Van Busch did not drop. He dangled by the hands and sweated. He blasphemed in an agony of terror, though it seemed to him that he prayed.

For the dandy little Engineer officer had left the cigar-box lying empty among the powdery ashes in the wide, old-world hearthplace. An innocent-looking parcel it had contained, wrapped in a bit of old canvas, and, further secured with copper wire and string, was wedged in a c.h.i.n.k between the blackened stones at the back of the hearth. From it a fuse hung down; a short length nearly consumed by the crepitating fiery spark at its loose end. It burned with a little purring sound, as though it liked the business it was engaged upon. Bough Van Busch knew that in another moment the detonation would take place....

He heard nothing of it when it came.... Nor did he know it when the walls of Cyclopean masonry bulged and opened about him like the petals of a flowering lily. He was beyond all that. His gross body, headless, rent and torn as though the devils it had housed had wreaked their fury on their dwelling, lay sandwiched between the wreckage of the great chimney and the millstone that had paved its hearth, now a yawning cavity, some six feet deep. Leaning on its side in a trench its own weight had dug in the stony earth of the dirty courtyard was the huge stone that had topped the shaft.

Something ugly was wedged in the central hole that had been made bigger to let out the smoke. And the murderer's soul, light as a dried leaf fluttering through the illimitable s.p.a.ces of Eternity, went wandering on its way to the Balances of G.o.d.

The party of Cape Police who had searched Haargrond Plaats, with the drab-painted cart, the three Engineers, and the dandified little officer, had only ridden to a safe distance. They halted, and, concealed from observation by a fold of the gra.s.sy veld, waited for the explosion of the dynamite cartridge. When it came, the Engineer officer shut his binoculars, and gave the signal to return.

LIII

There were two funerals in the Cemetery at Gueldersdorp, upon a night that no one will forget who stood in the packed throng of shadowy mourners about each of those open graves. The wind blew soft from the west, and the vault of heaven might have been hollowed out of the darkling depths of an amethyst of inconceivable splendour and planetary size. Myriads of stars, dazzlingly white, swung under this, the Mother's fitting canopy, shared with another, not like her holy, not n.o.ble or unselfish or devoted, but like her in that he was brave and much beloved.

Beloved undoubtedly. You could not look at the crowding faces about the narrow open trench where the Reverend Julius Fraithorn read the Burial Service by lantern-light without being sure of that. Men's eyes were wet, and women sobbed unrestrainedly. He had been so beautiful and so merry and cheerful always, said the wet-eyed women; the men praised him for having been such a swordsman, horseman, shot. Everyone spoke of him as the life and soul of the garrison, the idol of his brother-officers, and worshipped by the men under his command. Everyone had something to tell of dead Beauvayse that was pleasant to hear.

But the great bulk of the crowd was ma.s.sed behind the black-robed, white-coiffed figures of the Sisters, kneeling rigid and immovable about the second open grave, where the Mother-Superior lay in her snow-white coffin, fully habited and mantled, her Rosary in the marble hand on which the plain gold ring of her Divine espousals shone, the parchment formula of the vows she took when admitted to her Order nineteen years before, lying under those meekly-folded hands upon her breast. So she had lain, feet to the altar, in the Convent chapel that her daughters in Religion had draped and decked for her, keeping their loving vigils about her from twilight to dawn, from dawn to twilight, until this hour when they must yield all that was mortal of her to Earth's guardianship and the unsleeping watchfulness of G.o.d.

Suffocatingly dense the throng about this grave, and strangely quiet. The women's faces white and haggard and tearless, the men's drawn and deeply lined. Not even m.u.f.fled groans or sighs of pity broke the profound silence as the solemn rite drew to its singularly simple and impressive close. As the fragrant incense rose from the censer and the holy water sprinkled the snow-white pall that bore the Red Cross, one dreadful word lurked sinister in every thought:

Murdered!...

Their friend, helper, nurse, consoler, the woman whose hands had staunched the bleeding wounds of many present, whose arm had lifted and pillowed the dying heads of others dear to them; who had stood through long nights of fever and delirium beside their Hospital pallets, ministering as a very Angel from Heaven to tortured bodies and suffering souls--murdered!

The tender Mother, the wise virgin, who watched continually with her lamp prepared, that at the first summons of the Heavenly Bridegroom she might enter with Him into the marriage chamber, could it be that His signal had come to her by the bloodstained hand of an a.s.sa.s.sin? It was so. And--ah!

the horror of it!

The aged priest sobbed as, followed by the server, he moved round the grave within the enclosing wall of kneeling Sisters. But no answering sob came from the vast a.s.semblage. They were as dumb--stricken to stone. They could not yet contemplate the felicity of the pure soul of the martyred saint, carried by G.o.d's Angels into the Land of the ever-living, admitted to the unspeakable reward of the Beatific Vision. They could only realise that somebody had killed her.

But when the solemn strophes of the Litany for the Dead broke in upon a profound silence, the responses of the mult.i.tude surged upwards like giant billows shattering their forces in hollow thunder upon Arctic heights. And when, in due pursuance of the symbolic rite of Rome, the vested priest and her whole Sisterhood suddenly withdrew from the grave, and left her earthly body, how wonderful in its marble, hushed, close-folded, mysterious beauty none who had looked upon it ever could forget, waiting for the second coming of her Master and her Lord, a great sob mounted, and broke from every breast, and every face was drenched with sudden tears.

Perhaps G.o.d let her see how much they loved her in that parting hour. And then the bugle sounded "Last Post" over both the open graves, softly for fear of Brounckers' German gunners, and the great crowd melted away, and all was done and over.

I have said that all the people wept. There was a girl in white, for she would not let the Sisters put black garments on her, kneeling between Sister Tobias and Sister Hilda-Antony. This girl did not weep at all.

Chief mourner at both these funerals, she was not conscious of the fact.

She knew that Beauvayse was on duty at Maxim Outpost South, and could not get away, and that the Reverend Mother was vexed with her, and was hiding at the Convent, pretending that she had gone somewhere, and would never come back.

She was especially clear of mind when she thought all this. At other times she was not Lynette, and knew no one, and had never known anybody of the name. She was the ragged Kid, crouching on the Little Kopje in the gathering twilight or on the long mound that its eastward shadow covered.

Or she was lying under the tattered horse-blanket on the foul straw pallet in the outhouse, waiting for the Lady to come with the great, kind, covering dark.

Or she was sitting in the bar-parlour on an upturned cube-sugar box beside the green rep sofa where Bough lolled on wet days or stormy nights, her great eyes wild with apprehension, her every nerve tense and strained with terror of the master in his condescending moods, when he would make pretence of teaching her to scrawl coa.r.s.e pothooks and hangers on the greasy slate that usually hung below the gla.s.s-and-bottle shelf. Or--and at these times the Sisters found her difficult to manage--she was crouching upon one side of a locked door, and a long thin wire was feeling its way into the keyhole on the other side, and the man who manipulated it laughed as the agile pliers nipped the end of the key and turned it in the wards of the lock....

And then she would be running through the night, anywhere, nowhere, and Bough would be riding after. She could hear the short wheezing gallop of the tired pony when she laid her ear to the ground. And then the sjambok, wielded by a strong and brutal hand, would bite into the quivering flesh of the child, and she would shriek for mercy, and presently fall upon the ground and lie there like one dead--acting that old tragedy over and over again.

G.o.d was very kind to you, Reverend Mother, if He hid that sight from one to whom she was so dear. But if His Blessed in Heaven have cognisance of what takes place in this dull, distant speck of Earth, I think some salt tears must needs have fallen from the starry eyes of one of Christ's saintly maiden-spouses, glorious under the dual crown of Virginity and Martyrdom, and yet a mother as truly as His Own.

That swift unerring judgment of Saxham's had pointed, months ago, to some such mental and physical collapse, as the result of shock, crowning long-continued nervous overstrain. He had said to the Mother that such a result would be easier to avert than to deal with.

There was not an ounce of energy the man possessed that he did not employ in dealing with it now.

Let Sister Tobias tell us, as she told Saxham then, the story of the Finding. She was always a plain woman of few words.

"The last charge the Mother laid on us--Sister Hilda-Antony and me--was to keep our eyes upon the child. The very day _it_ was done she told us, and I saw that something had made her anxious by the look that was in her eyes." She dried her own with a coa.r.s.e blue cotton handkerchief before she took up her tale. "She went alone to the Head Hospital that day. None of us were to be surprised, she said, if she came home extra late. Sister Hilda-Antony and me were on duty at the Railway Inst.i.tute. We took Lynette with us.--There!... Didn't she look up, just for the one second, as if she remembered her name?"

She had not done so at all. She was sitting on her stool in her old corner of the Convent bombproof, but she did not heed the shattering crashes of the bombardment any more. She had only moved to push out of her eyes the dulled and faded hair that the Sisters could not keep pinned up, and bent over her little slate again. Before that, and a pencil had been given her she had been restless and uneasy. Now she would be occupied for long hours, making rude attempts at drawing houses and figures such as a child represents, with round "O's" of different sizes for heads and bodies, and pitchforks for legs and arms....

Sister Tobias went on: "The _Siege Gazette_ had come out that day, with the news of"--she dropped her voice to a whisper--"of her being likely to be married before long to him that's gone. May Our Lord give him rest!"

Sister Tobias's well-accustomed fingers pattered over the bib of her blue-checked ap.r.o.n, making the Sign. "And Sister Hilda-Antony and me had the world's work with all the people who stopped us in the street and came round us at the Inst.i.tute to say how glad they were. Talk of a stone plopped in a duckpond! You'd have thought by the crazy way folks carried on that two pretty young people had never went and got engaged before."

Sister Tobias was never coldly grammatical in speech. "But the child was happy, poor dear, in hearing even strangers praise him; and when the firing stopped and we were on our way home, she begged us to turn out of it and call in at the Convent, where he'd begged her to meet him, if only for a minute, not having seen her since the Sunday when----"

"Yes--yes!"

Saxham, who writhed inwardly, remembering that Sunday, nodded, bending his heavy brows. His ears were given to Sister Tobias, his eyes to the slight figure that somehow, in the skirt some impatient movement had wrenched from the gathers and the shirt-bodice that was b.u.t.toned awry, had the air of a ragged, neglected child. And she held up her scrawled slate to ward off his look, and peeped at him round the side of it.

Big strong men like that could be cruel when they were angry. The Kid knew that so well.

"We went to the Convent with the child," Sister Tobias continued: "We hadn't the heart to deny her, though we thought the Mother might be vexed that we hadn't come straight home. A queer thing happened as we crossed the road and went up along the fence towards the gates with the child between us.... A big, heavy man, dressed as the miners dress, with a great black beard and his hat pulled down over his eyes, came along in such a hurry that he knocked Sister Hilda-Antony off the kerb into the road, and brushed close up against _her_----"

"Against Miss Mildare? Did it occur to you that the man had come out of the Convent enclosure?" Saxham asked quickly.

Sister Tobias shook her head.

"No; but I did think he meant stopping and speaking to the child, and then changed his mind and hurried on. 'Did he hurt you, dearie?' I asked her, seeing her shaking and quite fl.u.s.tered-like. And she answers, 'I don't know....' And 'Was it anyone you knew?' I puts to her again, and 'I can't tell,' says she, like as if she was answering in her sleep. Do you thinks she understands we're talking about her, poor lamb?"

They both looked at her, and she, having been taught by painful experience that to be the object of simultaneous observation on the part of the man and woman meant punishment involving stripes, began to tremble, and hung her head. From under her tangled hair she peeped from side to side, wondering what it was she had left undone? Ah!--the broom, standing in the corner. She had forgotten to sweep out the house-place and the bar. When the dreaded eyes turned from her, she got up and went softly to the corner where Sister Tobias's besom stood, and took it and began to sweep, casting terrified glances through her hair at her two Fates.

Something gripped Saxham by the heart and wrung it. The scalding tears were bitter in his throat. Do what he would to keep them free, his eyes were dimmed and blinded, and Sister Tobias wiped her own openly with the blue cotton handkerchief.

"We thought the young gentleman would be waiting near the Convent," said Sister Tobias, "or in one of the ground-floor rooms, but he wasn't there.

Me and Sister Hilda-Antony looked at one another. 'Early days for a young girl's sweetheart to be late at the meeting-place!' says Sister Hilda-Antony's eyes to me, and mine said back, 'The Lord grant no harm's come to him!' We waited five minutes by the school clock, that's never been let run down, and then another five, and still he didn't come. He had got his death-wound, though we didn't know it, hours before."

"The Angel of Death had spread his wings over the Convent. Both me and Sister Hilda-Antony felt there was a strange and awful stillness and solemnness about the place. At last me and her told the child that go we must. We'd wait no longer. But _she_, knowing we'd never leave without her, ran upstairs. We heard her light feet going over the wet matting and down the long pa.s.sage to the chapel door. Then----"

Sister Tobias sobbed for another moment in the blue handkerchief. The child, who had been diligently sweeping, looked at the woman and at the big man who had made her cry, with great dilated eyes of fear. She put the broom back noiselessly in its corner, and stole back to her stool. Who knew what might happen next?

"Then," said Sister Tobias, "we heard the dreadfullest scream. 'Mother!'

just once, and after it dead silence. Then--I don't know how we got there, it was so like a cruel dream--but we were in the chapel, trying to raise them up. That dear Saint--may the Peace of G.o.d and the Bliss of His Vision be upon her for ever!--lay dead on the altar-steps where the wicked, murdering hand had shot her down.... And the child lay across her, just where she had dropped in trying to lift her. And the strength of me and the Sister, and the strength of them that came after, wasn't equal to unloose those slender little hands you're watching."

The slender little hands were busy with the slate and pencil as Saxham looked at them.