Part 165

"Sorry for her! Why on earth should you be?"

The shriek startles Lynette. She brings back her grave eyes from the distance, flushing faint coral pink to the red-brown waves at her fair temples.

"She--she had on so few clothes!" she says. And there is a profound silence, broken by Lessie's saying with icy dignity:

"If the Lord Chamberlain opined I'd got enough on, I expect that ought to do for you!"

"I--don't quite understand."

Lynette opens her golden eyes in sincere wonder at the marvellous change that has been wrought in the little lady who sits beside her.

"I am Miss Lessie Lavigne," says the little lady, with an angry toss of the pretty head, adorned with the wistaria-trimmed hat. "At least, that is the name I am known by in the profession."

"I beg your pardon," Lynette falters. "I did not recognise you. I am afraid you must think me rather rude!"

"Oh, pray don't mention it!" cries the owner of the red umbrella. "Rude?--not in the least!"

Mere rudeness would be preferable, infinitely, to the outrage the little lady has suffered. She, Lessie Lavigne, the original exponent of the rôle of "The Chiffon Girl," the idol of the pit and gallery, Queen regnant over the hearts beating behind the polished shirt-fronts in the stalls, has lived to hear herself pitied--not envied, but commiserated--for the scantiness of the costume in which it is alike her privilege and her joy to trill and caper seven times in the week before her patrons and adorers. Small wonder that she feels her carefully-manicured nails elongating with the desire to scratch and rend.

Then she reveals the chief arrow in her quiver. Not for nothing is she the widow of an English nobleman. With all the hereditary dignities of the Foltlebarres she will arm herself, and reduce this presuming stranger to the level of the dust. At the thought of the humiliation it is in her power to inflict she smiles quite pleasantly, displaying a complete double row of beautifully stopped teeth. And she says, as she fumbles in a châtelaine bag of golden links, studded with turquoises, and with elaborately ostentatious dignity produces therefrom a card-case, as precious as regards material, and emblazoned with a monogram and coronet, enriched with diamonds and pearls:

"I think you mentioned that you lived in the neighbourhood? May I know who I have the a--pleasure of being indebted to for finding my daughter to-day?"

"I am Mrs. Owen Saxham. I live at that grey stone house up there on the cliff. 'Plas Bendigaid,' they call it," explains Lynette, a little nervously, as her reluctant eyes scan the face and figure of the woman who owns the legal right to bear Beauvayse's name. The encounter is distasteful to her. She is painfully conscious of an acute sensation of antagonism and dislike. "The house belongs to my husband, and this is my first visit to Herion," she adds hurriedly, "because we--my husband and I--have not been very long married. But I like the place. And the house is charming, and there is a hall that was once the chapel, when it was a Convent. It shall be a chapel again; that is"--the wild-rose colour deepens on the lovely face--"if my husband agrees? To have it so restored would make the Plas seem more like a home, because I was brought up in a Convent, though not in England."

Her eyes stray back to the sun-kissed beauty of Nantmadoc Bay and the dotted line of white spots that indicate the town of St. Tudwalls at the base of the green promontory beyond the Roads. She forgets that this little overdressed person is Beauvayse's wife. She forgets in the moment that she herself is Saxham's. She is back in the beloved past with the Mother.

"It was in South Africa, my Convent ... more than a thousand miles from Cape Town, in British Baraland, on the Transvaal Border--in a little village-town, dumped down in the middle of the veld."

"What on earth is the veld?" asks the lady of the red umbrella, with acerbity. "I'm sick of seeing the word in the papers, and nobody seems to know what it means."

Lynette's soft voice answers:

"You can never know what it means until you have lived its life, and it has become part of yours. It spreads away farther than your eyes can follow it, for miles and miles. It is jade colour in spring, blue-green in early summer, desolate, scorching yellow-brown in winter, with dreadful black tracts of cinders, where it has been burned to let the young grass grow up. There is hardly a tree; there is scarcely a bird, except a vulture, a black speck high in the hot blue sky. There are flat-topped mountains and cone-shaped kopjes, reddish, or pale pink, or mauve-coloured, as they are nearer or farther away. And that is all!"

"All?"

"All, except the sunshine, bathing everything, soaking you through and through."

"But there is not always sunshine? It must be sometimes night?" argues Lessie, a little peevishly.

"There are deep violet nights, full of great white stars," Lynette answers. "There are storms of dust and rain, lightning and thunder, such as are only read of here.... There are plots, conspiracies, raids, robberies, murders, slumps and losses, plagues and massacres. There are rebellions of white men, and native risings. There have been wars; there is war to-day, and there will be war again in the days that are yet to come!"

She has almost forgotten the little woman beside her, staring at her with big, brown, rather animal eyes. Now she turns to her with her rare and lovely smile:

"The war that is going on now began at the little village-town where I was a Convent schoolgirl. We were shut for months within the lines. But, of course, you have read the newspaper accounts of the Siege of Gueldersdorp? I am only telling you what you know!"

Lessie laughs, and the laugh has the hard, unpleasant, mirthless little tinkle of a toy dog's collar-bell, or bits of crushed ice rattled in a champagne-glass.

"What I have good reason to know!"

Her podgy, jewelled hands are clenching and unclenching in her heliotrope chiffon lap; there is a well-defined scowl between the black arched eyebrows, and the murky light of battle gleams in the eyes that no longer languish between their bistred eyelids as she scans the pure pale face under the sweep of her heavily blackened lashes. She would almost give the ruby buttons out of her ears to see it wince and quiver, and crimson into angry blushes. And yet Lessie is rather amiable than otherwise in her attitude towards other women. True, she has never before met one who had the insolence to pity her to her face.

"So quite too interesting!" she says, with an exaggerated affectation of amiability, and in high, fashionable accents, "you having been at Gueldersdorp through the Siege and all. Were you ever--I suppose you must have been sometimes--shot at with a gun?"