She quivered in every limb, and longed to shut her eyes and bar out the intolerable sight of him, leering and lying there. Had she not interrupted, she must have cried out. She said:

"You tell me this man Bough is at Diamond Town?"

"I said he was there when I left. The young woman he talked of was brought up at his place in Orange Free State, a nice respectable boarding-house and hotel for travelling families on the veld between Driepoort and Kroonfontein. Bough was good to the girl, and so was his wife, that's dead since. Uncommon! Not that they had much of the dibs to spend in those days. But, being an honest Christian man, Bough treated the girl like his own. And right down bad she served him."

He licked his thick lips again, and the flattish, light-hued adder-eyes glittered.

"There was a bloke that used to hang around the place--kind of coloured loafer, with Dutch blood, overgiven to Squareface and whisky. He got going gay with the girl----"

She stood like a statue of ebony and ivory. Only by the deep breaths that heaved her broad bosom could you tell she lived--by that, and by the unswerving watchfulness of those burning eyes.

"And Bough, when he caught them together, got mad, being a respectable man, and let her taste the sjambok. Then she ran away."

He coughed, and shifted again from one foot to the other. He would have preferred a woman who had loaded him with invectives, and told him that he lied like h.e.l.l.

"The man that had left her to Bough's guardianship was a sort of broken-down English officer by the name of Mildare----"

Her bosom heaved more stormily, but her intense and scorching regard of him never wavered.

"--Mildare. He left a hundred pounds with Bough, to be kept for her till she was twenty. There was a waggon and team Bough was to have had to sell, and use the money for the girl's keep, but a thief of a Dutch driver waltzed with them--took 'em up Johannesburg way, and melted 'em into dollars. Bough got nothing for all his kindness--not a tikkie. But he's ready to hand over the hundred, her being so nigh come to age. There's a locket with a picture in it, and brilliants round, that may be worth seventy pounds more. All Bough wants is to do the square thing. This is the message he sends her now. The money and the jewels will be handed over, as in duty bound; and, since she's turned respectable and got education, I was to say there's an honest man--widower now, and well off--that's ready to hang up his hat for her, and wipe all old scores off the slate in the regular proper way...."

She said in tones that were of ice:

"Bough is the honest man?..."

"Just Bough.... 'Maybe, in my decent anger at her goings on,' he says, 'I went a bit too far. Well! I'm ready to make amends by making her my wife.'"

The lioness crouched and leapt.

"You are Bough! You are the evil man, the servant of Satan, who wrought abomination upon a helpless child!"

The onslaught came so suddenly that he was staggered. Then he swore.

"Not me, by G----!"

She pointed her long arm at him, and some strange force seemed to be wielded by that unweaponed woman-hand that struck him and pierced him through flesh, and bone and marrow....

"You are the man!" She stretched her arms to the wild, hurrying clouds that looked in upon her through the yawning rifts in the roof, and called upon her Maker for vengeance. "How long wilt Thou delay, O Lord, righteous in judgment? Fulfil Thy promise! Bind Thou Thy millstone about the neck of this wretch, hated and accursed of Thee, and let it drag him down to the uttermost depths of the Lake of Fire, where such as he shall wallow and howl throughout Eternity!----"

She was infinitely more terrible than the lioness who has licked her murdered cubs. No Pythoness at the dizziest height of the sacred frenzy, no Demeter wrought to delirium by maternal bereavement, was ever imagined by poet or painter as half so grand, and terrible, and awe-inspiring, as this furious cursing nun.

"--Delay not Thou, O Lord!" she prayed....

Rain fell in a curtain of gleaming crystal rods between them. Seen through it, she appeared supernaturally tall, her garments streaming like black flames, her face a white-hot furnace, her eyes intolerable, merciless, grey lightnings, her voice a fiery sword that cleft the guilty to the soul.

The voice of Conscience was dumb in him. He knew no remorse, and made a jest of G.o.d. But his callous heart had been filled from the veins of generations of Irish Catholic peasants, and, in spite of himself, the blood in his veins ran cold with superst.i.tious fear.

Yet, when no palpable answer came from that Heaven to which she cried, he rallied, remembering that, after all, she was a woman, and alone with him in the place. She had sunk back against the altar that was behind her. Her eyes were closed, her face a white mask of anguish; she looked as though about to swoon. Bough hailed the symptoms as favourable. Fainting was the prelude to caving in, with the women he knew. But when he stirred, her eyes were wide and preternaturally bright, and held him. He snarled:

"You'll not take the girl my message, then?"

She reared up her tall form, and laughed awfully.

"Did you dream I would defile her ears with it? Now that I know you, you will be wise to leave this place; for it is a spot where your sins may find you out!"

He jeered:

"That flash bounce doesn't go down with me. The trouble'll be at your end of the house, unless you listen to reason and stop giving off hot air.

What's to hinder me making a clean breast to that swell toff she's wheedled into asking her to marry him? What's to hinder me from standing up before the whole mob, saying as I've repented what I done years back, and I've come to make an honest girl of her at last?"

The whirling waters of bitterness in her breast were rising, drowning her.... He realised her momentary weakness, and moved a step or two nearer, keeping well between the woman and the door.

"What's to hinder me, I say?"

Her rapier of keen womanly intuition flashed out at him again, and drew the blood.

"Your fear will hinder you. You are here in an a.s.sumed character, and under a false name." The long arm shot out, the white hand pointed at him again. "You never came here from Diamond Town. That letter was a forgery.

You have papers on you now that would prove you to be a spy, if you were taken. Ah, I can see it written in your coward's face!"

The devil was at the woman's ear, prompting her. Or was it----? Bough's dark, full-blooded face bleached to muddy-pale as her terrible voice rang through the desolate place, and echoed among the broken rafters.

"You boast yourself ready to admit your infamy. You shall be compelled!

Everything shall be made known! I will go to Lord Beauvayse now, and tell him all--all! And if he loves her, he will marry her. And you who have secrets upon your soul even more perilous, if less vile and hideous"--again the terrible hand pointed, and that sense of a supernatural force that it wielded knocked his knees together and dried up his mouth--"I see the millstone round your neck!..."

The clarion voice mounted on a great note of triumph. With her inspired face, and with her floating veil, she looked like a Prophetess of old.

"The Lord is not mocked! He will avenge His little one as He has promised!

Move aside, you lost, and branded, and miserable wretch! Do you dare to dream you can hinder Me from doing what I have said?"

He was at the bottom of the altar-steps as the tall, imperious figure came sweeping down. The curtain of rain no longer fell between them, but behind him. He must silence that railing voice that cried in the house-top--put out the light of those intolerable eyes....

He drew out his revolver with a blasphemous oath. At the gleam of steel in the thickening twilight she dropped her upraised arms, and made a swift rush to the rope of the bell, and set it clanging. Two double strokes rang out; the third was broken in the middle.... For as she swung round, panting and tugging at the rope, he shot her in the back above the line of the white wimple from which the veil streamed aside, and ran to the door as she cried out and swayed forward, still clinging to the vibrating rope, and turned there and fired a second shot, that struck her in the body.

Then he was gone, and the walls were crowding in on her to crush her, and then receding to immeasurable distances, and the blood and air from her pierced lungs bubbled through the bullet-holes in the serge stuff and the scorched linen.

She stumbled a few steps blindly, then fell and lay choking, with that strange gurgling and whispering in her ears, the rushing blood mingling with the water of the puddles that the rain had made upon the littered floor. She faltered out the name of her Master and Spouse, and commended her pure soul to Him in utter humility. Death would have been a welcome loosing of her bonds but for the Beloved left behind, at the mercy of the merciless.

The stab of that remembrance lent her strength to struggle up upon her knees. Ah, cruel! cruel!... But she must submit. Was it not the Holy Will?

She signed the Cross upon her bosom, with fingers already growing stiff, and made a piteous little act of charity, forgiving the sin of the man against herself, but not his crime against dead Richard's child. And she stretched out long black-sleeved arms gropingly in the thick, numbing darkness that hemmed her in, and moaned to the Mother of the motherless to have pity!... pity!...

She swayed forwards then, like a stately falling column, and lay with outspread arms upon the altar-step.

"Jesu.... Mary.... _The child!..._"

The sacred names were stifled in her blood. The last two words were nearly her last sigh. Thenceforward there was no sound at all in the Convent chapel, save the dull splash of rain, falling through the holes in the broken roof upon the sodden floor, where the dead woman lay, face downwards.

LII