"Why should I awaken you, beloved, you who needed rest?" she murmured, groping for his hand. "Yes, it is too late. It was some time ago. I thought it was a cramp, but I must have been bitten."
Laurence was thinking—and thinking hard. What remedy was there? None. It was even as she had said—too late. The poison had penetrated her whole system.
"I am dying, beloved—and shall soon go into the Dark Unknown——" she murmured, more drowsily than before. "Yet it matters nothing, for those of our nation do not fear death. And listen. I heard the Arab's proposal to you, and your answer thereto—yet, when you returned to your people, what would have become of me?"
"I AM DYING, BELOVED—AND SHALL SOON GO INTO THE DARK UNKNOWN."
She was but voicing his own thoughts of many and many a time before. Yet now Laurence felt almost startled. Was it the clear intuition which rightly or wrongly is believed to accompany the hour of dissolution? Then he remembered she could have learned much about civilized peoples through the talk of Tyisandhlu and her father.
"I die, beloved, but I welcome death," she went on,—"for I have lived—ah, yes, I have lived. I feel no pain now, and I die in your arms. Surely my itongo[7] will not weep mournfully on the voices of the night as others do; surely it will laugh for very joy, for very love, because of this my end, until time shall die—will it not, Nyonyoba, my beloved? Say—will it not?"
But Laurence could not say anything, for, lo—a marvel. This man, deadened for long years to feeling or ruth; this coldly pitiless trafficker in the sufferings of human beings; in whose cynical creed now such a love as that of this savage girl held no place—felt now as though a hand were gripping him by the throat, choking all power of reply. And the call of birds, high among the tree-tops, alone broke the silence, in the semi-gloom of the forest aisles.
Lindela's voice had sunk until it was well-nigh inaudible, and Laurence was constrained to bend his head to hers in order to catch her every word. Then—a flash of gladness seemed momentarily to light up the drowsy eyes, and she spoke no more. Her eyelids closed, her breathing grew fainter and fainter, and soon Laurence knew that that which lay heavy within his arms was no longer a living woman. Lindela had passed.