The Dop Doctor Part 78

"My G.o.d, how unutterably horrible!"

Saxham shoulders his way into the ring of white faces that have gathered about the dark little muddy officer.

"What has happened to Miss Mildare----?"

The little officer answers, panting:

"The Sisters could not make her understand. She----"

The Chief speaks for him:

"She had been previously stunned by the shock of--a terrible calamity."

"What calamity?"

"The Mother-Superior has been killed. Two of the Sisters and Miss Mildare found her in the Convent chapel. They got there before evening. She must have been dead some hours. She had been shot through the lungs."

"By a stray bullet?"

"By a bullet from a revolver, fired close enough to scorch the clothes.

Foul murder, and by G.o.d who saw it done----"

The lean clenched hand, thrown upwards in a savage gesture, the blazing eyes, the livid, furrowed face, the writhen mouth, the furious, jarring voice, leave little doubt of the vengeance that will be wreaked when he shall track down the murderer. He wheels abruptly, and goes to the telephone. The swift, imperative orders volt from fort to fort; the circuit of vigilance is made complete, the human bloodhounds unleashed upon the trail, in a few instants, thanks to the buzzing wire that brings the mouth of a man to the ear of another across a void of miles.

But Bough, primed with knowledge as to which are dummy rifle-pits and which are real, aided by acquaintance with the ground, and covered by that wuthering night of storm, has already pierced the lines. Subsequently that excellent Afrikander, Mr. Van Busch, rejoins Brounckers' bright boy at Tweipans, with information that decides the date of Schenk Eybel's Feint from the East.

L

She had gone about her Master's business all Monday, calm and composed, and inexorably gentle. She did not meet Richard's daughter before nightfall. "She will not suffer now," she thought, even as she sent the message that was to allay Lynette's anxiety, and give notice of her whereabouts in case of need. Her mission led her to a half-wrecked shanty at the south end of the town, where some Lithuanian emigrants herded together in indescribable filth and misery. A woman who had been recently confined lay there raving in puerperal fever. Until nightfall, when she was removed to the Isolation Hospital on the veld, near the Women's Laager, the Mother-Superior remained with the patient.

A burly, bushy-bearded man, with a peculiarly dark skin and strange steely eyes, pa.s.sing the broken window, caught sight of the n.o.ble profile and the stately shoulders stooping above the miserable bed. Going home at dark, the Mother heard a stealthy footstep following behind her.

Since the Town Guard had been withdrawn to man the trenches, many people, revisiting their deserted dwellings, had found them plundered of movable possessions, and, losing the fear of Eternity in wrath at the wholesale evaporation of their worldly goods, had thenceforth remained to protect them. Instances there had been of robbery from the person by thieves not all tracked down by Martial Justice and made examples of.

The hovering human night-bird and the prowling human jackal, whose sole end is money and money's worth, have no terrors for Holy Poverty. But there are other creatures of prey more terrible than these. And the padding footsteps that followed, hurrying when she hurried and slackening when she went more slowly, and stopping dead when she paused and looked round, conveyed to her a haunting sense of something sinister, and at the same time greedy and guileful, that bided its time to spring.

She moved in long, swift, undulating rushes, her black robes sweeping noiselessly as a great moth's wings over the well-known ground, her course kept unfalteringly; but her heart shook her, and she gasped as the Convent bomb proof neared in sight. She had wrought much and suffered more of late, and she knew herself less strong than she had been. When the blue light that hung from a post by the ladder-hole blinked "Home" through the mirk of a night of thin rain and mist-shrouded stars, she knew infinite relief. Her great eyes were as wild and strained as a hunted deer's, and her bosom heaved with her panting breaths. She paused a moment to regain her composure before she went down.

The nuns who were not on night-duty were gathered together about the trestle-table sewing, while the lay-Sisters prepared the scanty evening meal. Lynette was there, sitting pale and quiet on her corner-stool.

Richard's daughter had been watching and waiting for her Mother. Ah! to see the relief and gladness leap into the dear face, and shine in the beautiful wistful eyes that had shed such tears, dear G.o.d!--such tears of anguish upon Sunday--and then had dried at the utterance of her decree--

"You are never to tell him!"

--And changed into radiant stars of joy, by whose light the darkness of her own wickedness and misery seemed almost bearable.

"It is the Mother. Mother----"

Lynette sprang up, and would have hurried to her, but the Mother lifted a warning hand, and calling Sister Tobias to her, pa.s.sed aside into a curtained-off and precautionary cave that had been hollowed out behind the ladder. This was the custom when the ladies of the Holy Way returned from doubtful or infectious cases. Lynette sighed, and went back to her stool to wait. The busy needles had not ceased st.i.tching.

That humble saint, Sister Tobias, hurried to her diligent ministry of purification. When she came in with hot water and carbolic spray, she brought a letter with her. It was directed to the Mother in a coa.r.s.e round-hand.

"Somebody dropped this down the ladder-hole as I came by with my kettle,"

said Sister Tobias. "It's the first letter-box I ever knew that was as wide as the door. Maybe 'twill bring in a new fashion, for all we know."

She made her homely joke with a sore heart for the sorrow she read in the Mother's beloved face, and trotted away to fetch clean towels, saying--a favourite saying with Sister Tobias--that her head would never save her heels.

The Mother opened the letter. It was anonymous, and utterly vile. Had the pen been dipped in liquid ordure, the thing written could not have been more defiling to the touch than its meaning was to this pure woman's chaste eyes. Had a puff-adder writhed out of the envelope, and struck its fangs into her beautiful hand, it would have poisoned her less certainly.

And every beat of the obscene words upon her brain, strangely enough, awakened an echo of those long padding footsteps that had followed in the dark. And the writer knew of all that had happened at the tavern on the veld, when a human brute had triumphed in his b.e.s.t.i.a.lity, and a girl-child had been helpless, and the great white stars had looked down unmoved and changeless upon Innocence destroyed.

The Mother read the letter from the loathly beginning to the infamous end.

She had been sorely wrought upon of late. She tried to pray, but she knew the Ear Above must be averted from one who had lied and was in deadly sin.... When Sister Tobias came back she found her lying in a swoon.

The little old crooked, nimble Sister, with the long, pale sheep-face, dropped on her knees beside that p.r.o.ne column of stately womanhood, removed the Mother's hooded mantle, loosened the _guimpe_ and habit, and worked strenuously to revive her, dropping tears.

"My beautiful, my poor lamb!" she crooned. "What's come to her? What wicked shadow's black on all of us? What's brooding near us--Mary be our guardian!--that's struck at _her_ to-night!"

The letter lay upon the floor, where it had dropped from the unconscious hand. It lay there for Sister Tobias, and might lie. If the Mother willed to tell its contents, she would tell. If not, the little old nun, her faithful daughter, would never ask or seek to know.

She opened her great eyes at last, and smiled up at the tender, wrinkled ugliness of the long, sheep-like face in the close white linen wimple.

"Say nothing to anybody. I was overdone," she said, and rose. Sister Tobias picked up the letter, and gave it to her. There was a Boer mutton-fat candle flaring draughtily in an iron sconce upon the wall. The Mother moved across the little room, and burned the letter to the last blank corner, and trod the fallen ashes into impalpable powder. Then she helped Sister Tobias to remove every trace left, and obviate every danger that might result from her late toil, and rejoined her quiet family of daughters as though nothing had happened.

They recalled afterwards how cheerful and how placid she had seemed that night. Her smile had a heart-breaking sweetness, and her voice made wonderful melody even in their accustomed ears.

They supped on the little that they had, and chatted, said the night-prayers, and went, aching, all of them, with unsatisfied hunger, to bed. You may conjecture the orderly, modest method of retiring, each Sister vanishing in turn behind a curtained screen to disrobe, lave, and vest herself for sleep, emerging in due time in the loose, full conventual night-garment of thick white twilled linen, high-throated, monkish-sleeved, and girdled with a thin cotton cord, her face, plain or pretty, young or elderly, framed in the close little white drawn cap of many tucks.

Then, the ladder having been removed, and the tarpaulin pulled over its hole, the lights were extinguished, and only the subdued crimson glow of the tiny lamp that burned before the silver Crucifix that had stood above the Tabernacle on the altar of the Convent chapel burned ruby in the thick, hot dark, where, upon the little iron beds, each divided by a narrow, white-cotton-covered board into two constricted berths, the row of quiet figures lay outstretched, her Breviary upon every Sister's pillow, and her beads about her wrist.

The Mother lay very still, seeing the hideous sentences of the anonymous letter written in h.e.l.lish characters of mocking flame on the background of the dark. She prayed as the wrecked may when the ship beneath their feet is going down. Beside her Lynette, not daring to disturb the silence, suddenly grown rigid and awful, lay aching with the loneliness of living on the other side of the wide gulf of division that had suddenly yawned between.

She had spent the day at the Hospital with Sister Hilda-Antony and Sister Cleophee. She had not seen Beauvayse. But a note had come from him, that had warmed the heart she hid it near. His dearest, he called her--his own beautiful beloved. He could not s.n.a.t.c.h a minute from duty even to kiss his darling's sweetest eyes, but on Sunday they would be together all day. And would she not meet him at the Convent on Thursday, at twilight, when the sh.e.l.ling stopped, and it would be safe for his beloved to venture there?

She must not come alone. Dear old Sister Tobias would bring her, and play Mrs. Grundy's part. And, with a thousand kisses, he was hers in life and death.

Lynette's first love-letter, and it seemed to her so beautiful. It laid a hand upon her heart that thrilled, and was warm and strong. The hand said "Mine!"

His. She would be his one day--soon; and there would be no more mysteries between the man and the woman welded by G.o.d's ordinance into husband and wife. She shivered a little at the thought of that intimate, peculiar, utter oneness. And then, with a sickening, horrible sinking of the heart, she realised that, however well such a secret as that she guarded might be hidden before the priest and the clergyman made they twain One, it must be known of both afterwards, or else be for ever threatening to start through the burying earth, crying, "I am here. How came you to forget?"

She had been cold in the sultry heat of that long noon, and deaf when voices spoke to her. She was thinking.... How if she might be mistaken in Beauvayse, even now? He was beautiful and brave and alluring to her woman's sense in what she knew of him and what was yet to know. He called her and drew her. Nothing n.o.ble awakened in her at the smile on the gay, bold lips and in the grey-green, jewel-bright eyes. When he had held her to his heart, she had not felt her soul merge with another, its fellow, and yet stronger and greater, in that embrace. He and she were not bodiless spirits floating in pure ether, but an earth-made girl and boy, very much athirst for the common cup of human rapture, hungry for the banquet of mortal bliss.

It was sweet, but how if he were another, and not the one? How if her hasty gift of herself robbed both in the long end? How if his headlong pa.s.sion and tempestuous love should be torn from him like rags in the first instant of that discovery that must almost inevitably be made? She heard his boyish voice crying, "Hateful!... You have deceived me!" and was stabbed with quick anguish, knowing him in the right.

Men did not enter into marriage pure. By some unwritten code of that strange lawgiver, the World, they were absolved of the necessity of spotlessness. They might slake their thirst at muddy sources unrebuked.

And the more each wallowed, the more he demanded of the woman he wedded that she should be immaculate in thought and deed--if in knowledge, that was all the better.

What a cloud of doubts a.s.sailed her, swarming like bees, settling in every blossomed branch of her mind, and blotting out the sweetness with angry buzzing, furry bodies, armed with sharp stings for punishment or revenge.

She had seen a little peach-tree weighed down and bowed to the red earth at its roots with the weight of such a swarm. She felt at this juncture very like the tree. A little more, only a slight increase of the burden, and the slender trunk would have snapped. When the native bee-master came and shook the double swarm into a couple of hives, the little tree stayed crooked. It did not regain its beautiful, healthful uprightness for a long time.