"She was very noble, very pure, and very beautiful. Everyone loved her, and her life was spent in doing good. You were dear to her—inexpressibly dear to her. She used to call you her beloved daughter. Tell me who she was?"
Her face quivered, and in the depths of her dim, vague eyes a beam of the golden light of old was rekindled.
"She was the Lady. When will she come again?"
He raised his hand and pointed to the sky.
"When that is rolled away, and the Sign of the Cross shines from the east to the west, and from the north to the south, and the King of Glory comes with His Angels and His Saints, we shall see her again, Lynette——"
His voice broke. He laid the cool, delicate, nerveless hand back upon her knee, and rose, for the Sister was folding up her sewing. He looked long after the girlish figure as it was led away.
He understood everything now. He knew why the mother-plover had trailed her wing in the dust, striving to lead the footsteps of the stranger aside from the hidden nest. He stooped and gathered a blade or two of grass, and a few crumbs of red, sandy earth, from the grave at his feet, and kissed them, and folded them reverently in an envelope, and hid the little packet in his breast before he went.
That evening there were pillars and banks of dust on the north-west horizon, and the flashes of lyddite and the booming of artillery told patient Gueldersdorp that the hour of deliverance was near. A few hours later the Relief had lamp-signalled brief details of the battle with Huysmans, ending with "Good-night" and the promise to fight a way in next morning. Later still, eight troopers in khâki, jaunty ostrich-tips in their smasher hats, rode into the little battered village town that huddled on the low, sandy mound, and all the waiting world was gladdened with the news. And London called on a quiet elderly lady, to tell her what the man, her boy, had done.
The name of that little hamlet town has, cruelly enough, passed into a byword—a synonym for everything that is rowdy, vulgar, apish in the English character, with the dregs stirred up. But yet it will ring down the silver grooves of Time as long as Time shall be.
Do I wander from the thread of my story—I who have dressed my puppets in the brave deeds of those who strove and endured and suffered, to what a glorious end?