Part 44 (1/2)
”It is my duty to put down insubordination, and chastise inefficiency where I encounter it. May I ask you to point out the fellow who behaved insolently?”
She said: ”I--I think he is head of the carting-gang. A Kaffir boy they call Jim Gubo.”
”That will do, thank you, Miss Mildare. You are not alone here?”
Her glad smile a.s.sured him of that. ”Oh no, I am with the Mother. I go everywhere with her, and I think I am of use. I am not at all afraid of sickness, you know, or--the other things.”
”But yet,” Saxham said, ”you must be careful of your health.”
”You have no idea how tremendously strong I am,” she answered him, and he broke into laughter in spite of himself. She looked so tender, so delicately frail a creature to be there in that malodorous Gehenna, ministering to the wants of slatternly vrouws and stalwart, down-at-heel Irishwomen. His smile emboldened her to say: ”I did not thank you the other day, after all.”
”The Krupp sh.e.l.l came along and changed the subject of the conversation.”
He added: ”Were you alarmed? You had rather an escape.”
”I was with Mother.”
”You love her very dearly?” The words had escaped him unconsciously. They were his spoken thought. She flushed, and said with a thrill of tenderness in her clear girlish tones:
”More dearly than it is possible to say. I don't believe G.o.d Himself will be angry with me that I have always seen His Face and Our Blessed Lady's s.h.i.+ning through hers and beyond it; for He knows as no one else can ever know what she has been since they brought me to the Convent years and years ago.”
”They” were her people, presumably. It was odd--Saxham supposed it the outcome of that Convent breeding--that she should speak of G.o.d as simply, to quote Gladstone's criticism on the Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff, as though He were her grandfather. Saxham had been reared in the Christian faith by a pious Welsh mother, but there had always been a little awkwardness about domestic references to the Deity. In times of sadness or bereavement He was frequently referred to. But always in a deprecatory tone.
”Your family is not Colonial?” he asked.
She shook her lovely red-brown head.
”I--don't know.”
”Mildare is an unusual surname.”
”You think it pretty?”
He thought her very pretty as she stood there, a slender willowy creature with the golden shadow of her rough straw-hat intensifying the clear amber of her thoughtful eyes.
”Very.”
She looked him in the face and smiled.
”So did I when the Mother gave it to me. I think it belonged to someone she used to know, and her mother was Lynette. So they baptised me Lynette Mildare. It seems rather strange not having a name of one's own, but really I never had one.”
”Never had one?”
Saxham echoed her half-consciously, revelling in the play of light and shadow over the delicate face, and the gleaming as of golden dust upon the outer edges of the waves of red-brown hair drawn carelessly back over the little ears.
”Not to my knowledge. Of course, I may have had one once.” She added, as he looked at her in suddenly roused surprise, ”I must have had one once.”
She was looking beyond him at a broad ray of moted white-hot suns.h.i.+ne that slanted through one of the wide openings above, and cleft the thick atmosphere of the crowded place like a fiery sword. ”I have often wondered what it really is, and whether I should like it if I heard it? To exchange Lynette Mildare for Eliza Smith ... that would be horrible. Don't you think so?”
Saxham smiled. ”I think you are joking, and that a young lady who can do so under the present circ.u.mstances deserves to be commended.”
She looked at him full.