Part 138

Her slender fingers closed desperately upon his. Her heart shook her, and Fear was in her eyes. Her voice vibrated and shuddered at her white lips as a caught moth vibrates and shudders in a spider-web. She began again:

"When the woman went away, Bough----"

Her eyes quailed and flickered; her pale and quivering face was convulsed by a sudden spasm of awful fear. The muscles of her whole body stiffened in the immovable rigor of terror. Only her head jerked from side to side, like that of some timid creature of the wilds held captive in crushing folds or crunching fangs. And he comprehended all; and understood all, in one lightning leap of intuition, as he saw.

"Hush!" He stopped her with his authoritative eyes and the firm, reassuring pressure of his hand. "Forget that--speak of it no more. Try and tell me who lies here, under these grasses and flowers that you water every day?"

He moved the hand he held to touch the grave, and the spasm that contracted her features relaxed, and the terror died out of her eyes, as though some soothing, healing virtue were conveyed to her by the mere contact with that sacred earth. He went on:

"She was very noble, very pure, and very beautiful. Everyone loved her, and her life was spent in doing good. You were dear to her--inexpressibly dear to her. She used to call you her beloved daughter. Tell me who she was?"

Her face quivered, and in the depths of her dim, vague eyes a beam of the golden light of old was rekindled.

"She was the Lady. When will she come again?"

He raised his hand and pointed to the sky.

"When that is rolled away, and the Sign of the Cross shines from the east to the west, and from the north to the south, and the King of Glory comes with His Angels and His Saints, we shall see her again, Lynette----"

His voice broke. He laid the cool, delicate, nerveless hand back upon her knee, and rose, for the Sister was folding up her sewing. He looked long after the girlish figure as it was led away.

He understood everything now. He knew why the mother-plover had trailed her wing in the dust, striving to lead the footsteps of the stranger aside from the hidden nest. He stooped and gathered a blade or two of grass, and a few crumbs of red, sandy earth, from the grave at his feet, and kissed them, and folded them reverently in an envelope, and hid the little packet in his breast before he went.

That evening there were pillars and banks of dust on the north-west horizon, and the flashes of lyddite and the booming of artillery told patient Gueldersdorp that the hour of deliverance was near. A few hours later the Relief had lamp-signalled brief details of the battle with Huysmans, ending with "Good-night" and the promise to fight a way in next morning. Later still, eight troopers in khâki, jaunty ostrich-tips in their smasher hats, rode into the little battered village town that huddled on the low, sandy mound, and all the waiting world was gladdened with the news. And London called on a quiet elderly lady, to tell her what the man, her boy, had done.

The name of that little hamlet town has, cruelly enough, passed into a byword--a synonym for everything that is rowdy, vulgar, apish in the English character, with the dregs stirred up. But yet it will ring down the silver grooves of Time as long as Time shall be.

Do I wander from the thread of my story--I who have dressed my puppets in the brave deeds of those who strove and endured and suffered, to what a glorious end?

Great writers lay down plans, formulate elaborate synopses. Not so I, who, out of all the wreaths that Fame holds yet in her lap to give away, shall never call one laurel mine....

A wandering wind came sighing past my ears one night upon the Links at Herion, burdened with this story it had to tell. Before then it had only blown in fitful gusts. Then again it blew steadily. I had caught some whispers from it years before. On the deck of the great, populous, electric-lighted ocean-hotel that was hurrying me across the Atlantic, racing the porpoise-schools to get to New York City; and later at Washington, when the red sunset-fires burned low behind the Capitol, it spoke to me in the wonderful, beloved voice I shall never hear on earth any more. Yet once more the wind came faintly sighing, in the giant blue shadow of Table Mountain; it blew at Johannesburg, six thousand feet above sea-level, in a raging cyclone of red gritty dust. Again it came, stirring the celadon-green carpet of veld that is spread at the feet of the Magaliesberg Ranges, that were turquoise-blue as the scillas growing in the South Welsh garden that lies before the window where I write, this variable spring day. But it blew with a most insistent note on the dumpy mound where they have rebuilt the ridiculous, glorious village that gave birth to deeds worthy of the Age Heroic, about whose sand-bagged defences nightly patrolled a Sentinel who never slept.

Gueldersdorp tumbled out of bed at three-thirty, to see the troops march in by the cold white morning moonlight that painted long indigo-blue shadows of marching horsemen and rolling guns, drawn by many horses, and huge-teamed baggage-waggons, eastward over the bleached dust.

I dare not attempt to describe the indescribable. Zulu and Barala, Celestial and Hindu, welcomed the Relief each after his own manner, and were glad and rejoiced. But of these haggard men and emaciated women of British race I can but say that in them human joy attained the climax of a sacred frenzy--that human gratitude and enthusiasm, loyalty and patriotism, reached the pitch at which the mercury in the thermometer of human emotion ceases to record altitudes.

At its height, when the last fort had fallen to England and the flag of the United Republics had fluttered down from the tree whence it had waved so long, and the Union Jack went up to frantic cheering, and the retreating cloud of dust on the horizon told of the exit of the enemy from the Theatre of War, Saxham played his one trump card in the game that meant life and death to him, and life, and everything that made life worth living, to one other.

* * * * *

You are to see the hulking Doctor with the square-cut face, his grim under-jaw more squarely set than ever, his blue eyes smouldering anxiety under their glooming brows, trying to coax a pale, bewildered girl to take a walk with him. She would at length, provided Sister Tobias walked on the other side and held her hand. So this party of three plunged into the boiling whirlpool of joyous Gueldersdorp.

People were singing "God Save the Queen," and "The Red, White, and Blue," "Auld Lang Syne" and "Rule, Britannia," all at once and all together, and playing the tunes of them on mouth-organs and concertinas. They were shaking hands with one another and everybody else, and shedding tears of joy, and borrowing the pocket-handkerchiefs of sympathetic strangers to dry them, or leaving them undried. They were crowding the Government kitchens, drinking the healths of the officers and men of Great Britain's Union Brigade in hot soup and hot coffee. They were clustered like bees upon the most climbable house-tops, watching those retiring dust-clouds in the distance, and the nearer movements of their friends and allies; they were hearing the experiences of dust-stained and travel-worn Imperialists, and telling their own; and one and all, they were thanking God Who had led them, through bodily fear, and mental anguish, and bitter privations, to hail the dawn of this most blessed day.

The electrical atmosphere, the surge of the multitude, the roar of thousands of voices, the gaze of thousands of eyes, had its effect upon the girl. She trembled and flushed and paled. Her breath came quick and short. She threw back her head and gasped for air. But she did not wish to be taken back to the Convent bombproof. She shook her head when Sister Tobias suggested that they should return.

And then some of the women whom she had helped to nurse in hospital saw her, and recognised her, and came about her with pitiful words and compassionate looks--not only for her own sake, but for that dead woman's whose adopted daughter they knew her to have been.

"You poor, blessed, innocent lamb!" They crowded about her, kissing her hands and her dress, and Sister Tobias's shabby black habit. "Lord help you!" they mourned over her. "Christ pity you, and bring you to yourself again!"

"Why are you so sorry?" Lynette asked them, knitting her delicate brows, and peering curiously in their tearful smiling faces. "No!" she corrected herself; "I mean why are you so glad?"

"Glad is ut, honey!" screamed a huge Irishwoman, throwing a brawny red arm about the shrinking figure and hugging it. "Begob, wid the Holy Souls dancin' jigs in Purgatory, an' the Blessed Saints clappin' their han's in Heaven, we have rayson to be glad! Whirroosh! Ould Erin for ever--an' God save the Cornel!"