"Clang--clang--clang!"
A man and a girl came back out of Paradise when the Catholic church-bell
rang the Angelus. The girl's sweet flushed face had paled at the first
three strokes. When the second triple clanged out, her colour came back.
She rose from her seat upon a lichened slab of granite in the cool shadow
of the great boulder, and bent her lovely head, Beauvayse watching her
lips as they moved, soundlessly repeating the Angelic Salutation:
"_Ave Maria, gratia plena; Dominus tecum! Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et
benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus._"
The wonderful simplicity of the Chosen One's reply followed, and the
announcement of the Unspeakable Mystery. The little prayer followed, and
the rapid signing with the Cross, and she dropped her slight hand from her
bosom, and turned her eyes back upon his.
"You remind me of my mother," he told her. "She is Catholic, you know."
"And not you?"
"We fellows, my brothers Levestre and Daltham and myself, were brought up
as pillars of the Established Church." His sleepy, grey-green eyes
twinkled, his white teeth showed in the laugh. "The girls are of my
mother's faith. It was a family agreement. Are you quite sure you have
come down to earth again? Because there's such an awful lot I want to say
to you that I don't know where to begin."
Though his mouth laughed, his eyes had wistful shadows under them. He had
tossed aside his Service felt when she had taken off her hat, and the
sunshine, piercing the thick foliage overhead, dappled the scaly trunks of
the blue-gum trees, and dripped gold upon the red-brown head and the
crisp-waved golden one.
"I am here. I am listening."
She stood before him with meekly drooping eyelids, feeling his ardent gaze
like a palpable weight, under which her knees trembled and her whole body
swayed. The great boulder rose upon her left hand like a beneficent
presence. Delicate ferns and ice-plants sprang from its chinks and
crannies. The long fronds of the sparaxis bowed at her small, brown-shod
feet, some bearing seed-pods, others rows of pink bells, or yellow--a
fairy chime. In the damper hollows iris bloomed, and the gold and scarlet
sword-flowers stood in martial ranks, and gaily-plumaged finches were
sidling on overhanging boughs, or dipping and drinking in the shallows.
The wattled starlings whistled to each other, or fought as starlings will.
A grey partridge was bathing in the hot dry sand between the reed-beds and
the bank, and in the deeper pools the barbel were rising at the flies.
There was no sound but the running water. The spicy smell of aromatic
leaves and the honeyed perfume of a great climbing trumpet-flower made the
air languorous with sweetness.
He answered her now.
"You are here, and I am here. And for me that means everything. And I feel
that I want nothing more, and, still, such a tremendous lot besides."
He breathed as though he had been running, and his sharply-cut nostrils
quivered. His white teeth gleamed under the clipped golden moustache.
Perhaps it made his charm the more definite and irresistible that in
these days of storm, and stress, and hardship and peril, his handsome face
was never without its gay, confident smile. His tall, athletic figure, in
the neat workmanlike Service dress that suited him so well, leaned towards
her eagerly. He kept his clear eyes on her face, with the direct
simplicity of a child's gaze, but the look bred in her a delicious terror.
The perfume of youth and health, of vigour and virility, that exhaled from
him, came to her mingled with the scent of the crushed spice-leaves and
the perfume of the waxen-belled heaths and the breath of the giant
trumpet-flower. She was turning dizzy. She could scarcely stand.
"I--I will sit down," she murmured, and he beat the grasses at the foot of
the great granite slab and prodded in chinks and crannies for snakes and
tarantulas; and when she sank down with a faint sigh of relief, threw
himself at her feet with a careless, powerful grace, and lay there looking
up at her, worshipping the golden lights that gleamed through the thick
dark eyelashes, and the sweet shadows under them, and her little pointed
chin.
The lace-trimmed frills of a white cambric petticoat peeped under the hem
of her green cloth skirt; below there was a glimpse of slender, crossed
ankles in brown silk hose, and the little brown shoes laced with wide silk
ties. She drew off one of her thin, loose tan gloves, and smoothed back a
straying lock above her ear, and flushed, hearing him murmur in his
caressing voice:
"Take off the other glove, too."
She was well aware how beautiful her hands were--small, and slender, and
ivory-white, and exquisitely modelled, with little babyish nicks at the
wrists, and at the inner edges of the rosy palms, and gleaming pink nails,
of the true almond shape. She thought little of her face, though she knew
it to be charming; but she ingenuously admired her slender feet, that were
quite as pretty without the silk stockings and little brown shoes, and the
delicate hands she bared for him now. He looked at them with ardent
longing, and said:
"How dear of you to do that, because I asked you! And do you realise that
we're here together alone, you and me, for the first time? Nobody saw us
steal away but Sister Cleophee, and I've a notion she wouldn't tell,
blessed old soul!"
Her eyes smiled.
"You would not call the Mother that?"
"No more than I would Queen Victoria or the Princess of Wales. And a
snubbing from the Religious would be rather worse, on the whole, than a
snubbing from the Royalty."
"The Princess never snubbed you?"
"Didn't she? Tremendously, once. Do you want to hear about it? She had
sent away her brougham while the giddy old Dean and Chapter were showing
her round St. Paul's. And--acting as Extra Equerry--I'd got instructions
to call her a hack conveyance, and--being young and downy, I'd picked
H.R.H. the glossiest growler on the rank. But you've been bred and born
here. You don't even know what a growler is. And in five years' time there
won't be one left in London."
"Perhaps I shall see London before the five years are over. And a growler
is a four-wheeled cab. You see, I'm not so ignorant...."
"You sweetest!" he burst out passionately. "I wish I knew all that you
could teach me!"
He might have frightened her if he had stretched out his arms to clasp her
then. But he mastered himself so far. Lying at full length in the grass,
leaning upon his elbow, he rested his head upon his hand, and drank her in
with thirsty eyes. And that something emanating from him enveloped her,
delicately and yet forcefully, constraining and urging and compelling her
to meet his gaze. And the perfume of the great honeyed flower came to her
in waves of sweetness, growing in strength, and the monotonous buzzing of
the black honey-bees mingled with the drumming of the crickets, and the
flowing of the river, and the beating of her heart, and the rushing of her
blood. She leaned her fair head back against the great boulder, and said
in a voice that shook a little:
"Tell me about the snubbing."
"It was High Art. Three words--and I knew I'd behaved like a bounder of
the worst--I had to go back and get the other cab, with a broken front
window and a cabby...." He chuckled. "I've met red noses enough but you
could have seen that chap's glowing through the thickest fog that ever
blanketed Ludgate Hill and wrapped the Strand in greasy mystery. Don't
move, please!... There's a ray of sunshine touching your head that makes
your hair look the colour of a chestnut when the prickly green hull first
cracks to let it out. Or ... there's a rose grows on the pergola at home
at Foltlebarre Royal, with a coppery sheen on the young leaves.... I
wondered why I kept thinking of it as I looked at you. But I know now. And
your skin is creamy white like the flower. Oh, if I could only gather the
girl-rose and carry it home to the others!"
She was pink as the loveliest La France now.
"You ought not to talk to me in that way."
"Don't I know it?" Beauvayse groaned out. He turned over upon his face in
the grass, and lay quite still. A shuddering sigh heaved the strong young
shoulders from time to time, and his hands clenched and tore at the
grasses, "Don't I know it? Lynette, Lynette!"
She longed to touch the close-cropped golden head. Unseen by him, she
stretched out a hand timidly and drew it back again, unsatisfied.
"Lynette, Lynette! I'm paying at this moment for every rotten act of
headlong folly I've ever committed in my life, and you're making me!" He
caught at a fold of her skirt and drew it to him and hid his face in it,
kissing it again and again. It was one of the caresses she had been used
herself to offer where she most loved. To find yourself being worshipped
instead of worshipping is an experience. She touched the golden head now,
as the Mother had often touched her own. He caught the hand.
"No, no!" She grew deadly pale, and shivered. "Please let me go. I--I did
not----"
She tried to release the hand. He raised himself, and she started at the
warm, quivering pressure of his beautiful mouth, scarcely shaded by the
young, wheat-golden moustache, upon her cool, sweet flesh. She snatched
her hand away with a faint cry, and sprang to her feet, and her cheeks
blazed anew as she turned to go.
"You want to leave me? You would punish me like that--just for a kissed
hand?"
He barred her way, taller than herself, though he stood upon the sloping
lower level. She had learned always to be true in thought and speech.
"I--don't--like to be touched." She said it without looking at him.
"You put your hand upon my head. Why did you do it if you hate me so?"
"I--don't hate you!"
"I love you! My rose, my dove, my star, my joy! Queen of all the girls
that ever I saw or dreamed of, say that you could love me back again!"
"I--must not."
Her bosom heaved. He could see the delicate white throat vibrating with
the tumultuous beating of her heart.
"Why not? Nobody has told you anything against me? Nobody has said to you
that I have no right to love you?" he demanded.
"No."
"Look at me."
The golden hazel, dark-lashed eyes she shyly turned to his were full of
exquisite, melting tenderness. Her lips parted to speak, and closed again.
He leaned towards her--hung over her, his own lips irresistibly attracted
to those sweetest ones....
"Lord Beauvayse----" she began, and stopped.
He begged:
"Please, not the duffing title, but 'Beauvayse' only. Tell me you love me.
Tell me that you'll wait until I'm able to come to you and say: 'My
beloved, the way's clear. Be my wife to-morrow!'"
His tone was masterful. His ardent eyes thrilled her. She murmured:
"Beauvayse ...!"
She swayed to him, as a young palm sways before a breeze, and he caught
her in his strenuous, young embrace, and held her firmly against him. Her
old terrors wakened, and dreadful, unforgettable things stirred in the
darkness, where they had lain hidden, and lifted hydra-heads. She cried
out wildly, and strove to thrust him from her, but he held her close.
There was a shaking among the tangled growths of bush and cactus high up
on the opposite bank, and Lynette realised that Beauvayse's arms no
longer held her. She leaned back against the boulder, panting and
trembling, and saw Beauvayse's revolver glitter in his steady hand, as
something came crashing down through the tangled jungle upon the edge of
the farther shore, and a heavily-built man in khaki pushed through the
shoulder-high growth of reeds, and leaped upon a rock that had a swirl of
water round it. It was Saxham.
"Miss Mildare!" called the strong, vibrating voice.
She faltered:
"It--it is Dr. Saxham."
"And what the devil does Dr. Saxham want?" was written in Beauvayse's
angry face. But he called out as he lowered his revolver-hand:
"You've had rather an escape of getting shot, Saxham, do you know? You
might have been a Boer or a buffalo. Better be more careful next time, if
you're anxious to avert accidents."
Saxham was a little like the buffalo as he lowered his head and surveyed
the alert, virile young figure and the insolent, high-bred face from under
ominously scowling brows. He made no answer; only laid one finger upon the
butt of his own revolver, and the slight action fanned Beauvayse's
annoyance and resentment to a white-heat, as perhaps Saxham had intended.
He sprang upon another boulder that was in the mid-swirl of the current,
and spoke again.
"Miss Mildare, I was walking on one of the native paths that have been
made in the bush there"--he indicated the bank behind him--"when I heard
you cry out. I am here, at your service, to offer you any help or
protection that is in my power to give."
Lynette looked at him vaguely. Beauvayse, crimson to the crisp waves upon
his forehead and the white collar-line above the edge of his jacket,
answered for her.
"Miss Mildare does not require any help or protection other than what I am
privileged to place at her disposal. You had better go on with your walk,
Doctor. You know the old adage about two being company?"
He laughed, but his voice had quivered with fury, and the hand that held
the revolver shook too. And his eyes seemed colourless as water against
the furious crimson of his face. Still ignoring him, Saxham said, his own
square, pale face turned full upon Lynette, and his vivid blue eyes
constraining her:
"Miss Mildare, I am at your commands. Tell me to cross the river and take
you back to the ladies of the Convent, or order me to continue my walk. In
which case I shall understand that the familiarities of Lord Beauvayse are
not unwelcome to you."
"By God ...! You----"
Beauvayse choked, then suddenly remembered where and how to strike. But he
waited, and Saxham waited, and still she did not speak.
"Am I to go or stay? Kindly answer, Miss Mildare!"
Beauvayse's eyes were on her. He said to her below his breath:
"Tell him to go!"
She stammered:
"Th--thank you. But--I--I--had rather you went on."
Beauvayse saw his opportunity, and added, with an intolerable smile:
"My 'familiarities,' as you are pleased to term them, being more
acceptable to a lady than the attentions of the Dop Doctor."
Saxham started as though an adder had flashed its fangs through his boot.
A rush of savage blood darkened his face; his hand quivered near the butt
of his revolver, and his eyes blazed murder. But with a frightful effort
he controlled himself, lifted his hat slightly to Lynette, turned and
leaped back to the stone he had quitted, strode through the reed-beds, and
plunged back into the tangled boscage. That he did not continue his walk,
but turned back towards the town, was plain, for his retreat could be
traced by the shaking of the thick bush and the high grasses through which
he forced his way. It did him good to battle even with these vegetable
forces, and the hooked thorns that tore his clothes and rent his flesh
left nothing like the traces that those few words of dismissal, spoken by
a girl's voice, and the hateful taunt that had followed, had left upon his
heart.
It was over. Over--over, the brief, sweet season of hope. Nothing was left
now but his loyalty to the friend who believed in him. If that man had
not stood between Saxham and his despair, Gueldersdorp would have got back
her Dop Doctor that night. For the Hospital stores included a cherished
case or two of Martell and Kinahan, and all these things were under
Saxham's hand.
The heavy footsteps crashed out of hearing. The startled finches settled
down again, except at that point, higher up on the opposite bank, to which
Beauvayse's attention had first been directed. There the little birds yet
hovered like a cloud of butterflies, but, practised scout as Beauvayse
was, he paid no heed to their distress. She had declared for him. The
Doctor's discomfiture enhanced his triumph. Gad! how like an angry buffalo
the fellow was! The sort of beast who would put down his head and charge
at a stone wall as confidently as at a mud one. It was a confounded
nuisance that he had seen what he had seen. But a man who had eventually
cut so poor a figure, had been snubbed so thoroughly and completely, might
prefer to hold his tongue. And if he did not, here in Gueldersdorp, while
no letters got through, while no news filtered in from the big humming
world outside, it would be possible to carry things bravely off for a long
time. He had told Bingo, to be sure, about--about Lessie. But Bingo,
though he might bluster and barge about dishonourable conduct, would never
give away a man who had trusted him. To be sure, it was not quite fair,
not altogether square; it was not playing the game as it should be played,
to gain her promise as a free man. Should he make a clean breast of it,
and tell her the whole wretched story now?
Perhaps he might if she had not been standing, a slender green-and-white,
nymph-like figure, against the background of sun-hot, shadow-flecked,
lichened stone, looking at him. The rosy light bathed her in its radiance.
And as she looked, it seemed to him that something was dawning in that
face of hers. He watched it, breathless with the realisation of his
dreams, his hopes, his desires. The prize was his. Every other baser
memory was drowning within him. It seemed to him that her purity, as he
bathed in it, washed him clean of stain. He forgot everything but the
secret that those sweet eyes told at last.
"My beloved! I'm not good enough to tie your blessed little shoes, and
yet no other man shall ever have you, hold you, call you his own....
Lynette, Lynette! Dear one, isn't there a single kiss? And I might get
shot to-morrow."
It was characteristic of him that his brave, gay mouth should laugh even
in the utterance of the appeal that melted her. She gave a little sob, and
raised her sweet face to his, flushing loveliest rosy red. She lifted her
slender arms and laid them about his strong young throat, and kissed him
very quietly and purely. He had meant to snatch her to his leaping heart
and cover her with eager, passionate caresses. But the strong impulse was
quelled. He said, almost with a sob:
"Is this your promise? Does this mean that you belong to me?"
Her breath caressed his cheek as she whispered:
"Yes."
He was thrilled and intoxicated and tortured at once to know himself her
chosen. Ah! why was he not free? Why had Chance and Luck and Fate forced
him to play a part like this?
"I wish to Heaven we had met a year ago!" he broke out impulsively.
"Half-a-dozen years ago--only you'd have been a mere kid--too young to
understand what Love means.... Why, Lynette darling! what is the matter?
What have I said that hurt?"
Her arms had fallen from about his neck. She shrank away from him. He drew
back, shocked into silence by the sudden, dreadful change in her. Her
eyes, curiously dulled and faded, looked at Beauvayse as though they saw
not him, but another man, through him and behind him. Her face was peaked
and pinched; her supple, youthful figure contracted and bent like that of
a woman withered by some wasting sickness, her dainty garments seemed to
lose their colouring and their freshness, and hang on her, by some strange
illusion wrought by the working of her mind upon his, like sordid rags.
Against the splendid riot of life and colour over and under and about her,
she looked like some slender sapling ringed and blighted, and ruined by
the inexorable worm. For she was remembering the tavern on the veld. She
was recalling what had been--realising what must henceforth be, in its
fullest meaning. She shuddered, and her half-open mouth drew in the air
in gasps, and the blankness of her stare appalled him. He called in alarm:
"Lynette dearest! what is the matter? Why do you look at me like that?
Lynette!"
She did not answer. She shook like a leaf in the wind, and stared through
him and beyond him into the Past. That was all. There was a rustling of
leaves and branches higher on the bank, and the sound of thick woollen
draperies trailing through grass. The bush on the edge of the cleared
space that was about the great boulder was parted by a white, strong hand
and a black-sleeved arm, and the Mother-Superior moved out into the open,
and came down with those long, swift steps of hers to where they were. Her
eyes, sweeping past Beauvayse, fastened on the drooping, stricken figure
of the girl, read the altered face, and then she turned them on the boy,
and they were stern as those of some avenging Angel, and her white wimple,
laundried to snowy immaculateness by the capable hands of Sister Tobias,
framed a face as white.
"What is the reason of--this? What has passed between you to account for
it? Has your mother's son no sense of honour, sir?"
The icy tone of contempt stung him to risk the leap. He drew himself to
his splendid height, and answered, his brave young eyes boldly meeting the
stern eyes that questioned him:
"Ma'am, I am sorry that you should think me capable of dishonourable
conduct. The fact is, that I have just asked Miss Mildare to be my wife.
And she consents."
A spasm passed over the pale face. So easily they leave us whom we have
reared and tended, when the strange hand beckons and the new voice calls.
But the Mother-Superior was not a woman to betray emotion. She drew her
black nun's robe over the pierced mother-heart, and said calmly, holding
out her hand to him:
"You will forgive me if I was unjust, knowing that she is dear to me. And
now I shall ask you to leave us. Please tell the Sisters"--from habit she
glanced at her worn gold watch--"we shall join them in ten minutes' time."
He bowed, and lifted his smasher hat from the grass, and took up the
Lee-Metford carbine he had been carrying and had laid aside, and went to
Lynette and took her passive hand, and bent over it and kissed it. It
dropped by her side lifelessly when he released it. Her face was a mask
void of life. He looked towards the Mother in distress. Her white hand
imperiously motioned him away. He expostulated:
"Is it safe for two ladies, ma'am, so far from the town, without
protection? Natives or white loafers may be hanging about."
"If you desire it, you can remain within hearing of a call. But go now."
He went, lightly striding down the sandy path between the reed-beds on the
foreshore. She watched the tall, athletic figure until it swung round a
bend and was lost to sight.
Then she went to the girl and touched her. And at the touch Lynette
dropped as though she had been shot, and lay among the trodden grasses and
the flaunting cowslips face downwards. A low, incessant moaning came from
the muffled mouth. Her hands were knotted in her hair. She writhed like a
crushed snake, and all of her slender neck and face that could be seen and
the little ears that her clutching, twining fingers sometimes bared and
sometimes covered were one burning, shameful red.
"Lynette! My dear one!" The Mother, wrung and torn with a very agony of
tenderness and pity, knelt beside her, and began with gentle strength to
untwine those clutching hands from the girl's hair. She prisoned both in
one of hers, and passed the other arm beneath the slender rigid body, and
lifted it up and held it in her strong embrace, silently until a moan,
more articulate than the rest, voiced:
"Mother!"
"It is Mother. She holds you; she will not let you go."
The head lay helplessly upon her bosom. She felt the rigor lessen. The
moaning ceased, and the tortured heart began to leap and strain against
her own, as though some invisible hand lashed it with an unseen thong.
There were no tears. Only those moans and the leaping of the heart that
shook her whole body. And it seemed to the Mother that her own heart wept
tears of blood. The hour had come at last, as always she had known it
would. The love of a man had wakened the woman in Lynette. She knew now
the full value of the lost heritage, and realised the glory of the jewel
that had been snatched by the brutal hand of a thief. Ah, Lord! the pity
of it!
The pity of it! She, the stainless one, could have stripped off her own
white robe of virgin purity, had it been possible, to clothe the despoiled
young shoulders of Richard's daughter, cowering prostrate under her burden
of guiltless shame, crushed by the terrible knowledge that ruined
innocence must always pay the penalty, whether the destroyer is punished
or goes free.
The penalty! Suppose at the price of a lie from lips that had never lied
yet it could be evaded? The Mother's face contracted with a spasm of
mental pain. A dull flush mounted to her temples, and died out in olive
paleness; her lips folded closely, and her black brows frowned over the
sombre grey fires burning in their hollow caves. She rebuked a sinner at
that moment, and the culprit was herself.
She, the just mistress and wise ruler of so many Sisters in the religious
profession; she, so slow to judge and condemn others, was unsparing in
austerity towards herself. She had always recognised her greatest weakness
in her love for this adopted daughter that might have been her own if
Richard Mildare had not played traitor. She had never once yielded to the
clinging of those slight hands about her heart, but she had exacted
forfeit from herself, and rigorously. So much for excess of partiality, so
much for over-consideration, so much for lack of faith in over-anxiety, so
much more of late for the keen mother-jealousy that had quickened in her
to anguish at the thought that another would one day usurp her undivided
throne, and claim and take the lion's share of the love that had been all
hers. Her spiritual director was far too lenient, in her opinion. She was
all the more exacting towards herself. What right had a nun to be so bound
by an earthly tie? It was defrauding her Saviour and her Spouse to love
with such excess of maternal passion the child He had given. Yet she loved
on.
She reviewed all her shortcomings, even while the girl's head lay
helplessly against her, and the scalding tears that had at last begun to
gush from those shut, quivering eyelids wetted her breast. She had
esteemed and valued perfect candour above all things. And yet of what
concealments had she not been guilty in the shielding of this dearest
head?
She had deceived, for Richard's child, Richard's friend, in the deft
interweaving of fragmentary truths into a whole plausible fabric. She knew
that, if necessary, she would deceive again, trailing her wings,
fluttering on before, as the golden plover lures the footsteps of the
stranger from her nest.
Perhaps you call her scruples fantastic, her sense of guilt morbid. Even
the lay Catholic can with difficulty comprehend and enter fully into the
mental constitution of the Religious. This was a nun, to whom a blur upon
the crystal of the soul kept pure, like the virginal body, for the daily
reception of the Consecrated Host, meant defilement, outrage, insult, to
her Master and her Lord.
And she had always known, it seemed to her, that this terrible hour would
come. When the two young figures had moved away together into the green
gloom of the trees, she had felt a premonitory chill that streamed over
her whole body like icy water, paralysing and numbing her strength. She
had read their secret in their faces, unconscious of her scrutiny, and
watched them out of sight, praying, as only such a mother can, that it
might not be as she feared. This was her beloved's great hour; she would
not have stretched out a finger to delay its coming,--she who had known
Love, and could not forget! It might be that in this splendid boy, who was
as beautiful as the Greek Alcibiades, and as brave as the young Bayard,
lay the answer to all her prayers for her darling. The bridal white would
not be a blasphemy, like the young nun's snowy robe and veil. And yet--and
yet, in Lynette's place she knew that she could never have looked into the
face of a rosy, smiling, wedded Future without seeing under the myrtle and
orange-blossom garland the leering satyr-face of the Past.
Was it wise that another should be made to share that vision? She put that
question to herself, looking with great agonised, unseeing eyes over the
head that lay upon her bosom, out across the slowly moving water, stained
with amber from ironstone beds through which it had wound its way, tinged
with ruddy crimson from the sunset. For the sky, from the western horizon
to the zenith, and from thence to the serried peaks and frowning bastions
of purple-black cloud that lowered in the north, was all orange-crimson
now, and the moon, then at the ending of her second quarter, swung like a
pale lamp of electrum at the eastward corner of the flaming tent.
"Was it wise?" She seemed to hear her own voice echoing back out of the
past. And it said:
"The only just claim to your entire confidence in all that concerns your
past life will rest in the hands of the man who may one day be your
husband."
The perfume of the great white trumpet-flower came to her in gusts of
intensified, sickening, loathsome sweetness. She glanced round and saw it
on her right, clasping in its luxuriant embrace a slender young bush that
it was killing. The thick, juicy green stems and succulent green leaves,
the greedily embracing tendrils and great fleshy-white, hanging flowers
revolted her. The creeper seemed the symbolisation of Lust battening upon
Innocence.
Other like images crowded thick and fast upon her. From a mossy cranny in
a stone a hairy tarantula leaped upon a little lizard that sunned itself,
not thinking Death so near. A lightning-quick pounce of the bloated thing
with the fierce, bright eyes and the relentless, greedy claws, and the
little reptile vanished. She shuddered, thinking of its fate.
The blue gums and oaks that fringed the river gorge and the bushes that
grew about were ragged and torn with shell and shrapnel-ball. Chips and
flinders had been knocked by the same forces from the boulders and the
rocks. Amongst the flowers near her shone something bright. It was an
unexploded Maxim-shell, a pretty little messenger of Death, girt with
bright copper bands and gaily painted. And a ninety-four-pound projectile,
exploded, had scattered the shore with its fragments, and doubtless the
river-bed was strewn thick with others. You had only to look to see them.
Once Lynette's lover knew everything there was to know, the trees and
rocks and flowers of the Eden in which every daughter of Eve owns the
right to walk, if only once in a whole lifetime, would be marred and
broken, scorched and spoiled, like these.
Purblind that she had been. What claim had any man, seeing what the lives
of men are, to this pitiful sacrifice of reticence, this rending of the
veil of merciful, wise secrecy from an innocent young head? None. Not the
shadow of a claim. She tossed away her former scruples. They sailed from
her on the faint hot breeze lightly as thistledown. And now the
tear-blurred face was lifted from her bosom, and the voice, hoarse and
weak and trembling, appealed:
"Mother, you are not angry? I never meant to be underhand, or to
hide--anything from you."
"No," she said, hiding the pang it gave her to realise how much had been
concealed between the lines that she had read so often. "You did not mean
to." The trembling voice went on:
"He never spoke to me as though we were strangers. Never, from the first.
And to-day, he----" Her heart's throbbing shook her. The Mother said:
"He has told me what has passed. He said that he had asked you to marry
him, and you had--agreed." The bitterness of her wounded love was in her
tone.
"I--had forgotten," she panted, "_that_--until one little careless thing
he said brought it all back to me in such a flood. It was like drowning.
Then you came, and--and----" The quavering, pitiful voice rose to a cry:
"Mother, must I tell him everything?" She cowered down in the enfolding
arms. "Mother, Mother, must I tell him?"
A great wave of pity surged out from the deep mother-heart that throbbed
against her own. The deep, melodious voice answered with one word:
"No."
Amazement sat on the uplifted, woebegone face of the girl. The sorrowful
eyes questioned the Mother's incredulously.
"You mean that you----"
She folded the slight figure to her. Her sorrowful eyes, under their great
jetty arches, looked out like stars through a night of storm. Her greyish
pallor seemed a thin veil of ashes covering incandescent furnace-fires.
She rose up, lifting the slender figure. She said, looking calmly in the
face:
"I mean that you are not to tell him. Upon your obedience to me I charge
you not to tell him. Upon your love for me I command you--never to tell
him! Kiss me, and dry these dear eyes. Put up your hair; a coil is
loosened. He is waiting for us! Come!"