Part 72

She looked at him full.

"I am not joking." Borne by a waft of the sickly air a downy winged seed came floating towards her, a frail gossamer courier coming from the world above with tidings that Dame Nature, in spite of all the destruction wreaked by men, was carrying on her business. "And--I do not even know that I am a young lady. See there"--she blew a little puff of breath at the moving messenger, and it wafted away upon a new air-pilgrimage, and, rising, caught a stronger current, and soared out of sight--"that is me. It came from somewhere, and it is going somewhere. That is all I know about myself; perhaps as much as I shall ever know. Why do you look so glad?"

His lips were sealed. The throb of selfish triumphant exultation came of the belief that the gulf between them was less wide and deep than he had thought it. A wastrel may woo and wed a waif, surely, without many questions being asked. And then, at the clear, innocent questioning of her eyes, rushed in upon him, scalding, the memories he had thrust away. He saw the Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp, his short daily stint of labour done, settling down to drink himself into hoggish oblivion in his accustomed corner of the Dutchman's liquor-saloon. He beheld him, his purpose accomplished, sleeping stertorously, spilled out like the very dregs of manhood in the sawdust of that foul place; he shuddered as the bloated, dishevelled thing roused and reeled homewards, trickling at the mouth, as the clear primrose day peeped over the flat-topped eastern hills. And he sickened at the thing he had been.

"I felt glad," he lied, with looks that shunned Lynette's, "that in your need you found so good a friend as the Mother-Superior. Yours must have been a sorrowful, lonely childhood."

Her own vision rose before her, blotting out his face. She saw the little kopje with the grave at its foot. She saw a ragged child sitting there watching for the earliest flush of dawn or the solemn folding of night's wide wing over the lonely veld, and the coming of the great white stars....

"She is much, much more than a friend. She is the Mother." Her loyal heart was in her face. "I have no secrets from her. I tell her everything."

Was that deeper flush born of the remembrance of a secret unshared? And how strange that every change of colour and expression in the delicate face should mean so much, so soon. He said, with a hungry flash of the gentian-blue eyes:

"Your love and confidence repay her richly."

"I can do so little." There was an anxious fold between the slender eyebrows. "Only follow her and be near her; only look on as she spends herself for others, never resting, never sparing, never discouraged or cast down." Great tears brimmed the white, darkly-fringed underlids, and ran over. "And she only laughs at me at night when I cry at the sight of her dear, blistered feet."

"You will be able to laugh with her when this is over," Saxham said rather clumsily.

"Shall I? Perhaps." Still that fold between the fine, delicate eyebrows.

"You have seen War," Saxham went on, his own voice sounding strange to him. "And that is a terrible experience for a woman, young or old, but you will be the richer by it in the end, believe me, Miss Mildare. Richer in courage and endurance and calmness in the presence of danger and death, and in sympathy with the pain and suffering inevitable under such circumstances."

"Sympathy? They had all my sympathy before." Her fair throat swelled against its encircling band of moss-green velvet, her voice rang, her eyes flashed golden fire under the shadow of the wide straw hat. "Do you think it needed War to teach me how hideously women suffer? How they have suffered since the world began, and how they will suffer until its end, unless they rise up in revolt once for all, against the wickedness of men?"

She was transformed under Saxham's eyes. The slender virginal body increased in stature and proportions as he gazed, and what obscure emotions seemed striving in her face!

"Look at them," she said, indicating with a slight revealing gesture the swarming, dowdy, listless occupants of the crowded trench. "How patient they are, how resigned to the dreadful life they drag on here from day to day, full of the horror and the pain and the suffering that you say is inevitable. Why should it be inevitable? Did these women who are the chief victims of it and the greatest losers by it, choose that there should be War? See that poor soul with the rag of crape upon her hat, who sits at her door peeling potatoes. Did she desire it? Yet her young husband was shot in the trenches a week ago and her little baby died of fever this morning.... And, did those other women whose homes have been wrecked and ruined, whose sons and husbands and fathers may be shot, and whose children may sicken with the same fever before night, demand of their Governments, Imperial or Republican, that there should be War? You see them patient and submissive because they neither realise their wrongs or understand their rights. But a day will come when they will understand, and then"--her eyes grew dreamy--"I do not know exactly what will happen. But these international questions, with others, will be decided by a general plebiscite, the women will vote as well as the men; and as women are in the majority, and every woman will vote for Peace--how can there be War?"

"You are an advocate of Universal Suffrage, then? You believe that there must be absolute sex-equality before the world can be--I think 'finally regenerated' is the stock phrase of the militant apostle of Women's Rights? I have heard this outcry from many feminine throats in London, but Gueldersdorp," said Saxham drily, "is about the last place one would expect to ring with it."

"'Universal Suffrage, Sex-Equality, Women's Rights....'" The shibboleth that Saxham quoted was evidently unfamiliar to the girl. "I know"--there was a sombre shadow in her glance--"what Women's Wrongs are, but I am not very well informed about the things you speak of. The Mother tells me that there are many well-educated women in London and Paris, in Berlin and in New York, who have devoted their lives to the study of such questions. Who write and speak and labour to teach their fellow-women that they have only to band themselves together to be powerful, only to be powerful to be feared, only to will it to be free. When I am twenty-four I mean to go out into the world and meet those leader-women. Some of them, I am told, have suffered loss and ill-usage; some of them have even undergone imprisonment for the sake of what they believe and teach. Well, I will hear what they have to say, and then they will listen to me. For until my work is done, theirs will never be accomplished, Something tells me that with a most certain voice."

"And until that time comes?" said Saxham.

Her eyes grew bright again, a smile played about her exquisite lips.

"Until that time comes I will study and gather more knowledge, and capacity to fit myself for a struggle with the world."

"You 'struggle with the world'!"

Her girlish pride in her high purpose being sensitive, she mistook the brusque tenderness in Saxham's face and voice for irony.

"Yes. Perhaps you may not believe it, but I know a great many useful things. Latin and French and German and Italian, well enough to teach and translate. I am well grounded in History and Science and Mathematics. I can take a temperature and make a poultice, or sweep a room and cook a dinner." She nodded at Saxham with a little spark of laughter underlying the sweet earnestness of her look. "Also, I have learned book-keeping and typewriting, and shorthand. I earn enough now, by bookbinding, to pay for my clothes. The Mother says that I am competent to earn my living anywhere, and to teach others to earn theirs. But I am not to begin until I am twenty-four. That is our agreement."

Saxham understood the fine maternal tact that never set this ardent young enthusiast chafing at the tightened rein. But he said roughly:

"The Mother.... How can she approve your joining the ranks of the Shrieking Sisterhood?"

"She knows," Lynette explained, with adorable gravity, "that I should never shriek."

"How will you bear parting from her? And how will she endure parting from you?"

The girl's mobile lips began to tremble. The luminous amber eyes were dimmed with moisture as she said: