School at the Convent of the Holy Way at Gueldersdorp was breaking up,
suddenly and without warning, very soon after the beginning of the
Christmas term. Many of the pupils had already left in obedience to urgent
telegrams from relatives in Cape Colony or in the Transvaal, and every
Dutch girl among the sixty knew the reason why, but was too astute to hint
of it, and every English girl was at least as wise, but pride kept her
silent, and the Americans and the Germans exchanged glances of
intelligence, and whispered in corners of impending war between John Bull
and Oom Paul.
That deep and festering political hatreds, fierce enthusiasms, inherited
pride of race, and instilled pride in nationality, were covered by worked
apron-bibs, and even childish pinafores, is anyone likely to doubt?
Schoolgirls can be patriots as well as rebels, and the seminary can vie
with the college, or possibly outdo it, occasion given. Ask Juliette Adam
whether the bread-and-butter misses of France in the year 1847 did not
squabble over the obstinacy of King Louis Philippe and the greed of M.
Guizot, the claims of Louis Napoleon and the theories of Louis Blanc, of
Odilon Barrot, and Ledru-Rollin? And I who write, have I not seen a North
Antrim Sunday-school wrecked in a faction-fight between the Orange and the
Green? Lord! how the red-edged hymnals and shiny-covered S.P.G. books
hurtled through the air, to burst like hand-grenades upon the texted
walls. In vain the panting, crimson clergyman mounted the superintendent's
platform, and strove to shed the oil of peace upon those seething waters.
Even the class-teachers had broken the rails out of the Windsor
chair-backs, and joined the hideous fray, irrespective of age or sex.
"Miss Maloney--Miss Geoghegan--I am shocked--appalled! In the name of
decency I command yees to desist!"
"Hit him again, Moggy Lenahan, a taste lower down!"
"Serve you right, Mulcahy! why would you march wid the Green?"
Thirty years ago. As I gaped in affright at the horrid scene of strife,
small revengeful fingers twisted themselves viciously in my auburn curls,
and wresting from my grasp a "Child's Own Bible Concordance," a birthday
outrage received from an Evangelical aunt, Julia Dolan, aged twelve, began
to pound me about the face with it. As a snub-nosed urchin, gifted with a
marvellous capacity for the cold storage and quick delivery of Scripture
genealogies and Hebrew proper and improper names, I had often reduced my
mild, long-legged girl-neighbour to tearful confusion. Now meek Julia
seemed as though possessed by seven devils. I had been taught the
elementary rule that boys must not hurt girls, but the code had no precept
helpful in the present instance, when a girl was hurting me. Casting
chivalry to the winds, I remember that I kicked Julia's shins, and she
fled howling; but not before she had reduced my leading feature to a state
of ruin, which created a tremendous sensation when they led me home.
Later, during the election riots, two young women fought in the Market
Place, stripped to the waist, and wielding boards wrenched from the side
of a packing-case, heavy, jagged, and full of nails. And when the soldiers
were called out, we know how many a saddle was emptied by the stones the
children threw....
Only a day previously the centipede-like procession of girls of all ages,
in charge of nuns and pupil-teachers, in passing over the Gueldersdorp
Recreation-Ground, had sustained an experience with which every maiden
bosom would have been still vibrating had not an event even more exciting
occurred between the early morning roll-call and prayers-muster and
breakfast.
Greta Du Taine had had another love-letter!
The news darted from class-room to class-room more quickly than little
Monsieur Pilotell, the French literature professor; it spread like the
measles, and magnified like the mumps.
The Red Class, composed of the elder girls, "young ladies" who were
undergoing the process of finishing, surged with volcanic excitement,
hidden, but not in the least repressed. The White Class, their juniors,
who were chiefly employed in preparing for Confirmation, should have been
immersed in graver things, but were not. They waited on mental tiptoe for
details, and a peep at the delicious document. The Blue Class, as became
mere infants ranging from six to ten years old, remained phlegmatically
indifferent to the missive, yet avid for samples of the chocolates that
had accompanied the declaration, made to eighty girls of all ages by one
undersized, pasty, freckled young man employed as junior clerk and
chain-assistant in a surveyor's office, and who signed at the end of a
long row of symbolistic crosses the unheroic name of Billy Keyse.
He had seen and been helplessly stunned by the vision of Greta Du Taine
out walking at the head of the long winding procession of English, German,
Dutch, Dutch-French, Dutch-American, and Jewish girls. They are sent now
to be taught in Europe, those daughters of the Rand millionaires, the
Stock Exchange speculators, the wealthy fruit-farmers, or cereal-growers,
or cattle and sheep breeders, who are descended themselves from the old
pioneers and voortrekkers, but they do not get a better education than was
to be had at the Convent school at Gueldersdorp, where the Sisters of
Mercy took in and taught and trained coltish girl-children, born in a
strongly stimulating climate, and accustomed to lord it over Kaffir and
Hottentot servants to their hearts' content. These they tamed, these they
transformed into refined, cultivated, accomplished young women, stamped
with the indefinable seal of high breeding, possessed of the tone and
manner that belongs to the upper world.
What shall I say of the Sisters of the Convent of the Holy Way at
Gueldersdorp, I who know but little of any Order of Religious? They are a
Community, chiefly of ladies of high breeding and ancient family, vowed to
feed the hungry, clothe the naked, nurse the sick, comfort the dying, and
instruct the ignorant. Like the Fathers of the Society of Jesuits, those
skilled, patient, wise tillers in the soil of the human mind, their daily
task is to hoe and tend, and prune and train, and water the young green
things growing in what to them is the Garden of God, and to other good and
even holy people, the vineyard of the devil. Possibly both are right?
I have heard the habit of the Order called ugly. But upon the stately
person of the Mother Superior the garb was regal. The sweeping black folds
were as imposing as imperial purple, and the starched guimpe framed a
beauty that was grave, stern, almost severe until she smiled, and then you
caught your breath, because you had seen what great poets write of, and
great painters try to render, and only great musicians by their
impalpable, mysterious tone-art can come nearest to conveying--the earthly
beauty that has been purged of all grosser particles of dross in the white
fires of the Divine Love. She was not altogether perfect, or one could not
have loved her so. Her scorn of any baseness was bitterly scathing; the
point of her sarcasm was keen as any thrusting blade of tempered steel;
her will was to be obeyed, and was obeyed as sovereign law, else woe
betide the disobedient. Also, though kind and gracious to all, tenderly
solicitous for, and incessantly watchful of, the welfare of the least of
her charges, she never feigned where she could not feel regard or love.
Her rare kiss was coveted in the little world of the Convent school as the
jewel of an Imperial Order was coveted in the bigger world outside it, and
the most rebellious of the pupils held her in respect mingled with fear.
The head-mistresses of the classes had their followers and admirers. It
was for the Mother Superior to command enthusiasm, and to sway ambition,
and to govern the hearts and minds of children with the personal charm and
the intellectual powers that could have ruled a nation from a throne.
Well, she has gone to God. It is good for many souls that she lived upon
earth a little. There was nothing sentimental, visionary, or hysterical in
her character. Nor, in giving her great heart with her pure soul to her
Saviour, did she ever quite learn to despise the sweetness of earthly
love. Not all a Saint. Yet the children of those women who most were
swayed by her influence in youth are taught to hold her Saint as well as
Martyr. And there is One Who knows.
It was not until recess after the midday dinner that Greta Du Taine could
exhibit her love-letter. She was a Transvaal Dutch girl with old French
blood in her, a vivacious, sparkling Gallic champagne mingling with the
Dopper in her dainty blue veins. Nothing could be prettier than Greta in a
good temper, unless it might be Greta in a rage. She was in a good temper
now, as, tossing back her superb golden hair plait, as thick as a child's
arm, and nearly four feet long, she drew a smeary envelope from the front
of her black alpaca school-dress, and, delicately withdrawing the epistle
enclosed, yielded the envelope for the inspection of the Red Class.
"What niggly writing!" objected Nellie Bliecker, wrinkling her snub nose
in the disgust that masks the gnawing tooth of envy.
"And the envelope is all over sticky brown," said another carping critic.
"That's because _he_ put the letter inside the chocolate-box," explained
Greta, "instead of outside. And the best chocolates--the expensive
ones--always go squashy. Only the cheap ones don't melt--because they have
got stuff like chalk inside. But wait till I show you as much as the
envelope of my next letter--that's all, Julia K. Shaw!"
Julia K. wilted. Greta proceeded:
"It's directed 'To My Fair Addored One,' because, of course, he didn't
know my name. I don't object to his putting a d too much in adored; I
rather prefer it. His own name is simple, and rather pretty." She made
haste to say that, because she felt doubtful about it. "Billy Keyse."
"_Billy?_"
"Billy Keyse?"
"B-i-l-l-y K-e-y-s-e!"
The name went the round of the Red Class. Nobody liked it.
"He must, of course, have been christened William. Shakespeare was a
William. The Emperor of Germany," stated Greta loftily, "is a William.
Mr. Pitt and Mr. Gladstone were both Williams. Many other great men have
been Williams."
"But not Billies," said Christine Silber, provoking a giggle from the
greedily-listening White Class.
Greta scorched them into silence with a look, and continued:
"He is by profession a surveyor, not exactly a partner in the firm of Gadd
and Saxby, on Market Square, but something very near it." (Do you who read
see W. Keyse carrying the chain and spirit-level, and sweeping out the
office when the Kaffir boy forgets?). "He saw me walking in the Stad with
the Centipede," Greta added.
This was a fanciful name for the whole school of eighty pupils promenading
upon its hundred and sixty legs of various nationalities in search of
exercise and fresh air.
"Go on!" said the Red Class in a breath, as the White Class giggled and
nudged each other, and the Blue Class opened eyes and ears.
"He was knocked dumb-foolish at once, he says, by my eyes and my figure
and my hair. He is not long up from Cape Colony: came out from London
through chest-trouble, to catch heart-trouble in Gueldersdorp" (do you
hear hectic, coughing Billy Keyse cracking his stupid joke?). "And if I'll
only be engaged to him, he promises to get rich, become as big a swell on
the Rand as Marks or Du Taine--isn't that funny, his not knowing Du Taine
is my father?--and drive me to race-meetings on a first-class English
drag, with a team of bays in silver-mounted harness, with rosettes the
colour of my eyes."
Greta threw her golden head back and laughed, displaying a double row of
enviable pearls.
"But I've got to wait for all these things until Billy Keyse strikes
pay-reef. Poor Billy! Hand over those chocolates, you greedy things!"
Somebody wanted to know how the package had been smuggled into the
Convent. Those lay-Sisters were so sharp....
"They're perfect needles--Sister Tarsesias particularly, and Sister
Tobias. But there's a new Emigration Jane among the housemaids. You've
seen her--the sallow thing with the greasy light-coloured fringe in
curlers, who walks flat-footed like a wader on the mud. I keep expecting
to hear her quack.... Well, Billy got hold of her. She didn't know my
name, being new, but she recognised me by Billy's description, and
sympathised with him, having a young man herself, who doesn't speak a word
of English, except 'damn' and 'Three of Scotch, please.' I've promised to
translate her letters; he writes them in the Taal. And Billy gave her two
dollars, and I've given her a hat. It's the big red one mother brought
back from Paris--she paid a hundred francs for it at the Maison Cluny--and
Emigration Jane thinks, though it's a bit too quiet for her taste, it'll
do her a fair old treat when she trims it up with a bit more colour and
one or two 'imitation ostridge' tips.... I'd give another hundred francs
for the Maison Cluny _modiste_ to hear." Again the birdlike laugh rang
out. "Now you know everything there is in the letter, girls, except the
bit of poetry at the end, which only my most intimate friends may be
permitted to read. Lynette Mildare!"
Lynette, bending over a separate table-desk in the light of the north
window of the long deal match-boarded class-room, looked up from her work
of tooling leather, the delicate steel instrument in her hand, a little
gilding-brush between her white teeth, a little fold of concentrated
attention between her slender brown eyebrows.
"Yes. Did you want anything?"
Greta jumped up, leaving the rest of the box of chocolates to dissolve
among the White Class, and came over, threading her way between the long
rows of desk-stalls.
"Of course I want something."
"What is it?" asked Lynette, laying down the little tool.
"What everyone has a right to expect from the person who is her dearest
friend--sympathy," said Greta, jumping up and sitting on the corner of the
desk, and biting the thick end of her long flaxen pigtail.
"You have it--when there is anything to sympathise about."
Greta tapped the letter, trying to frown.
"Do you call this nothing?"
"You have saved me from doing so."
"Lynette Mildare, have you a heart inside you?"
"Certainly; I can feel it beating, and it does its work very well."
"Am I, then, nothing to you?"
Lynette smiled, looking up at the piquant, charming face.
"You are a great deal to me."
"And I regard you as a bosom-friend. And the duty of a bosom-friend,
besides rushing off at once to tell you if she hears anybody say anything
nasty of you behind your back--a thing which you never do--is to
sympathise with you in all your love-affairs--a thing which you do even
seldomer."
Greta stamped with the toe of the dainty little shoe that rested on the
beeswaxed boards of the class-room, and kicked the leg of the desk with
the heel of the other.
"Please don't spill the white of egg, or upset the gold-leaf. And as I
shall be pupil-teacher of the youngest class next term, I suppose I ought
to tell you that 'seldomer' isn't in the English dictionary."
"I'm glad of it. I like my own words to belong to me, my own self. I
should be ashamed to owe everything I say to silly Nuttall or stupid old
Webster. You're artful, Lynette Mildare, trying to change the
conversation. I say you don't sympathise with me properly in my affairs of
the heart--and you never, never tell me about yours."
The beautiful black-rimmed, golden-tawny eyes laughed as some eyes can,
though there was no quiver of a smile about the purely-modelled,
close-folded lips.
"Don't tell me you never have, or never had, any," scolded Greta. "You're
too lovely by half. Don't try to scowl me down--you are! I'm pretty enough
to make the Billy Keyses stand on their silly heads if I told them to, but
you're a great deal more. Also, you have style and grace and breeding.
Anybody could tell that you came of tremendously swell people over away in
England, where the Dukes and Marquesses and Earls began fencing in the
veld somewhere about the eleventh century, to keep common people from
killing the deer, or carving their vulgar names on the castle walls, and
coming between the wind and their nobility. There's a quotation from your
dear Shakespeare for you! He does come in handy sometimes."
"Doesn't he!" agreed Lynette, with an ardent flush.
"And you're descended from some of the people he wrote about," pressed
Greta. "Own it!"
There was a faint line of sarcasm about the lovely lips.
"Shakespeare wrote of clowns and churls as well as of Kings and noblemen."
"If you were a clown, you wouldn't be what you are. The very shape of your
head, and ears, and nails, bespeaks a Princess, disguised as a finished
head-pupil, going to take over a class of grubby-fingered little
ones--pah!--next term. And don't we all know that an English Duchess sends
you your Christmas and Easter and birthday gifts! Come, you might as well
speak out, when this is my last term, and we have always been such dear
friends, and always will be," coaxed Greta, "because the Duchess lets you
out, you know!"
She said it so quaintly that Lynette laughed, though there was a pained
contraction between the delicate eyebrows and a vexed and sorrowful shadow
on her face. Greta went on:
"We have all of us always known that you were--a mystery. Has it got
anything to do with the Duchess?"
The round, shallow blue eyes were too greedily curious to be pretty at the
moment. Lynette met them with a full, grave, answering denial.
"No; I am nothing to the Duchess of Broads, or she to me. She is sister to
the Mother-Superior, and she sends to me at Christmas and Easter, and on
birthdays, by the Mother's wish. Doesn't the Mother's second sister, the
Princesse de Dignmont-Veziers, send Katie"--Katie was a little Irish
novice--"presents from Paris twice a year?"
Greta's pretty eyebrows went up. Her blue greedy eyes became circular with
surprise.
"Yes, of course--out of charity, because Katie was a foundling, picked up
in the Irish quarter in Cape Town."
Lynette went on steadily, but, looking out of the window at the great
wistaria that climbed upon the angle of the Convent wing in which were the
nuns' cells.
"If Katie was a foundling, I am nothing better."
"Lynette Mildare, you're never in earnest?"
The shocked tone and the scandalised disgust on Greta's pretty face stung
and hurt. But Lynette went on:
"I speak the truth. The Mother and the Sisters, who have always known it,
have kept the secret. In their great considerate kindness, they have never
once let me feel there was any difference between me and the other
girls--not once in all these years. And I can never thank them
enough--never be grateful enough for their great goodness--especially
_hers_." The steady voice shook a little.
"We all know that you have always been the Mother's favourite." There was
a little cool inflection of contempt in Greta's high, sweet, birdlike
tones that had been lacking before. "And she is the niece of a great
English Cardinal, and the sister of a Duchess and a Princess, and her
step-brother is an Earl." The inflection added for Greta: "_And yet she
turns to the charity child!_"
Lynette said in a low voice:
"It is because she is perfect in the way of humility. She is beyond all
pride ... greater than all prejudice ... she has been more to me than I
can say, since she and Sister Ignatius and Sister Tobias found me on the
veld seven years ago, when they were trekking up from Natal to join the
Sisters who were already working here."
Greta's face dimpled, and the bright, cold eyes grew greedy again. There
was a romance, after all.
"My gracious! How did you get there? Did your people lose you, or had you
run away from home?"
The delicate wild-rose colour sank out of Lynette's cheeks. Her eyes sank
under those bold, curious, blue ones of Greta's. She said, with a painful
effort:
"I--had run away from the place that was called my home. I don't remember
ever having lived anywhere else before."
"My! And ...?"
"It was a--dreadful place." A little convulsive shudder rippled through
the girl's slight frame. Little points of moisture showed upon the
delicate white temples, where clung the little stray rings and tendrils of
the red-brown hair. "I wore worse rags than the children at the native
kraals, and was worse fed. I scrubbed floors, and fetched water, and was
beaten every day. Then"--she drew a deep, quivering breath--"I ran
away--and--and ran until I could run no more, and fell down.... I don't
remember being picked up. I woke up one day here at the Convent; and I was
in bed, and my hair was cut short, and there was ice upon my head. I said,
'Where am I?' and the Mother-Superior stooped down and looked into my
eyes, and said, 'You are at home.' And the Convent has been my home ever
since, and I hope with all my heart it always will be!"
Greta descended from the desk. She drew her embroidered cambric skirts
primly about her, and said in a shocked voice:
"And I asked you to visit me--to come and stay with us at our place near
Johannesburg--you who are not even respectable!"
Lynette grew burning red. One moment her eyes wavered and fell. Then she
lifted them and looked back bravely into the pretty, shallow, blue ones.
"That is why I have told you--what you know now."
"Of course," Greta said patronisingly, "if you wish it, I shall not tell
the class."
Lynette deliberately put away her tools and the calf-bound volume she had
been working on, and shut and locked her desk. Then she rose. Her eyes
swept over the long room, its lower end packed with giggling, whispering,
squabbling, listening, gossiping, or reading girls. She said very clearly:
"It will be best that you should tell the class. Do it now. The girls can
think it over while they are away, and make up their minds whether they
will speak to me or not when they come back. Make no delay."
Then she went, moving with the long, smooth, light step and upright,
graceful carriage that she had somehow caught from the Mother-Superior,
out of the room. Curious eyes followed her; sharp ears, that had caught
fragments of the colloquy, wanted the rest; eager tongues plied Greta with
questions, as she stood reticent, knowing, bursting with information
withheld, in the middle of the class-room, where honours she coveted had
been won and prizes gained by the charity-bred foundling.
You may be sure that Greta told the story. It lost nothing by her telling,
be equally sure. But all that heard it did not take it in Greta's way. The
stamp of the woman who ruled this place was upon many minds and intellects
and hearts here, and her teaching was to bear fruit in bitter, stormy,
bloodstained years of days that were waiting at the very threshold.
"I tell you," said Christine Silber, the handsome Jewess, with a fierce
flash of her black Oriental eyes, "foundling or charity girl, or whatever
else you choose to call her, Lynette Mildare is the pride of the school."
Silber's father was President of the Groenfontein Legislative Council. A
hum of assent followed on her utterance, and an English girl got up upon a
form. She was the niece of a High Commissioner, daughter of a Secretary of
Imperial Government, at Cape Town, who wrote K.C.M.G. after his name.
"Silber speaks the truth. Not a girl here is a patch on the shoes of
Lynette Mildare. I am going home to London next winter to be presented,
and we shall have a house in Chesterfield Gardens for the season, and if
Lynette will come and visit us, I can tell her that she will be treated as
an honoured guest. As for you, Greta Du Taine, who are always bragging
about your father and his money, tell me which three letters of the
alphabet you would find tattooed upon his conscience--if the strongest
microscope ever made could find his conscience out? Shall _I_ tell you
them?" She held up her finger. "Shall I tell you how he bought those
orange-groves at Rustenburg--and the country seat near Johannesburg--and
the drag with the silver-mounted harness and the team of blood bays?"
"No, please!" begged Greta, flinching from the torture.
But the English girl was pitiless. She checked the letters off upon her
fingers:
"I. D. B."
A shout went up from the Red Class.
Greta turned and ran.