"There is no mystery about the water at all. It is very simple." Standing there with her head held high and the fine, free, graceful lines of her tall figure outlined by the heavy folds of the now worn and darned black habit, and her hands, still beautiful, though roughened by toil, calmly folded upon her scapular, she was as remarkable and noble a figure, it seemed to Saxham, as the golden sunlight could fall upon anywhere in the world. And besides, she was his right hand at the Hospital. A capable, watchful, untiring nurse—and beauty would have decked her in his surgeon's eyes if she had been physically ugly or deformed.
"There is no mystery whatever, only when the bombardment first began I thought of the waterworks, and that one of my first cares, supposing I had been General Brounckers"—she smiled slightly—"would have been to operate there. So I set the Sisters to work at filling every empty barrel and bucket and tub in the Convent with water from the taps. And as we happened to have plenty of empty barrels and tubs, why, there is water to be had there now, and will be for some time to come. Go now, my children."
The smiling Sisters waved their hands. The orderly saluted with his whip and drove on in obedience to Saxham's nod.
"Of course, the Sisters are aware," he said, meeting the Mother's grave glance, "that if it is quicker to drive, it is safer to walk?"
She nodded with the gay, sweet smile that had belonged to Lady Biddy.
"They know, of course. But danger is in the day's work. We do not seek it. We are prepared for it, and it comes and passes. If one day it does not pass without the cost of life, we are prepared for that, and God's Will is done always."
"You are very brave," he said. It was the first time in his life that he had used the phrase to any woman, and the words came out almost grudgingly.
"Oh no, not brave," she told him; "only obedient." Her veil fluttered in the hot November breeze that bore with it the heavy fetid taint from the overcrowded trenches that ringed Gueldersdorp, and the acrid fumes of the cordite; though the air up here on the veld was sweet compared with the befouled atmosphere of the Women's Laager and the crowded wards at the Hospital, in spite of all that disinfectants could do. She went on:
"And we are very grateful to you for the lift. Sister Ruperta was on duty last night, and Sister Hilda Antony—the rosy Sister—is not as well as she would have us believe. Ah——"
With her grave eyes screened by her lifted hand, she had been watching the progress of the spider westward over the dun-yellow veld. Now the long wailing notes of the headquarter bugle sounded, in slow time, the Assembly, and in the same instant, from the Staff over the Colonel's hotel, where the red lamp signalled danger by night and the Red Flag gave its warning by day, the scarlet danger-signal fluttered in the breeze. Once, twice, again, the deep bell of the Catholic Church tolled. A dozen other bells echoed the warning, signifying danger by the number of their iron-tongue strokes to the threatened quarter of the town.