"Ah! but of British parents, surely? I once knew an English lady," he went
steadily on, "whom she resembles strikingly."
Her eyes were inscrutable, and her lips were folded close.
"She was the wife of the Colonel commanding my old Regiment--Sir George
Hawting. A grand old warrior, and something of a martinet. He married a
third daughter of the Duke of Runcorn--Lady Lucy Briddwater."
She said without the betraying flicker of an eyelash: "I have seen the
lady named...."
He said, with a prick of self-reproach for having again turned the barb
that festered in her bosom:
"Lady Lucy was a very lovely creature, and a very impulsive one. She lived
not happily, and she died tragically."
There was the ring of steel and the coldness of ice in the Mother's words:
"She met the fate she chose."
He thought, looking at her:
"What a woman this is! How silent, how resourceful, how calm, how
immeasurably deep! And why does she think of me as an opponent?" He went
on, stung by that quiet marshalling of all her forces against him:
"Unhappily, the fate we choose for ourselves sometimes involves others.
The death of that unhappy woman and the father of her child left an
innocent creature at the mercy of sordid, evil hands."
"In evil hands, indeed, judging by--what you have told me."
"I would give much to be able to trace her." There was a heavy line
between his eyebrows, and his eyes were stern and sad. "It would be
something to know what had become of her, even if she were dead, or worse
than dead."
A violent, sudden scarlet dyed her to the edge of the white starched coif.
Her mouth writhed as though words were bursting from her; but she nipped
her lips together, and controlled her eyes. And still her silence angered
and defied him. He went on:
"If I seem to you to harp painfully upon this subject, pardon me. You have
my word that, without encouragement from you, I will not refer to it after
to-day." His close-clipped brown moustache was straightened by the tension
of the muscles of his mouth. He passed his palm over it, and continued
speaking without moving a muscle of his face or taking his searching eyes
from the Mother's.
"The name of the young lady who is so fortunate as to be your ward, and
even more, the striking likeness I spoke of just now, have led me to hope
that my dead friend's daughter was led by a Hand, in whose Divine guidance
I humbly believe, to find the very shelter he would have chosen for her.
Pray answer, acquitting me in your own mind of persistence or
inquisitiveness. Am I right or wrong?"
She might have been a statue of black marble, with wimple and face and
hands of alabaster, she stood so breathlessly still. Her heart did not
seem to beat; her blood was stagnant in her veins. She felt no faintness.
Her observation was unnaturally keen, her mind dazzlingly clear; her brain
seemed to work with twice its ordinary power. She thought. He glanced at
the shabby watch he wore upon the steel lip-strap, and waited. She was
aware of the action, though she never turned her head. She was weighing
the question, to tell or not to tell? Her soul hung poised like a seagull
in the momentary shelter of a giant wave-crest. Another moment, and the
battle with the raging gale and the driving halberds of the sleet would
begin again.
She looked again towards Lynette, and in an instant her purpose
crystallised, her line of action was made clear. She saw a little bunch of
wax-belled white heath fall from the girl's scarlet belt in the act of
rising. She saw Beauvayse snatch it greedily from the grass and read the
glance that passed between the golden-hazel and the green-grey eyes, and
understood with a great pang of jealous mother-pain that she was no longer
first in her beloved's heart. Then came a throb of unselfish joy at the
knowledge that Richard's girl had come into her kingdom, that the divine
right and heritage and crown of Womanhood were hers at last.
Were hers? Not yet, but might be hers, if every clue that led back to that
tavern upon the veld could be broken or tangled in such wise that the
keenest and most subtle seeker should be baffled and lost. It all lay
clear before her now, the manipulation of events, the deft rearrangement
of actual fact that might best be used to this end. As her clear brain
planned, her bleeding heart trailed wings in the dust, seeking to lead the
searcher away from the hidden nest, and now her motherhood and her pride
and all the diplomacy acquired in her long years of rule rose up in arms
to meet him.
They were not of equal height. Her great, changeful eyes, purple-grey now,
dropped to encounter his. She regarded him quietly, and said:
"No one of your wide experience needs to be reminded that resemblances
between persons who are not allied by blood exist, and are strangely
misleading. But since you have conveyed to me in unmistakable terms your
conviction that Miss Mildare is the daughter of--a mutual friend who bore
that surname--is actually identified in your idea with that most unhappy
child who was left orphaned some seventeen years ago--at--I think you said
a veld hotel in the Orange Free State?"
He bowed assent, biting the short hairs of his moustache in vexation and
embarrassment.
"Hardly an hotel--a wretched shanty of the usual corrugated-iron and
mud-wall type, in the cattle-grazing country between Driepoort and
Kroonfontein. And--it seems my fate to be continually bringing our
conversation back to a--most unhappy and painful theme."
"I acquit you of the intention to pain or wound. When I have finished what
I have to say, we will revert to the subject no more. It will be buried
between us for ever, though the memory of the Dead live in our pardoning
and loving thoughts, and in our prayers."
The vivid colour that had flamed in her cheeks had sunk and left them
marble. The humid mist of tears that veiled her eyes gave them a wonderful
beauty.
He answered her:
"Your thoughts could not be otherwise than noble and generous. Prayers as
pure as yours could not be unheard."
"No prayers are unheard, though all are not granted."
She made the slight gesture with her large, beautiful hand that put
unnecessary speech from her, and let the hand drop again by her side. Her
bosom rose and fell quietly with her even speaking. None could have
guessed the tumult within, and the doubts and convictions and
apprehensions that battled together, and the religious fears and scruples
that rent and tore her suffering soul. But for the sake of Richard's
daughter she rallied her grand forces, and nerved herself to carry out her
hated task.
"I will tell you how I came to be interested in the young lady who is now
my adopted daughter, and whom you know as Lynette Mildare. At the end of
the winter of 18-- the Reverend Mother of our Convent died, and I was sent
up from the Mother-House at Natal, by order of the Bishop, to take her
place as Superior. Two Sisters came with me. It was the usual slow journey
of many weeks. The wet season had begun. Perhaps that was why we did not
encounter many other waggons on the way. But one party of emigrants of the
labouring class--we never really learned where bound--trekked on before
us, and generally outspanned within sight. There were three rough
Englishmen--two middle-aged and one quite old--a couple of tawdry women,
and a young girl. They used to ill-treat the girl. We heard her crying
often, and one of the Kaffir voor-loopers of their two waggons told a Cape
boy who was in our service that the old Baas would kill the little white
thing one of these days. She was used as a drudge by them all--a servant,
unpaid, ill-fed, worse-clothed than the Kaffirs--but the old man,
according to our informant, bore her a special grudge, and lost no
opportunity of wreaking his malice on her."
"I understand," he said. She went on:
"We would have helped the child if we could have reached her; but it was
not possible. If she had run away and taken refuge with us, and the men
had followed her, I do not think we should have given her up for any
threats of theirs, or even for threats carried out in action."
"I know you never would have."
She made the slight gesture with her hand that put all inferred praise
aside.
"The waggons of the emigrants were no longer in sight, one morning when
we inspanned. They had headed south as if for the Diamond Mines, and we
were trekking west...." There was a slight hesitation, and her lashes
flickered, then she took up her story. "Perhaps we were a hundred and
fifty miles from Gueldersdorp, perhaps more, when we came upon what we
believed at first to be the dead body of a young girl, almost a child,
lying among the karroo bush, face downwards, upon the sand. She had been
cruelly beaten with the sjambok--she bears the scars of that terrible
ill-usage to-day.... We judged that she had fainted and fallen from one of
the emigrants' trek-waggons. Months afterwards, when her wounds were
healed"--her steady lips quivered slightly--"and she had recovered from an
attack of brain-fever brought on by alarm and anxiety and the ill-usage,
she told me that she had run away from people who were cruel to her--from
a man who----"
"This distresses you. I am grieved----"
He noted the sickness of horror in her face, and the starting of
innumerable little shining points of moisture on her white, broad forehead
and about her lips. She drew out her handkerchief and wiped them away with
a hand that shook a little.
"I have very little more to say. She was quite crushed and broken by
cruelty and ill-usage. No native child could have been more ignorant--she
could not even tell us her name when we asked it. She probably had never
had one. And Father Wix, who is our Convent Chaplain, and has charge of
the Catholic Mission here, baptised her at my instance, giving her two
names that were dear to me in that old life that I left behind so long
ago. She is Lynette Mildare.... Are you surprised that in seven years a
young creature so neglected should have become what you see? Those powers
were inherent in her which training can but develop. We found in her great
natural capacity, an intelligence keen and quick, a taste naturally
refined, a sweet and gentle disposition, a pure and loving heart----" Her
voice broke. Her eyes were blinded by a sudden rush of tears. She moved
her hand as though to say: "There is no more to tell."
"You shut the door upon my hope," he said.
It was to her veritably as though the gates of her own deed clashed
behind her with the closing of the sentence. For she had stated the
absolute truth, and yet left much untold. She saw disappointment and
reluctant conviction in his face, coupled with an immense faith in her
that stung her to an agony of shame and self-reproach. What had she
suppressed?
Nothing, but that the waggons of the emigrants had turned south for
Diamond Town a fortnight before the finding of that lost lamb upon the
veld. And her scrupulous habit of truth, her crystal honour, her keen,
clear judgment no less than her rigorous habit of self-examination, told
her that the half-truth was no better than falsehood, and that she,
Christ's Bride and Mary's Daughter, had deliberately deceived this man.
Yet for his own sake, was it not best that he should never know the truth!
And for the sake of Richard's daughter, was it not her sacred maternal
duty to shield that dearest one from shame? She steeled herself with that
as he bared his head before her.
"Ma'am, you have more than honoured me with your confidence, and I need
not say that it is sacred in my eyes, and shall be kept inviolate. And for
the rest----"