XLIII
The Mother was kneeling, as she had knelt the whole night through, before the dismantled altar in the battered little chapel of the Convent, with the big white stars looking down upon her through the gaps in the shell-torn roof. When it was the matin-hour she rose and rang the bell. Matins over, she still knelt on. When it was broad day she broke her fast with the Sisters, and went about the business of the day calmly, collectedly, capably as ever. Only her face was white and drawn, and great violet circles were about her great tragical grey eyes.
"The blessed Saint she is!" whispered the nuns one to the other.
If she had heard them, it would have added yet another iron point to the merciless scourge of her self-scorn.
A Saint, in that stained garment! What tears of bitterness had fallen that night upon the shameful blots that marred its whiteness! But for Richard's child, even though she herself should become a castaway, she must go on to the end. All the chivalry in her rose in arms to defend the young, shame-burdened, blameless head.
Ah! if she had known?...
Cold, light, cruel eyes had watched from across the river that day as her tall, imposing figure, side by side with the slender, more lightly-clad one, moved between the mimosa-bushes and round the river-bend. When the two were fairly out of sight, the jungle of tree-fern and cactus had rustled and cracked. Then the burly, thickset, powerful figure of a bearded man pushed through, traversed the reed-beds, and, leaping from boulder to boulder, crossed the river. Before long the man was standing on the patch of trodden grass and flowers in the lee of the great boulder, shutting up a little single-barrelled, brass-mounted field-glass that had served him excellently well.
He was Bough, alias Van Busch, otherwise the man who had come in through the enemy's lines as a runner from Diamond Town, bringing the letter from a hypothetical Mrs. Casey to a Mr. Casey who did not exist. His light eyes, that were set flat in their shallow orbits like an adder's, looked about and all around the place, as he stroked the dense brake of black-brown beard that cleverly filled in the interval between Mr. Van Busch's luxuriant whiskers. Presently he stooped and picked up a little tan-leather glove, lying in a tuft of pink flowers. The daintiness of the little glove brought home to Bough more forcibly than anything else, that the Kid had become a lady.
For it was the girl, sure. No error about that little white face of hers, with the pointed chin, and the topaz-coloured eyes, and the reddish hair. The glass had brought her near enough to make that quite certain. He had been too far off to hear a word, but he had made out what had been going on very well. First, she had been giddying with the tall young English swell, drawing him on while he seemed courting her, as all women knew how to, and then the tall Sister of Mercy had come and rowed her; and she had cried, thrown down there among the grass and flowers, exactly as if somebody had beaten her with a sjambok to cure her of the G. D.'d obstinacy that had to be thrashed out of women, if you would have them get to heel when you chose it, or come at your call when you chose again.