Rain leaked through the tarpaulin over the ladder-hole, falling in heavy, sullen gouts and splashes on the beaten earth below as blood drips from a desperate wound. That image rose, and the blackness seemed all red—red with those lines of fiery writing on it, smoking and crawling, flickering and blazing, climbing, and licking with thin, greenish tongues of hell-begotten flame.
Then the midnight hour struck, and it was time to rise for Matins. Long after the Sisters had gone back to bed the Mother knelt on, a motionless figure wrestling in silent prayer before the silver Crucifix upon the wall. Dawn found her still kneeling. No ray of heavenly light had found her soul, that weltered in darkness, crying to One Who seemed not to hear.
LI
She did not venture to take Lynette with her to the Hospital next day, but secretly charged Sister Tobias and Sister Hilda-Antony to carry her whithersoever they went, and not once to let her out of sight. This done, she knew herself impotently helpless to do more. This strong and salient woman, lapped in unseen, impalpable serpent-coils that tightened every hour, was waxing weak. By her own deed she had barred out help and put counsel far from her. She had known the punishment would not be long in coming, when, for the sake of Richard's daughter, she had lied to Richard's friend.
Now she knew, poor, noble, suffering soul, that it would have been wiser to have saved her spotless garment from the smirch by telling him the truth. Then she could have fought this invisible tarantula Thing, with the conjectural hairy claws, the baleful, glittering eyes, and the padding feet that dogged her in the dark, with a strong man's arm to aid her. God was in Heaven, and in Him were her faith and trust, but the comfort of a human counsellor would have been unspeakable.
In a purely spiritual difficulty she would have gone to Father Wix. The kindly, fussy, feeble little old priest could hardly help her in this extremity. She had never told him what had happened at the tavern on the veld. Deep in her pitying woman's heart the child's cruel secret had been buried, once learned. Sister Tobias was the only one who shared it.
Meanwhile she was followed that night and the next night; and on the morning of the Thursday, when she rose from her sleepless bed, another letter weighted with a stone had been dropped down the ladder-hole. She was to give the anonymous writer a meeting and receive a message, unless she wished them that chose to be nameless to lay in wait for the girl. Most likely that would be the better way. She could choose.
She burned the second letter before she went to the Hospital. She found there the single sheet of the Siege Gazette fluttering in every hand. Even her dignified reserve could not ward off the well-meant congratulations, the eager questions, the interested comments on the news contained in the three last paragraphs of the column that was signed "Gold Pen." Then came the telephone message from Lady Hannah. We know what words of hers the wire carried back. All the more firm, all the more courageous, all the more determined that her knees shook, and her heart was as water within her. For the Thing that coiled in the dark would surely strike now.