She swayed forwards then, like a stately falling column, and lay with outspread arms upon the altar-step.
"Jesu.... Mary.... The child!..."
The sacred names were stifled in her blood. The last two words were nearly her last sigh. Thenceforward there was no sound at all in the Convent chapel, save the dull splash of rain, falling through the holes in the broken roof upon the sodden floor, where the dead woman lay, face downwards.
LII
No one had heeded the revolver-shot. The detonation of a cartridge or so when a bombardment is going on, what does it count for? And yet, when the burly figure of the runner from Diamond Town slipped out of the Convent doorway and stole across the shrapnel-littered garden, and crossed the veld towards the native town, it had been barely twilight—a twilight of heavy, drenching rain, to be sure. Still, in it he had encountered those who might have suspected afterwards....
Perhaps it would have been better had he stopped in Gueldersdorp and mugged it out. But that sharp, prompt, swift, unsparing thing called Martial Law is not a power to play with with impunity, and of the man who wielded it in Gueldersdorp, Bough had conceived a wholesome dread. Best that he had fled, although his going tagged him with suspicion. That cursed stupid game of his with the telephone at the Headquarters of the Baraland Rides might cost him more than the bit of twist with which he had bribed the orderly, left for a moment in sole charge, and demoralised by the sight of tobacco.
Opium played you tricks like that, when, for the gratification of a sinister whim, a grotesque fancy, born and bred of the stuff, you would risk everything. In excess it played hell with the nerves. That was why those eyes of hers.... Damn them! Why couldn't a man put them out of mind and out of sight?
It was not to be done. The obsession held him. A black shadow on the floor would be the long body, lying face downwards on the altar-steps, with outspread, crucified arms. He heard her stifled crying upon the Name, and the gurgling outrush of mingled air and blood that followed each deep sob for breath....
And then he would be running through the lashing, bucketing wet, circumventing the sentry-posts, wriggling over the veld on his belly like a snake. He would be pushing through the dripping covert of the north bank of the river—for that, he had decided, was the safest way out or in—leaving fragments of his garments on the thorny cacti that grabbed at him with their green hands. And then he would find himself lying doggo between two great stones, waiting for it to be quite dark before he essayed to pass the rifle-pits that angled across either shore. Two hours he had lain so, and it had hailed, and sheet lightning had smitten greenish-blue glares from the hissing, clattering whiteness, and he had remembered with a shudder those eyes....