“Don’t be angry with me--over last evening. It is good and generous of you to wish to make provision for me. But I shall be much happier to feel myself no burden upon you. And it will be so easy for me to earn my living again. I shall be much happier, really.”
The little word, with which she so often confirmed her statements, the familiar touch of her hand, the sense of her delicate, fragile figure so near him caused a spasm of pain to pass through his heart; disillusion had not touched his common, human want of her. He bowed his head in his hands.
“Some day, Yvonne, it may be possible for me to ask you--to come back. If I give in to your wishes now, will you give in to mine then?”
The emotion in his voice was too strong to escape her. It stirred all the yielding sweetness and tender pity of Yvonne. She forgot the reproaches, the pitilessness, the religious scruples comprehended only as unloving. His broad shoulders shook beneath her touch.
“I will come whenever you want me,” she said.
“If I have been ungenerous in word or thought to you, Yvonne, forgive me.”
Her hand strayed shyly to a lock of grizzling hair above his temples and smoothed it back gently.
He raised his head, and looked at her for a second or two with an expression of anguish.
Then he sprang to his feet, and before Yvonne, shrinking back, could realise his intention, his arms were about her in a tight clasp, and his kiss was on her face. “God help us. God help us both, my child.” He released her and went hurriedly from the room.
They buried Noakes on the other side of the _kopje_ behind the house. He had lasted through the winter and early spring, but the season of the rains and heat, when the damp oozed through wooden walls and mud floor, and hung clammily upon sheets and pillows, gave the remnants of his lungs no breathing chance, and Noakes went uncomplainingly to his place.
Joyce laid “the dear lady’s” letter on his breast before nailing down the rough wooden coffin. It seemed as if most of his own heart too were enclosed with the letter, to be put away under the ground for ever and ever. Wilson the farmer, himself, and a Kaffir carried the coffin to the hole that had been dug beneath a blue gum-tree. There Wilson read the burial service of the Church of England.