeks.
"Clang—clang—clang!"
A man and a girl came back out of Paradise when the Catholic church-bell rang the Angelus. The girl's sweet flushed face had paled at the first three strokes. When the second triple clanged out, her colour came back. She rose from her seat upon a lichened slab of granite in the cool shadow of the great boulder, and bent her lovely head, Beauvayse watching her lips as they moved, soundlessly repeating the Angelic Salutation:
"Ave María, grátia plena; Dóminus tecum! Benedícta tu in muliéribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus."
The wonderful simplicity of the Chosen One's reply followed, and the announcement of the Unspeakable Mystery. The little prayer followed, and the rapid signing with the Cross, and she dropped her slight hand from her bosom, and turned her eyes back upon his.
"You remind me of my mother," he told her. "She is Catholic, you know."
"And not you?"
"We fellows, my brothers Levestre and Daltham andmyself, were brought up as pillars of the Established Church." His sleepy, grey-green eyes twinkled, his white teeth showed in the laugh. "The girls are of my mother's faith. It was a family agreement. Are you quite sure you have come down to earth again? Because there's such an awful lot I want to say to you that I don't know where to begin."
Though his mouth laughed, his eyes had wistful shadows under them. He had tossed aside his Service felt when she had taken off her hat, and the sunshine, piercing the thick foliage overhead, dappled the scaly trunks of the blue-gum trees, and dripped gold upon the red-brown head and the crisp-waved golden one.
"I am here. I am listening."
She stood before him with meekly drooping eyelids, feeling his ardent gaze like a palpable weight, under which her knees trembled and her whole body swayed. The great boulder rose upon her left hand like a beneficent presence. Delicate ferns and ice-plants sprang from its chinks and crannies. The long fronds of the sparaxis bowed at her small, brown-shod feet, some bearing seed-pods, others rows of pink bells, or yellow—a fairy chime. In the damper hollows iris bloomed, and the gold and scarlet sword-flowers stood in martial ranks, and gaily-plumaged finches were sidling on overhanging boughs, or dipping and drinking in the shallows. The wattled starlings whistled to each other, or fought as starlings will. A grey partridge was bathing in the hot dry sand between the reed-beds and the bank, and in the deeper pools the barbel were rising at the flies. There was no sound but the running water. The spicy smell of aromatic leaves and the honeyed perfume of a great climbing trumpet-flower made the air languorous with sweetness.
He answered her now.
"You are here, and I am here. And for me that means everything. And I feel that I want nothing more, and, still, such a tremendous lot besides."
He breathed as though he had been running, and his sharply-cut nostrils quivered. His white teeth gleamed under the clipped golden moustache.
Perhaps it made his charm the more definite and irresistiblethat in these days of storm, and stress, and hardship and peril, his handsome face was never without its gay, confident smile. His tall, athletic figure, in the neat workmanlike Service dress that suited him so well, leaned towards her eagerly. He kept his clear eyes on her face, with the direct simplicity of a child's gaze, but the look bred in her a delicious terror. The perfume of youth and health, of vigour and virility, that exhaled from him, came to her mingled with the scent of the crushed spice-leaves and the perfume of the waxen-belled heaths and the breath of the giant trumpet-flower. She was turning dizzy. She could scarcely stand.
"I—I will sit down," she murmured, and he beat the grasses at the foot of the great granite slab and prodded in chinks and crannies for snakes and tarantulas; and when she sank down with a faint sigh of relief, threw himself at her feet with a careless, powerful grace, and lay there looking up at her, worshipping the golden lights that gleamed through the thick dark eyelashes, and the sweet shadows under them, and her little pointed chin.
The lace-trimmed frills of a white cambric petticoat peeped under the hem of her green cloth skirt; below there was a glimpse of slender, crossed ankles in brown silk hose, and the little brown shoes laced with wide silk ties. She drew off one of her thin, loose tan gloves, and smoothed back a straying lock above her ear, and flushed, hearing him murmur in his caressing voice:
"Take off the other glove, too."
She was well aware how beautiful her hands were—small, and slender, and ivory-white, and exquisitely modelled, with little babyish nicks at the wrists, and at the inner edges of the rosy palms, and gleaming pink nails, of the true almond shape. She thought little of her face, though she knew it to be charming; but she ingenuously admired her slender feet, that were quite as pretty without the silk stockings and little brown shoes, and the delicate hands she bared for him now. He looked at them with ardent longing, and said:
"How dear of you to do that, because I asked you! And do you realise that we're here together alone, you and me, for the first time? Nobody saw us steal away but SisterCleophée, and I've a notion she wouldn't tell, blessed old soul!"
Her eyes smiled.
"You would not call the Mother that?"
"No more than I would Queen Victoria or the Princess of Wales. And a snubbing from the Religious would be rather worse, on the whole, than a snubbing from the Royalty."
"The Princess never snubbed you?"
"Didn't she? Tremendously, once. Do you want to hear about it? She had sent away her brougham while the giddy old Dean and Chapter were showing her round St. Paul's. And—acting as Extra Equerry—I'd got instructions to call her a hack conveyance, and—being young and downy, I'd picked H.R.H. the glossiest growler on the rank. But you've been bred and born here. You don't even know what a growler is. And in five years' time there won't be one left in London."
"Perhaps I shall see London before the five years are over. And a growler is a four-wheeled cab. You see, I'm not so ignorant...."
"You sweetest!" he burst out passionately. "I wish I knew all that you could teach me!"
He might have frightened her if he had stretched out his arms to clasp her then. But he mastered himself so far. Lying at full length in the grass, leaning upon his elbow, he rested his head upon his hand, and drank her in with thirsty eyes. And that something emanating from him enveloped her, delicately and yet forcefully, constraining and urging and compelling her to meet his gaze. And the perfume of the great honeyed flower came to her in waves of sweetness, growing in strength, and the monotonous buzzing of the black honey-bees mingled with the drumming of the crickets, and the flowing of the river, and the beating of her heart, and the rushing of her blood. She leaned her fair head back against the great boulder, and said in a voice that shook a little:
"Tell me about the snubbing."
"It was High Art. Three words—and I knew I'd behaved like a bounder of the worst—I had to go back and get the other cab, with a broken front window and a cabby...." He chuckled. "I've met red noses enoughbut you could have seen that chap's glowing through the thickest fog that ever blanketed Ludgate Hill and wrapped the Strand in greasy mystery. Don't move, please!... There's a ray of sunshine touching your head that makes your hair look the colour of a chestnut when the prickly green hull first cracks to let it out. Or ... there's a rose grows on the pergola at home at Foltlebarre Royal, with a coppery sheen on the young leaves.... I wondered why I kept thinking of it as I looked at you. But I know now. And your skin is creamy white like the flower. Oh, if I could only gather the girl-rose and carry it home to the others!"
She was pink as the loveliest La France now.
"You ought not to talk to me in that way."
"Don't I know it?" Beauvayse groaned out. He turned over upon his face in the grass, and lay quite still. A shuddering sigh heaved the strong young shoulders from time to time, and his hands clenched and tore at the grasses, "Don't I know it? Lynette, Lynette!"
She longed to touch the close-cropped golden head. Unseen by him, she stretched out a hand timidly and drew it back again, unsatisfied.
"Lynette, Lynette! I'm paying at this moment for every rotten act of headlong folly I've ever committed in my life, and you're making me!" He caught at a fold of her skirt and drew it to him and hid his face in it, kissing it again and again. It was one of the caresses she had been used herself to offer where she most loved. To find yourself being worshipped instead of worshipping is an experience. She touched the golden head now, as the Mother had often touched her own. He caught the hand.
"No, no!" She grew deadly pale, and shivered. "Please let me go. I—I did not——"
She tried to release the hand. He raised himself, and she started at the warm, quivering pressure of his beautiful mouth, scarcely shaded by the young, wheat-golden moustache, upon her cool, sweet flesh. She snatched her hand away with a faint cry, and sprang to her feet, and her cheeks blazed anew as she turned to go.
"You want to leave me? You would punish me like that—just for a kissed hand?"
He barred her way, taller than herself, though he stood upon the sloping lower level. She had learned always to be true in thought and speech.
"I—don't—like to be touched." She said it without looking at him.
"You put your hand upon my head. Why did you do it if you hate me so?"
"I—don't hate you!"
"I love you! My rose, my dove, my star, my joy! Queen of all the girls that ever I saw or dreamed of, say that you could love me back again!"
"I—must not."
Her bosom heaved. He could see the delicate white throat vibrating with the tumultuous beating of her heart.
"Why not? Nobody has told you anything against me? Nobody has said to you that I have no right to love you?" he demanded.
"No."
"Look at me."
The golden hazel, dark-lashed eyes she shyly turned to his were full of exquisite, melting tenderness. Her lips parted to speak, and closed again. He leaned towards her—hung over her, his own lips irresistibly attracted to those sweetest ones....
"Lord Beauvayse——" she began, and stopped.
He begged:
"Please, not the duffing title, but 'Beauvayse' only. Tell me you love me. Tell me that you'll wait until I'm able to come to you and say: 'My beloved, the way's clear. Be my wife to-morrow!'"
His tone was masterful. His ardent eyes thrilled her. She murmured:
"Beauvayse ...!"
She swayed to him, as a young palm sways before a breeze, and he caught her in his strenuous, young embrace, and held her firmly against him. Her old terrors wakened, and dreadful, unforgettable things stirred in the darkness, where they had lain hidden, and lifted hydra-heads. She cried out wildly, and strove to thrust him from her, but he held her close. There was a shaking among the tangled growths of bush and cactus high up on the opposite bank,and Lynette realised that Beauvayse's arms no longer held her. She leaned back against the boulder, panting and trembling, and saw Beauvayse's revolver glitter in his steady hand, as something came crashing down through the tangled jungle upon the edge of the farther shore, and a heavily-built man in khâki pushed through the shoulder-high growth of reeds, and leaped upon a rock that had a swirl of water round it. It was Saxham.
"Miss Mildare!" called the strong, vibrating voice.
She faltered:
"It—it is Dr. Saxham."
"And what the devil does Dr. Saxham want?" was written in Beauvayse's angry face. But he called out as he lowered his revolver-hand:
"You've had rather an escape of getting shot, Saxham, do you know? You might have been a Boer or a buffalo. Better be more careful next time, if you're anxious to avert accidents."
Saxham was a little like the buffalo as he lowered his head and surveyed the alert, virile young figure and the insolent, high-bred face from under ominously scowling brows. He made no answer; only laid one finger upon the butt of his own revolver, and the slight action fanned Beauvayse's annoyance and resentment to a white-heat, as perhaps Saxham had intended. He sprang upon another boulder that was in the mid-swirl of the current, and spoke again.
"Miss Mildare, I was walking on one of the native paths that have been made in the bush there"—he indicated the bank behind him—"when I heard you cry out. I am here, at your service, to offer you any help or protection that is in my power to give."
Lynette looked at him vaguely. Beauvayse, crimson to the crisp waves upon his forehead and the white collar-line above the edge of his jacket, answered for her.
"Miss Mildare does not require any help or protection other than what I am privileged to place at her disposal. You had better go on with your walk, Doctor. You know the old adage about two being company?"
He laughed, but his voice had quivered with fury, and the hand that held the revolver shook too. And his eyesseemed colourless as water against the furious crimson of his face. Still ignoring him, Saxham said, his own square, pale face turned full upon Lynette, and his vivid blue eyes constraining her:
"Miss Mildare, I am at your commands. Tell me to cross the river and take you back to the ladies of the Convent, or order me to continue my walk. In which case I shall understand that the familiarities of Lord Beauvayse are not unwelcome to you."
"By God ...! You——"
Beauvayse choked, then suddenly remembered where and how to strike. But he waited, and Saxham waited, and still she did not speak.
"Am I to go or stay? Kindly answer, Miss Mildare!"
Beauvayse's eyes were on her. He said to her below his breath:
"Tell him to go!"
She stammered:
"Th—thank you. But—I—I—had rather you went on."
Beauvayse saw his opportunity, and added, with an intolerable smile:
"My 'familiarities,' as you are pleased to term them, being more acceptable to a lady than the attentions of the Dop Doctor."
Saxham started as though an adder had flashed its fangs through his boot. A rush of savage blood darkened his face; his hand quivered near the butt of his revolver, and his eyes blazed murder. But with a frightful effort he controlled himself, lifted his hat slightly to Lynette, turned and leaped back to the stone he had quitted, strode through the reed-beds, and plunged back into the tangled boscage. That he did not continue his walk, but turned back towards the town, was plain, for his retreat could be traced by the shaking of the thick bush and the high grasses through which he forced his way. It did him good to battle even with these vegetable forces, and the hooked thorns that tore his clothes and rent his flesh left nothing like the traces that those few words of dismissal, spoken by a girl's voice, and the hateful taunt that had followed, had left upon his heart.
It was over. Over—over, the brief, sweet season of hope. Nothing was left now but his loyalty to the friend who believedin him. If that man had not stood between Saxham and his despair, Gueldersdorp would have got back her Dop Doctor that night. For the Hospital stores included a cherished case or two of Martell and Kinahan, and all these things were under Saxham's hand.
The heavy footsteps crashed out of hearing. The startled finches settled down again, except at that point, higher up on the opposite bank, to which Beauvayse's attention had first been directed. There the little birds yet hovered like a cloud of butterflies, but, practised scout as Beauvayse was, he paid no heed to their distress. She had declared for him. The Doctor's discomfiture enhanced his triumph. Gad! how like an angry buffalo the fellow was! The sort of beast who would put down his head and charge at a stone wall as confidently as at a mud one. It was a confounded nuisance that he had seen what he had seen. But a man who had eventually cut so poor a figure, had been snubbed so thoroughly and completely, might prefer to hold his tongue. And if he did not, here in Gueldersdorp, while no letters got through, while no news filtered in from the big humming world outside, it would be possible to carry things bravely off for a long time. He had told Bingo, to be sure, about—about Lessie. But Bingo, though he might bluster and barge about dishonourable conduct, would never give away a man who had trusted him. To be sure, it was not quite fair, not altogether square; it was not playing the game as it should be played, to gain her promise as a free man. Should he make a clean breast of it, and tell her the whole wretched story now?
Perhaps he might if she had not been standing, a slender green-and-white, nymph-like figure, against the background of sun-hot, shadow-flecked, lichened stone, looking at him. The rosy light bathed her in its radiance. And as she looked, it seemed to him that something was dawning in that face of hers. He watched it, breathless with the realisation of his dreams, his hopes, his desires. The prize was his. Every other baser memory was drowning within him. It seemed to him that her purity, as he bathed in it, washed him clean of stain. He forgot everything but the secret that those sweet eyes told at last.
"My beloved! I'm not good enough to tie your blessedlittle shoes, and yet no other man shall ever have you, hold you, call you his own.... Lynette, Lynette! Dear one, isn't there a single kiss? And I might get shot to-morrow."
It was characteristic of him that his brave, gay mouth should laugh even in the utterance of the appeal that melted her. She gave a little sob, and raised her sweet face to his, flushing loveliest rosy red. She lifted her slender arms and laid them about his strong young throat, and kissed him very quietly and purely. He had meant to snatch her to his leaping heart and cover her with eager, passionate caresses. But the strong impulse was quelled. He said, almost with a sob:
"Is this your promise? Does this mean that you belong to me?"
Her breath caressed his cheek as she whispered:
"Yes."
He was thrilled and intoxicated and tortured at once to know himself her chosen. Ah! why was he not free? Why had Chance and Luck and Fate forced him to play a part like this?
"I wish to Heaven we had met a year ago!" he broke out impulsively. "Half-a-dozen years ago—only you'd have been a mere kid—too young to understand what Love means.... Why, Lynette darling! what is the matter? What have I said that hurt?"
Her arms had fallen from about his neck. She shrank away from him. He drew back, shocked into silence by the sudden, dreadful change in her. Her eyes, curiously dulled and faded, looked at Beauvayse as though they saw not him, but another man, through him and behind him. Her face was peaked and pinched; her supple, youthful figure contracted and bent like that of a woman withered by some wasting sickness, her dainty garments seemed to lose their colouring and their freshness, and hang on her, by some strange illusion wrought by the working of her mind upon his, like sordid rags. Against the splendid riot of life and colour over and under and about her, she looked like some slender sapling ringed and blighted, and ruined by the inexorable worm. For she was remembering the tavern on the veld. She was recalling what had been—realising what must henceforth be, in its fullest meaning. She shuddered,and her half-open mouth drew in the air in gasps, and the blankness of her stare appalled him. He called in alarm:
"Lynette dearest! what is the matter? Why do you look at me like that? Lynette!"
She did not answer. She shook like a leaf in the wind, and stared through him and beyond him into the Past. That was all. There was a rustling of leaves and branches higher on the bank, and the sound of thick woollen draperies trailing through grass. The bush on the edge of the cleared space that was about the great boulder was parted by a white, strong hand and a black-sleeved arm, and the Mother-Superior moved out into the open, and came down with those long, swift steps of hers to where they were. Her eyes, sweeping past Beauvayse, fastened on the drooping, stricken figure of the girl, read the altered face, and then she turned them on the boy, and they were stern as those of some avenging Angel, and her white wimple, laundried to snowy immaculateness by the capable hands of Sister Tobias, framed a face as white.
"What is the reason of—this? What has passed between you to account for it? Has your mother's son no sense of honour, sir?"
The icy tone of contempt stung him to risk the leap. He drew himself to his splendid height, and answered, his brave young eyes boldly meeting the stern eyes that questioned him:
"Ma'am, I am sorry that you should think me capable of dishonourable conduct. The fact is, that I have just asked Miss Mildare to be my wife. And she consents."
A spasm passed over the pale face. So easily they leave us whom we have reared and tended, when the strange hand beckons and the new voice calls. But the Mother-Superior was not a woman to betray emotion. She drew her black nun's robe over the pierced mother-heart, and said calmly, holding out her hand to him:
"You will forgive me if I was unjust, knowing that she is dear to me. And now I shall ask you to leave us. Please tell the Sisters"—from habit she glanced at her worn gold watch—"we shall join them in ten minutes' time."
He bowed, and lifted his smasher hat from the grass, and took up the Lee-Metford carbine he had been carrying andhad laid aside, and went to Lynette and took her passive hand, and bent over it and kissed it. It dropped by her side lifelessly when he released it. Her face was a mask void of life. He looked towards the Mother in distress. Her white hand imperiously motioned him away. He expostulated:
"Is it safe for two ladies, ma'am, so far from the town, without protection? Natives or white loafers may be hanging about."
"If you desire it, you can remain within hearing of a call. But go now."
He went, lightly striding down the sandy path between the reed-beds on the foreshore. She watched the tall, athletic figure until it swung round a bend and was lost to sight.
Then she went to the girl and touched her. And at the touch Lynette dropped as though she had been shot, and lay among the trodden grasses and the flaunting cowslips face downwards. A low, incessant moaning came from the muffled mouth. Her hands were knotted in her hair. She writhed like a crushed snake, and all of her slender neck and face that could be seen and the little ears that her clutching, twining fingers sometimes bared and sometimes covered were one burning, shameful red.
"Lynette! My dear one!" The Mother, wrung and torn with a very agony of tenderness and pity, knelt beside her, and began with gentle strength to untwine those clutching hands from the girl's hair. She prisoned both in one of hers, and passed the other arm beneath the slender rigid body, and lifted it up and held it in her strong embrace, silently until a moan, more articulate than the rest, voiced:
"Mother!"
"It is Mother. She holds you; she will not let you go."
The head lay helplessly upon her bosom. She felt the rigor lessen. The moaning ceased, and the tortured heart began to leap and strain against her own, as though some invisible hand lashed it with an unseen thong.
There were no tears. Only those moans and the leaping of the heart that shook her whole body. And it seemed to the Mother that her own heart wept tears of blood. The hour had come at last, as always she had known it would. The love of a man had wakened the woman in Lynette.She knew now the full value of the lost heritage, and realised the glory of the jewel that had been snatched by the brutal hand of a thief. Ah, Lord! the pity of it!
The pity of it! She, the stainless one, could have stripped off her own white robe of virgin purity, had it been possible, to clothe the despoiled young shoulders of Richard's daughter, cowering prostrate under her burden of guiltless shame, crushed by the terrible knowledge that ruined innocence must always pay the penalty, whether the destroyer is punished or goes free.
The penalty! Suppose at the price of a lie from lips that had never lied yet it could be evaded? The Mother's face contracted with a spasm of mental pain. A dull flush mounted to her temples, and died out in olive paleness; her lips folded closely, and her black brows frowned over the sombre grey fires burning in their hollow caves. She rebuked a sinner at that moment, and the culprit was herself.
She, the just mistress and wise ruler of so many Sisters in the religious profession; she, so slow to judge and condemn others, was unsparing in austerity towards herself. She had always recognised her greatest weakness in her love for this adopted daughter that might have been her own if Richard Mildare had not played traitor. She had never once yielded to the clinging of those slight hands about her heart, but she had exacted forfeit from herself, and rigorously. So much for excess of partiality, so much for over-consideration, so much for lack of faith in over-anxiety, so much more of late for the keen mother-jealousy that had quickened in her to anguish at the thought that another would one day usurp her undivided throne, and claim and take the lion's share of the love that had been all hers. Her spiritual director was far too lenient, in her opinion. She was all the more exacting towards herself. What right had a nun to be so bound by an earthly tie? It was defrauding her Saviour and her Spouse to love with such excess of maternal passion the child He had given. Yet she loved on.
She reviewed all her shortcomings, even while the girl's head lay helplessly against her, and the scalding tears that had at last begun to gush from those shut, quivering eyelids wetted her breast. She had esteemed and valued perfectcandour above all things. And yet of what concealments had she not been guilty in the shielding of this dearest head?
She had deceived, for Richard's child, Richard's friend, in the deft interweaving of fragmentary truths into a whole plausible fabric. She knew that, if necessary, she would deceive again, trailing her wings, fluttering on before, as the golden plover lures the footsteps of the stranger from her nest.
Perhaps you call her scruples fantastic, her sense of guilt morbid. Even the lay Catholic can with difficulty comprehend and enter fully into the mental constitution of the Religious. This was a nun, to whom a blur upon the crystal of the soul kept pure, like the virginal body, for the daily reception of the Consecrated Host, meant defilement, outrage, insult, to her Master and her Lord.
And she had always known, it seemed to her, that this terrible hour would come. When the two young figures had moved away together into the green gloom of the trees, she had felt a premonitory chill that streamed over her whole body like icy water, paralysing and numbing her strength. She had read their secret in their faces, unconscious of her scrutiny, and watched them out of sight, praying, as only such a mother can, that it might not be as she feared. This was her beloved's great hour; she would not have stretched out a finger to delay its coming,—she who had known Love, and could not forget! It might be that in this splendid boy, who was as beautiful as the Greek Alcibiades, and as brave as the young Bayard, lay the answer to all her prayers for her darling. The bridal white would not be a blasphemy, like the young nun's snowy robe and veil. And yet—and yet, in Lynette's place she knew that she could never have looked into the face of a rosy, smiling, wedded Future without seeing under the myrtle and orange-blossom garland the leering satyr-face of the Past.
Was it wise that another should be made to share that vision? She put that question to herself, looking with great agonised, unseeing eyes over the head that lay upon her bosom, out across the slowly moving water, stained with amber from ironstone beds through which it had wound its way, tinged with ruddy crimson from the sunset. For the sky, from the western horizon to the zenith, and fromthence to the serried peaks and frowning bastions of purple-black cloud that lowered in the north, was all orange-crimson now, and the moon, then at the ending of her second quarter, swung like a pale lamp of electrum at the eastward corner of the flaming tent.
"Was it wise?" She seemed to hear her own voice echoing back out of the past. And it said:
"The only just claim to your entire confidence in all that concerns your past life will rest in the hands of the man who may one day be your husband."
The perfume of the great white trumpet-flower came to her in gusts of intensified, sickening, loathsome sweetness. She glanced round and saw it on her right, clasping in its luxuriant embrace a slender young bush that it was killing. The thick, juicy green stems and succulent green leaves, the greedily embracing tendrils and great fleshy-white, hanging flowers revolted her. The creeper seemed the symbolisation of Lust battening upon Innocence.
Other like images crowded thick and fast upon her. From a mossy cranny in a stone a hairy tarantula leaped upon a little lizard that sunned itself, not thinking Death so near. A lightning-quick pounce of the bloated thing with the fierce, bright eyes and the relentless, greedy claws, and the little reptile vanished. She shuddered, thinking of its fate.
The blue gums and oaks that fringed the river gorge and the bushes that grew about were ragged and torn with shell and shrapnel-ball. Chips and flinders had been knocked by the same forces from the boulders and the rocks. Amongst the flowers near her shone something bright. It was an unexploded Maxim-shell, a pretty little messenger of Death, girt with bright copper bands and gaily painted. And a ninety-four-pound projectile, exploded, had scattered the shore with its fragments, and doubtless the river-bed was strewn thick with others. You had only to look to see them. Once Lynette's lover knew everything there was to know, the trees and rocks and flowers of the Eden in which every daughter of Eve owns the right to walk, if only once in a whole lifetime, would be marred and broken, scorched and spoiled, like these.
Purblind that she had been. What claim had anyman, seeing what the lives of men are, to this pitiful sacrifice of reticence, this rending of the veil of merciful, wise secrecy from an innocent young head? None. Not the shadow of a claim. She tossed away her former scruples. They sailed from her on the faint hot breeze lightly as thistledown. And now the tear-blurred face was lifted from her bosom, and the voice, hoarse and weak and trembling, appealed:
"Mother, you are not angry? I never meant to be underhand, or to hide—anything from you."
"No," she said, hiding the pang it gave her to realise how much had been concealed between the lines that she had read so often. "You did not mean to." The trembling voice went on:
"He never spoke to me as though we were strangers. Never, from the first. And to-day, he——" Her heart's throbbing shook her. The Mother said:
"He has told me what has passed. He said that he had asked you to marry him, and you had—agreed." The bitterness of her wounded love was in her tone.
"I—had forgotten," she panted, "that—until one little careless thing he said brought it all back to me in such a flood. It was like drowning. Then you came, and—and——" The quavering, pitiful voice rose to a cry: "Mother, must I tell him everything?" She cowered down in the enfolding arms. "Mother, Mother, must I tell him?"
A great wave of pity surged out from the deep mother-heart that throbbed against her own. The deep, melodious voice answered with one word:
"No."
Amazement sat on the uplifted, woebegone face of the girl. The sorrowful eyes questioned the Mother's incredulously.
"You mean that you——"
She folded the slight figure to her. Her sorrowful eyes, under their great jetty arches, looked out like stars through a night of storm. Her greyish pallor seemed a thin veil of ashes covering incandescent furnace-fires. She rose up, lifting the slender figure. She said, looking calmly in the face:
"I mean that you are not to tell him. Upon yourobedience to me I charge you not to tell him. Upon your love for me I command you—never to tell him! Kiss me, and dry these dear eyes. Put up your hair; a coil is loosened. He is waiting for us! Come!"