To have lived for months and months under the silent contempt of this drunken woman-beating brute, to have been watched narrowly in all his business dealings--as he knew, from Wilson’s nature, must have been the case--to have been forced to stand helpless, degraded before this sot, while he vaunted his one virtue, honesty--it was gall and wormwood and all things bitter. The Southern Cross flashed down from the myriad stars in its startling splendour. The moon shone bright over the vast silent plain, limitless, broken only by the undulating mounds and the infinitely stretching clumps of karroo bushes. The camp-fire, just replenished with damp twigs and shrubs, burned sulkily and the smoke ascended in spirals into the clear air. The hooded waggon depended helplessly on its shafts. The Kaffirs, wrapped in blankets, slept beneath. The oxen, outspanned some distance off, chewed the cud in sharp, rhythmic munches. The universe was still--awfully still. All gave the sense of the littleness of man and the immensity of space. In a strange, imperious need of expansion, Joyce threw himself down on the wet earth and clutched the grasses and cried aloud:-- “Oh, God! I have suffered enough for my sin. Take this stain and degradation from my soul.” After a while he arose, ashamed of his weakness, the futility of his appeal. Relighting his pipe, he clambered into the waggon, and sitting on the floor against the back, watched the portion of starry sky framed by the hood, until the first streaks of dawn announced the hour for inspanning the oxen again and continuing his journey. CHAPTER XV--KNIGHT-ERRANT For all the change about him and within him, the hand of time might have been put back four years, and the tender might have been nearing the outward bound ship, instead of the Southampton landing-stage. It was the same raw mizzling rain as when he had crossed the harbour four years before; the same wet, shivering crowd of second-class passengers, with the water streaming from waterproofs, umbrellas and hand luggage on to the sloppy deck. In his heart was the same mingling of anxiety and apathy, the same ineradicable sense of pariahdom. He had thought that the sight of England once more would have brought him a throb of gladness. It only intensified his depressing fears for the future. The circumstances reproduced themselves with startling actuality. One of the men in charge of the tender had a great ugly seam across his face. Joyce remembered having seen him before, in just the same attitude, with a coil of rope in his hand. Had he not awakened from a minute’s dream that had covered an illusory four years of his life? He looked around, almost expecting to see Noakes, in his ridiculous curly silk hat and old frieze overcoat.