XXVII

For nearly two months, from dawn until dark, Gueldersdorp had squatted on

her low-topped hill in a screaming blizzard of shrapnel and Mauser

bullets. Never a town of imposing size or stately architecture, see her

now a battered hamlet of gaping walls, and shattered roofs, and wrecked

chimneys; staring defiance through glassless windows like the blind

eyeholes in the mouldered House that once has held the living thought of

Man. From dawn until dark the ancient seven-pounders of her batteries had

banged and grumbled, her Maxims had rattled defiance from Kopje Fort, and

the Nordenfelt released its showers of effective, death-dealing little

projectiles. Scant news from outside trickled into the town. Grumer, with

his Brigade, was guarding the Drifts, and when the Relief might be

expected was now a moss-grown topic of general conversation in

Gueldersdorp.

And within her girdle of trenches, stern, grimy, haggard men lived, cheek

to the heated rifle-breech, and ate, and snatched brief spells of sleep,

booted and bandoliered, and with the loaded weapon ready for gripping.

Since the attack on Maxim Kopje had choked the Hospital with wounded men

and dotted the Cemetery with little white crosses, nothing of much note

had occurred. The armoured train had done good service, and the Baraland

Rifle Volunteers had carried out their surprise against the enemy's

western camp one fine dark night, helped by a squadron of the Irregulars,

with eleven wounded, and the loss of six out of fifty fighting-men.

The Convent of the Holy Way stood empty and deserted in its

shrapnel-littered garden-enclosure.

From east, west, north, and south the deadly iron messengers had come,

making sore havoc of this poor house of Christ. "When the walls fall about

our ears, Colonel," the Mother-Superior had declared, "it will be time to

leave them." They were lacework now, with a confusion of bare rafters

overhead, over which streamed, as if in mockery, the Red-Cross Flag. Grim

figures, like geometrical problems gone mad, were made by water and gas

pipes torn from their bedding, and twisted as if by the hands of giants in

cruel play. The little iron bedsteads of the Sisters, and the holy symbols

over them, were the only articles missing from the cells, revealed in

section by the huge gaps in the masonry.

The Tabernacle of the chapel altar, void of the Unspeakable Mystery it had

housed, fluttered its rearward curtains through the wreckage of the east

wall and the cheap little stained-glass window, where the Shepherds and

the Magi had bowed before the Virgin Mother and the Divine Child. Within

sight of their ruined home, the Sisterhood had found refuge. An

underground dwelling had been dug for them in the garden before an

abandoned soft-brick-and-corrugated-iron house, formerly inhabited by one

of the head officials of the railway, a personage of Dutch extraction and

Boer sympathies, at present sequestered beneath the yellow flag of the

town gaol for their too incautious manifestation; while his wife and young

family were inhabitants of the Women's Laager. And from their subterranean

burrow the Sisters carried on their work of mercy as cheerfully as though

their Order had been originally one of Troglodytes, nursing the sick and

wounded, cooking and washing for the convalescents, comforting the

bereaved, and tending the many orphans of the siege.

South lay the laager of the Refugees. To the westward within the ring of

trenches and about a mile and a half from the town, was the Women's

Laager, visited not seldom by the enemy's shell-fire, in spite of the

Red-Cross Flag. Fever and rheumatism, pneumonia and diphtheria stalked

among the dwellers in these tainted burrows, claiming their human toll.

Women languished and little children pined and withered, dying for lack of

exercise and fresh air, with the free veld spreading away on all sides to

the horizon, and the burning blue South African sky overhead. Famine had

not yet appeared among the Europeans, though grisly black spectres in

Kaffir blankets haunted the refuse-heaps, and fought with gaunt dogs for

picked bones and empty meat-tins, and were found dead not unseldom, after

full meals of strange and dreadful things. Fresh meat was still to be had,

though the cattle and sheep of the Barala had been thinned by raids on the

part of the enemy, and poor grazing. Shell and rifle-fire not infrequently

spared the butcher trouble, so that your joints were sometimes weirdly

shaped. But they were joints, and there was plenty of the preserved

article in Kriel's Warehouse and at the Army Service Stores. Tea and

coffee were becoming rare and precious, the sparkling draught of lager was

to be had only in remembrance; the aromatic beer was all drunk up, and the

stone-ginger was three shillings a bottle. Whisky was to be had at the

price of liquid gold, brandy was treasured above rubies, and served out

sparingly by the Hand of Authority, as medicine in urgent cases.

You could get vegetables from the Chinaman, who continued to cultivate

onions, cabbages, potatoes, and melons in the market-gardens about the

town, imperturbable under shot and shell, his large straw hat affording an

admirable target from the Boer sniper's point of view, as metaphorically

he gathered his fat harvest of dollars from the soil. What you could not

get for any amount of dollars was peace and rest, clean air, and space to

stretch your cramped-up limbs in, until Sunday came, bringing the Truce of

God for Englishman and Transvaaler.

The Hospital, like each of the smaller hospitals that had sprung from the

parent stalk, was crowded. The operating theatre had been turned into a

ward where the lane between the beds just gave room for a surgeon or a

nurse to pass, and hourly the cry went up: "Room, more room for the

wounded and the sick!" And among these Saxham worked, night and day, like

a man upheld by forces superhuman.

"By-and-by," he would say impatiently, when they urged him to take rest,

and would bend his black brows, and hunch those great shoulders of his to

the work again.

"Ye have a demon, man," said Taggart, Major of the R.A.M.C., himself a

haggard-eyed but tireless labourer in the red fields of pain. "At three o'

the smalls ye got to your bed, and at six ye made the rounds, at seven ye

were dealing with a select batch o' shell-fire an' rifle-shot

casualties--our friends outside being a gey sicht better marksmen when

refreshed by a guid nicht's sleep; at eight ye had had your bit o'

breakfast, and got doon your gun an' gane oot for an hour o' calm,

invigorating sniping on the veld before returning punctually at ten o' the

clock to attack the business o' the day, wi' a bag o' twa Boers to your

creedit."

"I only got one, Major. The other chap hobbled down bandaged, upon

crutches, to-day, and had a pot-shot at me as I lay doggo behind my

particular stone. I put up my hat on a stick, and--see!" Saxham gravely

exhibited a felt Service smasher with a clean hole through it, an inch

above the lining-edge. "He's a snowy-locked, hoary-bearded, Father

Noah-hatted patriarch of seventy at least, and very proud of his shooting,

and I've let him think he got me this time, just to make him happy for one

night. To-morrow he is to make the painful discovery that I am still in

the flesh."

"Aweel, aweel! But I would point out to ye that Fortune is a fickle,

tricksy jade, and the luck o' the game might fall to your patriarch in the

antediluvian headgear to-morrow."

Then the luck of the game, thought the hearer, deep in that wounded heart

of his, would not only be with the patriarch. And the great puzzle, Life,

would be solved for good.

Taggart had said he, Saxham, had a demon. He could have answered that only

by hard, unceasing, unremitting work, or, when no more work was there to

do, by the fierce excitement of those grilling hours spent lying behind

the stone, was the demon to be kept out. Of all things he dreaded

inactivity, and though he would drop upon his cot in the tiny bedroom that

had been a Hospital ward-pantry, and sleep the heavy sleep of weariness

the moment his head touched the pillow, yet he would start awake after an

hour or two, parched with that savage, unquenched thirst, and drink great

draughts of the brackish well-water, boiled for precaution's sake, and

tramp the confined space until the grip of desire grew slack. But he had

never once yielded since the night when a man with the eye and voice of a

leader among men had come to the house in Harris Street and taken him by

the hand.

Do you say impossible, that the man in whom the habit of vice had formed

should be able to cast off his degrading weakness, like a shameful

garment, by sheer force of will, and be sane and strong and masterful

again? I say, possible with this man. You see him plucked from the slough

by the strong hand of manly fellowship, and nerved and strengthened, if

only for a little while, to play the game for the sake of that other's

belief in him. Such influence have such men among their fellows for good

or for ill.

You can see the Dop Doctor upon this brilliant November morning mounting a

charger lent him by his friend, a handsome Waler full of mettle and

spirit--oats not being yet required for the support of humans--and calling

au revoir to Taggart as he rides away from the Hospital gates followed by

an orderly of the R.A.M.C. in a spider, pulled by a wiry, shabby little

Boer mare.

"The man rides like a fox-hunter," commented Taggart, noticing the ease of

the seat, the light handling of the rein, the way in which the fidgety,

spirited beast Saxham rode answered to the gentling hand and the guiding

pressure of the rider's knee, as a sharp storm of rifle-fire swept from

the enemy's northern trenches, and the Mauser bullets spurted sand between

the wheels of the spider and under the horses' bellies.

Saxham spurred ahead, the spider following. The bullet-pierced, grey felt

smasher hat, a manly and not unpicturesque headgear, sat on the man's

close-cropped head with a soldierly air becoming to the square,

opaque-skinned face that had power and strength and virility in every line

of it. The blue eyes, under their black bar of meeting eyebrows, were

clear now, and the short aquiline nose, rough-hewn but not coarse, and the

grimly-tender mouth were no longer thickened and swollen and reddened by

intemperance. The figure, perfect in its manliness, if marred by the too

heavy muscular development of the throat and the slightly bowed shoulders,

looked well in the jacket of Service khaki, the Bedford cords and puttees

and spurred brown boots that had replaced the worn white drills, the blue

shirt and shabby black kamarband and canvas shoes. Looking at Saxham, even

with knowledge of his past, you could not have associated a personality so

striking and distinguished, an individuality so original and so strong,

with the idea of the tipsy wastrel, wallowing like a hog in self-chosen

degradation.

The Mother-Superior, coming up the ladder leading out of her underground

abode as the horseman and the attendant spider drew near, thought of

Bartolomeo Colleoni, as you see him, last of the great Condottieri, in the

bronze by great Verrochio at Venice to-day. In armour, complete in the

embossed morion, one with the great Flemish war-horse, he sat to the

sculptor, the baton of Captain-General, given him by the Doge of Venice,

in the powerful hand that only a little while before aided his picked men

of the infantry to pack and harden snow about the granite boulders of the

mountains in the Val Seriana, and sent the giant snow-balls thundering

down, crushing bloody lanes through the ranks of the Venetian cavalry

massed in the narrow defile below, and striking chill terror to the hearts

of Doge and Prince and Senate.

Only the baton was a well-worn staghorn-handled crop, Squire Saxham's

gift, together with a hunter, to his boy Owen, at seventeen. It was one of

the few relics of home that had stayed by Saxham during his wanderings.

He reined up now, saluting the Mother-Superior with marked respect.

"Good-morning, ma'am. All well with you and yours?"

She answered with unusual hesitation:

"All the Sisters are well, thank you. But--if you could spare me a minute,

Dr. Saxham, there is a question I should like to ask."

"As many minutes as you wish, ma'am. It is not your day for the Hospital,

I think?"

"Ah, no!" she said, with the velvety South of Ireland vowel-inflection.

"We keep Wednesday for the Women's Laager, always. Many of them are so

miserable, poor souls, about their husbands and sons and brothers who are

in the trenches, or who have been killed, and then there are the children

to be cared for and washed. Not only the siege orphans, but so many who

have sick or neglectful mothers. It takes us the whole day once we get

there."

Saxham dismounted as she stooped to seize the end of a blue cotton-covered

washing-basket impelled from below by an ascending Sister. The spider

pulled up under cover of the brick-and-corrugated-iron house vacated by

the railway-official, as another short storm of riflery cracked and

rattled among the eastern foothills, and a whistling hurry of the

sharp-nosed little messengers of death passed through Gueldersdorp. Some

of them hit and flattened on the gable of the railway-official's house,

one went through the leathern splashboard of the spider. Saxham moved

instinctively to place himself between the closely-standing group of nuns

and possible danger.

"No, no!" they cried, as one woman, their placid, cheerful tones taking a

shade of anxiety. "You must not do that!"

"I know you are all well-seasoned," he said, looking at them with the

smile that made his stern face changed and gentle.

"I am not so sure. The bullets come in the usual way of things. We take

our chance of them," the Mother-Superior answered. But she pressed her

lips together and grew pale as a faint cry came up from the subterranean

dwelling, roofed with sheets of corrugated iron laid upon steel rails, and

made bombproof with bags of earth. And Saxham, looking at the fine face,

with its worn lines of fatigue and over-exertion, and noting the deep

shadowy caves that housed the great luminous grey eyes, said:

"I think we must have you take some rest, or I shall be having my best

helper on my hands as a patient. And that won't do, you know."

"No, it would not do," she said, looking fully and seriously at him. "And

therefore I think our Lord will not permit it. But if He should, be sure

another will rise up to fill my place."

"Whoever your successor might be," said Saxham sincerely, "she would not

fulfil my ideal of an absolutely efficient nurse, as you do. So from the

personal, if not the altruistic point of view, let me beg you to be

careful."

"I take all reasonable care," she told him. "It is true, the work has been

heavy this week; but to-morrow is Sunday, and we shall rest all day and

sleep at the Convent. Indeed, some of us have taken it in turn to be on

guard there every night, or nothing would be left us."

"I understand."

He knew how prowlers and night-thieves made harvest in the darkness among

the deserted dwellings since Police and Town Guardsmen had been

requisitioned to man the trenches. She went on:

"The upper story of the house is sheer wreck, as you may see, but the

ground-floor is quite habitable. So much so that if the shells did not

strike the poor dear place so often, I should suggest your turning it into

a Convalescent Home."

"We may have to try the plan yet," said Saxham. "The Railway Institute is

frightfully overcrowded."

"And," she told him, "a shell struck there yesterday evening, and burst in

the larger ward."

"I had not heard of it," he said. "Was anybody hurt?"

"No one, thank God! But the fire was difficult to put out, until one of

the Sisters thought of sand."

"It was an incendiary shell?" Disgust and contempt swelled his deep-cut

nostrils and flamed from his vivid blue eyes. "And yet these Kaiser's

gunners, in their blue-and-white Death or Glory uniforms, can hardly

pretend ignorance of the Geneva Convention. But--your question?"

"It is--Children!" She beckoned to the two nuns, who stood at a little

distance apart holding the washing-basket between them. "I will ask you to

go on slowly before me with the basket. I will overtake you when I have

spoken to Dr. Saxham."

"Surely, Reverend Mother." One tall, pale, and thin, the other round and

rosy, they were alike in the placid, cheerful serenity of their good eyes

and readily smiling lips. "And won't we be after taking the bundle?"

"No, no! It is heavy, and I am as strong as both of you together."

"Very well, Reverend Mother."

They were obediently moving on.

"A moment." Saxham stopped them. "If you two ladies have no objection to a

little crowding, the spider will hold both of you as well as the bundle

and the basket of washing. At least, it looks like a basket of washing."

All three laughed as they accepted his offer, assuring him that his

suspicions were correct. For neither Kaffir laundrywoman or Hindu _dhobi_

would go down any more to the washing troughs by the river, for fear of

crossing that Stygian flood of blackness rivalling their own, supposing,

as Beauvayse once suggested, that there is a third-class ferry for niggers

and persons of colour? And from the waterworks on the Eastern side of the

town the supply had been cut off by the enemy, so that the taps of

Gueldersdorp had ceased to yield.

Old wells and springs had been reopened, cleaned, and brought into use for

drinking purposes, so that of a water-famine there could be no fear. But

the element became expensive when retailed by the tin bucketful, a bath a

rare luxury when the contents of the said bucket might be spilled or

thrown away in the course of the gymnastics wherewith the sable or

coffee-brown bearer sought to evade the travelling unexploded shell or the

fan-shaped charge of shrapnel. Therefore, the Sisters had turned

laundry-women. You could hear the sound of Sister Tobias's smoothing-iron

coming up from below, thump-thumping on the blanketed board.

"And where do you think we get the water, now?" the rosy Sister, in

process of being packed into the spider, leaned over the wheel to ask.

"Not from the Convent?" Saxham thought of the strip of veld between there

and the Hospital, even more fraught with peril than the patch he had just

traversed, or the distance yet to be covered between the Sisters'

bombproof and the Women's Laager, where Death, with the red sickle in his

fleshless hand, stalked openly from dawn to nightfall.

"From the Convent, carrying it across after dark. And no well there,

either, that you'd get the fill of a teaspoon out of"--a "tayspoon" it was

in the rosy Sister's Dublin brogue--"and yet there's water there."

"But how----" Saxham began. The Mother-Superior shook her head, and the

rosy Sister was silent.

"There is no mystery about the water at all. It is very simple." Standing

there with her head held high and the fine, free, graceful lines of her

tall figure outlined by the heavy folds of the now worn and darned black

habit, and her hands, still beautiful, though roughened by toil, calmly

folded upon her scapular, she was as remarkable and noble a figure, it

seemed to Saxham, as the golden sunlight could fall upon anywhere in the

world. And besides, she was his right hand at the Hospital. A capable,

watchful, untiring nurse--and beauty would have decked her in his

surgeon's eyes if she had been physically ugly or deformed.

"There is no mystery whatever, only when the bombardment first began I

thought of the waterworks, and that one of my first cares, supposing I had

been General Brounckers"--she smiled slightly--"would have been to operate

there. So I set the Sisters to work at filling every empty barrel and

bucket and tub in the Convent with water from the taps. And as we happened

to have plenty of empty barrels and tubs, why, there is water to be had

there now, and will be for some time to come. Go now, my children."

The smiling Sisters waved their hands. The orderly saluted with his whip

and drove on in obedience to Saxham's nod.

"Of course, the Sisters are aware," he said, meeting the Mother's grave

glance, "that if it is quicker to drive, it is safer to walk?"

She nodded with the gay, sweet smile that had belonged to Lady Biddy.

"They know, of course. But danger is in the day's work. We do not seek it.

We are prepared for it, and it comes and passes. If one day it does not

pass without the cost of life, we are prepared for that, and God's Will

is done always."

"You are very brave," he said. It was the first time in his life that he

had used the phrase to any woman, and the words came out almost

grudgingly.

"Oh no, not brave," she told him; "only obedient." Her veil fluttered in

the hot November breeze that bore with it the heavy fetid taint from the

overcrowded trenches that ringed Gueldersdorp, and the acrid fumes of the

cordite; though the air up here on the veld was sweet compared with the

befouled atmosphere of the Women's Laager and the crowded wards at the

Hospital, in spite of all that disinfectants could do. She went on:

"And we are very grateful to you for the lift. Sister Ruperta was on duty

last night, and Sister Hilda Antony--the rosy Sister--is not as well as

she would have us believe. Ah----"

With her grave eyes screened by her lifted hand, she had been watching the

progress of the spider westward over the dun-yellow veld. Now the long

wailing notes of the headquarter bugle sounded, in slow time, the

Assembly, and in the same instant, from the Staff over the Colonel's

hotel, where the red lamp signalled danger by night and the Red Flag gave

its warning by day, the scarlet danger-signal fluttered in the breeze.

Once, twice, again, the deep bell of the Catholic Church tolled. A dozen

other bells echoed the warning, signifying danger by the number of their

iron-tongue strokes to the threatened quarter of the town.

"'Ware big gun!" called the sentries. "West quarter, 'ware!"

The Mother-Superior grew pale, for the Women's Laager, towards which the

little Boer mare was steadily trotting with the laden spider, lay in the

menaced quarter, with a bare stretch of veld between it and the Camp of

the Irregular Horse, whose white tents and dug-out shelters were

pleasantly shaded by ancient blue gums, picturesque and stately in spite

of broken boughs and foliage torn by shrapnel and seared by the chemical

fumes of bursting charges innumerable.

"Will you not go down?" Saxham asked her.

She shook her head in reply, and stood with a waiting face in prayerful

silence, not stirring save to make the Sign of the Cross. And as the long

white fingers fluttered over the bosom of the black habit, the faint cry

that Saxham's quick ear had heard before floated up from the populous

depths below.

"What is that?"

Before the question had left Saxham's lips, the monster gun spoke out in

deafening thunder from the enemy's position at East Point, nearly two

miles away. The heavy grey smoke-pillar of the driving-charge towered

against the sunbright distance, and simultaneously with the crack of the

discharge, sounding as though all the pent-up forces of Hell had burst the

brazen gates of Terror, and rushed forth to annihilate and destroy, the

ninety-four pound projectile passed overhead, sweeping half the

corrugated-iron roof from the railway-official's late dwelling with a

fiendish clatter and din, as it passed harmlessly over the Women's Laager,

and, wrecking a sentry's shelter on the western line of defences, burst

harmlessly upon the veld beyond, blotting out the low hills behind a

curtain of acrid green vapour.

"Get under cover, quick!" Saxham had shouted to his companion, as deafened

by the tremendous concussion, and dazed and half-asphyxiated by the

poisonous fumes, he strove for mastery with his maddened horse. This

regained, he looked for the figure in the black habit and white coif, and

knew a shock of horror in seeing it prone upon the ground.

"No, no, I am not hurt!" she cried, lightly rising as he hurried towards

her. The tremendous air-concussion had thrown her down, and beyond a

scratch upon her hand and some red dust on the black garments she was in

nothing the worse.

"I don't know how I kept my own legs," Saxham said, laughing.

"It went by like twenty avalanches," she agreed. "And blessed be our Lord,

excepting for the damage to the roof, no more seems to have been done. I

can see the spider stopping near the Women's Laager." She peered out

earnestly over the shimmering waste of dusty yellow-brown, and cried out

joyfully: "Ah, Sister Hilda Antony and Sister Ruperta are getting out.

All is well with them; all is well."

"But not with the washing."

Saxham had swung round his binoculars, and brought them to bear upon the

vehicle and its late occupants. A grim smile played about his mouth as he

handed her the glasses, and heard her cry of womanly distress as she

beheld the fruit of late labour scattered on the veld and the Sisters'

agonised activity displayed in the gathering up of sheets, pillow-slips,

handkerchiefs, babies' shirts and petticoats, with other garments of a

strictly feminine and private character. Her grave, discreet eyes avoided

his as she handed back the binoculars, but a dimple showed near the edge

of the white coif.

"And now," Saxham said, glancing at his watch, "may I know in what I can

be of service?" It had seemed to him that the Mother-Superior hesitated to

broach the subject. Nor had he been mistaken. The dimple vanished. Her

calm eyes became troubled, and she asked, with a slight catching of the

breath:

"Yes, there was something.... Doctor, is it possible for a person to die

of fear?"

He answered promptly:

"In circumstances like the present? Certainly. Undoubtedly possible. I

have seen twenty deaths from pure fright since the bombardment began, and

I expect to see more before the siege ends, or people get callous to the

possibilities of sudden extermination that are afforded them a hundred

times a day. Is the person to whom you refer a woman or a child?"

"A young girl----" she was beginning, when a buxom little figure, black

veiled and habited like herself, rose up as if from the bowels of the

earth.

"I vill look. But I can see nozing," she called to someone invisible

below. "It must be that you vait until my eyes shall become more strong."

She shaded them, newly brought from semi-darkness and blinking in the hot,

white sunlight. The Mother-Superior hurried to her, saying with a note of

anxiety in her usually calm voice:

"Sister--Sister Cleophee; is anything the matter?"

"_Mon Dieu!_ It is ze Reverend Mozer!" ejaculated the other, relief and

joy expressed in the rapid movements of pliant hands and expressive eyes.

"Nozing is ze matter, Reverend Mozer, if only you are safe."

"Quite safe, and so are the Sisters. Only the linen was upset."

"My 'eavens, but a miraculous escapement!" The supple hands and the

expressive eyes and shoulders of Sister Cleophee made great play. "Me and

Sister Tobias, 'ow we _pray_ when we 'ear ze great gun, vith knowledge zat

you and ze Sisters were upon the vay to ze Women's Laager. My faith, it

vas terrible! Me, if I 'ad not make to ascend and learn how it go vid you,

Lynette vould 'ave come running up to make discovery for herself. She

behave like a little crazy, a little mad sing--I forget your vord for she

zat have lost 'er vits! Sister Tobias and me, we 'ave to 'old 'er." The

fine, expressive eyes went past the Mother-Superior, and lighted with

evident relief on Saxham. "Ah, Monsieur le Docteur, it is incredible vat

zat poor child she suffer. Madame 'ave told you----"

"Madame was about to tell me, my Sister," Saxham said, in his smooth,

fluent French, "when you appeared upon the scene."

Sister Cleophee launched, unwitting of the Mother-Superior's gesture of

vexation, into voluble explanations in that native language which M. le

Docteur spoke so well.

Mademoiselle Mildare, the ward of Madame the Mother-Superior, was no

coward. But no! the child had courage in plenty--it was the suspense that

devoured her in the absence of the Mother, to whom Mademoiselle was most

tenderly attached, that reduced her to a state of the most pitiable. The

Sisters left at home each day would talk of the work and the fine

weather--anything to distract the mind, that presented itself to them--but

now, nothing was of any use. When the Reverend Mother came back at

nightfall, behold a transformation. Mademoiselle would laugh and sing and

chatter. Her eyes would shine like stars, she would be happy, said Sister

Cleophee, with dramatic emphasis and gesture, as a soul in Paradise. Next

day, taking her guardian from her side, would bring the terrors back, find

redoubled the nervous sufferings of Mademoiselle, to-day reaching such a

height that Sister Cleophee felt convinced that something must be done.

"Ah, my Sister, if I could do anything!" the Mother-Superior said, with

the velvet Southern Irish inflection in the breathing aspirate, and the

soft melodious cadence that made her pure, cultivated utterance so

exquisite. The voice broke and faltered, and a spasm of mother-anguish

wrung the firm mouth, and as a slow tear dimmed each of her underlids and

splashed on the white _guimpe_ she put out her hand blindly, and the

sympathetic little Frenchwoman took it in both her own.

"Reverend Mozer, you can do zis. You can bring Monsieur le Docteur to see

Lynette. You can 'ave his advice upon 'er case, and you can----"

Another fusillade of rifle-fire, sweeping from the west over Gueldersdorp,

brought a repetition of the faint moaning cry from below. Saxham consulted

the Reverend Mother with a look. She bent her head in silent assent. He

hitched the horse's bridle to what had been the gatepost of the

railway-official's front-garden, as she signed to him to descend the

ladder leading to the Sisters' underground abode. And he went down to meet

his Fate there.