Thirty years ago. As I gaped in affright at the horrid scene of strife, small revengeful fingers twisted themselves viciously in my auburn curls, and wresting from my grasp a "Child's Own Bible Concordance," a birthday outrage received from an Evangelical aunt, Julia Dolan, aged twelve, began to pound me about the face with it. As a snub-nosed urchin, gifted with a marvellous capacity for the cold storage and quick delivery of Scripture genealogies and Hebrew proper and improper names, I had often reduced my mild, long-legged girl-neighbour to tearful confusion. Now meek Julia seemed as though possessed by seven devils. I had been taught the elementary rule that boys must not hurt girls, but the code had no precept helpful in the present instance, when a girl was hurting me. Casting chivalry to the winds, I remember that I kicked Julia's shins, and she fled howling; but not before she had reduced my leading feature to a state of ruin, which created a tremendous sensation when they led me home.

Later, during the election riots, two young women fought in the Market Place, stripped to the waist, and wielding boards wrenched from the side of a packing-case, heavy, jagged, and full of nails. And when the soldiers were called out, we know how many a saddle was emptied by the stones the children threw....

Only a day previously the centipede-like procession of girls of all ages, in charge of nuns and pupil-teachers, in pa.s.sing over the Gueldersdorp Recreation-Ground, had sustained an experience with which every maiden bosom would have been still vibrating had not an event even more exciting occurred between the early morning roll-call and prayers-muster and breakfast.

Greta Du Taine had had another love-letter!

The news darted from cla.s.s-room to cla.s.s-room more quickly than little Monsieur Pilotell, the French literature professor; it spread like the measles, and magnified like the mumps.

The Red Cla.s.s, composed of the elder girls, "young ladies" who were undergoing the process of finishing, surged with volcanic excitement, hidden, but not in the least repressed. The White Cla.s.s, their juniors, who were chiefly employed in preparing for Confirmation, should have been immersed in graver things, but were not. They waited on mental tiptoe for details, and a peep at the delicious doc.u.ment. The Blue Cla.s.s, as became mere infants ranging from six to ten years old, remained phlegmatically indifferent to the missive, yet avid for samples of the chocolates that had accompanied the declaration, made to eighty girls of all ages by one undersized, pasty, freckled young man employed as junior clerk and chain-a.s.sistant in a surveyor's office, and who signed at the end of a long row of symbolistic crosses the unheroic name of Billy Keyse.

He had seen and been helplessly stunned by the vision of Greta Du Taine out walking at the head of the long winding procession of English, German, Dutch, Dutch-French, Dutch-American, and Jewish girls. They are sent now to be taught in Europe, those daughters of the Rand millionaires, the Stock Exchange speculators, the wealthy fruit-farmers, or cereal-growers, or cattle and sheep breeders, who are descended themselves from the old pioneers and voortrekkers, but they do not get a better education than was to be had at the Convent school at Gueldersdorp, where the Sisters of Mercy took in and taught and trained coltish girl-children, born in a strongly stimulating climate, and accustomed to lord it over Kaffir and Hottentot servants to their hearts' content. These they tamed, these they transformed into refined, cultivated, accomplished young women, stamped with the indefinable seal of high breeding, possessed of the tone and manner that belongs to the upper world.

What shall I say of the Sisters of the Convent of the Holy Way at Gueldersdorp, I who know but little of any Order of Religious? They are a Community, chiefly of ladies of high breeding and ancient family, vowed to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, nurse the sick, comfort the dying, and instruct the ignorant. Like the Fathers of the Society of Jesuits, those skilled, patient, wise tillers in the soil of the human mind, their daily task is to hoe and tend, and prune and train, and water the young green things growing in what to them is the Garden of G.o.d, and to other good and even holy people, the vineyard of the devil. Possibly both are right?

I have heard the habit of the Order called ugly. But upon the stately person of the Mother Superior the garb was regal. The sweeping black folds were as imposing as imperial purple, and the starched guimpe framed a beauty that was grave, stern, almost severe until she smiled, and then you caught your breath, because you had seen what great poets write of, and great painters try to render, and only great musicians by their impalpable, mysterious tone-art can come nearest to conveying--the earthly beauty that has been purged of all grosser particles of dross in the white fires of the Divine Love. She was not altogether perfect, or one could not have loved her so. Her scorn of any baseness was bitterly scathing; the point of her sarcasm was keen as any thrusting blade of tempered steel; her will was to be obeyed, and was obeyed as sovereign law, else woe betide the disobedient. Also, though kind and gracious to all, tenderly solicitous for, and incessantly watchful of, the welfare of the least of her charges, she never feigned where she could not feel regard or love.

Her rare kiss was coveted in the little world of the Convent school as the jewel of an Imperial Order was coveted in the bigger world outside it, and the most rebellious of the pupils held her in respect mingled with fear.

The head-mistresses of the cla.s.ses had their followers and admirers. It was for the Mother Superior to command enthusiasm, and to sway ambition, and to govern the hearts and minds of children with the personal charm and the intellectual powers that could have ruled a nation from a throne.

Well, she has gone to G.o.d. It is good for many souls that she lived upon earth a little. There was nothing sentimental, visionary, or hysterical in her character. Nor, in giving her great heart with her pure soul to her Saviour, did she ever quite learn to despise the sweetness of earthly love. Not all a Saint. Yet the children of those women who most were swayed by her influence in youth are taught to hold her Saint as well as Martyr. And there is One Who knows.

It was not until recess after the midday dinner that Greta Du Taine could exhibit her love-letter. She was a Transvaal Dutch girl with old French blood in her, a vivacious, sparkling Gallic champagne mingling with the Dopper in her dainty blue veins. Nothing could be prettier than Greta in a good temper, unless it might be Greta in a rage. She was in a good temper now, as, tossing back her superb golden hair plait, as thick as a child's arm, and nearly four feet long, she drew a smeary envelope from the front of her black alpaca school-dress, and, delicately withdrawing the epistle enclosed, yielded the envelope for the inspection of the Red Cla.s.s.

"What niggly writing!" objected Nellie Bliecker, wrinkling her snub nose in the disgust that masks the gnawing tooth of envy.

"And the envelope is all over sticky brown," said another carping critic.

"That's because _he_ put the letter inside the chocolate-box," explained Greta, "instead of outside. And the best chocolates--the expensive ones--always go squashy. Only the cheap ones don't melt--because they have got stuff like chalk inside. But wait till I show you as much as the envelope of my next letter--that's all, Julia K. Shaw!"

Julia K. wilted. Greta proceeded:

"It's directed 'To My Fair Addored One,' because, of course, he didn't know my name. I don't object to his putting a d too much in adored; I rather prefer it. His own name is simple, and rather pretty." She made haste to say that, because she felt doubtful about it. "Billy Keyse."

"_Billy?_"

"Billy Keyse?"

"B-i-l-l-y K-e-y-s-e!"

The name went the round of the Red Cla.s.s. n.o.body liked it.

"He must, of course, have been christened William. Shakespeare was a William. The Emperor of Germany," stated Greta loftily, "is a William.

Mr. Pitt and Mr. Gladstone were both Williams. Many other great men have been Williams."

"But not Billies," said Christine Silber, provoking a giggle from the greedily-listening White Cla.s.s.

Greta scorched them into silence with a look, and continued:

"He is by profession a surveyor, not exactly a partner in the firm of Gadd and Saxby, on Market Square, but something very near it." (Do you who read see W. Keyse carrying the chain and spirit-level, and sweeping out the office when the Kaffir boy forgets?). "He saw me walking in the Stad with the Centipede," Greta added.

This was a fanciful name for the whole school of eighty pupils promenading upon its hundred and sixty legs of various nationalities in search of exercise and fresh air.

"Go on!" said the Red Cla.s.s in a breath, as the White Cla.s.s giggled and nudged each other, and the Blue Cla.s.s opened eyes and ears.

"He was knocked dumb-foolish at once, he says, by my eyes and my figure and my hair. He is not long up from Cape Colony: came out from London through chest-trouble, to catch heart-trouble in Gueldersdorp" (do you hear hectic, coughing Billy Keyse cracking his stupid joke?). "And if I'll only be engaged to him, he promises to get rich, become as big a swell on the Rand as Marks or Du Taine--isn't that funny, his not knowing Du Taine is my father?--and drive me to race-meetings on a first-cla.s.s English drag, with a team of bays in silver-mounted harness, with rosettes the colour of my eyes."

Greta threw her golden head back and laughed, displaying a double row of enviable pearls.

"But I've got to wait for all these things until Billy Keyse strikes pay-reef. Poor Billy! Hand over those chocolates, you greedy things!"

Somebody wanted to know how the package had been smuggled into the Convent. Those lay-Sisters were so sharp....

"They're perfect needles--Sister Ta.r.s.esias particularly, and Sister Tobias. But there's a new Emigration Jane among the housemaids. You've seen her--the sallow thing with the greasy light-coloured fringe in curlers, who walks flat-footed like a wader on the mud. I keep expecting to hear her quack.... Well, Billy got hold of her. She didn't know my name, being new, but she recognised me by Billy's description, and sympathised with him, having a young man herself, who doesn't speak a word of English, except 'd.a.m.n' and 'Three of Scotch, please.' I've promised to translate her letters; he writes them in the Taal. And Billy gave her two dollars, and I've given her a hat. It's the big red one mother brought back from Paris--she paid a hundred francs for it at the Maison Cluny--and Emigration Jane thinks, though it's a bit too quiet for her taste, it'll do her a fair old treat when she trims it up with a bit more colour and one or two 'imitation ostridge' tips.... I'd give another hundred francs for the Maison Cluny _modiste_ to hear." Again the birdlike laugh rang out. "Now you know everything there is in the letter, girls, except the bit of poetry at the end, which only my most intimate friends may be permitted to read. Lynette Mildare!"

Lynette, bending over a separate table-desk in the light of the north window of the long deal match-boarded cla.s.s-room, looked up from her work of tooling leather, the delicate steel instrument in her hand, a little gilding-brush between her white teeth, a little fold of concentrated attention between her slender brown eyebrows.

"Yes. Did you want anything?"

Greta jumped up, leaving the rest of the box of chocolates to dissolve among the White Cla.s.s, and came over, threading her way between the long rows of desk-stalls.

"Of course I want something."

"What is it?" asked Lynette, laying down the little tool.

"What everyone has a right to expect from the person who is her dearest friend--sympathy," said Greta, jumping up and sitting on the corner of the desk, and biting the thick end of her long flaxen pigtail.

"You have it--when there is anything to sympathise about."

Greta tapped the letter, trying to frown.

"Do you call this nothing?"

"You have saved me from doing so."

"Lynette Mildare, have you a heart inside you?"

"Certainly; I can feel it beating, and it does its work very well."

"Am I, then, nothing to you?"

Lynette smiled, looking up at the piquant, charming face.

"You are a great deal to me."

"And I regard you as a bosom-friend. And the duty of a bosom-friend, besides rushing off at once to tell you if she hears anybody say anything nasty of you behind your back--a thing which you never do--is to sympathise with you in all your love-affairs--a thing which you do even seldomer."

Greta stamped with the toe of the dainty little shoe that rested on the beeswaxed boards of the cla.s.s-room, and kicked the leg of the desk with the heel of the other.