"And now tell me, Sister dear,--is there any news yet?"

Sister Joanna gave a sigh as if some tight band round her had suddenly been loosened and she had breathing s.p.a.ce once more.

"No, child," and it was almost her old genial voice. "The men have come back from the bush. But to-morrow they are going up the mountain. I've worked them up to _that_."

"I'm glad," said Mary thoughtfully. "For do you know, Sister, I am beginning to believe as the children do, that there really _is_ a mollmeit up there and that she is at the bottom of all the disappearances."

The blue eyes fastened themselves keenly on the girl's face, then, "I have always believed it myself," said Sister Joanna solemnly.

The Irish stew had only a faintly burnt flavour, and looked appetising enough in its dish; but the sight of it had a curious effect on Sister Joanna. She looked at it almost ravenously, then turned away as though the sight sickened her.

"No--no, I couldn't eat any," she muttered half to herself. "I'm not hungry, but to-morrow--to-morrow I will make myself a little curry.

Curry always brings back my appet.i.te and bucks me up when I am tired out."

Mary's own appet.i.te had taken wings since that curious scene in the kitchen. Nevertheless she made a great pretence of hunger.

Fortunately, Sister did not stay to see whether the large helping of stew was eaten, but rose and stumbled towards her room which was next to the dining-room. It was easy to see that she was dropping with fatigue.

How could it be otherwise after two days of ceaseless activity during which she had eaten nothing? Her heavy pallid cheeks hung in haggard rolls about her jaws, and with the glare gone out of them, her eyes resembled two large blue beads stuck in a fat doll's face.

"I'll go to bed, Mary," she said heavily. "I must get rest."

"Yes, do, Sister. No Compline in the Oratory to-night, I suppose."

Like a flash, energy came back into the old woman's glance, and the haggard muscles of her face seemed to tighten; but Mary, though her heart had come bounding up into her throat, ate on placidly.

"No," said Sister slowly, "I shall say the Office in my room, and I advise you, my dear, to get to bed as soon as possible, for Jackson will be here for you at five in the morning. Have you got your things ready?"

"Not yet," said Mary, and secretly repeated to herself, "_Not yet_!"

She was dazed, bewildered, and terrified; creeping, creeping terror of she knew not what was in her veins. But not for nothing had she prayed and felt answering faith and courage poured into her heart! Definitely, she knew that after that prayer and its answer she had no right to go yet--until Rosalie was found--

Though she could not eat, she sat for some little time at the table, making sounds with her knife and fork. Her idea was to prolong the evening as much as possible. She did not wish to go to bed until Sister Joanna slept. She could hear the latter undressing, and presently murmuring the words of the Office; later, the iron bed creaked, but sleep was as yet far from that bed. Long ago, Mary had observed in Sister Joanna an intense, almost foxlike acuteness, that in one less kind and genial would have alarmed the girl; now it did alarm her, for from the silent bedroom, through the closed door she felt it directed upon her; those unfortunate last words about Compline had aroused it!

At last, Mary rose and softly cleared the table, went out to the yard and fed Fingo, made one or two little preparations for the morning, then bolted the back door, and retired to her room. With her door carefully ajar, as she often left it, she then began to shake out and fold up her holiday things and pack them in a carpet bag. In all she did, she was careful to be perfectly natural and make no sound more or less than she would any ordinary night, for she was still aware of that acute attention piercing through the very walls about her. At last, she washed her face, brushed and plaited her hair, and got into bed. But under her night-dress she was fully dressed.

There in the darkness she lay thinking, thinking, and while she thought, she practised breathing regularly and evenly as she had often done when a child. What was the meaning of it all?--the strange words in the kitchen--the abuse flung at the dog--the screeching knife--the grip on her arm--the watching eyes--the coral necklace in the Oratory? Mary had no clear idea; only, when she tried to piece the strange puzzle together, she was afraid with a deadly fear that froze the blood in her veins and paralysed her heart.

It seemed as though years instead of hours pa.s.sed before that happened which she had known must happen--very gently Sister Joanna's door opened, and feet came padding softly to the kitchen; beside Mary's door they paused; it was for this moment Mary had practised her regular breathing, and the practise stood her in good stead. After some frightful moments, the longest it seemed to Mary she had ever lived through, the stealthy feet crossed the kitchen, and the Oratory door was opened. It was then that Mary sat up in bed straining her ear-drums until she thought they would crack; but the only sound that reached her was a little soft _creaking_ sound. A moment later, she was lying flat again, breathing regularly, for the feet were returning to pause by her door and the light of a candle flickered in. At last the gentle opening and shutting of another door, and the creak of the iron bed under a heavy body told that Sister Joanna had finished her midnight prowlings.

It was Mary's turn to get up.

For a full hour, she stood listening in the darkness and in the end she heard the stertorous breathing of a stout, tired woman fallen heavily asleep. To strike a sulphur match without noise was no simple task, and only accomplished by making a cave of the bed-clothes. This time it was Mary who stole, candle in hand, to the Oratory. Drops of cold sweat stood on her forehead and round her mouth, as without a sound she opened the door of that silent room to seek there that which Sister Joanna had hidden and feared for another to find. Whatever and wherever it was, there was no time to lose. At any moment the old woman might wake!

Fearfully the girl stole to the altar, and lifting the heavy red cloth stared beneath. Nothing!

The only other possible place was the oak chest. With faltering hands she lifted the lid (which gave a little creak) and looked in, and at what she saw the candle all but fell from her hand. White and still upon the folded altar cloths lay the body of little Rosalie. Mary turned faint and sick, but the Power that had sustained her throughout the terrible night did not fail her in that moment. She put out her hand to touch the child, and at the same moment a faint bitter odour of herbs came towards her, and she recognised it as the same she had smelled in the cup in the kitchen. There was a brown stain on the child's lips, and drops of liquid on her dress. Like a flash Mary realised the truth, and touching the little hands found them still warm.

The child was not dead, but under the influence of a sleeping herb.

Plenty of air came through the holes and cracks of the old chest. She was being kept asleep until--until what. The sinister words muttered in the kitchen came back to memory.

"_No, no, I mustn't--I mustn't--I must wait till to-morrow_!"

Until to-morrow when Mary would be gone. Was that it? Then, in the silent house--what?

"_To-morrow I will make a curry_!"

Ah, G.o.d! What terrible thoughts! They almost unnerved Mary, but she found strength to catch up the child's still form, and turning fled from the accursed place. The lid of the chest fell with a loud bang, and as she gained the back door and fumbled with the bolt, she heard Sister Joanna leap like a tiger from her lair.

Ah! What a race was that through the black night! Over garden beds to the gate mercifully open, and down the long, lonely road. Far, far in front lay the native village and a single point of light glimmering out from a sick woman's hut; and behind was a wild beast balked of its prey, snarling, and panting. Mary ran until a glaze came over her eyes and the blood burst from her nostrils. The rush of the air woke the child in her arms to weak but piercing crying, and only then did the padding shambling feet behind begin to falter and fall back. But Mary ran staggering on toward the light burning in Sarah Paton's hut, and only stopped to fall fainting on the doorstep.

Within half an hour the tale was told, and men with lanterns in their hands and black fury in their hearts were out on the road. But they found no one and the school and cottage were both empty.

The mollmeit had fled to the mountain at last.

Sewn into the mattress of Sister Joanna's bed were discovered the emigration papers of Janet Fink, and later, from under the bed of herbs in the garden men dug out the skulls and bones of four little children.

Then, raging, they burned the Cottage and school of the Friend for Little Children, and with brands from the fire set alight the thick bush of the mountain. For four days the flames roared and crackled, sending down great gusts of heat to the town below, and by night lighting up the veld for miles. The rock rabbits and mountain buck came scudding down to the safety of the bush, but the men, deployed in a wide circle round the base of the _berg_, never raised a gun to them so intent were they on their grim vigil.

At length the flames died down, and Thaba Inkosisan blackened and bare, with no leaf or flower or branch, nor any living thing left upon it, gloomed silent above the town.

CHAPTER SIX.

ON THE WAY TO BEIRA.

Dettington lounged moodily against the counter of Randal and Hallam's _winkel_, his eyes sardonic, his mouth decorated with discontent. He was bored to the verge of suicide. Two whole days had been wasted in Umtali waiting for the convoy of waggons with all his kit on board, to arrive from Salisbury. Thirty miles off he had taken advantage of a lift offered him by a man in a trap and come on ahead. Now he was wishing himself back at the waggons instead of stuck in this place where everyone appeared to have been dead and buried for the last five years, in spite of the recent native rebellion when they had all had to leave their homes and come into laager with not enough food and ammunition to go round. Since then the Imperial troops had pa.s.sed through, bent on punitive measures, and people had gone back to their homes and were dully occupied in nursing and feeding themselves into good health again.

The burden of Bettington's song of dolour was that there was no one to talk to, nothing to drink but bad whiskey at a pound a bottle, not a man who could play poker worth a tin tack, no one keen on a shoot, and not a pretty woman in sight! Driven to sitting among the piles of coloured blankets, and bags of meal, and Kaffir corn, that composed the stock-in-grade of Randal and Hallam, he grew madder and madder every minute. Not so was he accustomed to waste his good time and rare gifts.

The shop was a large galvanised iron shed, lined with shelves and a counter, and stuffed with every imaginable thing on earth that had a strong smell attached to it--leather, limbo, toilet soap, paraffin, cheese, tarred rope, shoddy blankets, and tinned foods sweltering in their tins. Hallam who had been a medical student at Columbia until the examiners turned him down, was casting up the firm's books, perched on a packing-case at the far end of the shop. Randal flannel-shirted, pipe in mouth, coatless, tieless, his fair hair in damp streaks on his forehead, sat opposite Bettington, his elbows folded on the counter before him. No one would have guessed him an old Harrovian (except Bettington who was one himself), and one who in his year had stroked for Leander, but he was at peace with all the world, in spite of a poisoned foot that kept him from leaving the premises. Nothing about him of the restless energy which characterised the blonde man burnt a bright red who sat on the other side of the counter.

Vigour and vitality was in Bettington's every line. He wore his hat slouched low, but beneath it could be discerned a shrewd grey-green eye, a nose jutting out like an insolent rock, a mouth with more than a hint of coa.r.s.eness but none of weakness about it.

With the crop in his hand, he smote indiscriminately at his gaitered legs or the bags of mealies and other merchandise surrounding him.

"Nice country!" he muttered, giving so vicious a cut at a pile of shoddy Kaffir blankets, striped with gaudy red and yellow, that a cloud of dust ascended from it and joined all the other little cloudlets whirling and whisking through the open door from the hot and dusty street.

"_You_ needn't kick--you're leaving it," said Randal, sucking peacefully at his pipe. "Stop beating the colour out of my blankets. I got to make my living selling them for _portieres_ and table covers."

"No one in this hole with the s.p.u.n.k to get up a shoot, and half a dozen lions roaring their heads off out at Penhalonga! Oh, pot!"

"Yes, it's sad," agreed Randal. "But the fellows round here are like Oom Paul, they haven't lost any lions. Besides, this is the first I've heard of half a dozen. The n.i.g.g.e.r only reported one, and I daresay he saw that in his dreams."

Bettington became inconsequently derisive.

"This would be a fine place to raise a team for the Olympian Games, I should think--or send out an expedition against the Mad Mullah--any great adventure might have birth here!"

"What a fellow you are, Bettington! Haven't you had enough excitement round Salisbury during this unholy rebellion? One would think you'd be glad of a rest!"

"Rest--nothing," said the other savagely. "Time enough to rest when I'm dead."

"You soon will be, all right," prophesied Randal cheerfully. "You worry too much behind your face."