"If the Foltlebarres aren't absolute beetles they'll jump for joy. How could their boy possibly do better?"
"I don't see how myself."
"Ah, if you're going to back up Toby, the day is as good as won."
"You're very kind to say so."
The red was dying out of Lady Hannah's ear-tips. That "You're very kind" had a gratified sound. The most rigorous and implacable of men can be buttered, she thought, if the emollient be dexterously applied. And a bright spark of naughty triumph snapped in each of her birdlike black eyes.
"Thanks." He was speaking again. "Apologies for keeping you. You're up to your eyes in Hospital work, I don't doubt."
"There is enough to keep one going."
"Without the additional tax of literary labour." She was conscious of a premonitory, apprehensive chill that travelled from the roots of her hair down her spine, and apparently made its exit at the heels of her Louis Quinze shoes. "So the 'Social Jottings' column will not appear in theSiege Gazetteafter to-day. Good-morning."
"Is that my punishment for insubordination?"
Not a sound in reply. "He must have hung up the receiver and gone away. Oh, horrid, horrid male superiority!" thought Lady Hannah. "To have been put under arrest, even to have been ordered out and shot, would be preferable to being figuratively spanked and put in the corner." She winked away some more tears, and sniffed a little dejectedly. "And only the other day he seemed quite pleasedwith me," she added pensively. Then she shrugged her shoulders, and rang up the Head Hospital, North Veld Road.
"Who you-e?"
It was the sing-song voice of the Barala hall-boy.
"I'm Lady Hannah Wrynche. Is the Reverend Mother on duty in the wards to-day?"
"I go see. You hang-e on."
Lady Hannah hung on until her small remaining stock of patience deserted her. As she stamped her small feet, longing to accelerate the languid movements of the hall-boy with a humanely-wielded hatpin, a whisper in the velvet voice she knew stole across the distance.
"Hannah. Is it you?"
"It's me, Biddy dear."
There was a soft laugh that ended in a sigh. "It is so long since anybody called me that."
"I wouldn't dare to with you looking at me."
"Am I so formidable of aspect? But go on."
"It's not so easy. But I've had an awful morning. Everybody I like best down on me like bricks and m——" The speaker gulped a sob.
"You are crying, dear!"
"Not a drop. But if you join in the heckling I shall dribble away and dissolve in salt water. It's all about those wretched paragraphs of mine in theSiege Gazette. But perhaps you haven't seen it?"
"I have seen it."
"You were quite willing that thefiançaillesshould be made public.... Indeed, you gave me to understand you desired it."
"I was quite willing. I did wish it."
"Yes.... Thank you, dear; that was what I wanted to hear from you. I understand now what the one clapping pair of hands must mean to the actor who is booed by all the rest of the audience. Good-bye, dear."
"Stay.... Who are the persons who disapprove of the announcement?"
"My Bingo, for one. Not that anything the dear old stupid says matters in the slightest. And—and Toby."
"'Toby'?"
"I mean Lord Beauvayse."
"Tell him I quite approve. He should know that in this matter it was for me to decide."
"Certainly, dear."
"Whose is the other objecting voice?"
"The Chief thinks I ... we ... it ... I rather fancy that he used the word 'precipitate' in expressing his opinion."
"Refer him to me if he expresses it again."
"Of course, dear, since you ..."
"Good-bye."
"Good-bye, dear. If Biddy Bawne hadn't been a nun," reflected Lady Hannah, as she went out of the Matron's office and back to her patients, who had long ago dined, "I think she would have made rather a despotic Empress. 'Refer him to me,' indeed. What is it, Sergeant? Don't say I'm rung up again."
But the one-armed porter was positive on the subject, and her little ladyship went back. This last communication proved a puzzling one.
"You there?"
"I am Lady Hannah Wrynche. Where are you?"
There was a brief hesitation. A thickish man's voice said:
"I don't know as that matters."
"Who are you?"
There was another hesitation. Then the stranger parried with a question:
"You write them weekly screeds in theSiege Gazette?"
"I am responsible for some of the social paragraphs. Kindly say who is speaking?"
"Nobody that matters much. Can you tell me where Miss Mildare lives?"
"Not without knowing who you are."
"You may call me an old friend of hers," aid the thickish, lisping voice, with a sluggish chuckle in it that the little woman at the other end of the wire had heard ... where?...
"If you are an old friend of the young lady you mention, how is it you don't know her address?" she demanded.
"Keep her address all you want to. Only next time you come alongside her give her a message for me. Ask her ifshe remembers the Free State Hotel on the veld, three days' trek from Dreipoort, and Bough, who was her friend?"
Lady Hannah repeated:
"'And Bough, who was her friend.' You are Bough——?"
"Click!" Somebody had hung up the receiver.
Lady Hannah spent another bad night, not wholly due to the indigestible nature of a dinner of mule colloped, and locusts fried in batter by Nixey's chef. Staggering in the course of disturbed and changeful dreams, under the impact of sufficient bricks and mortar to rebuild toppledown Gueldersdorp, being hauled over mountains of coals, and getting into whole Gulf Streams of hot water, she was slumberously conscious that these nightmares were less harassing than one nasty, perplexing little vision that kept cropping up among the others. It had no beginning and no end. In it the Matron's room at the Convalescent Hospital and Kink's Family Hotel at Tweipans were somehow mixed up, and the ingenuous Mr. Van Busch, that Afrikander gentleman of British sympathies, whose chivalrous and patriotic sentiments had prompted and urged him to the imperilling of his own skin and the risking of his own liberty in the interests of an English lady masquerading for political reasons as the refugee-widow of a German drummer, was oddly confused in identity with an uncomfortably mysterious individual who possessed neither features nor name.
"Ask her if she remembers the Free State Hotel on the veld, three days' trek from Dreipoort, and Bough, who was her friend?" the voice would say..
"You are Bough?" she would find herself asking.
There would be a little guttural, horrible laugh, and nothing would answer but the buzzing of the wire.
And then she was wide awake and sitting up in bed, with a thumping heart. She was no longer in any doubt as to the identity of the owner of the voice. Van Busch was in Gueldersdorp ... and however he came, and whatever disguise of person or of purpose sheltered him, his presence boded no good. The merely logical masculine mind doffs hat respectfully before the superiority of feminine intuition.
Saxham, shouldering out of Julius's hotel upon his way to Staff Bombproof South, is made aware that the hundred-foot-high dust-storm that has raged and swirled throughout the morning is in process of being beaten down into a porridge of red mud by a downpour of February rain.
Straight as Matabele spears it comes down, sending pedestrians who have grown indifferent to shell-fire to huddle under cover, adding to the wretchedness of life in trench or bombproof as nothing else can. And the Doctor, biting hard upon the worn stem of the old briar-root, as he goes swinging along through the hissing deluge with his chin upon his breast and his fierce eyes sullenly fixed upon the goal ahead, recalls, even more vividly than upon Sunday, the angry buffalo of Lady Hannah's apt analogy.
He is drenched to the skin, it goes without saying, in a minute or two. So is the Railway Volunteer, who challenges him at the bridge that carries the single-gauge railway southward over the Olopo, in spite of his ragged waterproof and an additional piece of tarpaulin. So is a mounted officer of the Staff, in whom Saxham mechanically recognises Captain Bingo Wrynche, as he goes by at a furious gallop, spurring, and jagging savagely at the mouth of the handsome if attenuated brown charger, who sends stones and mud and water flying from his furious iron-shod hoofs. So is the Barala on guard by the wattled palisade of the native village—a muddy-legged and goose-fleshy warrior, in a plumed, brimless bowler and leopard-skin kaross, whose teeth can be heard chattering as he stands to attention and brings his gaspipe rifle to the slope. The Chinamen working in the patches of market-garden, where the scant supply of vegetables that command such famine-prices are raised, are certainly sheltered from the wet by their colossal umbrella-hats, but the splashed-up red gruel has imbrued them to the eyes. Yet they continue to labour cheerfully, hoeing scattered shell-fragments out of their potato-drills and removing incrusted masses of bullets that incommode the young kidney-beans, and arranging this ironmongery and metal-ware in tidy piles, possibly with a view to futurecommerce. And so, with another challenge from a picket, posted between the Barala village and the south trenches, where many of the loyal natives are doing duty, Saxham finds himself on the perilous tongue of land that lies behind Maxim Kopje South, and where the Staff Bombproof is situated.
As the long, low mound comes into view, a dazzling white flash leaps from a fold of the misty grey hills beyond, and one of Meisje's great shells goes screaming and winnowing westwards. Then a sentry of the Irregulars, a battered, shaggy, berry-brown trooper, standing knee-deep in a hole, burrowed in the lee of a segment of stone-dyke that is his shelter, challenges for the last time.
"'Alt! I know you well enough, Doctor." It is a man whose wounded arm was dressed, one blazing day last January, outside the Convent bombproof. "But you'll 'ave to give the countersign. Pass Honour and all's well. But"—the sentry's nostrils twitch as the savour of Saxham's pipe reaches them, and his whisper of appeal is as piercing as a yell—"if you left a pipeful be'ind you, it wouldn't do no 'arm. Don't pull your pouch out, sir; the lookout officer 'as 'is eye on you. Open it by the feel, an' drop a pinch by the stone near your toe. I'll get it when they relieve me."
Saxham complies, leaving the sentry to gloat distantly over the little brown lump of loose tangled fibres rapidly reducing to sponginess under the downpour from the skies. The long mound of raw red earth, crusted with greenish-yellow streaks of lyddite from the bursting-charges, rises now immediately before him. At its eastern end is a flagstaff displaying the Union Jack. Under the roof of the little penthouse from which the flagstaff rises are sheltered the vari-coloured acetylene lamps that are used for signalling at night.
Midway of the raw mound rises the rear elevation of an officer in dripping waterproofs, who is looking steadily through a telescope out between the long driving lances of the rain, beyond Maxim Kopje South to those mysterious hills, swathed in grey-black folds of storm-cloud, that look so desolate, and whose folds are yet as full of swarming, active, malignant life as the blanket of anunwashed Kaffir. An N.C.O. is posted a little below the officer, whose narrow shoulders and dark hair, showing above the edge of the turned-up collar and below the brim of the Field-Service cap, prove him to be not Beauvayse. And the usual blizzard of rifle-fire, varied by brisk bursts of cannonading, goes on, and the Red Scythe of the Destroyer sweeps over these two figures and about them in the customary way. But even women and children have grown indifferent to these things, and the men have long ceased to be aware of them.
A bullet sings past Saxham's ear, as the acrid exhalations of a stable rise gratefully to his nostrils, recently saluted by the fierce and clamorous smells of the native village. The ground slopes under his feet. He goes down the inclined way that ends in the horses' quarters, and the orderly, who is sitting on an empty ammunition-box outside the tarpaulin that screens off the interior of the officer's shelter, stiffens to the salute, receives a brief message, and disappears within.
Before Saxham rise the bony brown and bay and chestnut hindquarters of half a dozen lean horses, that are drowsing or fidgeting before their emptied mangers. Against the division of a loose-box that holds a fine brown charger, still saddled and steaming, and heavily splashed with mud, there leans a stretcher, which, by the ominous red stains and splashes upon it, has been recently in use.
Upon Saxham's left hand is the shelter for the rank and file. Here several gaunt, hollow-eyed, and hairy troopers are sitting on rough benches at a trestle-table, playing dominoes and draughts, or poring over tattered books by the light of the flickering oil-lamps, with tin reflectors, that hang against the earth walls. None of them are smoking, though several are sucking vigorously at empty pipes; and the rapacious light that glares in every eye as Saxham mechanically knocks out the ashes from his smoked-out briar-root against the side-post of the entrance is sufficient witness to the pangs that they endure.
Perhaps it is characteristic of the Doctor that, with a hell of revengeful fury seething in his heart, and a legion of devils unloosed and shrieking, prompting him to murder, he should have paused to relieve the tobacco-famine of thesentry, and be moved to a further sacrifice of his sole luxury by the sight of those empty pipes. The old rubber pouch, pitched by a cricketer's hand, flies in among the domino-players, and rebounds from a pondering head, as the orderly comes back, and lifts one corner of the tarpaulin for the Doctor to pass in. A pack of ravening wolves tussling over an unusually small baby might distantly reproduce the scene Saxham leaves behind him. The trestle-table and benches are upset, and men and benches, draughts and dominoes, welter in horrible confusion over the earthen floor, when the scandalised orderly-corporal rushes in to quell the riot, and thenceforward joins the rioters.
They fight like wolves, but the man who rises up from among the rest, clutching the prize, and grinning a three-cornered grin because his upper lip is split, divides the tobacco fairly to the last thread. They even share out the indiarubber pouch, and chew the pieces as long as the flavour lasts. When the thick, fragrant smoke curls up from the lighted pipes, it steals round the edges of the tarpaulin that has dropped behind Saxham, passing in to the wreaking of vengeance upon the thief whose profane and covetous hand has plucked the white lily of the Convent garden.
Now, with that deadly hate surging in his veins, with the lust to kill tingling in every nerve and muscle, he will soon stand in the presence of his enemy, and hers. As he thinks of this, suddenly a bell rings. The sound comes from the north, so it cannot be the bell of the Catholic Church, or that of the Protestant Church, or the bell of the Wesleyan meeting-house, or of the Dutch Kerk.
"Clang-clang! clang-clang! Clang——"
The last clang is broken off suddenly, as though the rope has been jerked from the ringer's hands, but Saxham is not diverted by it from his occupation. With that curious fatuity to which the most logical of us are prone, he has been conning over the brief, scorching sentences with which he means to strip the other man's deception bare to the light, and make known his own self-appointed mission to avenge her.
"They telephoned for me, and I have come, but notin the interests of your sick or wounded man. Because it was imperative that I should say this to you: Your engagement to Miss Mildare and your approaching marriage to her were announced in to-day'sSiege Gazette. You have received many congratulations. Now take mine—liar, and coward, and cheat!"
And with each epithet, delivered with all the force of Saxham's muscular arm, shall fall a stinging blow of the heavy old hunting-crop. There will be a shout, an angry oath from Beauvayse, staggering back under the unexpected, savage chastisement, red bars marring the insolent, high-bred beauty of the face that has bewitched her. Saxham will continue:
"You approached this innocent, inexperienced girl as a lover. You represented yourself to her and to her mother-guardian as a single man. All this when you had already a wife at home in England—a gaudy stage butterfly sleek with carrion-juices, whose wings are jewelled by the vices of men; and who is worthy of you, as you are of her. I speak as I can prove. Here is the written testimony of a reliable witness to your marriage with Miss Lavigne. And now you will go to her and show yourself to her in your true colours. You will undeceive her, or——"
There is a foggy uncertainty about what is to follow after that "or." But the livid flames of the burning hell that is in Saxham throw upon the greyness a leaping reflection that is red like blood. A fight to the death, either with weapons, or, best of all, with the bare hands, is what Saxham secretly lusts for, and savours in anticipation as he goes.
Let the humanitarian say what he pleases. Man is a manslayer by instinct and by will.
And within the little area of this beleaguered town do not men kill, and are not men killed, every day? The conditions are mediæval, fast relapsing into the primeval. The modern sanctity and inviolability attending and surrounding human life are at a discount. Even for children, the grim King of Terrors had become a bugaboo to laugh at; red wounds and ghastly sights are things of everyday experience; there is a slump in mortality.
In those old, far-distant Chilworth Street days, two men who engaged in a battle to the death about a woman desired might have seemed merely savages to Saxham. Here things are different. The elemental bed-rock of human nature has been laid bare, and the grim, naked scars upon it, testifying to the combat of Ice and Fire for the round world's supremacy, will never be quite hidden under Civilisation's green mantle of vegetation, or her toadstool-growths of bricks and mortar, any more.
And the men are well matched. Saxham knows himself the more muscular, but Beauvayse has the advantage of him in years, and is lithe, and strong, and supple as the Greek wrestler who served the sculptor Polycleitos as a model for the Athlete with the Diadem.
It will be a fight worth having. No quarter. And Saxham's breath comes heavily, and his blue eyes have in them a steely glitter, and, as the tarpaulin falls behind him, he shifts to a better grip on the strong old hunting-crop.
Overhead the rain drums deafeningly on the tarpaulins. The long bombproof is heterogeneously furnished with full and empty ammunition-boxes marked A.O.S., a leathern sofa-divan, tattered by spurs and marked by muddy boots, several cane or canvas deck-chairs, and others of the Windsor pattern common to the barrack-room. Arms and accoutrements are in rude racks against the corrugated-iron-panelled walls; a trestle-table covered with oilcloth runs down the middle. It is lighted by a couple of acetylene lamps hanging by their chains from iron bars that cross the trench above, and there is another lamp, green-shaded, upon a bare deal table that stands, strewn with papers, against the farther wall.
A man in shirt-sleeves sits there writing. Another man is busy at a telephone that is fixed against the wall beyond the writing-table. There is something fateful and ominous about the heavy silence in which they do their work. It is broken only by a strange sound that comes almost continuously from—where Saxham does not trouble to ask. It is the groaning, undoubtedly, of the wounded man to whose aid he has been summoned, with the added injunction, "Bring morphia," showing that little further can bedone for him, whoever he may be, than to smooth his passage into the Beyond by the aid of the Pain Slayer.
Let him wait, however sore his need, until Saxham has dealt with his enemy. He is resentfully impatient in the knowledge that neither of the men present is Beauvayse.
Then, as he stands sullen and lowering, the man who has been writing gets up and comes to him. Saxham recognises the keen-featured face with the rusty-brown moustache, and the grip of the lean, hard hand that hauled a Dop Doctor out of the Slough of Despair is familiar. The pleasant voice he likes says something about somebody being very wet. It is Saxham, from whose soaked garments the water is running in streams, and whose boots squelch as he crosses the carpet that has been spread above the floor-tarpaulin. The friendly hand pours out and offers him a sparing measure of that rare stimulant, whisky.
"As preventive medicine. We can't have our Medical Staff men on the sick-list."
Some such commonplace words accompany the proffered hospitality.
"I shall not suffer, thanks. You have a shell-casualty, you have 'phoned us, but before I see your man it is imperative that I should speak to Lord Beauvayse. Where is he?"
"He is here."
"My business with him is urgent, sir."
The man at the telephone makes a sound indicative that a message is coming through. The Chief is beside him instantly, with the receiver at his ear. He looks round for an instant at Saxham as he waits for the intelligence, and the muscles of his face twitch as if under the influence of some strong, repressed emotion, and the Doctor's practised glance notes the unsteadiness of the uplifted hand. Then he is saying to the officer in charge at Maxim Kopje South:
"The ammunition comes up to-night. Tell Gaylord that we are short-handed here, and shall want him to help on night duty.... Practically as soon as he can join us. No, no better. All for the present ... thanks! Saxham, please come this way."
There is a sleeping-place at the end of the long, narrow, lamp-lit perspective, curtained off from the rude bareness of the outer place. Light shows between the curtains,and they are of plush, in hue a rich, deep red. As that strong colour sinks into his brain, through his intent and glittering eyes, Saxham the man has a sudden furious impulse to tear the deep folds back, with a clash of brazen rings on iron rods, and call to the betrayer who lurks behind them to come out and be dealt with. But that hollow, feeble moaning sounds continuously from the other side, and Saxham the surgeon stays his hand and follows the Colonel in. There are two camp-beds in the small sleeping-place, and a washstand and a folding-chair. A lamp hangs above, and its light falls full upon the face of the man whom he is seeking.
Ah! where are they? His furious anger and his deadly hate, where are they now? Like snow upon the desert they vanish away. How can one rage against this shattered thing, stretched on the pallet of the low cot-bed from which the blankets have been stripped away? First Aid bandages have been not ineffectually applied. Fragments of packing-case have been employed as splints for the broken arm and shattered hand, but, in spite of all that has been done, the beautiful young life is sinking, waning, flowing out with that ruddy tide that will not be stayed.
The greenish pallor and the sweat of mortal agony are upon the face of Beauvayse, thrown back upon the pillow, and looking upwards to where the deluging rain makes thunder on the tarpaulined roof. The atmosphere is heavy with the sour-sickly smell of blood, and lamp-fumes; he draws each breath laboriously, and exhales it with a whistling sound. Through his clenched teeth, revealed by the lips that are dragged back in the semi-grin of desperate agony, that dumb, ceaseless moaning makes its way despite the gallant effort to restrain it. The one uninjured arm hangs downwards, its restless fingers picking at the bloodstained matting that covers the loose boards of the floor. A sheet has been lightly laid over him. It is dabbled with the prevailing hue, and sinks in an ominous hollow below the breast. And beyond the bottom of it splashed leggings and muddy boots with spurs on them stick out with helpless stiffness.
A flask of brandy—a precious restorative treasured for use in such desperate need as this—stands with a tumblerand a jug of water on the camp washstand that is between the two cot-beds. Upon the second bed sits a big and stoutish man, whose large face, not pink just now, is hidden in his thick, quivering hands. It is Captain Bingo Wrynche, heavy Dragoon, and honest, single-hearted gentleman, to whom belongs the blown and muddy charger drooping in the loose-box outside. The telephone has summoned him in haste from Hotchkiss Outpost North, to see the last of a friend.
"It was just before the rainstorm that it happened. He was on the lookout. They have been moving the big gun and the 16-pounder Krupps again, and some of the laagers seem to be shifting, so we have kept an extra eye open of late, by night as well as by day. He was very keen always...."
Already he is spoken of by those who have known and loved him as one who was and has been.
"He had relieved me at 10 a.m. He might have been up over an hour when it happened. The orderly-sergeant had got his mouth at the speaking-tube, in the act of sending down a message; he did not see him hit. It was a shell from their Maxim-Nordenfelt. And when we got to him, the first glance told us there was little hope."
"There is none at all," says Saxham curtly, as is his wont. "A splinter has shattered the lower portion of the spine. The agony can be deadened with an opiate, and the ruptured arteries ligatured. Beyond that there is nothing else to do, though he may live till morning."
"He managed to ask for Wrynche before he swooned, so we 'phoned him at Hotchkiss Outpost North. He got here ten minutes ago, badly cut up, but there has been no recognition of him. Do what you can, Saxham, in the case. Every moment may bring Wrynche's recall. There is another person I should have expected the poor boy to ask for.... That young girl, Saxham, whose heart has to be broken with the news, sooner or later. Perhaps about nightfall, when it will be safe for her to venture. I ought to send an escort for Miss Mildare?"
The slow, dusky colour rises in Saxham's set, pale face, and as slowly sinks out again. He has been standing in low-toned colloquy with the Chief outside the heavy plush curtains. He turns silently upon his heel and vanishes behind them.
"Ting—ting—ting!"
The telephone-bell heralds an urgent recall from Hotchkiss Outpost North. And a beckoning hand summons Captain Bingo from the bedside of his dying friend ere ever the word of parting has been spoken.
"It is for you, Wrynche, as I expected."
"I am ready, sir. Orderly, get my damned brute out!"
The sorrow and love that swell the big man's heart to bursting find rather absurd expression in his savage objurgation of the innocent brown charger. But Captain Bingo, when he stoops over the camp-bed where lies Beauvayse, kisses him solemnly and clumsily upon the forehead, and then goes heavily striding out of the death-chamber with his bulldog jowl well down upon his chest; and a moment later when he is seen bucketing the lean brown charger through the thrashing hailstorm that is jagged across by the white-green fires of bursting shell, is rather a tragic figure, or so it seems to me.
Meanwhile, what of the man who lies upon the bed? Since Bingo's face came between and receded into, those thick grey mists that gather about the dying, he has lost consciousness of present things. Fever is rising in those wellnigh empty veins of his, his skin is drawing and creeping; it seems as though innumerable ants were running over him. The hand that is not powerless tries to brush them away. Sometimes he thinks he is in Hospital, and that the man in the next bed is groaning, and then he is aware that the groans are his own. He is conscious that a needle-prick in the sound wrist has been followed by sensible relief. The unspeakable grinding agonies subside; he is able to murmur, "Thanks, Nurse," as he gulps some liquid from the glass a strange hand holds to his lips....
The groans are sighs now, and the clogged brain, spurred by morphia, shakes off its lethargy. The fever goes on rising, and he begins, silently, for his powers fail of speech,to wander over all the past. Could Saxham, sitting motionless and vigilant on the folding-chair, his keen eyes quick to note each change, his deft hand prompt to do all that can be done—could Saxham hear, he would behold, anatomised before his mental vision, the soul of this his fellow-man.
"Coming straight for me—five round black spots punched in the grey. If they go by, luck's on my side, and I marry her. If not ... hit—and done for!"
Exactly thus has Saxham made of the unconscious Father Noah, of the Boer sharp shooters behind their breastwork, the arbiters of Fate.
"Send for Bingo!" flashes across the dying brain "Something to say to Bingo. Don't bringher. Who'd want a woman who loved him to remember him like this? What was it the Mahometansycethemusthelephant killed at Bhurtpore said about his wife? 'Let her cool my grave with tears.' Until she finds out ... until someone tells her. Ah—'h!" There is a groan, and a convulsive shudder, and the beautiful dim eyes roll up in agony, and the blue, swollen lips are wrung as the feeble voice whispers: "Nurse, this hurts like—hell! Some more—that stuff!"
Saxham gives another subcutaneous injection of morphia. The curtains part, and the Colonel, in waterproof and a dreadnought cap, comes noiselessly in. "No change," Saxham answers to the mute inquiry. "I anticipate none before midnight. Of course, the weakness is progressive."
"Of course." The Chief touches the cold, flaccid wrist. There are hollows in his lean cheeks, and deep crow's-feet at the corners of the kindly hazel eyes, and the brown moustache is ominously straight and curveless. "Tell him, if he recovers consciousness, that I thought it best to send for her. Chagrave has gone with a couple of the men. It's a desperate night for a woman to be out in, but they took an Ambulance sling-chair with them. They'll wrap her in tarpaulins, and carry her in that."
He nods and goes up on the lookout with a night-glass, and the wearied officer he relieves comes down. As he has said, it is a desperate night of driving sleet and swirling blackness, illuminated only with the malignant coruscations of lyddite bursting-charges. But the tempest withoutis nothing to the tempest that rages in the soul of the quiet man in sodden khâki who watches by the dying.
She has been sent for.... She is coming.... To kneel by the low cot and weep over him who lies there; kiss the tortured lips and the beautiful dim eyes, and hold the unwounded head upon her breast.... How shall Saxham bear it without crying out to tell her? He clenches his hands, and sets his strong jaw, and the sweat breaks out upon his broad, pale forehead. The man upon the bed, mentally clear, though incapable of coherent speech, is now listening to comments that shall ere long be made by living men upon one who very soon shall be numbered with the dead.
"Well, well, don't be hard on the poor beggar!" he hears them saying. "Give the devil his due: not a bad chap—take him all round. Got carried away and lost his head. She's as lovely as they make 'em, and he ... always a fool where a pretty woman was concerned—poor old Toby!"
He pleads unconsciously, with his most merciless judge, in his utter incapacity to plead at all....
And so the time goes by. There has been coming and going in the place outside. The guard has relieved the double sentries, the official lamp burns redly under the little penthouse. A reconnoitring-patrol ride out, the horses' hoofs sounding hollow on the earth-covered boards of the sloping way. The business of War goes on in its accustomed grooves, and the business of Life will soon be over for Beauvayse. Yet she has not come. And Saxham looks at his watch.
Nine o'clock. He has not eaten since early morning. He is wet to the skin and stiff with long sitting. But when the savoury odours of hot horse-soup and hot bean-coffee, accompanied by the clinking of crockery and tin pannikins, announce a meal in readiness, and would-be hosts come to the curtains and anxiously beg him to take food, he merely shakes his square black head and falls again to watching the unconscious face of Beauvayse. The conscious brain behind its blankly-staring eyes is thinking:
"Those paragraphs.... In black and white the thing looked damnable. And think of the gossip and tongue-wagging. Whatever they say about me ... she'll be the one to suffer. They're never so hard on ... the man!"
He has uttered these last words audibly; they pierce to the heart's core of the mute, impassive watcher. Strong antipathy is as clairvoyant as strong sympathy, and with a leap of understanding, and a fresh surge of fierce resentment, Saxham acknowledges the deadly truth contained in those few halting words. She will be the one to suffer. Beside the martyrdom inevitably to be endured by the white saint, the agony of the sinner's death-bed pales and dwindles. There is a savage struggle once again between Saxham the man and Saxham the surgeon beside the bed of death.
His sudden irrepressible movement has knocked the tumbler from the little iron washstand at his elbow. It falls and shivers into fragments at his feet. And then—the upturned face slants a little, and the eyes that have been blankly staring at the roof-tarpaulins come down to the level of his own. He and her fallen enemy regard each other silently for a moment. Then Beauvayse says weakly, in the phantom of the old gay, boyish voice that wooed and won her:
"Thought it was Wrynche. Where is——"
The question ends in a groan.
Saxham the man shrinks from him with unutterable loathing. But Saxham the surgeon stoops over him, saying, in distinct, even tones:
"Captain Wrynche was here. He has been recalled to Hotchkiss Outpost North. Drink this." This is a little measure of brandy-and-water, in which some tabloids of morphia have been dissolved. And Beauvayse obeys, panting:
"All right. But ... more a job for the Chaplain than the Doctor, isn't it?"
"Do you wish the Chaplain sent for?"
There is a glimmer of the old lazy, defiant humour in the beautiful dim eyes.
"What could he do?"
Saxham answers—how strangely for him, the Denier:
"He would probably pray beside you, and talk to you of God."
There is a pause. The faint, almost breathless whisper asks:
"It's night, isn't it?"
"It is dark and stormy night."
Beauvayse says, in the whispering voice interrupted by long, gasping sighs that are beginning to have a jarring rattle in them:
"Before to-morrow.... I shall know more of God ... than the whole Bench of Bishops."
There is silence. And she does not come. The man on the bed makes a painful effort, gathering his nearly-spent forces for something he wants to say:
"Doctor!"
"Let me wipe your forehead. Yes?"
"I ... insulted you frightfully the other day."
"You need not recall that. I have forgotten it."
"I ... beg your pardon! Will you ... shake hands?... My left, if you don't mind. The other one's ... no good."
He tries to lift the heavy arm that lies beside him. There is only a faint movement of the finger-tips, and he gives up the effort with a fluttering sob. And the square white face with the burning eyes under the lowering brows opposes itself to his. Words are crowding to Saxham's lips:
"I would gladly shake the hand of the man who insulted me and who has apologised. And I honour the brave officer who meets Death upon the field. But with the would-be betrayer of an innocent girl, the dancing-woman's husband who proposed himself as mate for Lynette Mildare, I have nothing but contempt and abhorrence. He is to me a leper. Worse, for the leper I would touch to cure!"
He does not utter the words, nor does his rugged, unconquerable sincerity admit of his taking the hand. He fights with his hatred in silence. And she has not come. What ishesaying in that weak voice with the rattling breaths between?
"Listen, Saxham.... There's ... something I want you ... say to Miss Mildare."
The grey mists that gather about him shut out a clear view of Saxham's terrible face. The feeble whisper struggles on, broken by those rattling gasps.
"Tell her forget me. Say when I ... asked her ... to marry me...."
Silence. He is falling, falling into an abyss of vast uncertainties. The blue lips dabbled with foam can frame no more coherent words. Only the brain behind the dyingeyes is alive to understand when Saxham approaches his own livid face and blazing eyes to the face upon the pillow, and says:
"Do not try to speak. Close your eyes when you mean 'Yes.' I know what you wish me to tell Miss Mildare. It is that when you asked her to marry you, you were already the husband of another woman. Am I correct?"
The affirmative signal comes.
"You were married to Miss Lavigne at the Registrar's office, Cookham-on-Thames, last June, before you sailed. The witnesses were your valet and a female servant at Roselawn Cottage. And knowing that you were not free, you deceived and cheated her. That is what I am to tell Miss Mildare? Signal if I am right."
The dying eyes are brimming with tears. When the lids shut, signifying "Yes," slow, heavy drops are forced between them.
"Very well. Now hear. I will not tell her!"
The eyes open wide with surprise.
"I will never tell her," says Saxham again. "I will not blacken any man's reputation to further my own interests." The vital strength and the white-hot passion of him, contrasted with the spent and utter laxity of the dissolving thing of clay upon the bed, seem superhuman. "Do you hear me?" he demands again. "Listen once more. Knowing the truth of you, I came here to force you to undeceive her. Had you refused, I would certainly have killed you. But I would never have betrayed you!"
That "never" of Saxham's carries conviction. The pale ghost of a laugh is in the dying eyes. The wraith of Beauvayse's old voice comes back again to say:
"Doctor, you're a ... damned good sort!" And then there is a long, long silence, broken only by those painful rattling breaths, never by her coming.
The end comes, and she is not there. A pale blink in the wild sky eastward hints to the night lookouts of hot drink, food, and welcome rest. The Chief stands beside the comfortless camp-bed, where the hope of a high old House is flickering out. The Doctor holds the wet and icy wrist, where the pulse has ceased to be perceptible. The sheet above the labouring breast rises and falls with those panting,rattling gasps; the beautiful eyes are rolled up and inwards. The light is very nearly out, when, with a last effort, the flame leaps up. He thinks that what is the barely perceptible whisper of a tongue already clay is a loud and ringing cheer. He thinks that he is shouting, his strong young voice topping a hundred other voices. It seems to him who, for the bribe of all the beauty he has coveted, and all the love that is yet unwon, could not speak one audible word or move a finger, that he waves his hat again and again. Oh! glorious moment when the white moonbeams blink on the grey dust-wall rolling down from the North, and the horsemen of the Advance ride out of it, and clustering enemies that have rallied again to the attack waver, and disperse, and scatter....
"Hurrah! They're running—running for their lives! Give it 'em with shrapnel! Oh, pepper 'em like hell! The Relief! The Relief! Hurrah!"
It is all over with the opening of the day-eye in the east. When they leave him, beautiful, and stern, and calm in that deep slumber from which only the Angel with the Trumpet may awaken him, and pass out between the curtains, the dark, short officer who was on the lookout when the Doctor came, stands very pale and muddy, and steaming with damp, waiting to report. And two troopers of the Irregulars, wet and muddy and steaming too, are waiting also, just inside the tarpaulins of the outer doorway. And she is not there.
A few rapid words, an exclamation from the Chief, shaken for once out of his steely composure, and quivering from head to foot with mingled rage and grief:
"My God, how unutterably horrible!"
Saxham shoulders his way into the ring of white faces that have gathered about the dark little muddy officer.
"What has happened to Miss Mildare——?"
The little officer answers, panting:
"The Sisters could not make her understand. She——"
The Chief speaks for him:
"She had been previously stunned by the shock of—a terrible calamity."
"What calamity?"
"The Mother-Superior has been killed. Two of the Sisters and Miss Mildare found her in the Convent chapel. They got there before evening. She must have been dead some hours. She had been shot through the lungs."
"By a stray bullet?"
"By a bullet from a revolver, fired close enough to scorch the clothes. Foul murder, and by God who saw it done——"
The lean clenched hand, thrown upwards in a savage gesture, the blazing eyes, the livid, furrowed face, the writhen mouth, the furious, jarring voice, leave little doubt of the vengeance that will be wreaked when he shall track down the murderer. He wheels abruptly, and goes to the telephone. The swift, imperative orders volt from fort to fort; the circuit of vigilance is made complete, the human bloodhounds unleashed upon the trail, in a few instants, thanks to the buzzing wire that brings the mouth of a man to the ear of another across a void of miles.
But Bough, primed with knowledge as to which are dummy rifle-pits and which are real, aided by acquaintance with the ground, and covered by that wuthering night of storm, has already pierced the lines. Subsequently that excellent Afrikander, Mr. Van Busch, rejoins Brounckers' bright boy at Tweipans, with information that decides the date of Schenk Eybel's Feint from the East.
She had gone about her Master's business all Monday, calm and composed, and inexorably gentle. She did not meet Richard's daughter before nightfall. "She will not suffer now," she thought, even as she sent the message that was to allay Lynette's anxiety, and give notice of her whereabouts in case of need. Her mission led her to a half-wrecked shanty at the south end of the town, where some Lithuanian emigrants herded together in indescribable filth and misery. A woman who had been recently confined lay there raving in puerperal fever. Until nightfall, when she was removed to the Isolation Hospital on the veld, near the Women's Laager, the Mother-Superior remained with the patient.
A burly, bushy-bearded man, with a peculiarly dark skin and strange steely eyes, passing the broken window, caught sight of the noble profile and the stately shoulders stooping above the miserable bed. Going home at dark, the Mother heard a stealthy footstep following behind her.
Since the Town Guard had been withdrawn to man the trenches, many people, revisiting their deserted dwellings, had found them plundered of movable possessions, and, losing the fear of Eternity in wrath at the wholesale evaporation of their worldly goods, had thenceforth remained to protect them. Instances there had been of robbery from the person by thieves not all tracked down by Martial Justice and made examples of.
The hovering human night-bird and the prowling human jackal, whose sole end is money and money's worth, have no terrors for Holy Poverty. But there are other creatures of prey more terrible than these. And the padding footsteps that followed, hurrying when she hurried and slackening when she went more slowly, and stopping dead when she paused and looked round, conveyed to her a haunting sense of something sinister, and at the same time greedy and guileful, that bided its time to spring.
She moved in long, swift, undulating rushes, her black robes sweeping noiselessly as a great moth's wings over the well-known ground, her course kept unfalteringly; but her heart shook her, and she gasped as the Convent bomb proof neared in sight. She had wrought much and suffered more of late, and she knew herself less strong than she had been. When the blue light that hung from a post by the ladder-hole blinked "Home" through the mirk of a night of thin rain and mist-shrouded stars, she knew infinite relief. Her great eyes were as wild and strained as a hunted deer's, and her bosom heaved with her panting breaths. She paused a moment to regain her composure before she went down.
The nuns who were not on night-duty were gathered together about the trestle-table sewing, while the lay-Sisters prepared the scanty evening meal. Lynette was there, sitting pale and quiet on her corner-stool. Richard's daughter had been watching and waiting for her Mother. Ah! to see the relief and gladness leap into the dear face, and shine in the beautiful wistful eyes that had shed suchtears, dear God!—such tears of anguish upon Sunday—and then had dried at the utterance of her decree—
"You are never to tell him!"
—And changed into radiant stars of joy, by whose light the darkness of her own wickedness and misery seemed almost bearable.
"It is the Mother. Mother——"
Lynette sprang up, and would have hurried to her, but the Mother lifted a warning hand, and calling Sister Tobias to her, passed aside into a curtained-off and precautionary cave that had been hollowed out behind the ladder. This was the custom when the ladies of the Holy Way returned from doubtful or infectious cases. Lynette sighed, and went back to her stool to wait. The busy needles had not ceased stitching.
That humble saint, Sister Tobias, hurried to her diligent ministry of purification. When she came in with hot water and carbolic spray, she brought a letter with her. It was directed to the Mother in a coarse round-hand.
"Somebody dropped this down the ladder-hole as I came by with my kettle," said Sister Tobias. "It's the first letter-box I ever knew that was as wide as the door. Maybe 'twill bring in a new fashion, for all we know." She made her homely joke with a sore heart for the sorrow she read in the Mother's beloved face, and trotted away to fetch clean towels, saying—a favourite saying with Sister Tobias—that her head would never save her heels.
The Mother opened the letter. It was anonymous, and utterly vile. Had the pen been dipped in liquid ordure, the thing written could not have been more defiling to the touch than its meaning was to this pure woman's chaste eyes. Had a puff-adder writhed out of the envelope, and struck its fangs into her beautiful hand, it would have poisoned her less certainly. And every beat of the obscene words upon her brain, strangely enough, awakened an echo of those long padding footsteps that had followed in the dark. And the writer knew of all that had happened at the tavern on the veld, when a human brute had triumphed in his bestiality, and a girl-child had been helpless, and the great white stars had looked down unmoved and changeless upon Innocence destroyed.
The Mother read the letter from the loathly beginning to the infamous end. She had been sorely wrought upon of late. She tried to pray, but she knew the Ear Above must be averted from one who had lied and was in deadly sin.... When Sister Tobias came back she found her lying in a swoon.
The little old crooked, nimble Sister, with the long, pale sheep-face, dropped on her knees beside that prone column of stately womanhood, removed the Mother's hooded mantle, loosened theguimpeand habit, and worked strenuously to revive her, dropping tears.
"My beautiful, my poor lamb!" she crooned. "What's come to her? What wicked shadow's black on all of us? What's brooding near us—Mary be our guardian!—that's struck atherto-night!"
The letter lay upon the floor, where it had dropped from the unconscious hand. It lay there for Sister Tobias, and might lie. If the Mother willed to tell its contents, she would tell. If not, the little old nun, her faithful daughter, would never ask or seek to know.
She opened her great eyes at last, and smiled up at the tender, wrinkled ugliness of the long, sheep-like face in the close white linen wimple.
"Say nothing to anybody. I was overdone," she said, and rose. Sister Tobias picked up the letter, and gave it to her. There was a Boer mutton-fat candle flaring draughtily in an iron sconce upon the wall. The Mother moved across the little room, and burned the letter to the last blank corner, and trod the fallen ashes into impalpable powder. Then she helped Sister Tobias to remove every trace left, and obviate every danger that might result from her late toil, and rejoined her quiet family of daughters as though nothing had happened.
They recalled afterwards how cheerful and how placid she had seemed that night. Her smile had a heart-breaking sweetness, and her voice made wonderful melody even in their accustomed ears.
They supped on the little that they had, and chatted, said the night-prayers, and went, aching, all of them, with unsatisfied hunger, to bed. You may conjecture the orderly, modest method of retiring, each Sister vanishing inturn behind a curtained screen to disrobe, lave, and vest herself for sleep, emerging in due time in the loose, full conventual night-garment of thick white twilled linen, high-throated, monkish-sleeved, and girdled with a thin cotton cord, her face, plain or pretty, young or elderly, framed in the close little white drawn cap of many tucks.
Then, the ladder having been removed, and the tarpaulin pulled over its hole, the lights were extinguished, and only the subdued crimson glow of the tiny lamp that burned before the silver Crucifix that had stood above the Tabernacle on the altar of the Convent chapel burned ruby in the thick, hot dark, where, upon the little iron beds, each divided by a narrow, white-cotton-covered board into two constricted berths, the row of quiet figures lay outstretched, her Breviary upon every Sister's pillow, and her beads about her wrist.
The Mother lay very still, seeing the hideous sentences of the anonymous letter written in hellish characters of mocking flame on the background of the dark. She prayed as the wrecked may when the ship beneath their feet is going down. Beside her Lynette, not daring to disturb the silence, suddenly grown rigid and awful, lay aching with the loneliness of living on the other side of the wide gulf of division that had suddenly yawned between.
She had spent the day at the Hospital with Sister Hilda-Antony and Sister Cleophée. She had not seen Beauvayse. But a note had come from him, that had warmed the heart she hid it near. His dearest, he called her—his own beautiful beloved. He could not snatch a minute from duty even to kiss his darling's sweetest eyes, but on Sunday they would be together all day. And would she not meet him at the Convent on Thursday, at twilight, when the shelling stopped, and it would be safe for his beloved to venture there? She must not come alone. Dear old Sister Tobias would bring her, and play Mrs. Grundy's part. And, with a thousand kisses, he was hers in life and death.
Lynette's first love-letter, and it seemed to her so beautiful. It laid a hand upon her heart that thrilled, and was warm and strong. The hand said "Mine!"
His. She would be his one day—soon; and there would be no more mysteries between the man and thewoman welded by God's ordinance into husband and wife. She shivered a little at the thought of that intimate, peculiar, utter oneness. And then, with a sickening, horrible sinking of the heart, she realised that, however well such a secret as that she guarded might be hidden before the priest and the clergyman made they twain One, it must be known of both afterwards, or else be for ever threatening to start through the burying earth, crying, "I am here. How came you to forget?"
She had been cold in the sultry heat of that long noon, and deaf when voices spoke to her. She was thinking.... How if she might be mistaken in Beauvayse, even now? He was beautiful and brave and alluring to her woman's sense in what she knew of him and what was yet to know. He called her and drew her. Nothing noble awakened in her at the smile on the gay, bold lips and in the grey-green, jewel-bright eyes. When he had held her to his heart, she had not felt her soul merge with another, its fellow, and yet stronger and greater, in that embrace. He and she were not bodiless spirits floating in pure ether, but an earth-made girl and boy, very much athirst for the common cup of human rapture, hungry for the banquet of mortal bliss.
It was sweet, but how if he were another, and not the one? How if her hasty gift of herself robbed both in the long end? How if his headlong passion and tempestuous love should be torn from him like rags in the first instant of that discovery that must almost inevitably be made? She heard his boyish voice crying, "Hateful!... You have deceived me!" and was stabbed with quick anguish, knowing him in the right.
Men did not enter into marriage pure. By some unwritten code of that strange lawgiver, the World, they were absolved of the necessity of spotlessness. They might slake their thirst at muddy sources unrebuked. And the more each wallowed, the more he demanded of the woman he wedded that she should be immaculate in thought and deed—if in knowledge, that was all the better.
What a cloud of doubts assailed her, swarming like bees, settling in every blossomed branch of her mind, and blotting out the sweetness with angry buzzing, furry bodies, armed with sharp stings for punishment or revenge. Shehad seen a little peach-tree weighed down and bowed to the red earth at its roots with the weight of such a swarm. She felt at this juncture very like the tree. A little more, only a slight increase of the burden, and the slender trunk would have snapped. When the native bee-master came and shook the double swarm into a couple of hives, the little tree stayed crooked. It did not regain its beautiful, healthful uprightness for a long time.
The Mother had commanded her never to tell Beauvayse. She realised that in this one sorrowful instance she was wiser than her teacher. If unutterable misery was not to result from their union, he must be told the truth before ...
Once he knew it, would he love her any longer? Would he desire to make her his wife? She knitted her brows and her fingers in anguish, and set her little teeth. Possibly not. Probably not.
And supposing all went well and they were married. She had not realised clearly, even when she talked of travelling abroad into the unknown, conjectured world, what it would mean to go out from this, the first home she had ever known, and leave the Mother. She caught her breath, and her heart stopped at the thought of waking up one morning in a new, strange country, and knowing that dear face thousands of miles away.
The loneliness drove her to daring. She reached out a timid hand, and laid it upon the breast of the still, rigid, immovable figure beside her. Ah, what a leaping, striving, throbbing prisoner was caged there! A faint sob of surprise broke from her. Ah! what was it? what could it mean?
The faint sound she uttered plucked at the strings of that tortured heart. The Mother turned, rose upon her elbow, leaned over the low dividing barrier, took the slight body in her arms, and gathered it closely to her, shielding it from the fangs of that coiled, formless Terror that threatened in the dark. She felt how thin and light it was, and how frail the arms were that clung about her, and how wasted was the face that pressed against the coarse, conventual linen, covering the broad, deep bosom whose chaste and hidden beauties Famine had not spared.
She would be a real mother once—just once. God would not grudge her that. She bared her breast to thecheek with a sudden half-savage, wholly maternal gesture, and drew it close and pillowed it and rocked it. Had Heaven wrought a miracle and unsealed those white fountains of her spotless womanhood, she would have found it sweet to give of herself to Richard's starving child. But she had nothing but her great, indignant pity and her boundless agony of love. Long hours after the face lay hushed in sleep above her heart, and while the long, soft breaths of slumber went and came, she lay staring out into the sinister blackness over the beloved, menaced head.
Rain leaked through the tarpaulin over the ladder-hole, falling in heavy, sullen gouts and splashes on the beaten earth below as blood drips from a desperate wound. That image rose, and the blackness seemed all red—red with those lines of fiery writing on it, smoking and crawling, flickering and blazing, climbing, and licking with thin, greenish tongues of hell-begotten flame.
Then the midnight hour struck, and it was time to rise for Matins. Long after the Sisters had gone back to bed the Mother knelt on, a motionless figure wrestling in silent prayer before the silver Crucifix upon the wall. Dawn found her still kneeling. No ray of heavenly light had found her soul, that weltered in darkness, crying to One Who seemed not to hear.
She did not venture to take Lynette with her to the Hospital next day, but secretly charged Sister Tobias and Sister Hilda-Antony to carry her whithersoever they went, and not once to let her out of sight. This done, she knew herself impotently helpless to do more. This strong and salient woman, lapped in unseen, impalpable serpent-coils that tightened every hour, was waxing weak. By her own deed she had barred out help and put counsel far from her. She had known the punishment would not be long in coming, when, for the sake of Richard's daughter, she had lied to Richard's friend.
Now she knew, poor, noble, suffering soul, that it would have been wiser to have saved her spotless garment from thesmirch by telling him the truth. Then she could have fought this invisible tarantula Thing, with the conjectural hairy claws, the baleful, glittering eyes, and the padding feet that dogged her in the dark, with a strong man's arm to aid her. God was in Heaven, and in Him were her faith and trust, but the comfort of a human counsellor would have been unspeakable.
In a purely spiritual difficulty she would have gone to Father Wix. The kindly, fussy, feeble little old priest could hardly help her in this extremity. She had never toldhimwhat had happened at the tavern on the veld. Deep in her pitying woman's heart the child's cruel secret had been buried, once learned. Sister Tobias was the only one who shared it.
Meanwhile she was followed that night and the next night; and on the morning of the Thursday, when she rose from her sleepless bed, another letter weighted with a stone had been dropped down the ladder-hole. She was to give the anonymous writer a meeting and receive a message, unless she wished them that chose to be nameless to lay in wait for the girl. Most likely that would be the better way. She could choose.
She burned the second letter before she went to the Hospital. She found there the single sheet of theSiege Gazettefluttering in every hand. Even her dignified reserve could not ward off the well-meant congratulations, the eager questions, the interested comments on the news contained in the three last paragraphs of the column that was signed "Gold Pen." Then came the telephone message from Lady Hannah. We know what words of hers the wire carried back. All the more firm, all the more courageous, all the more determined that her knees shook, and her heart was as water within her. For the Thing that coiled in the dark would surely strike now.
Perhaps it was some premonition of approaching death that made her, always gracious, always infinitely kind, untiring in helpful deeds, move about among the sick that day, with such a sorrowful-sweet tenderness for them in her noble face and in her gentle touch, and in that wood-dove's voice of hers, that they spoke of it long afterwards with bated breath. A perfume as of rare incense was waftedfrom the folds of her veil, they said, and a pale aureole of light shone about her white-banded forehead, and her eyes—— Ah! who that met their look could ever forget those eyes?
It was before twilight when she left the Hospital and went to the Convent, a tall, upright, mantled and hooded figure, stepping through the heavy rain that had fallen since noon, under a quaint monster of a cotton umbrella with ribs of ancient whale,—Tragedy carrying Farce.
It was not the custom to linger in the neighbourhood of the Convent, even among those who were most indifferent to shot and shell. No one was visible in its vicinity, except one burly, bushy-bearded, dark-skinned man in tan-cords and a moleskin jacket. He lounged against a bent and twisted lamp-post, near the broken entrance-gates, cutting up a lump of something that might have been cake-tobacco upon his broad, thick palm with a penknife.
She passed him as she went in. His slouched hat made shadow for his eyes. But so curiously shallow and flat and rusty pale were they against the purplish-brown of the full-blooded, bearded face, that their sharp, sly, sudden look as she went by was as though the adder-fangs had slashed at her. She knew it was the man who had written those two letters. And something else she knew, but did not dare to admit her knowledge even to herself as yet.
She mustered all her forces to meet what was coming as she went up the broken stairs. The wind and the long, driving lances of the rain came at her through the gaps in the walls. The sky was a driving hurry of muddy vapours. The grey hills were blotted out by mist and fog. Long flashes of white fire leaped from them, and the heavy boom of cannon followed. Then all would be still again. She passed down the whitewashed, matted, sodden corridor, and drew out the heavy key of the chapel door from a deep pocket under her black habit, and went in.
Rain beat in here through jagged holes in the soft brickwork and poured through the broken roof, whose rubbish littered the floor. Whiter squares on the whitewashed walls, sodden now with damp, and peeling, showed where the pictures of the Stations of the Cross had hung; with them all draperies had been stripped away and hidden.The crimson-velvet-covered ropes that had done duty instead of altar-rails had been removed, their brass supports unscrewed from the floor. The naked altar-stone was covered with fragments of cheap stained-glass from the little east window of which the Sisters had been so proud. The Tabernacle gaped empty; sandy, reddish-grey dust filled the tiny piscina, and lay thick upon the altar-stone and the shallow wooden altar-steps, and wherever else the rain had not reached it to turn it into yellow mud.
Why had she come here? Because she felt as though the Presence that had housed under the veil of the Consecrated Element were still guarding Its desecrated home. And near the door of the tiny sacristy dangled the rope communicating with the bell that hung, as yet uninjured, in the little wooden cupola upon the roof. The bell could be rung, should need arise. She did not formulate in thought what need. But the recollection of those poisonous adder-eyes stirred even in that proud, dauntless woman's bosom a cold and creeping fear. And when she heard the padding, stealthy footsteps whose sound seemed burned in upon her brain, traversing the soaked matting of the corridor, she caught her breath, and an icy dew of anguish moistened her shuddering flesh.
Then slowly, cautiously, the door opened. He came in, shutting it noiselessly after him. It was the man she had seen loafing by the lamp-post. And, standing tall and forbidding on the bare altar's carpetless steps, she threw out her white hand in a quick, imperious gesture, forbidding his nearer approach.
For an instant the dignity and authority of the tall, black-robed figure gave pause even to Bough. Then he touched his wide-brimmed felt hat to her with a civility that was the very essence of insolence, and took it off and shook the wet from it, and dropped it back upon his head again. He leaned against the wall by the door where there was a little holy-water font, and stuck his gross thumbs in his belt, and waited for her to begin. Always he followed that plan when the woman was angry. Nothing remained for any bloke to teach Bough about the sex. You let her row a bit, and when she had done herself out, you put inwhat you had got to say. That was Bough's way with them always.
"You have written letters to me and followed me."
His grinning red mouth and tobacco-stained teeth showed in the beard. He looked at her and waited.
"Why have you done this? And, now that you have brought yourself into my sight, quitting the safe shelter of darkness and anonymity, what is to hinder me from handing you over to those who administer and enforce Martial Law in this town, and will deal with you as you deserve?"
His light eyes glittered. His teeth showed again in the brown bush. He spat upon the floor of the sacred place, and answered:
"That's all blow. How do I know what you mean about writing letters and following? Who has seen me doing it? Not one of the mob. I'm just a man that has come in off the road out of the rain. Maybe I have no business in this crib? That's for you to say.... Maybe I have a message for somebody you know. So you don't choose to give it, then that's for her to hear."
He swung about in pretended haste, and laid his hand upon the door.
"Stop," she said, with white lips. "You will not molest the person to whom you refer. You will give your message—if it be one—to me, and to me alone."
"High and mighty," the ugly, wordless smile that faced round on her again seemed to say. "But in a little I'll bring you down off that...." He spat again upon the Chapel floor, and scratched his head under his hat, and began, like a simple, good-natured fellow, a rough miner with a heart of gold:
"No offence is meant, lady, and why should it be taken?"
She seemed to grow in height as she folded her arms in their flowing black sleeves, and looked down upon him silently. The boiling whirlpool in her breast mounted as it spun, stifling her. But she was outwardly calm. He went smoothly on, with an occasional display of red mouth and grinning teeth in the big beard, and always that baleful glitter in his strange light eyes:
"I'm a man that, in the goodness of his heart, is always doing jobs for other people, and never getting thanked for it. I started to push my way up here, two hundred miles from Diamond Town, three weeks back, with a letter from a woman to her husband. She couldn't pay me nothing, poor old girl. Said she'd pray for me to her dying day. There was a pal of mine put up the grubstake. His name"—his evil eyes were glued upon her face—"was Bough. You've heard that name before!"