"It was just before the rainstorm that it happened. He was on the lookout.
They have been moving the big gun and the 16-pounder Krupps again, and
some of the laagers seem to be shifting, so we have kept an extra eye open
of late, by night as well as by day. He was very keen always...."
Already he is spoken of by those who have known and loved him as one who
was and has been.
"He had relieved me at 10 a.m. He might have been up over an hour when it
happened. The orderly-sergeant had got his mouth at the speaking-tube, in
the act of sending down a message; he did not see him hit. It was a shell
from their Maxim-Nordenfelt. And when we got to him, the first glance told
us there was little hope."
"There is none at all," says Saxham curtly, as is his wont. "A splinter
has shattered the lower portion of the spine. The agony can be deadened
with an opiate, and the ruptured arteries ligatured. Beyond that there is
nothing else to do, though he may live till morning."
"He managed to ask for Wrynche before he swooned, so we 'phoned him at
Hotchkiss Outpost North. He got here ten minutes ago, badly cut up, but
there has been no recognition of him. Do what you can, Saxham, in the
case. Every moment may bring Wrynche's recall. There is another person I
should have expected the poor boy to ask for.... That young girl, Saxham,
whose heart has to be broken with the news, sooner or later. Perhaps about
nightfall, when it will be safe for her to venture. I ought to send an
escort for Miss Mildare?"
The slow, dusky colour rises in Saxham's set, pale face, and as slowly
sinks out again. He has been standing in low-toned colloquy with the Chief
outside the heavy plush curtains. He turns silently upon his heel and
vanishes behind them.
"_Ting--ting--ting!_"
The telephone-bell heralds an urgent recall from Hotchkiss Outpost North.
And a beckoning hand summons Captain Bingo from the bedside of his dying
friend ere ever the word of parting has been spoken.
"It is for you, Wrynche, as I expected."
"I am ready, sir. Orderly, get my damned brute out!"
The sorrow and love that swell the big man's heart to bursting find rather
absurd expression in his savage objurgation of the innocent brown charger.
But Captain Bingo, when he stoops over the camp-bed where lies Beauvayse,
kisses him solemnly and clumsily upon the forehead, and then goes heavily
striding out of the death-chamber with his bulldog jowl well down upon his
chest; and a moment later when he is seen bucketing the lean brown charger
through the thrashing hailstorm that is jagged across by the white-green
fires of bursting shell, is rather a tragic figure, or so it seems to me.
Meanwhile, what of the man who lies upon the bed? Since Bingo's face came
between and receded into, those thick grey mists that gather about the
dying, he has lost consciousness of present things. Fever is rising in
those wellnigh empty veins of his, his skin is drawing and creeping; it
seems as though innumerable ants were running over him. The hand that is
not powerless tries to brush them away. Sometimes he thinks he is in
Hospital, and that the man in the next bed is groaning, and then he is
aware that the groans are his own. He is conscious that a needle-prick in
the sound wrist has been followed by sensible relief. The unspeakable
grinding agonies subside; he is able to murmur, "Thanks, Nurse," as he
gulps some liquid from the glass a strange hand holds to his lips....
The groans are sighs now, and the clogged brain, spurred by morphia,
shakes off its lethargy. The fever goes on rising, and he begins,
silently, for his powers fail of speech, to wander over all the past.
Could Saxham, sitting motionless and vigilant on the folding-chair, his
keen eyes quick to note each change, his deft hand prompt to do all that
can be done--could Saxham hear, he would behold, anatomised before his
mental vision, the soul of this his fellow-man.
"Coming straight for me--five round black spots punched in the grey. If
they go by, luck's on my side, and I marry her. If not ... hit--and done
for!"
Exactly thus has Saxham made of the unconscious Father Noah, of the Boer
sharp shooters behind their breastwork, the arbiters of Fate.
"Send for Bingo!" flashes across the dying brain "Something to say to
Bingo. Don't bring _her_. Who'd want a woman who loved him to remember him
like this? What was it the Mahometan _syce_ the _musth_ elephant killed at
Bhurtpore said about his wife? '_Let her cool my grave with tears._' Until
she finds out ... until someone tells her. Ah--'h!" There is a groan, and
a convulsive shudder, and the beautiful dim eyes roll up in agony, and the
blue, swollen lips are wrung as the feeble voice whispers: "Nurse, this
hurts like--hell! Some more--that stuff!"
Saxham gives another subcutaneous injection of morphia. The curtains part,
and the Colonel, in waterproof and a dreadnought cap, comes noiselessly
in. "No change," Saxham answers to the mute inquiry. "I anticipate none
before midnight. Of course, the weakness is progressive."
"Of course." The Chief touches the cold, flaccid wrist. There are hollows
in his lean cheeks, and deep crow's-feet at the corners of the kindly
hazel eyes, and the brown moustache is ominously straight and curveless.
"Tell him, if he recovers consciousness, that I thought it best to send
for her. Chagrave has gone with a couple of the men. It's a desperate
night for a woman to be out in, but they took an Ambulance sling-chair
with them. They'll wrap her in tarpaulins, and carry her in that."
He nods and goes up on the lookout with a night-glass, and the wearied
officer he relieves comes down. As he has said, it is a desperate night of
driving sleet and swirling blackness, illuminated only with the malignant
coruscations of lyddite bursting-charges. But the tempest without is
nothing to the tempest that rages in the soul of the quiet man in sodden
khaki who watches by the dying.
She has been sent for.... She is coming.... To kneel by the low cot and
weep over him who lies there; kiss the tortured lips and the beautiful dim
eyes, and hold the unwounded head upon her breast.... How shall Saxham
bear it without crying out to tell her? He clenches his hands, and sets
his strong jaw, and the sweat breaks out upon his broad, pale forehead.
The man upon the bed, mentally clear, though incapable of coherent speech,
is now listening to comments that shall ere long be made by living men
upon one who very soon shall be numbered with the dead.
"Well, well, don't be hard on the poor beggar!" he hears them saying.
"Give the devil his due: not a bad chap--take him all round. Got carried
away and lost his head. She's as lovely as they make 'em, and he ...
always a fool where a pretty woman was concerned--poor old Toby!"
He pleads unconsciously, with his most merciless judge, in his utter
incapacity to plead at all....
And so the time goes by. There has been coming and going in the place
outside. The guard has relieved the double sentries, the official lamp
burns redly under the little penthouse. A reconnoitring-patrol ride out,
the horses' hoofs sounding hollow on the earth-covered boards of the
sloping way. The business of War goes on in its accustomed grooves, and
the business of Life will soon be over for Beauvayse. Yet she has not
come. And Saxham looks at his watch.
Nine o'clock. He has not eaten since early morning. He is wet to the skin
and stiff with long sitting. But when the savoury odours of hot horse-soup
and hot bean-coffee, accompanied by the clinking of crockery and tin
pannikins, announce a meal in readiness, and would-be hosts come to the
curtains and anxiously beg him to take food, he merely shakes his square
black head and falls again to watching the unconscious face of Beauvayse.
The conscious brain behind its blankly-staring eyes is thinking:
"Those paragraphs.... In black and white the thing looked damnable. And
think of the gossip and tongue-wagging. Whatever they say about me ...
she'll be the one to suffer. They're never so hard on ... the man!"
He has uttered these last words audibly; they pierce to the heart's core
of the mute, impassive watcher. Strong antipathy is as clairvoyant as
strong sympathy, and with a leap of understanding, and a fresh surge of
fierce resentment, Saxham acknowledges the deadly truth contained in those
few halting words. She will be the one to suffer. Beside the martyrdom
inevitably to be endured by the white saint, the agony of the sinner's
death-bed pales and dwindles. There is a savage struggle once again
between Saxham the man and Saxham the surgeon beside the bed of death.
His sudden irrepressible movement has knocked the tumbler from the little
iron washstand at his elbow. It falls and shivers into fragments at his
feet. And then--the upturned face slants a little, and the eyes that have
been blankly staring at the roof-tarpaulins come down to the level of his
own. He and her fallen enemy regard each other silently for a moment. Then
Beauvayse says weakly, in the phantom of the old gay, boyish voice that
wooed and won her:
"Thought it was Wrynche. Where is----"
The question ends in a groan.
Saxham the man shrinks from him with unutterable loathing. But Saxham the
surgeon stoops over him, saying, in distinct, even tones:
"Captain Wrynche was here. He has been recalled to Hotchkiss Outpost
North. Drink this." This is a little measure of brandy-and-water, in which
some tabloids of morphia have been dissolved. And Beauvayse obeys,
panting:
"All right. But ... more a job for the Chaplain than the Doctor, isn't
it?"
"Do you wish the Chaplain sent for?"
There is a glimmer of the old lazy, defiant humour in the beautiful dim
eyes.
"What could he do?"
Saxham answers--how strangely for him, the Denier:
"He would probably pray beside you, and talk to you of God."
There is a pause. The faint, almost breathless whisper asks:
"It's night, isn't it?"
"It is dark and stormy night."
Beauvayse says, in the whispering voice interrupted by long, gasping sighs
that are beginning to have a jarring rattle in them:
"Before to-morrow.... I shall know more of God ... than the whole Bench of
Bishops."
There is silence. And she does not come. The man on the bed makes a
painful effort, gathering his nearly-spent forces for something he wants
to say:
"Doctor!"
"Let me wipe your forehead. Yes?"
"I ... insulted you frightfully the other day."
"You need not recall that. I have forgotten it."
"I ... beg your pardon! Will you ... shake hands?... My left, if you don't
mind. The other one's ... no good."
He tries to lift the heavy arm that lies beside him. There is only a faint
movement of the finger-tips, and he gives up the effort with a fluttering
sob. And the square white face with the burning eyes under the lowering
brows opposes itself to his. Words are crowding to Saxham's lips:
"_I would gladly shake the hand of the man who insulted me and who has
apologised. And I honour the brave officer who meets Death upon the field.
But with the would-be betrayer of an innocent girl, the dancing-woman's
husband who proposed himself as mate for Lynette Mildare, I have nothing
but contempt and abhorrence. He is to me a leper. Worse, for the leper I
would touch to cure!_"
He does not utter the words, nor does his rugged, unconquerable sincerity
admit of his taking the hand. He fights with his hatred in silence. And
she has not come. What is _he_ saying in that weak voice with the rattling
breaths between?
"Listen, Saxham.... There's ... something I want you ... say to Miss
Mildare."
The grey mists that gather about him shut out a clear view of Saxham's
terrible face. The feeble whisper struggles on, broken by those rattling
gasps.
"Tell her forget me. Say when I ... asked her ... to marry me...."
Silence. He is falling, falling into an abyss of vast uncertainties. The
blue lips dabbled with foam can frame no more coherent words. Only the
brain behind the dying eyes is alive to understand when Saxham approaches
his own livid face and blazing eyes to the face upon the pillow, and says:
"Do not try to speak. Close your eyes when you mean 'Yes.' I know what you
wish me to tell Miss Mildare. It is that when you asked her to marry you,
you were already the husband of another woman. Am I correct?"
The affirmative signal comes.
"You were married to Miss Lavigne at the Registrar's office,
Cookham-on-Thames, last June, before you sailed. The witnesses were your
valet and a female servant at Roselawn Cottage. And knowing that you were
not free, you deceived and cheated her. That is what I am to tell Miss
Mildare? Signal if I am right."
The dying eyes are brimming with tears. When the lids shut, signifying
"Yes," slow, heavy drops are forced between them.
"Very well. Now hear. I will not tell her!"
The eyes open wide with surprise.
"I will never tell her," says Saxham again. "I will not blacken any man's
reputation to further my own interests." The vital strength and the
white-hot passion of him, contrasted with the spent and utter laxity of
the dissolving thing of clay upon the bed, seem superhuman. "Do you hear
me?" he demands again. "Listen once more. Knowing the truth of you, I came
here to force you to undeceive her. Had you refused, I would certainly
have killed you. But I would never have betrayed you!"
That "never" of Saxham's carries conviction. The pale ghost of a laugh is
in the dying eyes. The wraith of Beauvayse's old voice comes back again to
say:
"Doctor, you're a ... damned good sort!" And then there is a long, long
silence, broken only by those painful rattling breaths, never by her
coming.
The end comes, and she is not there. A pale blink in the wild sky eastward
hints to the night lookouts of hot drink, food, and welcome rest. The
Chief stands beside the comfortless camp-bed, where the hope of a high old
House is flickering out. The Doctor holds the wet and icy wrist, where the
pulse has ceased to be perceptible. The sheet above the labouring breast
rises and falls with those panting, rattling gasps; the beautiful eyes
are rolled up and inwards. The light is very nearly out, when, with a last
effort, the flame leaps up. He thinks that what is the barely perceptible
whisper of a tongue already clay is a loud and ringing cheer. He thinks
that he is shouting, his strong young voice topping a hundred other
voices. It seems to him who, for the bribe of all the beauty he has
coveted, and all the love that is yet unwon, could not speak one audible
word or move a finger, that he waves his hat again and again. Oh! glorious
moment when the white moonbeams blink on the grey dust-wall rolling down
from the North, and the horsemen of the Advance ride out of it, and
clustering enemies that have rallied again to the attack waver, and
disperse, and scatter....
"Hurrah! They're running--running for their lives! Give it 'em with
shrapnel! Oh, pepper 'em like hell! The Relief! The Relief! Hurrah!"
It is all over with the opening of the day-eye in the east. When they
leave him, beautiful, and stern, and calm in that deep slumber from which
only the Angel with the Trumpet may awaken him, and pass out between the
curtains, the dark, short officer who was on the lookout when the Doctor
came, stands very pale and muddy, and steaming with damp, waiting to
report. And two troopers of the Irregulars, wet and muddy and steaming
too, are waiting also, just inside the tarpaulins of the outer doorway.
And she is not there.
A few rapid words, an exclamation from the Chief, shaken for once out of
his steely composure, and quivering from head to foot with mingled rage
and grief:
"My God, how unutterably horrible!"
Saxham shoulders his way into the ring of white faces that have gathered
about the dark little muddy officer.
"What has happened to Miss Mildare----?"
The little officer answers, panting:
"The Sisters could not make her understand. She----"
The Chief speaks for him:
"She had been previously stunned by the shock of--a terrible calamity."
"What calamity?"
"The Mother-Superior has been killed. Two of the Sisters and Miss Mildare
found her in the Convent chapel. They got there before evening. She must
have been dead some hours. She had been shot through the lungs."
"By a stray bullet?"
"By a bullet from a revolver, fired close enough to scorch the clothes.
Foul murder, and by God who saw it done----"
The lean clenched hand, thrown upwards in a savage gesture, the blazing
eyes, the livid, furrowed face, the writhen mouth, the furious, jarring
voice, leave little doubt of the vengeance that will be wreaked when he
shall track down the murderer. He wheels abruptly, and goes to the
telephone. The swift, imperative orders volt from fort to fort; the
circuit of vigilance is made complete, the human bloodhounds unleashed
upon the trail, in a few instants, thanks to the buzzing wire that brings
the mouth of a man to the ear of another across a void of miles.
But Bough, primed with knowledge as to which are dummy rifle-pits and
which are real, aided by acquaintance with the ground, and covered by that
wuthering night of storm, has already pierced the lines. Subsequently that
excellent Afrikander, Mr. Van Busch, rejoins Brounckers' bright boy at
Tweipans, with information that decides the date of Schenk Eybel's Feint
from the East.
L
She had gone about her Master's business all Monday, calm and composed,
and inexorably gentle. She did not meet Richard's daughter before
nightfall. "She will not suffer now," she thought, even as she sent the
message that was to allay Lynette's anxiety, and give notice of her
whereabouts in case of need. Her mission led her to a half-wrecked shanty
at the south end of the town, where some Lithuanian emigrants herded
together in indescribable filth and misery. A woman who had been recently
confined lay there raving in puerperal fever. Until nightfall, when she
was removed to the Isolation Hospital on the veld, near the Women's
Laager, the Mother-Superior remained with the patient.
A burly, bushy-bearded man, with a peculiarly dark skin and strange steely
eyes, passing the broken window, caught sight of the noble profile and the
stately shoulders stooping above the miserable bed. Going home at dark,
the Mother heard a stealthy footstep following behind her.
Since the Town Guard had been withdrawn to man the trenches, many people,
revisiting their deserted dwellings, had found them plundered of movable
possessions, and, losing the fear of Eternity in wrath at the wholesale
evaporation of their worldly goods, had thenceforth remained to protect
them. Instances there had been of robbery from the person by thieves not
all tracked down by Martial Justice and made examples of.
The hovering human night-bird and the prowling human jackal, whose sole
end is money and money's worth, have no terrors for Holy Poverty. But
there are other creatures of prey more terrible than these. And the
padding footsteps that followed, hurrying when she hurried and slackening
when she went more slowly, and stopping dead when she paused and looked
round, conveyed to her a haunting sense of something sinister, and at the
same time greedy and guileful, that bided its time to spring.
She moved in long, swift, undulating rushes, her black robes sweeping
noiselessly as a great moth's wings over the well-known ground, her course
kept unfalteringly; but her heart shook her, and she gasped as the Convent
bomb proof neared in sight. She had wrought much and suffered more of
late, and she knew herself less strong than she had been. When the blue
light that hung from a post by the ladder-hole blinked "Home" through the
mirk of a night of thin rain and mist-shrouded stars, she knew infinite
relief. Her great eyes were as wild and strained as a hunted deer's, and
her bosom heaved with her panting breaths. She paused a moment to regain
her composure before she went down.
The nuns who were not on night-duty were gathered together about the
trestle-table sewing, while the lay-Sisters prepared the scanty evening
meal. Lynette was there, sitting pale and quiet on her corner-stool.
Richard's daughter had been watching and waiting for her Mother. Ah! to
see the relief and gladness leap into the dear face, and shine in the
beautiful wistful eyes that had shed such tears, dear God!--such tears of
anguish upon Sunday--and then had dried at the utterance of her decree--
"You are never to tell him!"
--And changed into radiant stars of joy, by whose light the darkness of
her own wickedness and misery seemed almost bearable.
"It is the Mother. Mother----"
Lynette sprang up, and would have hurried to her, but the Mother lifted a
warning hand, and calling Sister Tobias to her, passed aside into a
curtained-off and precautionary cave that had been hollowed out behind the
ladder. This was the custom when the ladies of the Holy Way returned from
doubtful or infectious cases. Lynette sighed, and went back to her stool
to wait. The busy needles had not ceased stitching.
That humble saint, Sister Tobias, hurried to her diligent ministry of
purification. When she came in with hot water and carbolic spray, she
brought a letter with her. It was directed to the Mother in a coarse
round-hand.
"Somebody dropped this down the ladder-hole as I came by with my kettle,"
said Sister Tobias. "It's the first letter-box I ever knew that was as
wide as the door. Maybe 'twill bring in a new fashion, for all we know."
She made her homely joke with a sore heart for the sorrow she read in the
Mother's beloved face, and trotted away to fetch clean towels, saying--a
favourite saying with Sister Tobias--that her head would never save her
heels.
The Mother opened the letter. It was anonymous, and utterly vile. Had the
pen been dipped in liquid ordure, the thing written could not have been
more defiling to the touch than its meaning was to this pure woman's
chaste eyes. Had a puff-adder writhed out of the envelope, and struck its
fangs into her beautiful hand, it would have poisoned her less certainly.
And every beat of the obscene words upon her brain, strangely enough,
awakened an echo of those long padding footsteps that had followed in the
dark. And the writer knew of all that had happened at the tavern on the
veld, when a human brute had triumphed in his bestiality, and a girl-child
had been helpless, and the great white stars had looked down unmoved and
changeless upon Innocence destroyed.
The Mother read the letter from the loathly beginning to the infamous end.
She had been sorely wrought upon of late. She tried to pray, but she knew
the Ear Above must be averted from one who had lied and was in deadly
sin.... When Sister Tobias came back she found her lying in a swoon.
The little old crooked, nimble Sister, with the long, pale sheep-face,
dropped on her knees beside that prone column of stately womanhood,
removed the Mother's hooded mantle, loosened the _guimpe_ and habit, and
worked strenuously to revive her, dropping tears.
"My beautiful, my poor lamb!" she crooned. "What's come to her? What
wicked shadow's black on all of us? What's brooding near us--Mary be our
guardian!--that's struck at _her_ to-night!"
The letter lay upon the floor, where it had dropped from the unconscious
hand. It lay there for Sister Tobias, and might lie. If the Mother willed
to tell its contents, she would tell. If not, the little old nun, her
faithful daughter, would never ask or seek to know.
She opened her great eyes at last, and smiled up at the tender, wrinkled
ugliness of the long, sheep-like face in the close white linen wimple.
"Say nothing to anybody. I was overdone," she said, and rose. Sister
Tobias picked up the letter, and gave it to her. There was a Boer
mutton-fat candle flaring draughtily in an iron sconce upon the wall. The
Mother moved across the little room, and burned the letter to the last
blank corner, and trod the fallen ashes into impalpable powder. Then she
helped Sister Tobias to remove every trace left, and obviate every danger
that might result from her late toil, and rejoined her quiet family of
daughters as though nothing had happened.
They recalled afterwards how cheerful and how placid she had seemed that
night. Her smile had a heart-breaking sweetness, and her voice made
wonderful melody even in their accustomed ears.
They supped on the little that they had, and chatted, said the
night-prayers, and went, aching, all of them, with unsatisfied hunger, to
bed. You may conjecture the orderly, modest method of retiring, each
Sister vanishing in turn behind a curtained screen to disrobe, lave, and
vest herself for sleep, emerging in due time in the loose, full conventual
night-garment of thick white twilled linen, high-throated,
monkish-sleeved, and girdled with a thin cotton cord, her face, plain or
pretty, young or elderly, framed in the close little white drawn cap of
many tucks.
Then, the ladder having been removed, and the tarpaulin pulled over its
hole, the lights were extinguished, and only the subdued crimson glow of
the tiny lamp that burned before the silver Crucifix that had stood above
the Tabernacle on the altar of the Convent chapel burned ruby in the
thick, hot dark, where, upon the little iron beds, each divided by a
narrow, white-cotton-covered board into two constricted berths, the row of
quiet figures lay outstretched, her Breviary upon every Sister's pillow,
and her beads about her wrist.
The Mother lay very still, seeing the hideous sentences of the anonymous
letter written in hellish characters of mocking flame on the background of
the dark. She prayed as the wrecked may when the ship beneath their feet
is going down. Beside her Lynette, not daring to disturb the silence,
suddenly grown rigid and awful, lay aching with the loneliness of living
on the other side of the wide gulf of division that had suddenly yawned
between.
She had spent the day at the Hospital with Sister Hilda-Antony and Sister
Cleophee. She had not seen Beauvayse. But a note had come from him, that
had warmed the heart she hid it near. His dearest, he called her--his own
beautiful beloved. He could not snatch a minute from duty even to kiss his
darling's sweetest eyes, but on Sunday they would be together all day. And
would she not meet him at the Convent on Thursday, at twilight, when the
shelling stopped, and it would be safe for his beloved to venture there?
She must not come alone. Dear old Sister Tobias would bring her, and play
Mrs. Grundy's part. And, with a thousand kisses, he was hers in life and
death.
Lynette's first love-letter, and it seemed to her so beautiful. It laid a
hand upon her heart that thrilled, and was warm and strong. The hand said
"Mine!"
His. She would be his one day--soon; and there would be no more mysteries
between the man and the woman welded by God's ordinance into husband and
wife. She shivered a little at the thought of that intimate, peculiar,
utter oneness. And then, with a sickening, horrible sinking of the heart,
she realised that, however well such a secret as that she guarded might be
hidden before the priest and the clergyman made they twain One, it must be
known of both afterwards, or else be for ever threatening to start through
the burying earth, crying, "I am here. How came you to forget?"
She had been cold in the sultry heat of that long noon, and deaf when
voices spoke to her. She was thinking.... How if she might be mistaken in
Beauvayse, even now? He was beautiful and brave and alluring to her
woman's sense in what she knew of him and what was yet to know. He called
her and drew her. Nothing noble awakened in her at the smile on the gay,
bold lips and in the grey-green, jewel-bright eyes. When he had held her
to his heart, she had not felt her soul merge with another, its fellow,
and yet stronger and greater, in that embrace. He and she were not
bodiless spirits floating in pure ether, but an earth-made girl and boy,
very much athirst for the common cup of human rapture, hungry for the
banquet of mortal bliss.
It was sweet, but how if he were another, and not the one? How if her
hasty gift of herself robbed both in the long end? How if his headlong
passion and tempestuous love should be torn from him like rags in the
first instant of that discovery that must almost inevitably be made? She
heard his boyish voice crying, "Hateful!... You have deceived me!" and was
stabbed with quick anguish, knowing him in the right.
Men did not enter into marriage pure. By some unwritten code of that
strange lawgiver, the World, they were absolved of the necessity of
spotlessness. They might slake their thirst at muddy sources unrebuked.
And the more each wallowed, the more he demanded of the woman he wedded
that she should be immaculate in thought and deed--if in knowledge, that
was all the better.
What a cloud of doubts assailed her, swarming like bees, settling in every
blossomed branch of her mind, and blotting out the sweetness with angry
buzzing, furry bodies, armed with sharp stings for punishment or revenge.
She had seen a little peach-tree weighed down and bowed to the red earth
at its roots with the weight of such a swarm. She felt at this juncture
very like the tree. A little more, only a slight increase of the burden,
and the slender trunk would have snapped. When the native bee-master came
and shook the double swarm into a couple of hives, the little tree stayed
crooked. It did not regain its beautiful, healthful uprightness for a long
time.
The Mother had commanded her never to tell Beauvayse. She realised that in
this one sorrowful instance she was wiser than her teacher. If unutterable
misery was not to result from their union, he must be told the truth
before ...
Once he knew it, would he love her any longer? Would he desire to make her
his wife? She knitted her brows and her fingers in anguish, and set her
little teeth. Possibly not. Probably not.
And supposing all went well and they were married. She had not realised
clearly, even when she talked of travelling abroad into the unknown,
conjectured world, what it would mean to go out from this, the first home
she had ever known, and leave the Mother. She caught her breath, and her
heart stopped at the thought of waking up one morning in a new, strange
country, and knowing that dear face thousands of miles away.
The loneliness drove her to daring. She reached out a timid hand, and laid
it upon the breast of the still, rigid, immovable figure beside her. Ah,
what a leaping, striving, throbbing prisoner was caged there! A faint sob
of surprise broke from her. Ah! what was it? what could it mean?
The faint sound she uttered plucked at the strings of that tortured heart.
The Mother turned, rose upon her elbow, leaned over the low dividing
barrier, took the slight body in her arms, and gathered it closely to her,
shielding it from the fangs of that coiled, formless Terror that
threatened in the dark. She felt how thin and light it was, and how frail
the arms were that clung about her, and how wasted was the face that
pressed against the coarse, conventual linen, covering the broad, deep
bosom whose chaste and hidden beauties Famine had not spared.
She would be a real mother once--just once. God would not grudge her that.
She bared her breast to the cheek with a sudden half-savage, wholly
maternal gesture, and drew it close and pillowed it and rocked it. Had
Heaven wrought a miracle and unsealed those white fountains of her
spotless womanhood, she would have found it sweet to give of herself to
Richard's starving child. But she had nothing but her great, indignant
pity and her boundless agony of love. Long hours after the face lay hushed
in sleep above her heart, and while the long, soft breaths of slumber went
and came, she lay staring out into the sinister blackness over the
beloved, menaced head.
Rain leaked through the tarpaulin over the ladder-hole, falling in heavy,
sullen gouts and splashes on the beaten earth below as blood drips from a
desperate wound. That image rose, and the blackness seemed all red--red
with those lines of fiery writing on it, smoking and crawling, flickering
and blazing, climbing, and licking with thin, greenish tongues of
hell-begotten flame.
Then the midnight hour struck, and it was time to rise for Matins. Long
after the Sisters had gone back to bed the Mother knelt on, a motionless
figure wrestling in silent prayer before the silver Crucifix upon the
wall. Dawn found her still kneeling. No ray of heavenly light had found
her soul, that weltered in darkness, crying to One Who seemed not to hear.