There were two funerals in the Cemetery at Gueldersdorp, upon a night that
no one will forget who stood in the packed throng of shadowy mourners
about each of those open graves. The wind blew soft from the west, and the
vault of heaven might have been hollowed out of the darkling depths of an
amethyst of inconceivable splendour and planetary size. Myriads of stars,
dazzlingly white, swung under this, the Mother's fitting canopy, shared
with another, not like her holy, not noble or unselfish or devoted, but
like her in that he was brave and much beloved.
Beloved undoubtedly. You could not look at the crowding faces about the
narrow open trench where the Reverend Julius Fraithorn read the Burial
Service by lantern-light without being sure of that. Men's eyes were wet,
and women sobbed unrestrainedly. He had been so beautiful and so merry
and cheerful always, said the wet-eyed women; the men praised him for
having been such a swordsman, horseman, shot. Everyone spoke of him as the
life and soul of the garrison, the idol of his brother-officers, and
worshipped by the men under his command. Everyone had something to tell of
dead Beauvayse that was pleasant to hear.
But the great bulk of the crowd was massed behind the black-robed,
white-coiffed figures of the Sisters, kneeling rigid and immovable about
the second open grave, where the Mother-Superior lay in her snow-white
coffin, fully habited and mantled, her Rosary in the marble hand on which
the plain gold ring of her Divine espousals shone, the parchment formula
of the vows she took when admitted to her Order nineteen years before,
lying under those meekly-folded hands upon her breast. So she had lain,
feet to the altar, in the Convent chapel that her daughters in Religion
had draped and decked for her, keeping their loving vigils about her from
twilight to dawn, from dawn to twilight, until this hour when they must
yield all that was mortal of her to Earth's guardianship and the
unsleeping watchfulness of God.
Suffocatingly dense the throng about this grave, and strangely quiet. The
women's faces white and haggard and tearless, the men's drawn and deeply
lined. Not even muffled groans or sighs of pity broke the profound silence
as the solemn rite drew to its singularly simple and impressive close. As
the fragrant incense rose from the censer and the holy water sprinkled the
snow-white pall that bore the Red Cross, one dreadful word lurked sinister
in every thought:
Murdered!...
Their friend, helper, nurse, consoler, the woman whose hands had staunched
the bleeding wounds of many present, whose arm had lifted and pillowed the
dying heads of others dear to them; who had stood through long nights of
fever and delirium beside their Hospital pallets, ministering as a very
Angel from Heaven to tortured bodies and suffering souls--murdered!
The tender Mother, the wise virgin, who watched continually with her lamp
prepared, that at the first summons of the Heavenly Bridegroom she might
enter with Him into the marriage chamber, could it be that His signal had
come to her by the bloodstained hand of an assassin? It was so. And--ah!
the horror of it!
The aged priest sobbed as, followed by the server, he moved round the
grave within the enclosing wall of kneeling Sisters. But no answering sob
came from the vast assemblage. They were as dumb--stricken to stone. They
could not yet contemplate the felicity of the pure soul of the martyred
saint, carried by God's Angels into the Land of the ever-living, admitted
to the unspeakable reward of the Beatific Vision. They could only realise
that somebody had killed her.
But when the solemn strophes of the Litany for the Dead broke in upon a
profound silence, the responses of the multitude surged upwards like giant
billows shattering their forces in hollow thunder upon Arctic heights. And
when, in due pursuance of the symbolic rite of Rome, the vested priest and
her whole Sisterhood suddenly withdrew from the grave, and left her
earthly body, how wonderful in its marble, hushed, close-folded,
mysterious beauty none who had looked upon it ever could forget, waiting
for the second coming of her Master and her Lord, a great sob mounted, and
broke from every breast, and every face was drenched with sudden tears.
Perhaps God let her see how much they loved her in that parting hour. And
then the bugle sounded "Last Post" over both the open graves, softly for
fear of Brounckers' German gunners, and the great crowd melted away, and
all was done and over.
I have said that all the people wept. There was a girl in white, for she
would not let the Sisters put black garments on her, kneeling between
Sister Tobias and Sister Hilda-Antony. This girl did not weep at all.
Chief mourner at both these funerals, she was not conscious of the fact.
She knew that Beauvayse was on duty at Maxim Outpost South, and could not
get away, and that the Reverend Mother was vexed with her, and was hiding
at the Convent, pretending that she had gone somewhere, and would never
come back.
She was especially clear of mind when she thought all this. At other
times she was not Lynette, and knew no one, and had never known anybody of
the name. She was the ragged Kid, crouching on the Little Kopje in the
gathering twilight or on the long mound that its eastward shadow covered.
Or she was lying under the tattered horse-blanket on the foul straw pallet
in the outhouse, waiting for the Lady to come with the great, kind,
covering dark.
Or she was sitting in the bar-parlour on an upturned cube-sugar box beside
the green rep sofa where Bough lolled on wet days or stormy nights, her
great eyes wild with apprehension, her every nerve tense and strained with
terror of the master in his condescending moods, when he would make
pretence of teaching her to scrawl coarse pothooks and hangers on the
greasy slate that usually hung below the glass-and-bottle shelf. Or--and
at these times the Sisters found her difficult to manage--she was
crouching upon one side of a locked door, and a long thin wire was feeling
its way into the keyhole on the other side, and the man who manipulated it
laughed as the agile pliers nipped the end of the key and turned it in the
wards of the lock....
And then she would be running through the night, anywhere, nowhere, and
Bough would be riding after. She could hear the short wheezing gallop of
the tired pony when she laid her ear to the ground. And then the sjambok,
wielded by a strong and brutal hand, would bite into the quivering flesh
of the child, and she would shriek for mercy, and presently fall upon the
ground and lie there like one dead--acting that old tragedy over and over
again.
God was very kind to you, Reverend Mother, if He hid that sight from one
to whom she was so dear. But if His Blessed in Heaven have cognisance of
what takes place in this dull, distant speck of Earth, I think some salt
tears must needs have fallen from the starry eyes of one of Christ's
saintly maiden-spouses, glorious under the dual crown of Virginity and
Martyrdom, and yet a mother as truly as His Own.
That swift unerring judgment of Saxham's had pointed, months ago, to some
such mental and physical collapse, as the result of shock, crowning
long-continued nervous overstrain. He had said to the Mother that such a
result would be easier to avert than to deal with.
There was not an ounce of energy the man possessed that he did not employ
in dealing with it now.
Let Sister Tobias tell us, as she told Saxham then, the story of the
Finding. She was always a plain woman of few words.
"The last charge the Mother laid on us--Sister Hilda-Antony and me--was to
keep our eyes upon the child. The very day _it_ was done she told us, and
I saw that something had made her anxious by the look that was in her
eyes." She dried her own with a coarse blue cotton handkerchief before she
took up her tale. "She went alone to the Head Hospital that day. None of
us were to be surprised, she said, if she came home extra late. Sister
Hilda-Antony and me were on duty at the Railway Institute. We took Lynette
with us.--There!... Didn't she look up, just for the one second, as if she
remembered her name?"
She had not done so at all. She was sitting on her stool in her old corner
of the Convent bombproof, but she did not heed the shattering crashes of
the bombardment any more. She had only moved to push out of her eyes the
dulled and faded hair that the Sisters could not keep pinned up, and bent
over her little slate again. Before that, and a pencil had been given her
she had been restless and uneasy. Now she would be occupied for long
hours, making rude attempts at drawing houses and figures such as a child
represents, with round "O's" of different sizes for heads and bodies, and
pitchforks for legs and arms....
Sister Tobias went on: "The _Siege Gazette_ had come out that day, with
the news of"--she dropped her voice to a whisper--"of her being likely to
be married before long to him that's gone. May Our Lord give him rest!"
Sister Tobias's well-accustomed fingers pattered over the bib of her
blue-checked apron, making the Sign. "And Sister Hilda-Antony and me had
the world's work with all the people who stopped us in the street and came
round us at the Institute to say how glad they were. Talk of a stone
plopped in a duckpond! You'd have thought by the crazy way folks carried
on that two pretty young people had never went and got engaged before."
Sister Tobias was never coldly grammatical in speech. "But the child was
happy, poor dear, in hearing even strangers praise him; and when the
firing stopped and we were on our way home, she begged us to turn out of
it and call in at the Convent, where he'd begged her to meet him, if only
for a minute, not having seen her since the Sunday when----"
"Yes--yes!"
Saxham, who writhed inwardly, remembering that Sunday, nodded, bending his
heavy brows. His ears were given to Sister Tobias, his eyes to the slight
figure that somehow, in the skirt some impatient movement had wrenched
from the gathers and the shirt-bodice that was buttoned awry, had the air
of a ragged, neglected child. And she held up her scrawled slate to ward
off his look, and peeped at him round the side of it.
Big strong men like that could be cruel when they were angry. The Kid knew
that so well.
"We went to the Convent with the child," Sister Tobias continued: "We
hadn't the heart to deny her, though we thought the Mother might be vexed
that we hadn't come straight home. A queer thing happened as we crossed
the road and went up along the fence towards the gates with the child
between us.... A big, heavy man, dressed as the miners dress, with a great
black beard and his hat pulled down over his eyes, came along in such a
hurry that he knocked Sister Hilda-Antony off the kerb into the road, and
brushed close up against _her_----"
"Against Miss Mildare? Did it occur to you that the man had come out of
the Convent enclosure?" Saxham asked quickly.
Sister Tobias shook her head.
"No; but I did think he meant stopping and speaking to the child, and then
changed his mind and hurried on. 'Did he hurt you, dearie?' I asked her,
seeing her shaking and quite flustered-like. And she answers, 'I don't
know....' And 'Was it anyone you knew?' I puts to her again, and 'I can't
tell,' says she, like as if she was answering in her sleep. Do you thinks
she understands we're talking about her, poor lamb?"
They both looked at her, and she, having been taught by painful experience
that to be the object of simultaneous observation on the part of the man
and woman meant punishment involving stripes, began to tremble, and hung
her head. From under her tangled hair she peeped from side to side,
wondering what it was she had left undone? Ah!--the broom, standing in the
corner. She had forgotten to sweep out the house-place and the bar. When
the dreaded eyes turned from her, she got up and went softly to the corner
where Sister Tobias's besom stood, and took it and began to sweep, casting
terrified glances through her hair at her two Fates.
Something gripped Saxham by the heart and wrung it. The scalding tears
were bitter in his throat. Do what he would to keep them free, his eyes
were dimmed and blinded, and Sister Tobias wiped her own openly with the
blue cotton handkerchief.
"We thought the young gentleman would be waiting near the Convent," said
Sister Tobias, "or in one of the ground-floor rooms, but he wasn't there.
Me and Sister Hilda-Antony looked at one another. 'Early days for a young
girl's sweetheart to be late at the meeting-place!' says Sister
Hilda-Antony's eyes to me, and mine said back, 'The Lord grant no harm's
come to him!' We waited five minutes by the school clock, that's never
been let run down, and then another five, and still he didn't come. He had
got his death-wound, though we didn't know it, hours before."
"The Angel of Death had spread his wings over the Convent. Both me and
Sister Hilda-Antony felt there was a strange and awful stillness and
solemnness about the place. At last me and her told the child that go we
must. We'd wait no longer. But _she_, knowing we'd never leave without
her, ran upstairs. We heard her light feet going over the wet matting and
down the long passage to the chapel door. Then----"
Sister Tobias sobbed for another moment in the blue handkerchief. The
child, who had been diligently sweeping, looked at the woman and at the
big man who had made her cry, with great dilated eyes of fear. She put the
broom back noiselessly in its corner, and stole back to her stool. Who
knew what might happen next?
"Then," said Sister Tobias, "we heard the dreadfullest scream. 'Mother!'
just once, and after it dead silence. Then--I don't know how we got there,
it was so like a cruel dream--but we were in the chapel, trying to raise
them up. That dear Saint--may the Peace of God and the Bliss of His Vision
be upon her for ever!--lay dead on the altar-steps where the wicked,
murdering hand had shot her down.... And the child lay across her, just
where she had dropped in trying to lift her. And the strength of me and
the Sister, and the strength of them that came after, wasn't equal to
unloose those slender little hands you're watching."
The slender little hands were busy with the slate and pencil as Saxham
looked at them.
"Those that came and helped us had been sent on from the Convent
bombproof, where they'd been to look for _her_"--Sister Tobias glanced
sorrowfully at the owner of those little busy hands--"with an Ambulance
chair and a story of more trouble. But Our Lady had had pity on the child.
She was past understanding why they'd come to fetch her.... The brain can
soak up trouble till it won't hold a drop more. But she was quiet and
happy kneeling by that blessed Saint, waiting till the Lady should wake
up, she said.... And, 'deed and 'deed, but it looked like the blessedest
sleep----"
Sister Tobias broke down and cried outright. The child eyed her half
suspiciously, half wonderingly. Her great terrified eyes had not seen the
man strike, but he must have hurt the woman. Therefore, she looked sharply
at the man between the tangled masses of the hair that could not be kept
pinned up, and saw two great slow tears ooze over his thick underlids, and
glitter as they hung there, and then fall. Others followed them, tumbling
down the square white face, and the stern mouth was wrenched with a
strange spasm, and the grim chin trembled curiously....
Somebody had hurt the man.... It is not possible to follow up the workings
of the disordered intelligence, and spell out the blurred letters of the
confused mind. It is enough that her terror of him abated. She slipped
from her stool to the floor, under the pretence of picking up her
slate-pencil, threw back the hair that prevented her seeing clearly, and
peered up in that working face of Saxham's with curiosity, crouching near.
She did not recoil violently when the strange, sorrowful face bent
towards her; she only shrank back as Saxham asked:
"You remember me? You know my name?"
She nodded, eyeing him warily. If his hand had moved, she would have
sprung backwards. But it did not stir.
"Tell me who I am, then?"
"Man."
Her lips shaped the word. Her voice was barely audible. His heart beat
thickly as he went on:
"Quite right, but something else besides a man. A man with a name. Tell me
the name, or shall I tell it you?"
She nodded, and her eyes were great and timorous, but there was no terror
of him in them now.
"My name is Saxham--Owen Saxham. Say the name after me."
For a wonder she obeyed. Sister Tobias caught a breath of surprise, but
her subdued exclamation was silenced in mid-utterance by Saxham's look.
"Dr. Owen Saxham--Doctor because I try to cure sick people. You have seen
me trying at the hospitals. You have helped me many times----"
She puckered her delicate, bewildered brows, and held her head on one
side. To be made to think, and recall, and remember, hurt.
"--Many times, and the sick people were grateful. They often ask me now,
How is Miss Mildare?"
Her attention had wandered to the bronzed buttons on the Doctor's khaki
coat. She was trying to count them, it seemed, by the movement of her
lips. Saxham went on with inexorable patience:
"Never mind the buttons. Look at me. Think of the patients at the Hospital
who are asking when Lynette Mildare is coming back again. Tell me what I
am to say to them, Lynette?"
His voice shook over the beloved name. In spite of his grim effort to
fight down the overmastering emotion, his eyes brimmed over, and a drop
splashed, hot and heavy, upon the wandering hand that crept out to finger
the buttons that would not let themselves be counted right. She looked up
at the eyes that wept for her, and their mingled love and anguish touched
even her dulled mind to pity. She held her slender hand up against the
light, and looked at the splash of wet upon it.
"You--cry?"
There was a glimmer of something in the eyes that redeemed their
vagueness. A rushlight seen shining through a night of mist upon a
desolate mountain-side might have meant as little or as much to eyes that
saw it. Saxham saw it, and it meant much to him. His great chest lifted on
a wave of hope as he answered her:
"I cry for somebody who cannot cry for herself. Shall I tell you her name?
It is Lynette Mildare. When tears come to her, then it will be for those
who love her to cry again for joy, for she will be given back to them...."
"Lord grant it!" breathed Sister Tobias behind them. But Saxham had
forgotten her. The fountains of his deep were broken up and words came
rushing from him.
"I think that day will come, Lynette. I believe that day will come," he
said, holding the beautiful vague gaze with his. "If every drop in these
veins of mine, poured out, could bring it more quickly, it should be
hastened so; if every faculty of my body, every cell in my brain, bent to
the achievement of one end, expended to the last unit of energy, in the
restoration of what is infinitely dearer to me than life--than a hundred
lives, if I had them to devote!--could insure its dawning, and bring the
light of Reason and Memory and Hope into these beloved eyes again----"
A sob tore its way through the Doctor's great frame. He rose up abruptly
and hurried away.