Part 61

She had never seemed so noble in his eyes as when she took that implied rebuke of his, with meek bending of her proud head, and candid self-condemnation in the eyes that were lowered and then raised to his, and beautiful humility in her speech:

"Sir, your reproach is just; it is I who have been lacking in faith. And--it shall be as you advise."

The distant bugle blared out its warning. The bell tolled twice, stopped, and tolled four; the smaller bells echoed. The voices of the sentries came to their ears, loudly at first, then more distant, then reduced to the merest spider-thread of sound:

"'Ware big gun! South quarter, 'ware!"

"I must go to her," the Mother-Superior said, and passed him swiftly and went down the ladder. Saxham followed. The white figure on the stool had not stirred, apparently. Its blank eyes still stared at the wall, and the mechanical hand moved, sewing at nothing, as diligently as ever.

"Lynette!"

The fixed, blindly-staring eyes came to life. Colour throbbed back into the wan ivory cheeks. The mouth lost its vacant droop. She rose up from the stool with a joyful cry, and, stumbling in her haste, ran into the outstretched arms. As they wrapped about her, clinging to her sole earthly friend and guardian as though she could never let go, came the crash of the driving-charge, the yelling Brocken-hunt of the passage of the huge projectile, the ear-splitting din of the shellburst. She lifted up a radiant face of laughing defiance, and then choked and quivered and burst out crying, leaning her panting young bosom against the black habit, and weeping as though her whole being must dissolve, Undine-like, in tears.

Ah, the lovely feminine woman who weeps and clings! She will never lose her dominion over the sons of men. The appealing glances of her beautiful wet eyes melt the stoniest male hearts, the soft tendril-like wreathing of her arms about the pillar of salt upon the Plain would have had power to change it back into a breathing human being once more, if Lot had looked back, instead of his helpmeet. Her sterner sisters may feel as keenly, love as tenderly, sorrow even more bitterly than she. Who will believe it among the sons of dead old Adam, who first felt the heaving bosom pant against his own, and saw the first bright tear-showers fall--forerunners of what oceans of world-sorrow to be shed hereafter, when the Angel of the flaming sword drove the peccant pair from Paradise. Ah, the fair, weak woman who weeps and clings!

And Owen Saxham, watching Lynette from the ladder-foot, and the Mother-Superior, clasping her and murmuring soft comfort into the delicate, fragile ear under the heaped waves of red-brown hair, shared the same thought.

How this trembling, vibrating, emotional creature will love one day, when the man arrives to whom imperious Nature shall bid her render up her all!

In whom, prayed the unselfish mother-heart, willing to be bereft of even the Heaven-sent consolation for the sake of the beloved, in whom may she find not only the earthly mate-fellow, but the kindred soul. For, all-pitying Mother of Mercy! should she, too, be doomed to stake all upon a wavering, unstable, headlong Richard, what will happen then?

Looking at the pair, Saxham thought of Ruth and Naomi. Lynette's tears had been dried quickly, like all joy-drops that the eyes shed. She was talking low and earnestly, pleading her cause with clinging hands and wistful looks and coaxing tones that were broken sometimes by a sob and sometimes by a little peal of girlish laughter.

"Mother, I am not made of sugar to be melted in the sun, or Dresden china to be broken. I am strong enough to take my share of the work; I am brave enough to bear anything--anything," she urged, "if only I may be with you. But to sit cooped up here day after day, safe and sheltered, sewing powder-bags or giving Katie French lessons, or helping Sister Tobias, and listening to the guns"--the blood fled from her cheeks and the great pupils of her eyes dilated until they looked all black in her face of whiteness--"the dreadful guns, and wondering where you are when the shells are bursting"--her voice rose in anguish--"I can't bear it! Mother, do you hear?" She threw her beautiful head back entreatingly, and the pulses in her white throat throbbed under Saxham's eyes, and her slight hands were desperate in their clutch upon the arms that held her. "I want my share of the risk, whatever it is. I will have it! It is my right. I have tried to be good and patient, but I can't, I can't, I can't stand this any more!"

Her voice broke upon a sob, and Saxham said from the doorway that was filled by his great shoulders from post to post:

"You will not have to stand it any more. The Reverend Mother has reconsidered her decision. She will take you to the Hospital and elsewhere from to-day."

The man's curt manner and authoritative tone brought Lynette for the first time to knowledge of his presence. Her glance went to him, and joy was mingled with surprise in the face she turned towards the Mother-Superior.

"Really, Mother?"

The Mother-Superior, though her own still face had flushed with quick, irrepressible resentment at Saxham's tone, said cheerfully:

"It is true, my child. Dr. Saxham thinks it will be best for you. Dr. Saxham, this is my ward, Miss Mildare."

Saxham made his little brusque bow. Lynette, bending her lovely head, gave a grateful glance at the khâki-clad figure with the great hulking shoulders, standing under the patch of hot blue sky that the top of the ladder vanished in, and a strange shock and thrill went through the man's whole frame. His odd, gentian-coloured eyes under the heavy thunder-cloud of black eyebrows lightened so suddenly in reply that the girl felt repelled and half frightened. She was conscious of a curious oppression. As for Saxham, a delicate, stinging fire ran newly in his veins. Something stirred in the secret depths of him, and came to life with an awakening thrill exquisitely poignant and sweet. For this slight, unsophisticated, Convent-bred creature, slender as a lily, reared in innocence among the blameless, was rich as her frail, lovely mother had been before her in the mysterious allure of sex. Beautiful Lady Bridget-Mary at the zenith of her stately beauty had never possessed one-tenth of the seductive charm that emanated from this young girl. Thoughts of the stored-up golden honey seen gleaming through the translucent waxen cells of the virgin comb made the senses reel as you looked at her, if you were man born of woman, with your passions alive and keen-edged in you, and your blood had not lost the lilt of the song that it has sung in healthy veins of sons of Adam since the Woman was made for and given to the Man. For Artemis may invite, if unconsciously, the hot pursuit of the hunter; the shy, close-folded nymph among the sedges may awaken the primal desire of Pan among the reeds.... Saxham, even in the years of his degradation, had scarcely sunk to the level of the crook-shinned, hairy-thighed, hoofed satyr. But he had built his nest with the birds of night, and slaked his thirst at impure sources, and only now did he realise how his mad dream of vengeance upon the Power that had cast him down and wrecked his future was to recoil upon himself. "I have done with Love," he had said, "and with Hope, and with Life as it is known of the honourable and the upright and the cleanly among men for ever!"

And now ... his thoughts were tipped with fire as he drank in the suddenly-awakened, vivid, delicate beauty of Lynette Mildare. Now he realised the depths of his own mad folly. Oh, to have had the right to hope again, to love again, to live again, and be grateful to David, who had betrayed him, and Mildred, who had deserted him--to this end! Oh, never to have lost the honourable claim to woo such loveliness as this and win such purity, and wear both as a talisman upon his heart for ever! He drew breath heavily as he looked at the girl, transformed and glowing under the touch she loved, shining from within like some frail, transparent alabaster lamp with the light that he had helped to rekindle. And as his great chest expanded with deep draughts of the subtle, intoxicating atmosphere of her, and the blood hummed through his veins to that new measure, the last link of his old fetters fell clanking to the ground. And then, with a sting of intolerable remorse, came the memory of his shameful five years' Odyssey spent as a hog among other hogs of the human kind. It had not been an overthrow. It had been a surrender of all that was noble and strong in him to all in him that was despicable and weak and vile. And his soul shuddered, and his heart contracted in the sickening clutch of shame.

XXIX

He awakened from that lost moment of enthralment to the pang and the shock of self-discovery, and to the knowledge that somebody was hailing him by name from the top of the ladder.

"Saxham! Doctor! Are you below there?"

It was the gay, fresh voice of Beauvayse, halted with a handful of Irregulars, bandoliered, carrying their rifles and the day's provisions, wearing their bayonets on their hips, and sitting their wiry little horses with the ease of old troopers in the lee-side of the piled-up mound of sandbags that roofed the underground convent. Five men and a Corporal of the Town Guard, similarly burdened and accoutred--we know the pale Cockney eyes and the thin face of the Corporal, whose freckles have long ago vanished in a uniform gingerbread hue--had also taken momentary shelter from one of the intermittent blizzards of Mauser bullets that drifted through Gueldersdorp.

One Irregular was sitting on an earth-filled packing-case, swearing softly, nursing a disabled right arm, and looking at the corded network of hairy, sunburned muscles that were delicately outlined in the bright red stream that trickled from beneath the rolled-up shirt-sleeve of raspy "greyback."

"We saw your hairy tied up outside, Doctor, and 'sensed' your whereabouts, as McFadyen says. Can the ladies spare you for a moment? Sorry to be a nuisance, but one of my fellows has got winged on our way to relieve the garrison at Maxim Outpost South, and though he swears he is as fit as a fiddle, I don't believe he ought to come on."

"I'm all right, Sir, 'pon me Sam I am!" protested the dismounted trooper. "It's a bit stiff, but the bleedin' 'll take that off. I shan't shoot a tikkie the worse for it. Lay anybody 'ere a caulker I don't!"