“Before I entered religion my name was Anita de Castro.”
Lilian was too overcome to make any reply. The nun continued:
“As I said, I am dead to the world, and such matters can hurt me little now; but the man need not have slandered my poor name. It is perfectly above slander, thanks to Lidwell. I tell you he was the saving of me. I dare not think of what and where I should be now but for his influence and the remembrance of him. My father was taken prisoner, with three others, by a British vessel, and hanged, and I was adrift in Zanzibar without a friend. I need not have been an hour destitute of mere creature necessaries; but that influence saved me. For you will understand me when I tell you how I loved him; yet he never cared for me. He liked me as a something to amuse him—a plaything—a child—but no more.”
She paused, and Lilian sat holding her hand, but did not interrupt.
“Your lover is safe,” went on Sister Cecilia. “All that was told you is untrue. He never fought against the English flag, or against any one but the tribes in the far interior. The affair with the Sea Foam took place a year before he came among us; I remember it well. And now tell me about this spy of Truscott’s. What was he like?”
Lilian remembered the man only too well, and described him minutely.
“I know him. He was shot by Lidwell in self-defence, and left as dead. He reappeared again, though, but after Lidwell had fled—to save his own life, for there was a plot to murder him. The man Truscott must have got the whole story from this other man, for neither of them have the slightest idea of my whereabouts. I only arrived here the day before yesterday, and to-morrow I am to leave with three others to join a mission in the Transvaal.”
Her quick Southern nature enabled her to master the whole plot at a glance. Truscott was a bold player at the game of intrigue, she thought; for to throw in her own name in the way he had done was a skilful stroke indeed.
“To think that I should be held as a sword over Lidwell,” she went on; “I, who would not harm a hair of his head, even if I had, as that slanderer said, anything to revenge, which I have not—quite the reverse. But show me the portrait. I shall never see him again; nor do I wish to—I have done with such desires. Yes, it is a splendid likeness; I can look at it calmly now. And, listen! He was as a demigod in that horrible slave settlement. I do not know why he came there, but many and many a time has he mitigated the sufferings of those poor tortured creatures, often at the risk of his life. At last, when he was obliged to fly, I helped him to get away. I, all unaided, delayed his murderers many hours, and enabled him to get safely beyond their reach. I do not boast; it is only that the recollection is sweet to dwell on. And now listen,” interrupting Lilian’s fervent utterance of admiration and gratitude. “His last words to me were these: ‘You are made for something better than this kind of life; leave it as soon as you are able.’ Then I hurried him away, for I heard them coming. He left that horrible place for ever, and I—well, I only prayed that I might die. But I lived—lived that I might remember those last words, and obey them to the letter.”
Lilian was crying. There was something inexpressibly touching in the narrative to which she listened; to her something grandly heroic in the way in which this girl—for the ageing effects of her Southern nationality and conventual dress notwithstanding, she was little more than a girl—had shunned the ease and luxury of evil to devote her whole life to the fulfilment of the last injunction of one whom she would never see again. This, too, was the daughter of a slave-dealer—reared among ruffians—whose father had met a felon’s death. And this protecting influence which had hallowed another’s pathway, was that of her own lover.