Part 104

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."