She was not looking at him. Her eyes were on the little white cross above the Mother's grave; there was an anxious fold between the slender dark eyebrows.
"You—you wish to marry a Catholic—you, who tell me that you were once a Christian and are now Agnostic?"
"If I have not what is called Faith," said Saxham, "I may at least lay claim to the quality of reverence. And I honour the religion that has made you what you are. Cleave to your Church, child—hold to your pure beliefs, and keep a little love back, Lynette, from your Holy Family and your Saints in Heaven, to give to a poor devil who needs it desperately!"
The sweet colour flushed her, and her face was more than beautiful in its compassion. She said:
"I pray for you now, and I will always. And one day our Lord will give you back the faith that you have lost."
"Thank you, dear!" said Saxham humbly. She was opening her lips to speak again when he lifted his hand and stopped her.
"There is one other thing I should like to make clear. I—am not rich. But neither am I absolutely poor. Letters that I have received from a firm of solicitors acting for the trustees and executors of—a near relative deceased, will prove to you that I am possessed of some small property, bringing in an annual income of something like two hundred pounds, and funds sufficient to settle a few thousands upon my wife by way of marriage-jointure. Believe me," he added, in answer to her look, "I know you to be incapable of a mercenary thought. But what I should have explained to"—he pointed to the grave that lay so near—"to her, I must make clear to you. It could not be otherwise."
She went over to the grave and knelt beside it, and laid her pure cheek upon it, and spoke to the Dead in a low, murmuring tone. Saxham knew as he watched her, breathing heavily, that the consent of the Mother would never have been given to the marriage he proposed. That other obstacle in the road of his desire, the lover who had deceived, had been swept away, with the stern and tender guardian, in one cataclysm of Fate. He went back in thought to the ending of his long shooting-match à outrance with Father Noah, and remembered how he had promised himself that all should go well with Saxham provided Saxham's bullet got home first.
Were not things going better than he had hoped? She had not even recoiled from him when he had told her of those degraded days of wastrelhood. Surely things were going well for Saxham, he said, as he waited with his hungering eyes upon his heart's desire. What it cost him not to step over to her, snatch her from the ground, and crush her upon his heart with hot and passionate kisses and wild words of worship, he knew quite well. But in that he was able to exercise such a mastery over himself and keep that other Saxham down, Saxham gave praise to that strange god he had set up, and worshipped, and bowed down before, calling it The Omnipotent Human Will.
She rose by-and-by, and stood with clasped hands, thinking. It was very still, and the air was sweet and balmy, and beyond the lines of the defence-works miles upon miles of sunlit veld rolled away to the hills that were mantled in clear hyacinth-colour and hooded with pale rose.