A fortnight passed, during which he saw her as often as the visiting hours allowed. He brought her whatever little trifles he could afford, and she accepted them with the eager gratification of a child. There was a secondhand bookshop he had come across during his late wanderings, in Upper Street, Islington, which had a speciality in cheap, tattered French novels. Thither he tramped one day in order to gratify a desire she had expressed, and spent an hour turning over the stock. It seemed hard not to be able to go into a West End shop and order the newest Paris fiction; but a poor devil must do as best he can and be cheerful. Yvonne’s delight repaid him for wounded pride. She dipped into them all, while he was there, turning to the last page to see how they ended. And then the rakish air their soiled yellow covers gave to the bed, as they sprawled upon it, amused them both.
They talked of many things. Yvonne interested herself in the patients and gossiped about their progress and their eccentricities. Often her artless candour and innate love of laughter gave him details unfit perhaps for ears masculine. Then she would catch herself up, while a faint tinge of colour came into her cheek, and with still smiling eyes, say:
“I always forget that you’re a man. You ought to remind me.”
Joyce, for his part, strove to amuse her with whatever gleams of brightness he could find in his colonial adventures. Noakes grew to be the hero of an Arthurian cycle. As for the fat Boer woman, he was surprised at the amount of grim humour he extracted from her doings.
“I hope you are going to put it in a book,” Yvonne would say, with her little air of wisdom. “You must n’t waste it all upon me.”
And Joyce, by thus disintegrating incidents from his confused mass of impressions, found the talks of material benefit as well as a delight. For a delight they were; the more so, because Yvonne’s gladness at his visits was so obviously genuine and spontaneous. She told him that she counted the hours between them. And Yvonne scarcely exaggerated. His visits were bright spots in a sorrowful, fear-haunted time. When he came, she summoned up all her strength and courage so as to make the hour pass pleasantly. Men do not like crying, complaining women, thought poor Yvonne. Unless she was bright for him, he might grow tired of coming, and then she would be lonelier than before. So Yvonne told him little of the anxieties that lay like a dead weight upon her poor little soul and kept her awake at nights, amid the moans of the sleeping women, that sounded faint and ghostly in the dim ward.
Her patient acceptance of her lot won Joyce’s admiration. But of her real position he had no idea. The gentleman in him that had survived his shame and degradation forbade him to pry into her private affairs. Besides, he took it for granted that when she recovered, she would live by herself again, in the old way, and that her drawing-room would be a haven of rest to him for indefinite years. The question of nursing alone, he thought, and her incomprehensible friendlessness, had brought her to the hospital. He longed for her to leave it.
One day, however, he found her lying down in bed, her hair in dark loose masses over the pillow, her face turned away towards the sister who was sitting by her side. The latter rose on seeing him, and hurried forward to meet him in the aisle.
“Be as kind as you can to her,” she said; “she is in great trouble to-day, poor little thing.”
“What is the matter?” asked Joyce, anxiously.