Part 105

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!"

XLII

The tall, soldierly young figure was standing motionless and stiff, as though on guard, on the river-shore beyond the bend. Whatever apprehensions, whatever regrets, whatever fears may have warred within Beauvayse, whatever consciousness may have been his of having taken an irrevocable step, bound to bring disgrace and reproach, sorrow, and repentance upon the innocent as upon the guilty, he showed no sign as he came to meet them, and lifted the Service felt from his golden head, and held out an eager hand for Lynette's. She gave it shyly, and with the thrill of contact Beauvayse's last scruple fled. He turned his beautiful, flushed face and shining eyes upon the Mother, and asked with grave simplicity:

"Ma'am, is not this mine?"

"First tell me, do you know that there is nothing in it?"

Her stern eyes searched his. He laughed and said, as he kissed the slender hand:

"It holds everything for me!"

"Another question. Are you aware that my ward is a Catholic?"

"My wife will be of my mother's faith. I would not have her of any other."

The Mother gave Beauvayse her own hand then, that was marred by many deeds of charity, but still beautiful.

Those two, linked together for a moment in their mutual love of her, made for Lynette a picture never to be forgotten. Then Beauvayse said, in the boyish tone that made the man irresistible:

"You have made me awfully happy!"

"Make her happy," the Mother answered him, with a tremble in her rich, melancholy tones, "and I ask no more."

Her own heart was bleeding, but she drew her black draperies over the wound with a resolute hand. Was not here a Heaven-sent answer to all her prayers for her beloved? she asked herself, as she looked at the girl. Eyes that beamed so, cheeks that burned with as divine a rose, had looked back at Lady Biddy Bawne out of her toilet-glass, upon the night of that Ascot Cup-Day, when Richard had asked her to be his wife. But Richard's eyes had never worn the look of Beauvayse's. Richard's hand had never so trembled, Richard's face had never glowed like this. Surely here was Love, she told herself, as they went back to the place of trodden grass where the tea-making had been.