Chapter Eight.Dare sat on the stoep of his hotel in Johannesburg reading a letter from Mrs Carruthers, who kept up a spasmodic correspondence with him at his own urgent request; her letters, he explained, gave him a sense of living still in the world. One clause in this letter interested him particularly; it was a clause which referred to Pamela.“I have just returned,” the writer stated, “from the christening of the Arnott baby,—a querulous man-child whom I have undertaken to keep uncontaminated from the wiles of the devil,—a preposterous thing to ask one human being to do for another. Being a childless woman myself, I am more afraid of my godson than of the devil, the latter being so conveniently unsubstantial. Whether it is the added cares of maternity, or due to the fact that the connubial bliss I once dilated upon to you is not so assertive as it was a year ago, your sweet-faced divinity is decidedly less prepossessing in appearance. I would never have believed that a year could age a woman as it has aged Pamela Arnott. Besides looking older, she is considerably less gay. But she is a dear woman, all the same.”The writer passed on to other matters, and mentioned that she was glad there was a chance of seeing him shortly. She hoped while he was in Cape Town he would spare them a few days.Dare folded the letter and placed it in his pocket-book; then he sat back in his chair and fell to thinking about Pamela. Why, he wondered, should a year make such a difference in a woman’s appearance that to her intimate friends who saw her continually this change should be so apparent? And what had caused the diminution in the married happiness which, little as he had seen of the Arnott’s home life, he too had been conscious of? Pamela had radiated happiness on the evening he first met her.He recalled Mrs Carruthers’ words, uttered carelessly to him that night in the garden, when she had alluded to the Arnotts’ marriage as an instance of perennial courtship, and had added, with a touch of sarcasm not altogether innocent of malice: “But, after all, five years is but a step of the journey.”That bore out what more than one married man had told him, that it was the silliest mistake man or woman ever made to imagine that because one is violently in love for a period that state of erotic bliss is going to endure.“It’s beyond the bounds of possibility,” one man had said to him recently in palliation of his own unfaithfulness. “And it’s a good thing all round for the race that we are as we are.”But Dare had a conviction that, given the right woman, his love would endure to the end. The right woman for him, he believed, was Pamela; and she was beyond his reach.Feeling as he did about Pamela, the wisest course for him to pursue was to keep out of her way. He realised this fully; at the same time he desired very earnestly to see her. Since she was ignorant of his feeling in regard to her, he argued, there could be no harm in their meeting; he had sufficient self-control to be able to converse with a woman without allowing her to suspect that he was interested in her in any marked degree. Indeed, he would have found his interest difficult to explain. To assert that he had fallen in love at sight with the face of a girl he had seen several years ago and never spoken to until he met her later as a married woman, would have lain him open to ridicule; it would have strained the credulity, he felt, of Pamela herself. He had heard of cases of love at first sight, but he had not believed in them prior to his own experience. It had always seemed to him that love could be begotten only of some quality of deep attraction in the personality of the individual. Certainly had he not found those attractive qualities in Pamela when eventually he met her, the romance he had cherished for five years would have gone the way of dreams; but his meeting with her kindled afresh the fires of his sleeping fancy; and the romance, which had promised to remain only a sentimental memory, was quickened into life. What he had loved in the girl’s face, he loved again in her personality. He was quite satisfied that Pamela was as sweet as she looked; and he determined to play the unobtrusive part of the silent male friend to this woman who was his ideal. He would not deny himself the pleasure of her society merely because he loved her. Never from look or word of his should she guess his secret. But if destiny ever offered him the chance of serving her, he would count himself well rewarded for his undeclared devotion.The news concerning Pamela in Mrs Carruthers’ letter, quite as much as his own feelings, made him feverishly anxious to see her again. Business was taking him to Cape Town; he decided that when he was through with the business he would put in a little time on his own account; and Mrs Carruthers’ invitation fitted in with his plans.He wrote her a cordial, but guarded, letter, in which he told her that he would take her at her word and bring himself and his suit case along and enjoy himself for a week. He followed shortly after the despatch of his letter.Once arrived in Cape Town, the doubtful wisdom of his action in laying himself open to the direct influence of Pamela’s personality struck him forcibly for the first time. He stood to lose more than he was ever likely to gain in thus venturing so close to the flame. He was likely to emerge from the conflict scarred pretty badly, he told himself. But no amount of prudent reasoning could overcome his desire to see her again; that desire was paramount; it subdued every argument he brought forward against it. It was not wise, he allowed. But was a man in love ever wise?He had resolved when he first met Pamela Arnott, and discovered in his friend’s wife the girl he had seen years before, to go out of her life finally; he had felt that it would not be safe to continue an acquaintance which could only be disturbing to himself, if indeed it developed no further inconvenience; but that suggestion in Mrs Carruthers’ letter that everything was not as formerly in the conditions of Pamela’s life shook this resolution, unsettled him. He wanted to judge for himself. If, as Mrs Carruthers had seemed to insinuate, Pamela was no longer happy in her marriage, then perhaps...He broke off in his reverie, frowning at his own unbidden thoughts. If there was a grain of truth in that disquieting statement, it was very plain to him that the position of sympathiser was the last thing for him to take upon himself. The platonic, useful friend was very well in theory, but it didn’t answer put into practice as a rule, particularly in the case of the disappointed wife fretting at the conditions of her lot.Dare had arrived at Mrs Carruthers to find her out, but he was sufficiently at home in that house to be equal to settling himself in, even to the ordering of refreshment, which, in the form of a whisky and soda, was brought to him on the stoep. Mrs Carruthers returned to find him reading the English papers, and quietly smoking.“You look as though you had been sitting there for years,” she remarked, as she came up the steps. “When did you get here?”He came forward with alacrity and took her extended hands. Each displayed unaffected pleasure in the other.“Oh, about an hour ago! How well you look!”“I’ve been enjoying myself. I suppose that’s why... Dickie’s late.”She seated herself and began drawing off her gloves. Dare returned to his former chair.“Tell me how you have contrived to get so much pleasurable excitement out of the afternoon,” he said.“Oh, bridging,” she said,—“and I won—enormously. But never mind me. What I want to know is, what has abruptly shaken your obduracy? You have persistently refused my pressing invitations for over a year,—and now suddenly you arrive.”He sat forward and regarded her inquiring face with a faintly amused smile. Ever since he had known her she had subjected him to this kind of suggestive inquiry. She was always reading a motive in his simplest act.“Your last invitation arrived at a moment when it was possible, as well as agreeable, to accept it,” he explained. “I couldn’t get away before.”“Umph!” she returned, and laughed. “I thought perhaps—But no matter. Your sex always suits its own convenience. Now tell me exactly what you want to do while you are here, and I’ll lay myself out to be obliging. That’s a prerogative of my sex, and I’ve not noticed that you ever attempt to check it.”“Why should one discourage anything so commendable?” he asked.“That’s no answer to my question,” she observed.“No,” he returned. “But, you see, the question scarcely needs answering from my point of view. What should I want to do, but enjoy your society, and loaf delightfully?”“Never at a loss,” she said, and smiled at him approvingly. “I hope your ideas of loafing will fit in with my evening’s arrangement I have asked the Arnotts and three others in to make a couple of tables for bridge. I had a feeling at the back of my mind that you would wish to see something of your sweet-faced Madonna during your stay, so I wasted no time. Considering that I am three parts in love with you myself, that is rather magnanimous on my side.”“In any one else it might be,” he returned; “but you were made like that. Besides, you are fully assured that no one on earth could shake my intense admiration for yourself. I wonder why you married Dick?” he added speculatively. “All the nicest women are married.”“I wasn’t married when I met you first,” she reminded him. “The truth of the matter is, you, like the majority of middle-aged bachelors, only appreciate the fruit which grows beyond your reach.”“Middle-aged!” he protested. “Come now! I’m only thirty-five.”“And seventy is the limit the Psalmist gives us. You have wasted your time, my friend.”“Yes,” he agreed abruptly, and sat a little straighten, “I’ll have to go the pace,” he said, “in order to catch up.”“You can make the most of the years that are left you,” Mrs Carruthers replied crushingly, “but you can never catch up. If people realised that in their youth, they wouldn’t waste their time as they do.”“I wish you wouldn’t be so depressing,” he expostulated.“I’m not I’m merely lamenting your lost opportunities. I’m for early marriages, and big families, and bother the cost.”“That’s all very fine. But big families can’t be launched indiscriminately, and flung on the State.”“People are so prudent nowadays,” she said; “they miss a lot of happiness. A jolly struggle is preferable to discreet luxury, with a will at the finish, leaving everything to the stranger or organised charities. I was one of fourteen, and there wasn’t a jollier or a poorer home in the Colony.”She laughed, and thrust forward a small, misshapen foot.“That comes of having to wear my elder sister’s outgrown shoes. But if I had had my footgear made for me, my feet would probably have been flat and large; and the sight of an incipient bunion brings back glorious memories of childhood’s makeshifts, and the joy of trying on coveted and outgrown clothes. We weren’t proud as children. And the bread and butter and onions we ate for supper tasted lots better than the eight-o’clock dinner I take now with Dickie.”She sighed deeply, and became suddenly grave.“All the rest have big families themselves,” she added wistfully. “I’m just out of it.”“Children are mixed blessings,” he said consolingly.“They aren’t,” she asserted. “They give one the satisfied feeling of carrying on. When we haven’t children, we just finish with our own little lives.” She sat up and smiled at him with cheerful encouragement. “I have invited a girl for you this evening. She is young and fresh and—”“Oh, don’t!” he interposed hastily.“She is quite nice to look at,” Mrs Carruthers resumed, not heeding his interruption. “She comes of good stock, and is amiable, and not too clever. She dances well, and plays games well, and is thoroughly domesticated,—an orphan, poor,—the eldest of a family of seven.”“Ye gods!” he murmured. “Why didn’t you invite the other six?”“They aren’t out,” replied Mrs Carruthers.He repressed a desire to smile.“It is my particular wish that you pay her special attention,” she continued calmly, “with a view to an early and suitable marriage. Now don’t make up your mind against it straightway. It will be an admirable thing for you, and I’ve set my heart on it.”He laughed outright.“Oh, you woman!” he said. “You inveterate matchmaker! If your girl is all you profess, why can’t you find her some one younger and more human? As my wife, she would have the devil of a time—you know she would.”“I think you are rather severe in your judgment of yourself,” she returned imperturbably. “You are quite agreeable. And you could provide handsomely for a woman, and—other things.”“Oh, yes; fourteen of them, if necessary,” he returned sarcastically. “But I don’t want them, really. I should feel horribly embarrassed with them.”“Oh, you would get over that!” she answered easily. “You mustn’t think so much of yourself.”He got up and passed round to the back of her chair and laid his two hands on her shoulders.“You scheming little fiend!” he said. “You have had this in your mind all along when you have asked me repeatedly to come down.”“I have always wanted you to marry,” she allowed, smiling up at him. “You will make a delightful husband.”“Well, I’m not going to marry,” he said. “If you air any more of your matrimonial plans, I’ll make love to you. I’ll wreck your home.”“You couldn’t,” she said. “Dickie would never trouble to be jealous of any one.” She put up her two hands and laid them upon his where they rested upon her shoulders. “You will be nice to her, George, won’t you?” she said. “You’ll like her immensely, if only you let yourself.”“Of course I shall,” he replied, and smiled grimly. “I like every Eve’s daughter of you, worse luck!”
Dare sat on the stoep of his hotel in Johannesburg reading a letter from Mrs Carruthers, who kept up a spasmodic correspondence with him at his own urgent request; her letters, he explained, gave him a sense of living still in the world. One clause in this letter interested him particularly; it was a clause which referred to Pamela.
“I have just returned,” the writer stated, “from the christening of the Arnott baby,—a querulous man-child whom I have undertaken to keep uncontaminated from the wiles of the devil,—a preposterous thing to ask one human being to do for another. Being a childless woman myself, I am more afraid of my godson than of the devil, the latter being so conveniently unsubstantial. Whether it is the added cares of maternity, or due to the fact that the connubial bliss I once dilated upon to you is not so assertive as it was a year ago, your sweet-faced divinity is decidedly less prepossessing in appearance. I would never have believed that a year could age a woman as it has aged Pamela Arnott. Besides looking older, she is considerably less gay. But she is a dear woman, all the same.”
The writer passed on to other matters, and mentioned that she was glad there was a chance of seeing him shortly. She hoped while he was in Cape Town he would spare them a few days.
Dare folded the letter and placed it in his pocket-book; then he sat back in his chair and fell to thinking about Pamela. Why, he wondered, should a year make such a difference in a woman’s appearance that to her intimate friends who saw her continually this change should be so apparent? And what had caused the diminution in the married happiness which, little as he had seen of the Arnott’s home life, he too had been conscious of? Pamela had radiated happiness on the evening he first met her.
He recalled Mrs Carruthers’ words, uttered carelessly to him that night in the garden, when she had alluded to the Arnotts’ marriage as an instance of perennial courtship, and had added, with a touch of sarcasm not altogether innocent of malice: “But, after all, five years is but a step of the journey.”
That bore out what more than one married man had told him, that it was the silliest mistake man or woman ever made to imagine that because one is violently in love for a period that state of erotic bliss is going to endure.
“It’s beyond the bounds of possibility,” one man had said to him recently in palliation of his own unfaithfulness. “And it’s a good thing all round for the race that we are as we are.”
But Dare had a conviction that, given the right woman, his love would endure to the end. The right woman for him, he believed, was Pamela; and she was beyond his reach.
Feeling as he did about Pamela, the wisest course for him to pursue was to keep out of her way. He realised this fully; at the same time he desired very earnestly to see her. Since she was ignorant of his feeling in regard to her, he argued, there could be no harm in their meeting; he had sufficient self-control to be able to converse with a woman without allowing her to suspect that he was interested in her in any marked degree. Indeed, he would have found his interest difficult to explain. To assert that he had fallen in love at sight with the face of a girl he had seen several years ago and never spoken to until he met her later as a married woman, would have lain him open to ridicule; it would have strained the credulity, he felt, of Pamela herself. He had heard of cases of love at first sight, but he had not believed in them prior to his own experience. It had always seemed to him that love could be begotten only of some quality of deep attraction in the personality of the individual. Certainly had he not found those attractive qualities in Pamela when eventually he met her, the romance he had cherished for five years would have gone the way of dreams; but his meeting with her kindled afresh the fires of his sleeping fancy; and the romance, which had promised to remain only a sentimental memory, was quickened into life. What he had loved in the girl’s face, he loved again in her personality. He was quite satisfied that Pamela was as sweet as she looked; and he determined to play the unobtrusive part of the silent male friend to this woman who was his ideal. He would not deny himself the pleasure of her society merely because he loved her. Never from look or word of his should she guess his secret. But if destiny ever offered him the chance of serving her, he would count himself well rewarded for his undeclared devotion.
The news concerning Pamela in Mrs Carruthers’ letter, quite as much as his own feelings, made him feverishly anxious to see her again. Business was taking him to Cape Town; he decided that when he was through with the business he would put in a little time on his own account; and Mrs Carruthers’ invitation fitted in with his plans.
He wrote her a cordial, but guarded, letter, in which he told her that he would take her at her word and bring himself and his suit case along and enjoy himself for a week. He followed shortly after the despatch of his letter.
Once arrived in Cape Town, the doubtful wisdom of his action in laying himself open to the direct influence of Pamela’s personality struck him forcibly for the first time. He stood to lose more than he was ever likely to gain in thus venturing so close to the flame. He was likely to emerge from the conflict scarred pretty badly, he told himself. But no amount of prudent reasoning could overcome his desire to see her again; that desire was paramount; it subdued every argument he brought forward against it. It was not wise, he allowed. But was a man in love ever wise?
He had resolved when he first met Pamela Arnott, and discovered in his friend’s wife the girl he had seen years before, to go out of her life finally; he had felt that it would not be safe to continue an acquaintance which could only be disturbing to himself, if indeed it developed no further inconvenience; but that suggestion in Mrs Carruthers’ letter that everything was not as formerly in the conditions of Pamela’s life shook this resolution, unsettled him. He wanted to judge for himself. If, as Mrs Carruthers had seemed to insinuate, Pamela was no longer happy in her marriage, then perhaps...
He broke off in his reverie, frowning at his own unbidden thoughts. If there was a grain of truth in that disquieting statement, it was very plain to him that the position of sympathiser was the last thing for him to take upon himself. The platonic, useful friend was very well in theory, but it didn’t answer put into practice as a rule, particularly in the case of the disappointed wife fretting at the conditions of her lot.
Dare had arrived at Mrs Carruthers to find her out, but he was sufficiently at home in that house to be equal to settling himself in, even to the ordering of refreshment, which, in the form of a whisky and soda, was brought to him on the stoep. Mrs Carruthers returned to find him reading the English papers, and quietly smoking.
“You look as though you had been sitting there for years,” she remarked, as she came up the steps. “When did you get here?”
He came forward with alacrity and took her extended hands. Each displayed unaffected pleasure in the other.
“Oh, about an hour ago! How well you look!”
“I’ve been enjoying myself. I suppose that’s why... Dickie’s late.”
She seated herself and began drawing off her gloves. Dare returned to his former chair.
“Tell me how you have contrived to get so much pleasurable excitement out of the afternoon,” he said.
“Oh, bridging,” she said,—“and I won—enormously. But never mind me. What I want to know is, what has abruptly shaken your obduracy? You have persistently refused my pressing invitations for over a year,—and now suddenly you arrive.”
He sat forward and regarded her inquiring face with a faintly amused smile. Ever since he had known her she had subjected him to this kind of suggestive inquiry. She was always reading a motive in his simplest act.
“Your last invitation arrived at a moment when it was possible, as well as agreeable, to accept it,” he explained. “I couldn’t get away before.”
“Umph!” she returned, and laughed. “I thought perhaps—But no matter. Your sex always suits its own convenience. Now tell me exactly what you want to do while you are here, and I’ll lay myself out to be obliging. That’s a prerogative of my sex, and I’ve not noticed that you ever attempt to check it.”
“Why should one discourage anything so commendable?” he asked.
“That’s no answer to my question,” she observed.
“No,” he returned. “But, you see, the question scarcely needs answering from my point of view. What should I want to do, but enjoy your society, and loaf delightfully?”
“Never at a loss,” she said, and smiled at him approvingly. “I hope your ideas of loafing will fit in with my evening’s arrangement I have asked the Arnotts and three others in to make a couple of tables for bridge. I had a feeling at the back of my mind that you would wish to see something of your sweet-faced Madonna during your stay, so I wasted no time. Considering that I am three parts in love with you myself, that is rather magnanimous on my side.”
“In any one else it might be,” he returned; “but you were made like that. Besides, you are fully assured that no one on earth could shake my intense admiration for yourself. I wonder why you married Dick?” he added speculatively. “All the nicest women are married.”
“I wasn’t married when I met you first,” she reminded him. “The truth of the matter is, you, like the majority of middle-aged bachelors, only appreciate the fruit which grows beyond your reach.”
“Middle-aged!” he protested. “Come now! I’m only thirty-five.”
“And seventy is the limit the Psalmist gives us. You have wasted your time, my friend.”
“Yes,” he agreed abruptly, and sat a little straighten, “I’ll have to go the pace,” he said, “in order to catch up.”
“You can make the most of the years that are left you,” Mrs Carruthers replied crushingly, “but you can never catch up. If people realised that in their youth, they wouldn’t waste their time as they do.”
“I wish you wouldn’t be so depressing,” he expostulated.
“I’m not I’m merely lamenting your lost opportunities. I’m for early marriages, and big families, and bother the cost.”
“That’s all very fine. But big families can’t be launched indiscriminately, and flung on the State.”
“People are so prudent nowadays,” she said; “they miss a lot of happiness. A jolly struggle is preferable to discreet luxury, with a will at the finish, leaving everything to the stranger or organised charities. I was one of fourteen, and there wasn’t a jollier or a poorer home in the Colony.”
She laughed, and thrust forward a small, misshapen foot.
“That comes of having to wear my elder sister’s outgrown shoes. But if I had had my footgear made for me, my feet would probably have been flat and large; and the sight of an incipient bunion brings back glorious memories of childhood’s makeshifts, and the joy of trying on coveted and outgrown clothes. We weren’t proud as children. And the bread and butter and onions we ate for supper tasted lots better than the eight-o’clock dinner I take now with Dickie.”
She sighed deeply, and became suddenly grave.
“All the rest have big families themselves,” she added wistfully. “I’m just out of it.”
“Children are mixed blessings,” he said consolingly.
“They aren’t,” she asserted. “They give one the satisfied feeling of carrying on. When we haven’t children, we just finish with our own little lives.” She sat up and smiled at him with cheerful encouragement. “I have invited a girl for you this evening. She is young and fresh and—”
“Oh, don’t!” he interposed hastily.
“She is quite nice to look at,” Mrs Carruthers resumed, not heeding his interruption. “She comes of good stock, and is amiable, and not too clever. She dances well, and plays games well, and is thoroughly domesticated,—an orphan, poor,—the eldest of a family of seven.”
“Ye gods!” he murmured. “Why didn’t you invite the other six?”
“They aren’t out,” replied Mrs Carruthers.
He repressed a desire to smile.
“It is my particular wish that you pay her special attention,” she continued calmly, “with a view to an early and suitable marriage. Now don’t make up your mind against it straightway. It will be an admirable thing for you, and I’ve set my heart on it.”
He laughed outright.
“Oh, you woman!” he said. “You inveterate matchmaker! If your girl is all you profess, why can’t you find her some one younger and more human? As my wife, she would have the devil of a time—you know she would.”
“I think you are rather severe in your judgment of yourself,” she returned imperturbably. “You are quite agreeable. And you could provide handsomely for a woman, and—other things.”
“Oh, yes; fourteen of them, if necessary,” he returned sarcastically. “But I don’t want them, really. I should feel horribly embarrassed with them.”
“Oh, you would get over that!” she answered easily. “You mustn’t think so much of yourself.”
He got up and passed round to the back of her chair and laid his two hands on her shoulders.
“You scheming little fiend!” he said. “You have had this in your mind all along when you have asked me repeatedly to come down.”
“I have always wanted you to marry,” she allowed, smiling up at him. “You will make a delightful husband.”
“Well, I’m not going to marry,” he said. “If you air any more of your matrimonial plans, I’ll make love to you. I’ll wreck your home.”
“You couldn’t,” she said. “Dickie would never trouble to be jealous of any one.” She put up her two hands and laid them upon his where they rested upon her shoulders. “You will be nice to her, George, won’t you?” she said. “You’ll like her immensely, if only you let yourself.”
“Of course I shall,” he replied, and smiled grimly. “I like every Eve’s daughter of you, worse luck!”
Chapter Nine.Change in a person’s appearance when it is due to mental conditions varies according to mood and outside influences. When Dare was face to face with Pamela Arnott he decided that Mrs Carruthers had exaggerated the want of look about which she had written: there was nothing to excite sympathy, or even comment, in the faintly flushed, pleasantly excited face which turned eagerly to greet him, as, on entering the Carruthers’ drawing-room, Pamela’s eyes singled him out with a smiling welcome in their blue depths.When he had talked with her a little while he did notice that she looked older; the girlishness, with its expression of frank gaiety, had faded during the past eighteen months.There was a more perceptible change he considered in Arnott himself. The man had coarsened, in manner as much as appearance. He was more noisy and assertive, and inclined to be offhand when addressing his wife. Dare hated him for that,—hated him for his lack of courtesy, and the absence of those small but significant attentions which had formerly been so noticeable in his bearing towards her. He seldom looked at her now, never with the old tender, almost absurdly chivalrous regard which one associates more with the lover than with the husband of some years’ standing. Dare decided that he had put off the lover finally; that was about what it amounted to. But that, after all, cannot be reckoned a calamity: men do not remain always obviously their wives’ lovers.“So glad to see you again,” murmured Pamela, and her smile seemed to demand that he should recall the length of the friendship he had once insisted upon, with its consequent intimacy. “I began to think you were becoming a mere memory.”“So long as you didn’t forget altogether!” he said, and looked earnestly into her eyes. “But I didn’t think you would.”“One doesn’t forget—pleasant things,” she returned. “Besides, it is only a little over a year and a half since we met, isn’t it?”“A long year and a half ago,” he replied enigmatically.Pamela acquiesced with unusual gravity. His speech broke in upon her happy mood, disturbing the careless tenor of her thoughts. A long year and a half! ... Truly it had been a long year and a half for her. So much had happened in the time: her whole life was altered with the changing of the months.“It has been a long year and a half,” she replied abstractedly, not thinking of the man at her side, nor of the interpretation he might put upon her words, upon the weary discontent of her tones: she thought only of the crowded events of the past eighteen months,—of the pain, the sickening disillusion, the constant humiliation. In certain circumstances a year and a half may seem a lifetime.He scrutinised her intently. There was something, after all, in Mrs Carruthers’ report. The discontent in her voice, the sadness of her face, arrested his attention. Had it been merely discontent, it would have failed to move him particularly, but her look of sadness roused his deepest sympathy. He rebelled at the thought that any sorrow should touch, should perhaps spoil, her life. She lifted her glance to his swiftly, on her guard, he fancied, against himself.“I have had rather a dull time,” she added, assuming a lighter manner.“Dulness is depressing,” he allowed. “I have more experience of it than you, I expect. You’ve not been my way yet?”“No,” she returned slowly. “I don’t go from home much. You see, there are the children.”“True!” he said, and kept the conversation in the safer channel into which she had directed it. “And how is my little friend?”“Oh, growing big—and naughty! I am beginning to think of schoolroom discipline for her.”“Oh, lord!” he said. “That baby! Let her run wild for a bit longer.”“You haven’t to live with her,” she said. “But I only mean a nursery governess. She is getting beyond the control of coloured nurses. I am hoping I shall get Blanche Maitland. She is so nice with children.”“Blanche... Oh, I know,” he said.His glance followed hers across the room to where the girl Mrs Carruthers was bent on his marrying was talking with their host. So Pamela’s domestic arrangements were to clash with his. He smiled at the fancy. Blanche Maitland was a tall girl, with a noticeably good figure, a clear skin, and fine, dark, slumbrous eyes. Her face in repose was calm and unemotional and difficult to read; when she smiled it lighted wonderfully. She did not smile readily, but she looked really handsome and delightfully shy when surprised into laughter. She was laughing at the moment Dare looked at her: he did not immediately remove his gaze.“She is handsome,” he observed.“Is she?” Pamela regarded the subject of their talk with renewed interest. “I never thought her that—but I suppose she is.”“She is,” he affirmed.“It isn’t a necessary qualification in a governess,” she said.“It would be, if I were engaging one,” he returned. “I should make that and an agreeable voice the principal requirements. Personally, I am interested in good-looking faces. And plain people haven’t a monopoly of the virtues, you know.”“No,” she answered. “But they occasionally more than make up the deficit in looks in agreeable qualities.”“The wise make the most of what they have,” he replied. “And sometimes nature is lavish and adds kindliness and a sweet disposition to physical perfection... May I come and see you to-morrow?” he asked somewhat abruptly.“Do. Come and dine—informally. I’ll ask the Carruthers.”He looked slightly dissatisfied.“But I want you all to myself,” he objected. “I’m a selfish fellow; I hate sharing. I prefer rather to see my friends singly than in batches. And Carruthers always wants to play bridge. One can’t talk. He’s fussing about the tables already. Let me come and look at the mountain with you, and gossip, and drink tea. We don’t meet very often.”Pamela, if she felt a little surprised, was not displeased at his cool readjustment of her invitation. She returned his steady gaze with a faint uplift of her brows and the hint of a smile in her eyes.“If you really prefer that, of course you shall,” she said.“I’ve only a week,” he said. “I want to make the most of it.”“And when the week is up?”“I return to my mole-like habits,” he replied.“And you haven’t followed my advice?” she said.“What was that?” he asked... “Oh! I remember. Mrs Carruthers is always giving me the same. No; I don’t think there is much chance of my doing that.”Carruthers sauntered towards them with every intention, Dare realised, of ending the tête-à-tête.“You play at my table, Mrs Arnott,” he said. He glanced at Dare. “The wife has put you at the no-stakes table,” he added, grinning. “She thinks it is good for your morals to play for love on occasions.”Dare regarded the speaker coolly.“That sounds like your joke, rather than Mrs Carruthers’,” he remarked; “it’s so feeble.”Carruthers chuckled.“Ask her,” he returned.Pamela looked back at Dare over her shoulder as she moved away beside her host.“It’s quite the best game, really,” she said, and smiled at him.“I admit it,” he answered quietly, “when one is allowed to choose one’s partner.”Bridge without stakes was not much of a game, in Dare’s opinion; but he was obliged to acknowledge that Blanche Maitland played remarkably well. He had never seen a girl play with such skill; and she held good cards. They were partners. This might have been due to chance, since they cut; but he had a suspicion that Mrs Carruthers manipulated the cards. She was clever enough, and deep enough, to do it, he reflected.He did his best to oblige her in the matter of being agreeable; but, as he complained to her later, when discussing the evening after the guests had left, had he been the vainest of men he could not have flattered himself that he had created a favourable impression in the quarter in which she insisted he should exert his powers of fascination.“She thought me a stick,” he said. “I’m not at all comfortably assured in my mind that she didn’t think me a fool. I had an exhausting time racking my brain for agreeable conversation. She wouldn’t help me. It isn’t a ha’p’orth of use, my dear, trying to interest me in these sphinx-like young women with no small talk. You said she wasn’t clever.”“She isn’t.”“You are mistaken. No one who isn’t clever dare be so deadly dull. She is profound. I don’t think I like your selection of a wife.”“You can’t judge on a first acquaintance like that,” she insisted.“There you are entirely out. All my loves have been at first sight.”“Then why haven’t you married one of them?”“Because they have all been provided with husbands,” he answered. “When it is a matter of transgressing the moral law, one naturally hesitates.”“You seem singularly unfortunate,” Mrs Carruthers observed sarcastically. “I believe you have only been in love once in your life. You are true to that first love still.”“And who is that?” he inquired, looking down at her with mild curiosity in his eyes.“George Dare,” she answered.He laughed.“Poor devil!” he remarked. “If I didn’t show him some affection, who would? Besides, it’s a proof that there are lovable qualities in him. If a man can’t tolerate himself, he must be a fairly bad egg.”“You are not justified in making a virtue of egoism,” she argued. “And you ought to marry. It’s a duty you owe the State... Men are so selfish!”“Oh, come!” he remonstrated. “One can’t place all the big questions of life on such a brutally practical basis. There’s the human side to be considered. Your argument lowers the beautiful to a mere matter of essentials. There is a spiritual element in marriage, after all.”Mrs Carruthers turned a frankly wondering, inquisitive gaze upon him, with the disconcerting observation:“If you were not in love, you wouldn’t talk in that exalted strain. It’s unlike you.”“I didn’t know I was such a material beast,” he retorted.His eyes met hers for a second or so, and then, to her increasing amazement, avoided her gaze. He thrust his hands in his pockets and looked everywhere save at this woman whom he liked immensely, but whom he hoped to keep comfortably outside his confidence. He was afraid of Mrs Carruthers’ powers of divination. When a woman takes an affectionate interest in a man, she can become an embarrassment as much as a pleasure.“Youarein love!” she cried triumphantly. “It’s no use... Own up that I’m right.”“I believe that I have already admitted to you that it is a state which frequently overtakes me,” he replied.But his manner, despite its banter, lacked assurance. He felt that she was not in the least deceived.“And you never told me!” she said reproachfully.“There is nothing to tell. My love affairs never lead anywhere. Besides, it’s such an old story.”“Old!” she echoed.He smiled at the indignant incredulity in her voice.“It’s running Jacob’s romance pretty close now,” he said.“You are trying to put me off the scent,” she declared,—“if there is any scent. You won’t persuade me that you have been in love for seven years, and that I knew nothing about it.”“Six years and nearly nine months, to be exact,” he answered.“And who, may I ask, was fortunate enough to win your unswerving devotion six years and nine months ago?” she demanded, with fine sarcasm.“She hadn’t a personality for me,” he replied. “I fell in love with a face.”His listener eyed him derisively.“She hadn’t any body, I suppose?” she said.“Oh, yes, I believe so. The body was there, all right. But if it had been misshapen, or even, as you suggest, non-existent, that wouldn’t have made the slightest difference to my affections.”“Oh, don’t try to humbug me!” Mrs Carruthers exclaimed. “You can’t convince me, after all you have said, that you are in love with nothing more substantial than a face. Where is the girl now?”“She disappeared,” he answered vaguely. “I took the trouble to inquire, believe me. They told me she had married.”“That disposes of her,” Mrs Carruthers responded, with that touch of finality which convention brings to bear upon romance that can have no legitimate ending. “It is not decent of you to talk as though you were in love with her still. That’s all finished, anyhow.”“One cannot regulate one’s feelings,” he protested, “to satisfy a silly prejudice like that.”“But it’s not fair to the girl,” she urged.“Good lord!” he ejaculated. “The girl doesn’t know... How should she? Didn’t I tell you that I fell in love with a face?—Its owner was a stranger to me. I intended to effect an introduction; but some fellow got ahead of me, and carried her off.”“Oh!” said Mrs Carruthers, manifestly relieved.“A stranger! Then she doesn’t count. You have simply been wearying me with your nonsense.”“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought you were genuinely interested. When you are bored you shouldn’t appear so eager for details. In a desire to be obliging one is apt to become prosy.”Carruthers entered the room at the moment with a syphon of soda and glasses. Dare eyed the syphon discontentedly.“I hope you are for offering me something more heartening than that,” he remarked. “Your wife has reduced me to a state bordering on nervous collapse. She is starting a matrimonial agency. I wish you would bear me out in the lie that I’ve got a wife somewhere. I fancy she thinks it is not respectable to be unmarried.”“The whisky is on the table behind you,” returned Carruthers, unmoved. “As for bearing you out in the lie, how do I know it is one? It isn’t to be credited that every man who poses as a bachelor is single.”“If you are going to talk in that strain,” Mrs Carruthers observed, “I’m going to bed. It is past two.”She paused beside her husband, and pointed at Dare with a gesture that conveyed a mixture of derision and tolerant amusement and a certain affectionate malice.“He has been treating me to a resuscitation of his dead and gone love affairs,” she explained, “because I am desirous of interesting him in Blanche Maitland.”“Blanche Maitland! Why not?” quoth Carruthers, squirting soda-water into a glass. “Devilish fine girl. What!”Dare held the door open for Mrs Carruthers.“You’ve entrusted it to quite capable hands, you see,” he said. “The worst of it is, old Dick is so hopelessly frank. That is exactly how a man would describe her, and that is exactly how I wouldn’t choose to have my wife described. You’ll have to try again, Connie.”She placed her hand affectionately on his sleeve.“You are rather a dear, George,” she said softly, and passed out, leaving the astonished man to close the door behind her.It took a clever woman to accept defeat gracefully, he reflected.
Change in a person’s appearance when it is due to mental conditions varies according to mood and outside influences. When Dare was face to face with Pamela Arnott he decided that Mrs Carruthers had exaggerated the want of look about which she had written: there was nothing to excite sympathy, or even comment, in the faintly flushed, pleasantly excited face which turned eagerly to greet him, as, on entering the Carruthers’ drawing-room, Pamela’s eyes singled him out with a smiling welcome in their blue depths.
When he had talked with her a little while he did notice that she looked older; the girlishness, with its expression of frank gaiety, had faded during the past eighteen months.
There was a more perceptible change he considered in Arnott himself. The man had coarsened, in manner as much as appearance. He was more noisy and assertive, and inclined to be offhand when addressing his wife. Dare hated him for that,—hated him for his lack of courtesy, and the absence of those small but significant attentions which had formerly been so noticeable in his bearing towards her. He seldom looked at her now, never with the old tender, almost absurdly chivalrous regard which one associates more with the lover than with the husband of some years’ standing. Dare decided that he had put off the lover finally; that was about what it amounted to. But that, after all, cannot be reckoned a calamity: men do not remain always obviously their wives’ lovers.
“So glad to see you again,” murmured Pamela, and her smile seemed to demand that he should recall the length of the friendship he had once insisted upon, with its consequent intimacy. “I began to think you were becoming a mere memory.”
“So long as you didn’t forget altogether!” he said, and looked earnestly into her eyes. “But I didn’t think you would.”
“One doesn’t forget—pleasant things,” she returned. “Besides, it is only a little over a year and a half since we met, isn’t it?”
“A long year and a half ago,” he replied enigmatically.
Pamela acquiesced with unusual gravity. His speech broke in upon her happy mood, disturbing the careless tenor of her thoughts. A long year and a half! ... Truly it had been a long year and a half for her. So much had happened in the time: her whole life was altered with the changing of the months.
“It has been a long year and a half,” she replied abstractedly, not thinking of the man at her side, nor of the interpretation he might put upon her words, upon the weary discontent of her tones: she thought only of the crowded events of the past eighteen months,—of the pain, the sickening disillusion, the constant humiliation. In certain circumstances a year and a half may seem a lifetime.
He scrutinised her intently. There was something, after all, in Mrs Carruthers’ report. The discontent in her voice, the sadness of her face, arrested his attention. Had it been merely discontent, it would have failed to move him particularly, but her look of sadness roused his deepest sympathy. He rebelled at the thought that any sorrow should touch, should perhaps spoil, her life. She lifted her glance to his swiftly, on her guard, he fancied, against himself.
“I have had rather a dull time,” she added, assuming a lighter manner.
“Dulness is depressing,” he allowed. “I have more experience of it than you, I expect. You’ve not been my way yet?”
“No,” she returned slowly. “I don’t go from home much. You see, there are the children.”
“True!” he said, and kept the conversation in the safer channel into which she had directed it. “And how is my little friend?”
“Oh, growing big—and naughty! I am beginning to think of schoolroom discipline for her.”
“Oh, lord!” he said. “That baby! Let her run wild for a bit longer.”
“You haven’t to live with her,” she said. “But I only mean a nursery governess. She is getting beyond the control of coloured nurses. I am hoping I shall get Blanche Maitland. She is so nice with children.”
“Blanche... Oh, I know,” he said.
His glance followed hers across the room to where the girl Mrs Carruthers was bent on his marrying was talking with their host. So Pamela’s domestic arrangements were to clash with his. He smiled at the fancy. Blanche Maitland was a tall girl, with a noticeably good figure, a clear skin, and fine, dark, slumbrous eyes. Her face in repose was calm and unemotional and difficult to read; when she smiled it lighted wonderfully. She did not smile readily, but she looked really handsome and delightfully shy when surprised into laughter. She was laughing at the moment Dare looked at her: he did not immediately remove his gaze.
“She is handsome,” he observed.
“Is she?” Pamela regarded the subject of their talk with renewed interest. “I never thought her that—but I suppose she is.”
“She is,” he affirmed.
“It isn’t a necessary qualification in a governess,” she said.
“It would be, if I were engaging one,” he returned. “I should make that and an agreeable voice the principal requirements. Personally, I am interested in good-looking faces. And plain people haven’t a monopoly of the virtues, you know.”
“No,” she answered. “But they occasionally more than make up the deficit in looks in agreeable qualities.”
“The wise make the most of what they have,” he replied. “And sometimes nature is lavish and adds kindliness and a sweet disposition to physical perfection... May I come and see you to-morrow?” he asked somewhat abruptly.
“Do. Come and dine—informally. I’ll ask the Carruthers.”
He looked slightly dissatisfied.
“But I want you all to myself,” he objected. “I’m a selfish fellow; I hate sharing. I prefer rather to see my friends singly than in batches. And Carruthers always wants to play bridge. One can’t talk. He’s fussing about the tables already. Let me come and look at the mountain with you, and gossip, and drink tea. We don’t meet very often.”
Pamela, if she felt a little surprised, was not displeased at his cool readjustment of her invitation. She returned his steady gaze with a faint uplift of her brows and the hint of a smile in her eyes.
“If you really prefer that, of course you shall,” she said.
“I’ve only a week,” he said. “I want to make the most of it.”
“And when the week is up?”
“I return to my mole-like habits,” he replied.
“And you haven’t followed my advice?” she said.
“What was that?” he asked... “Oh! I remember. Mrs Carruthers is always giving me the same. No; I don’t think there is much chance of my doing that.”
Carruthers sauntered towards them with every intention, Dare realised, of ending the tête-à-tête.
“You play at my table, Mrs Arnott,” he said. He glanced at Dare. “The wife has put you at the no-stakes table,” he added, grinning. “She thinks it is good for your morals to play for love on occasions.”
Dare regarded the speaker coolly.
“That sounds like your joke, rather than Mrs Carruthers’,” he remarked; “it’s so feeble.”
Carruthers chuckled.
“Ask her,” he returned.
Pamela looked back at Dare over her shoulder as she moved away beside her host.
“It’s quite the best game, really,” she said, and smiled at him.
“I admit it,” he answered quietly, “when one is allowed to choose one’s partner.”
Bridge without stakes was not much of a game, in Dare’s opinion; but he was obliged to acknowledge that Blanche Maitland played remarkably well. He had never seen a girl play with such skill; and she held good cards. They were partners. This might have been due to chance, since they cut; but he had a suspicion that Mrs Carruthers manipulated the cards. She was clever enough, and deep enough, to do it, he reflected.
He did his best to oblige her in the matter of being agreeable; but, as he complained to her later, when discussing the evening after the guests had left, had he been the vainest of men he could not have flattered himself that he had created a favourable impression in the quarter in which she insisted he should exert his powers of fascination.
“She thought me a stick,” he said. “I’m not at all comfortably assured in my mind that she didn’t think me a fool. I had an exhausting time racking my brain for agreeable conversation. She wouldn’t help me. It isn’t a ha’p’orth of use, my dear, trying to interest me in these sphinx-like young women with no small talk. You said she wasn’t clever.”
“She isn’t.”
“You are mistaken. No one who isn’t clever dare be so deadly dull. She is profound. I don’t think I like your selection of a wife.”
“You can’t judge on a first acquaintance like that,” she insisted.
“There you are entirely out. All my loves have been at first sight.”
“Then why haven’t you married one of them?”
“Because they have all been provided with husbands,” he answered. “When it is a matter of transgressing the moral law, one naturally hesitates.”
“You seem singularly unfortunate,” Mrs Carruthers observed sarcastically. “I believe you have only been in love once in your life. You are true to that first love still.”
“And who is that?” he inquired, looking down at her with mild curiosity in his eyes.
“George Dare,” she answered.
He laughed.
“Poor devil!” he remarked. “If I didn’t show him some affection, who would? Besides, it’s a proof that there are lovable qualities in him. If a man can’t tolerate himself, he must be a fairly bad egg.”
“You are not justified in making a virtue of egoism,” she argued. “And you ought to marry. It’s a duty you owe the State... Men are so selfish!”
“Oh, come!” he remonstrated. “One can’t place all the big questions of life on such a brutally practical basis. There’s the human side to be considered. Your argument lowers the beautiful to a mere matter of essentials. There is a spiritual element in marriage, after all.”
Mrs Carruthers turned a frankly wondering, inquisitive gaze upon him, with the disconcerting observation:
“If you were not in love, you wouldn’t talk in that exalted strain. It’s unlike you.”
“I didn’t know I was such a material beast,” he retorted.
His eyes met hers for a second or so, and then, to her increasing amazement, avoided her gaze. He thrust his hands in his pockets and looked everywhere save at this woman whom he liked immensely, but whom he hoped to keep comfortably outside his confidence. He was afraid of Mrs Carruthers’ powers of divination. When a woman takes an affectionate interest in a man, she can become an embarrassment as much as a pleasure.
“Youarein love!” she cried triumphantly. “It’s no use... Own up that I’m right.”
“I believe that I have already admitted to you that it is a state which frequently overtakes me,” he replied.
But his manner, despite its banter, lacked assurance. He felt that she was not in the least deceived.
“And you never told me!” she said reproachfully.
“There is nothing to tell. My love affairs never lead anywhere. Besides, it’s such an old story.”
“Old!” she echoed.
He smiled at the indignant incredulity in her voice.
“It’s running Jacob’s romance pretty close now,” he said.
“You are trying to put me off the scent,” she declared,—“if there is any scent. You won’t persuade me that you have been in love for seven years, and that I knew nothing about it.”
“Six years and nearly nine months, to be exact,” he answered.
“And who, may I ask, was fortunate enough to win your unswerving devotion six years and nine months ago?” she demanded, with fine sarcasm.
“She hadn’t a personality for me,” he replied. “I fell in love with a face.”
His listener eyed him derisively.
“She hadn’t any body, I suppose?” she said.
“Oh, yes, I believe so. The body was there, all right. But if it had been misshapen, or even, as you suggest, non-existent, that wouldn’t have made the slightest difference to my affections.”
“Oh, don’t try to humbug me!” Mrs Carruthers exclaimed. “You can’t convince me, after all you have said, that you are in love with nothing more substantial than a face. Where is the girl now?”
“She disappeared,” he answered vaguely. “I took the trouble to inquire, believe me. They told me she had married.”
“That disposes of her,” Mrs Carruthers responded, with that touch of finality which convention brings to bear upon romance that can have no legitimate ending. “It is not decent of you to talk as though you were in love with her still. That’s all finished, anyhow.”
“One cannot regulate one’s feelings,” he protested, “to satisfy a silly prejudice like that.”
“But it’s not fair to the girl,” she urged.
“Good lord!” he ejaculated. “The girl doesn’t know... How should she? Didn’t I tell you that I fell in love with a face?—Its owner was a stranger to me. I intended to effect an introduction; but some fellow got ahead of me, and carried her off.”
“Oh!” said Mrs Carruthers, manifestly relieved.
“A stranger! Then she doesn’t count. You have simply been wearying me with your nonsense.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought you were genuinely interested. When you are bored you shouldn’t appear so eager for details. In a desire to be obliging one is apt to become prosy.”
Carruthers entered the room at the moment with a syphon of soda and glasses. Dare eyed the syphon discontentedly.
“I hope you are for offering me something more heartening than that,” he remarked. “Your wife has reduced me to a state bordering on nervous collapse. She is starting a matrimonial agency. I wish you would bear me out in the lie that I’ve got a wife somewhere. I fancy she thinks it is not respectable to be unmarried.”
“The whisky is on the table behind you,” returned Carruthers, unmoved. “As for bearing you out in the lie, how do I know it is one? It isn’t to be credited that every man who poses as a bachelor is single.”
“If you are going to talk in that strain,” Mrs Carruthers observed, “I’m going to bed. It is past two.”
She paused beside her husband, and pointed at Dare with a gesture that conveyed a mixture of derision and tolerant amusement and a certain affectionate malice.
“He has been treating me to a resuscitation of his dead and gone love affairs,” she explained, “because I am desirous of interesting him in Blanche Maitland.”
“Blanche Maitland! Why not?” quoth Carruthers, squirting soda-water into a glass. “Devilish fine girl. What!”
Dare held the door open for Mrs Carruthers.
“You’ve entrusted it to quite capable hands, you see,” he said. “The worst of it is, old Dick is so hopelessly frank. That is exactly how a man would describe her, and that is exactly how I wouldn’t choose to have my wife described. You’ll have to try again, Connie.”
She placed her hand affectionately on his sleeve.
“You are rather a dear, George,” she said softly, and passed out, leaving the astonished man to close the door behind her.
It took a clever woman to accept defeat gracefully, he reflected.
Chapter Ten.The week Dare had promised himself at Wynberg overlapped and ran into the better part of three weeks. He gave as his reason for this extension of his holiday that he was enjoying himself, and that he felt he needed the rest.“I suppose it is restful,” Mrs Carruthers remarked to him once, “mooning about the Arnott’s garden all day. Of course it is more of a change for you than using this garden... You do sleep here.”He looked at her oddly. They were standing on the stoep together. He was just about to visit next door to take Mrs Arnott a book he had promised her. He had explained all this to Mrs Carruthers rather elaborately, and had failed to meet her steady, disconcerting gaze with his usual candour. These daily explanations of his informal visits next door called for much ingenuity, and were growing increasingly embarrassing. He disliked having to account for his doings; at the same time courtesy to his hostess demanded something; he rather fancied that it demanded more than it received.“I admit the justice of that box on the ears,” he said. He held the book towards her. “We dine there to-night, I know; but I promised her she should have this this afternoon. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind sending it in with my compliments,” he suggested.“Pamela would be disappointed,” she said.“I believe she would,” he agreed.“George,” she looked at him very gravely, and her tone was admonishing, “I don’t wish to annoy you,—but do you think you are acting wisely?”“You couldn’t annoy me,” he answered. “And I haven’t considered the question in that light... What do you think?”“I think you are growing too interested in Pamela,” she replied.He was silent for a second or so, turning the book he held in his hand and gazing absently at its title. Abruptly he looked up.“You haven’t overstated the truth,” he said quietly, a little defiantly, she fancied.She shook her head seriously.“I am sorry to hear you admit it. From my knowledge of you, I should have thought that, realising that you would at least have avoided her.”“I am not doing her any harm,” he said.“How can you be sure of that? Two years ago I should have felt confident that you couldn’t. I am not so positive now.”“You mean she cares less for her husband than she did?”The eager light in his eyes as he put the question troubled her. It was not consistent with her opinion of Dare that he should behave other than strictly honourably towards any woman.“I don’t think you ought to have asked that,” she returned. He changed colour.“No,” he said; “perhaps not. In any case, there wasn’t any need. It’s fairly obvious.”“Leave her alone,” she counselled.“Look here!” He took a step nearer to her, and spoke quickly and with a kind of repressed excitement that conveyed more than his actual words how deeply he was moved. “Don’t start getting a lot of false ideas into your head. I’m not playing the despicable game you think I’m after. I’m not amusing myself. Amusing myself! God! there isn’t much amusement in it. I’m leaving on Saturday,—I’ve made up my mind to that. But I’m going to see as much of her as I can in the interval. It’s the last time... I sha’n’t come back, unless I can feel perfectly sure of myself. But I’m going to leave her with the knowledge that I am her friend,—to be counted on if she needs me. I only ask to serve her. If she doesn’t want my service, I will stand outside her life altogether.”“My dear boy,” she returned disapprovingly, “you are talking arrant nonsense. A married woman can have no need for a male friend such as you propose to be. He is either an object of ridicule to her, or she grows too fond of him. I am afraid you would not become an object for ridicule with Pamela; she hasn’t a sufficient sense of humour. You had far better give up going there.”“I can’t do that,” he said. “But I promise you when I leave here I won’t come back.”“Then leave to-morrow,” she advised.“Not unless you turn me out.”“You know I won’t do that,” she said. “But I don’t like it, George. I am—disappointed in you.”“I’m sorry,” he said, and having nothing more to add, he left her, and walked away down the path.She watched the tall figure disappear in the sunshine, and turned and went indoors, feeling justly aggrieved with this man whom she liked because he had fallen below the standard she believed him capable of attaining to. Love is either an elevating or a destructive factor; it is the supreme test of the qualities of the individual. She had believed that George Dare was made of stouter stuff. But the human being does not exist, she philosophised, on whom one can count absolutely. One may be able to answer for a person’s actions in relation to most human events, then the unexpected event befalls and one’s calculations are entirely at fault.Dare, as he walked away from her, was fully alive to the criticism his behaviour evoked. He had been aware of her unspoken disapproval for days, had anticipated the inevitable remonstrance. He admitted the justice and the wisdom of her reproof, none the less it irritated him intensely. It is usually the self-acknowledged wrong that one most resents the detection of by another. When a man knows that his steps are tending crookedly he likes to be assured that he is walking straight; even though he recognises the assurance to be mistaken, it gives him a comfortable sense of secure deception.“After all,” he reflected savagely, as though his conscience needed reassuring on the point, “I am intending her no harm. It’s my soul that gets scorched.”But he knew, as he crossed the Arnotts’ lawn to where Pamela sat under the trees waiting for him, that he was to a certain extent disturbing her peace. He filled the newly created blank in her life, added an agreeable atmosphere of romance and excitement which for the time caused her to cease to miss the happiness she was conscious of missing of late. His homage was gratifying; it reinstated her in her own regard. In these ways he was securing a place for himself, making himself necessary to her.She looked round at his approach, and a light came into her eyes, a smile to her lips, as he drew near. With his critical faculties keenly alert, following the recent interview, he noted more particularly the gladness of her welcome, and felt the inexplicable something that was like a mute bond of sympathy and understanding between them, perceived the furtive shyness of her glance, the quick change of colour as their hands met; and his mind became extraordinarily clear and active. He roused himself from his mental attitude of personal engrossment, and forced himself to an impartial consideration of her position. There was not a shadow of a doubt about it, though she had possibly not discovered the fact herself; she was becoming interested in him—in the man, not merely the friend. There wasn’t any danger, he told himself,—not yet; but there might be.He recalled how every day since he had been in Wynberg he had seen her on some pretext or other: they had aided one another in the invention of trivial reasons for meeting. He had not always had her to himself as now: sometimes she had the children with her; on occasions Arnott was present. Arnott always seemed glad when Dare came in; he contrived generally to monopolise the conversation, and was manifestly entirely unaware of Dare’s preference for his wife’s society. It simply did not occur to him. His friends always admired Pamela; he was never jealous, perhaps because he felt so certain that this woman who had cleaved to him in defiance of her principles of honour, would cleave to him always. Although he was conscious of a waning of his own passion, it did not strike him that any change in himself could possibly weaken her love. He felt absolutely sure of her.Pamela had been sewing before Dare joined her. When he sauntered across the lawn and drew up beside her chair, she dropped the work into her lap and gave him her undivided attention.“You’ve brought the book,” she said, and took it from him with a pleased smile. “I rather wondered if you would come to-day.”“Didn’t you feel fairly certain I would?” he asked, and fetched a chair for himself, which he placed close to hers, facing her.He seated himself. Pamela did not answer his question. She opened the book and turned its pages idly. It was a beautifully bound volume of “Paolo and Francesca.” He had wished her to read it. But she understood quite well that the poem was a secondary matter; the bringing it to her was the primary motive.“I am glad to have this,” she said. “I think I shall like it. The outside is beautiful, anyway.”“So is the inside,” he answered. “But it is a bit on the tragic side. You mustn’t look for the happy ending.”“No,” replied Pamela gravely. She put the book down and gazed beyond him at the sunshine that lay warmly on the garden, the golden mantle of gaiety which mocks the sadness of the world. “Life isn’t all happy ending, is it?”“For many of us, no,” he allowed.“I think the really happy people,” observed Pamela, wrinkling her brows while she pursued her reflections, “are the people who feel least.”“You mean,” he said, watching her, “the people who never love?”“I didn’t mean that exactly... And yet, in a way, I suppose I did. I meant the people of moderate passions,—self-disciplined people whose emotions are under control, whose minds are like a well ordered establishment in which nothing is ever out of place. They don’t admit disturbing elements, and so their lives run on in an even content. There are no big joys and no big sorrows. I have known several women like that. They suggest twilight somehow,—never the sunlight, and never blank darkness. They are restful.”“I prefer the glowing beauty of vivid contrasts myself,” he said. “A world in which there is only twilight would be a prison house.”“And yet you can spend a good portion of your time in the mines!” she said, bringing her face round and smiling at him.He was glad she had introduced a lighter note into their talk.“I get my contrasts that way,” he returned. “Besides, you can’t imagine how jolly it is to drop down into the warm darkness on a broiling sunny day. Come along to the mines some time, and I’ll take you down.”“I should be scared to death,” she declared.Quite unexpectedly he put his strong, thin hand over hers.“I don’t think so,” he answered. “I wouldn’t take you where there was any danger. You would be safe with me.”Pamela flushed deeply. There was in the strong, steady pressure of the nervous fingers which closed upon her hand so much of latent force, of protective power, of sex, that she felt strangely frightened. She wanted to withdraw her hand, and could not; some influence stronger than her own will prevented her. She felt oddly stirred, and immensely troubled and disconcerted. With an effort she lifted her eyes, disturbed and faintly questioning, to his. He was leaning forward, looking into the flushed face with earnest, compelling gaze.“I’m going back to-morrow,” he said jerkily, and was quick to see the startled expression which darkened her eyes as he made the announcement. “This is the last chance I have of seeing you alone. Will you write to me?”“I don’t think—I couldn’t,” she stammered nervously.“Then will you promise me that if ever you are in any trouble, no matter what, in which a friend who has your well-being at heart might perhaps be useful, you will write to me? ... You know that I am your friend?” he inquired.“I believe you are—yes.”“And will you promise what I have asked?” he persisted.Pamela hesitated, and stared at him with perplexed, embarrassed gaze.“But there isn’t any need,” she began...“Not now; no. I pray there never will be. But you will promise?”“Yes—oh! yes,” she whispered, and, to her own intense dismay, burst into sudden tears. She dashed them hastily away with her disengaged hand. “You’re—frightening me,” she gasped. “I don’t know what you mean.”“Don’t cry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. I’m not a beast. I’m not making love to you. But I just wanted you to know that everything I possess, myself included, is at your service at any time, and in any way you choose to command. Perhaps you may never require my services; but at least you know that I wish to be useful. Don’t misunderstand me,—that is all I wish to convey.”He released her hand and sat back. Pamela dabbed her eyes furtively, ashamed of her emotional outburst, and angry with herself beyond measure for behaving like a simpleton.“How silly I am!” she murmured. “I don’t know what you must think of me. I don’t know why I am crying.”“I think you are very sweet,” he said gently, “and beautifully natural. I probably startled you. The unexpected is often disconcerting. If you had been one of the temperamentally even people of whom we have been talking you wouldn’t have been startled; but then, in that case, neither should I have been offering knightly service after the manner of a hero of romance. As a sign that I am forgiven, will you sing this evening the song you delighted us with on the night I first met you?”“What was that?” Pamela asked, still too confused to meet his eyes.“Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix.”“Oh! Saint-Saëns... Yes, of course I will.”When Dare returned next door, which he did earlier than Mrs Carruthers expected, he amazed her with the abrupt announcement of his intended departure on the morrow.“You were right,” he said, “and I was wrong. I obey your marching orders. And now naturally,” he added, smiling at her grimly, “you’ll enjoy the feminine satisfaction in a moral victory—which is a euphony for getting your own way.”She approached him with a glad look on her face, which had in it a good deal of admiration, and held out her hand as a man might do.“I knew it,” she cried triumphantly. “Boy, you’re straight.”He made a wry face as he shook hands with her. Then suddenly he stooped and kissed her.“It’s the least you can offer me,” he said in explanation.She laughed, well satisfied. She had not been mistaken; he had vindicated her belief in him.
The week Dare had promised himself at Wynberg overlapped and ran into the better part of three weeks. He gave as his reason for this extension of his holiday that he was enjoying himself, and that he felt he needed the rest.
“I suppose it is restful,” Mrs Carruthers remarked to him once, “mooning about the Arnott’s garden all day. Of course it is more of a change for you than using this garden... You do sleep here.”
He looked at her oddly. They were standing on the stoep together. He was just about to visit next door to take Mrs Arnott a book he had promised her. He had explained all this to Mrs Carruthers rather elaborately, and had failed to meet her steady, disconcerting gaze with his usual candour. These daily explanations of his informal visits next door called for much ingenuity, and were growing increasingly embarrassing. He disliked having to account for his doings; at the same time courtesy to his hostess demanded something; he rather fancied that it demanded more than it received.
“I admit the justice of that box on the ears,” he said. He held the book towards her. “We dine there to-night, I know; but I promised her she should have this this afternoon. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind sending it in with my compliments,” he suggested.
“Pamela would be disappointed,” she said.
“I believe she would,” he agreed.
“George,” she looked at him very gravely, and her tone was admonishing, “I don’t wish to annoy you,—but do you think you are acting wisely?”
“You couldn’t annoy me,” he answered. “And I haven’t considered the question in that light... What do you think?”
“I think you are growing too interested in Pamela,” she replied.
He was silent for a second or so, turning the book he held in his hand and gazing absently at its title. Abruptly he looked up.
“You haven’t overstated the truth,” he said quietly, a little defiantly, she fancied.
She shook her head seriously.
“I am sorry to hear you admit it. From my knowledge of you, I should have thought that, realising that you would at least have avoided her.”
“I am not doing her any harm,” he said.
“How can you be sure of that? Two years ago I should have felt confident that you couldn’t. I am not so positive now.”
“You mean she cares less for her husband than she did?”
The eager light in his eyes as he put the question troubled her. It was not consistent with her opinion of Dare that he should behave other than strictly honourably towards any woman.
“I don’t think you ought to have asked that,” she returned. He changed colour.
“No,” he said; “perhaps not. In any case, there wasn’t any need. It’s fairly obvious.”
“Leave her alone,” she counselled.
“Look here!” He took a step nearer to her, and spoke quickly and with a kind of repressed excitement that conveyed more than his actual words how deeply he was moved. “Don’t start getting a lot of false ideas into your head. I’m not playing the despicable game you think I’m after. I’m not amusing myself. Amusing myself! God! there isn’t much amusement in it. I’m leaving on Saturday,—I’ve made up my mind to that. But I’m going to see as much of her as I can in the interval. It’s the last time... I sha’n’t come back, unless I can feel perfectly sure of myself. But I’m going to leave her with the knowledge that I am her friend,—to be counted on if she needs me. I only ask to serve her. If she doesn’t want my service, I will stand outside her life altogether.”
“My dear boy,” she returned disapprovingly, “you are talking arrant nonsense. A married woman can have no need for a male friend such as you propose to be. He is either an object of ridicule to her, or she grows too fond of him. I am afraid you would not become an object for ridicule with Pamela; she hasn’t a sufficient sense of humour. You had far better give up going there.”
“I can’t do that,” he said. “But I promise you when I leave here I won’t come back.”
“Then leave to-morrow,” she advised.
“Not unless you turn me out.”
“You know I won’t do that,” she said. “But I don’t like it, George. I am—disappointed in you.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and having nothing more to add, he left her, and walked away down the path.
She watched the tall figure disappear in the sunshine, and turned and went indoors, feeling justly aggrieved with this man whom she liked because he had fallen below the standard she believed him capable of attaining to. Love is either an elevating or a destructive factor; it is the supreme test of the qualities of the individual. She had believed that George Dare was made of stouter stuff. But the human being does not exist, she philosophised, on whom one can count absolutely. One may be able to answer for a person’s actions in relation to most human events, then the unexpected event befalls and one’s calculations are entirely at fault.
Dare, as he walked away from her, was fully alive to the criticism his behaviour evoked. He had been aware of her unspoken disapproval for days, had anticipated the inevitable remonstrance. He admitted the justice and the wisdom of her reproof, none the less it irritated him intensely. It is usually the self-acknowledged wrong that one most resents the detection of by another. When a man knows that his steps are tending crookedly he likes to be assured that he is walking straight; even though he recognises the assurance to be mistaken, it gives him a comfortable sense of secure deception.
“After all,” he reflected savagely, as though his conscience needed reassuring on the point, “I am intending her no harm. It’s my soul that gets scorched.”
But he knew, as he crossed the Arnotts’ lawn to where Pamela sat under the trees waiting for him, that he was to a certain extent disturbing her peace. He filled the newly created blank in her life, added an agreeable atmosphere of romance and excitement which for the time caused her to cease to miss the happiness she was conscious of missing of late. His homage was gratifying; it reinstated her in her own regard. In these ways he was securing a place for himself, making himself necessary to her.
She looked round at his approach, and a light came into her eyes, a smile to her lips, as he drew near. With his critical faculties keenly alert, following the recent interview, he noted more particularly the gladness of her welcome, and felt the inexplicable something that was like a mute bond of sympathy and understanding between them, perceived the furtive shyness of her glance, the quick change of colour as their hands met; and his mind became extraordinarily clear and active. He roused himself from his mental attitude of personal engrossment, and forced himself to an impartial consideration of her position. There was not a shadow of a doubt about it, though she had possibly not discovered the fact herself; she was becoming interested in him—in the man, not merely the friend. There wasn’t any danger, he told himself,—not yet; but there might be.
He recalled how every day since he had been in Wynberg he had seen her on some pretext or other: they had aided one another in the invention of trivial reasons for meeting. He had not always had her to himself as now: sometimes she had the children with her; on occasions Arnott was present. Arnott always seemed glad when Dare came in; he contrived generally to monopolise the conversation, and was manifestly entirely unaware of Dare’s preference for his wife’s society. It simply did not occur to him. His friends always admired Pamela; he was never jealous, perhaps because he felt so certain that this woman who had cleaved to him in defiance of her principles of honour, would cleave to him always. Although he was conscious of a waning of his own passion, it did not strike him that any change in himself could possibly weaken her love. He felt absolutely sure of her.
Pamela had been sewing before Dare joined her. When he sauntered across the lawn and drew up beside her chair, she dropped the work into her lap and gave him her undivided attention.
“You’ve brought the book,” she said, and took it from him with a pleased smile. “I rather wondered if you would come to-day.”
“Didn’t you feel fairly certain I would?” he asked, and fetched a chair for himself, which he placed close to hers, facing her.
He seated himself. Pamela did not answer his question. She opened the book and turned its pages idly. It was a beautifully bound volume of “Paolo and Francesca.” He had wished her to read it. But she understood quite well that the poem was a secondary matter; the bringing it to her was the primary motive.
“I am glad to have this,” she said. “I think I shall like it. The outside is beautiful, anyway.”
“So is the inside,” he answered. “But it is a bit on the tragic side. You mustn’t look for the happy ending.”
“No,” replied Pamela gravely. She put the book down and gazed beyond him at the sunshine that lay warmly on the garden, the golden mantle of gaiety which mocks the sadness of the world. “Life isn’t all happy ending, is it?”
“For many of us, no,” he allowed.
“I think the really happy people,” observed Pamela, wrinkling her brows while she pursued her reflections, “are the people who feel least.”
“You mean,” he said, watching her, “the people who never love?”
“I didn’t mean that exactly... And yet, in a way, I suppose I did. I meant the people of moderate passions,—self-disciplined people whose emotions are under control, whose minds are like a well ordered establishment in which nothing is ever out of place. They don’t admit disturbing elements, and so their lives run on in an even content. There are no big joys and no big sorrows. I have known several women like that. They suggest twilight somehow,—never the sunlight, and never blank darkness. They are restful.”
“I prefer the glowing beauty of vivid contrasts myself,” he said. “A world in which there is only twilight would be a prison house.”
“And yet you can spend a good portion of your time in the mines!” she said, bringing her face round and smiling at him.
He was glad she had introduced a lighter note into their talk.
“I get my contrasts that way,” he returned. “Besides, you can’t imagine how jolly it is to drop down into the warm darkness on a broiling sunny day. Come along to the mines some time, and I’ll take you down.”
“I should be scared to death,” she declared.
Quite unexpectedly he put his strong, thin hand over hers.
“I don’t think so,” he answered. “I wouldn’t take you where there was any danger. You would be safe with me.”
Pamela flushed deeply. There was in the strong, steady pressure of the nervous fingers which closed upon her hand so much of latent force, of protective power, of sex, that she felt strangely frightened. She wanted to withdraw her hand, and could not; some influence stronger than her own will prevented her. She felt oddly stirred, and immensely troubled and disconcerted. With an effort she lifted her eyes, disturbed and faintly questioning, to his. He was leaning forward, looking into the flushed face with earnest, compelling gaze.
“I’m going back to-morrow,” he said jerkily, and was quick to see the startled expression which darkened her eyes as he made the announcement. “This is the last chance I have of seeing you alone. Will you write to me?”
“I don’t think—I couldn’t,” she stammered nervously.
“Then will you promise me that if ever you are in any trouble, no matter what, in which a friend who has your well-being at heart might perhaps be useful, you will write to me? ... You know that I am your friend?” he inquired.
“I believe you are—yes.”
“And will you promise what I have asked?” he persisted.
Pamela hesitated, and stared at him with perplexed, embarrassed gaze.
“But there isn’t any need,” she began...
“Not now; no. I pray there never will be. But you will promise?”
“Yes—oh! yes,” she whispered, and, to her own intense dismay, burst into sudden tears. She dashed them hastily away with her disengaged hand. “You’re—frightening me,” she gasped. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Don’t cry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. I’m not a beast. I’m not making love to you. But I just wanted you to know that everything I possess, myself included, is at your service at any time, and in any way you choose to command. Perhaps you may never require my services; but at least you know that I wish to be useful. Don’t misunderstand me,—that is all I wish to convey.”
He released her hand and sat back. Pamela dabbed her eyes furtively, ashamed of her emotional outburst, and angry with herself beyond measure for behaving like a simpleton.
“How silly I am!” she murmured. “I don’t know what you must think of me. I don’t know why I am crying.”
“I think you are very sweet,” he said gently, “and beautifully natural. I probably startled you. The unexpected is often disconcerting. If you had been one of the temperamentally even people of whom we have been talking you wouldn’t have been startled; but then, in that case, neither should I have been offering knightly service after the manner of a hero of romance. As a sign that I am forgiven, will you sing this evening the song you delighted us with on the night I first met you?”
“What was that?” Pamela asked, still too confused to meet his eyes.
“Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix.”
“Oh! Saint-Saëns... Yes, of course I will.”
When Dare returned next door, which he did earlier than Mrs Carruthers expected, he amazed her with the abrupt announcement of his intended departure on the morrow.
“You were right,” he said, “and I was wrong. I obey your marching orders. And now naturally,” he added, smiling at her grimly, “you’ll enjoy the feminine satisfaction in a moral victory—which is a euphony for getting your own way.”
She approached him with a glad look on her face, which had in it a good deal of admiration, and held out her hand as a man might do.
“I knew it,” she cried triumphantly. “Boy, you’re straight.”
He made a wry face as he shook hands with her. Then suddenly he stooped and kissed her.
“It’s the least you can offer me,” he said in explanation.
She laughed, well satisfied. She had not been mistaken; he had vindicated her belief in him.
Chapter Eleven.Dare, as he sat at the Arnotts’ dinner-table that evening, making the extra man, the odd number, as he had done on a former occasion, was conscious of two discrepant facts; namely, that he had not decided a moment too soon to quit the danger zone of Pamela’s seductive influence, and that he was sincerely sorry he was leaving on the morrow. The regret was, perhaps, the keener sensation of the two; it balanced his sense of moral satisfaction to a nicety. The dinner was the funeral feast of his only real love affair. He intended, when he parted from Pamela that night, never to see her again.“I was a fool to come,” he told himself. “No one can handle fire and expect to escape unhurt. And I knew it was fire I was playing with.”Yet he would gladly have continued to act foolishly. The strongest inducement towards wisdom was the fear that Pamela herself might get singed; fire which spreads ends in a conflagration.One thing he noticed after the women had withdrawn, and it was not the first time he had observed the same thing, was that Arnott drank more than was good for him. This possibly accounted for the coarsening so evident in the man’s general deportment. It disgusted him; though probably had he not been in love with the man’s wife it would not have struck him so unpleasantly. It was revolting to think of a sweet, refined woman contaminated by close association with a man of intemperate habits. Arnott was inclined to be offensive when he had been drinking; it was on these occasions that he displayed discourtesy towards his wife. It enraged Dare to see how readily she recognised these symptoms, and how tactful she was in her avoidance of friction. It was as much as he could do at times to be civil to his host. Arnott’s self-indulgence was, he supposed, the cause of the cloud which had disturbed the domestic peace. If the man persistently made a beast of himself, it was not surprising that his wife should lose her affection for him.He was thankful to escape from the dining-room and join Pamela and Mrs Carruthers on the stoep.Mrs Carruthers, doubtless as a sign of her approval of the decision he had arrived at, acted that evening with a considerate kindness of which he was keenly sensible and gratefully appreciative: she contrived with admirable skill to engage her host and her husband in a political discussion which bored her exceedingly, and which roused Arnott to a heated denunciation of the Hertzog faction. Like many men sufficiently indifferent to public affairs to take no active part in them, Arnott was a fiery critic of anti-imperialism, indeed of any opinions which failed to accord with his own way of thinking. Mrs Carruthers threw in the necessary challenge at intervals in order to keep the talk from flagging, and, to her own amazement, found herself defending some of the backveld ideals.“I am a staunch believer in race preservation,” she announced. “I admire the Dutch for defending their principles, and insisting on the recognition of their language.”“Language!” Arnott sneered.“Oh! it’s a language of sorts, though we may not consider it exactly important. But it’s a kind of instinct with them, like the Family Bible, and a contempt for the natives. I don’t see why they shouldn’t uphold these things.”Dare, talking a little apart with Pamela, gazed thoughtfully at the quiet darkness of the garden and proposed walking in it. She hesitated for the fraction of a second, and then complied. He noted the slight hesitation, and felt glad that she conquered her reluctance. To have refused his request would have seemed to suggest a want of confidence in him. Nevertheless, some impulse, prompted by the recollection of that slight hesitation, impelled him to turn before they got beyond view of the others on the lighted stoep, and confine their walking to the limit of the path in front of the house. He had not intended this at the start; he longed for darkness and solitude. The murmur of voices, the little disjointed scraps of conversation overheard as they passed and repassed, disturbed him irritatingly; Arnott’s frequently raised, assertive tones sounded intrusive, broke upon the quiet of the garden discordantly, reminding the two who walked in it of his presence with a needlessly aggressive insistence.Dare tried to ignore these things, but they jarred his nerves none the less. He had not suspected until recently that he possessed any nerves; but they had made many disquieting manifestations of their actuality of late.“I can’t grow accustomed to the thought that you are leaving to-morrow,” Pamela said to him presently. Her voice was low, and betrayed unmistakable regret. The back of her hand brushed his lightly as they paced the gravel slowly side by side. The contact gave him immense satisfaction; he was grateful to her for not increasing the space between them and thus denying him this small pleasure. “Of course I knew you were only down for a short while; but your departure is a little unexpected, isn’t it?”“I came for a week,” he answered with a brief laugh. “It’s been a long one as days are reckoned, but time skips along when one is enjoying oneself... It was sweet of you to say that, to allow me to think that you will miss me a little. We have had some pleasant times together. The worst of these things is there always has to be an end. I shall miss you more than you will miss me.”“I wonder!” said Pamela.He turned his head suddenly and looked her squarely in the eyes. The light from the stoep shone on her face and showed it very fair and pale and pure. She turned aside as though unwilling to bear his earnest scrutiny.“One grows used to people,” she said. “Somehow, I have always felt at home with you. When you go away I have a feeling that you won’t come back. I had that feeling last time.”“Yet here I am,” he said in a lighter tone.“Yes,” she said. “I know. It’s stupid of me. I hate losing sight of friends. I have so few.”“Few!” he echoed. “I expect if I had half the number I should reckon myself rich.”“You don’t use the word in the sense I do,” she returned. “I meant the friends one can depend upon... who wouldn’t fail one under any circumstances.”“I understand,” he said, and added quietly: “I am glad you place me in that category.”“You head the list,” she answered with a faint smile. “I’m not quite sure your name doesn’t stand alone.”While she was speaking the belief was suddenly confirmed in her that this man was entirely sincere in his protestations of friendship, that even if he heard the shameful story of her life with Arnott, he would not withdraw his friendship. She felt that she could rely on him, trust him implicitly. She also knew that if she needed help at any time he was the one person in the world she would ask for it. He was so sympathetic that she believed he would understand, as no one else without a similar experience could understand, her position. He, at least, would recognise that she had not acted solely from base motives.“I shouldn’t like to believe that,” he said gently; “but I am proud to top the list. I have a feeling to-night,” he added slowly, unconsciously watching Arnott as the latter leaned forward in excited argument with Mrs Carruthers, “that we shall yet prove our belief in one another’s sincerity. Don’t think I am suggesting all manner of unnameable tragedies in your life,—the proof of loyal friendship is to be helpful also in little things. It’s rather a rotten idea—isn’t it?—that a man can’t be pals with a married woman.”“I think so,” Pamela answered. “Besides, you’ve disproved that in your friendship with Connie.”Dare was silent for a moment. There was, he knew, a very substantial difference in the quality of his friendship with Mrs Carruthers and his friendship with Pamela; sentiment was entirely absent in his feeling for the one; in the latter case the whole fabric of his regard was built upon it. He had a fairly strong conviction that he would throw, over Connie, throw over the whole world if need be, for this other woman. But he also realised with an equal certainty that the one thing he would not do was to allow her fair name to be sullied through his indiscretion. If it were necessary to the maintenance of a platonic friendship to remain at a distance, he would avoid any future possibility of their paths crossing. That much he could do for her. It was the strongest proof of his regard.“Men and women disprove that theory continually,” he returned. “But we only hear of the failures, and that brings discredit on the idea. One might as reasonably argue that the divorce court brings discredit on the married state. The whole thing is absurd.”“I wonder why you never married,” Pamela said suddenly. “Somehow, I can’t think of you as a married man; and yet you must surely have contemplated marriage. Most men do at some time or another.”“I suppose,” he said, “that you, like Connie, regard me as an old fogey and past such things?”“No,” she answered simply. “My husband was older than you when I—when—”She floundered helplessly, and paused in swift confusion. It was impossible, she found, to refer to her marriage; the word stuck in her throat. Always, it seemed to her in her distress, this galling knowledge that she was not legally married was being forced upon her realisation to her further humiliation. Unable to complete the sentence, she added lamely:“A man is never too old.”He laughed.“You think I might find some one to take pity on me even now?”“I think,” she returned warmly, “that the woman who wins you will be very fortunate. And you are only quizzing me in respect of age; you are quite young yet.”“Only recently,” he explained, “I have been called middle-aged, and it hurt my vanity. Age, like most things, is relative. When one is in one’s teens forty appears senility; when one approaches forty it wears quite another aspect,—a comfortably matured, youthful aspect compared with which the teens are puerile. The heart defies wrinkles. I resent being described as middle-aged: it tempts me to the committal of youthful follies.”They had reached the end of the path and were beyond the circle of light from the stoep. Dare brought up abruptly, and instead of turning, halted, and faced her in the gloom of the overhanging trees. His eyes scrutinised her face in the dimness with tender intensity.“This is the last lap,” he said. “I’m going to take you back now, and you’ll sing for me. ‘Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix.’ ... Don’t you love the words? They express better than any words in our language could just exactly how the dear particular voice affects one... Oh! little friend, I wish that fate did not decree that our paths in life must diverge just here, and so seldom cross.”“That bears out what I have felt,” said Pamela slowly, gazing steadily bade at him. “You won’t come again.”“Who can say?” he returned. “I feel—and I think you do too, though you are too wise and sweet to say so—that it is better I should stay away. I want you to bear me always kindly in your thoughts. And when I am near you I am never quite confident that I shall not say something which may lower me in your esteem. I shouldn’t like to do that. Man is but human, and humanity has some of the brute instincts, though we flatter ourselves we are only a little lower than the angels,—that little makes all the difference. Shall we turn back?”Pamela acquiesced in silence, and walked in silence to the house. She was conscious that Dare talked, but she scarcely heard what he said in her troubled preoccupation. What he had said beyond there in the shadow of the trees was repeating itself over and over in her mind. She could not misunderstand the purport of his words; and she felt sorry. She liked him so well. She wanted to keep and enjoy his friendship,—wanted him to be in her life, not forced by a recognition of the weakness he hinted at to stand always outside. Why could they not have remained friends in the real sense of the word, as he had first suggested? His admission made it impossible. She felt angry with him. She wanted his friendship so urgently.“You are not offended with me?” he asked presently, struck by her unheeding silence which insensibly conveyed a hurt resentment. He put the question twice before she answered him.“No,” she replied. “But—”“But?” he prompted gently.“I want your friendship,” she said quickly, with a little nervous catch of her breath. “I thought I had it... And you are making it impossible.”“Oh! no,” he answered. “I am making it very possible. It is because I feel I may perhaps be useful as a friend that I have been so honest with you. Don’t make any mistake about that.”She made no response. They were approaching within hearing of the others, and Mrs Carruthers was leaning on the rail of the stoep, watching their slow advance, observing them, it occurred to Pamela, from the concentrated earnestness of her look, with an unaccountable interest. She leaned towards them as they came up.“I’m on the verge of quarrelling with every one,” she said with remarkable cheerfulness. “You’ve only arrived in time to prevent bloodshed. If you have tired of doing the romantic, come in and let us have some music.”“Sing to us, Mrs Arnott,” pleaded Carruthers,—“something soothing. My wife has been most extraordinarily aggravating.”Pamela made some laughing response, and joined him. Mrs Carruthers turned towards Dare, who remained standing alone at the top of the steps.“I have saved the situation for you this evening,” she said, “and lost my own temper. But I am thankful for three things.”“And they are?” he inquired.“That there is no moon,—that you turned back when you did,—and that to-morrow is not many hours off.”“I never believed before,” he returned drily, “that it was in your nature to be unpleasant.”She smiled encouragingly.“You are only beginning,” she said, “to gauge my possibilities.”
Dare, as he sat at the Arnotts’ dinner-table that evening, making the extra man, the odd number, as he had done on a former occasion, was conscious of two discrepant facts; namely, that he had not decided a moment too soon to quit the danger zone of Pamela’s seductive influence, and that he was sincerely sorry he was leaving on the morrow. The regret was, perhaps, the keener sensation of the two; it balanced his sense of moral satisfaction to a nicety. The dinner was the funeral feast of his only real love affair. He intended, when he parted from Pamela that night, never to see her again.
“I was a fool to come,” he told himself. “No one can handle fire and expect to escape unhurt. And I knew it was fire I was playing with.”
Yet he would gladly have continued to act foolishly. The strongest inducement towards wisdom was the fear that Pamela herself might get singed; fire which spreads ends in a conflagration.
One thing he noticed after the women had withdrawn, and it was not the first time he had observed the same thing, was that Arnott drank more than was good for him. This possibly accounted for the coarsening so evident in the man’s general deportment. It disgusted him; though probably had he not been in love with the man’s wife it would not have struck him so unpleasantly. It was revolting to think of a sweet, refined woman contaminated by close association with a man of intemperate habits. Arnott was inclined to be offensive when he had been drinking; it was on these occasions that he displayed discourtesy towards his wife. It enraged Dare to see how readily she recognised these symptoms, and how tactful she was in her avoidance of friction. It was as much as he could do at times to be civil to his host. Arnott’s self-indulgence was, he supposed, the cause of the cloud which had disturbed the domestic peace. If the man persistently made a beast of himself, it was not surprising that his wife should lose her affection for him.
He was thankful to escape from the dining-room and join Pamela and Mrs Carruthers on the stoep.
Mrs Carruthers, doubtless as a sign of her approval of the decision he had arrived at, acted that evening with a considerate kindness of which he was keenly sensible and gratefully appreciative: she contrived with admirable skill to engage her host and her husband in a political discussion which bored her exceedingly, and which roused Arnott to a heated denunciation of the Hertzog faction. Like many men sufficiently indifferent to public affairs to take no active part in them, Arnott was a fiery critic of anti-imperialism, indeed of any opinions which failed to accord with his own way of thinking. Mrs Carruthers threw in the necessary challenge at intervals in order to keep the talk from flagging, and, to her own amazement, found herself defending some of the backveld ideals.
“I am a staunch believer in race preservation,” she announced. “I admire the Dutch for defending their principles, and insisting on the recognition of their language.”
“Language!” Arnott sneered.
“Oh! it’s a language of sorts, though we may not consider it exactly important. But it’s a kind of instinct with them, like the Family Bible, and a contempt for the natives. I don’t see why they shouldn’t uphold these things.”
Dare, talking a little apart with Pamela, gazed thoughtfully at the quiet darkness of the garden and proposed walking in it. She hesitated for the fraction of a second, and then complied. He noted the slight hesitation, and felt glad that she conquered her reluctance. To have refused his request would have seemed to suggest a want of confidence in him. Nevertheless, some impulse, prompted by the recollection of that slight hesitation, impelled him to turn before they got beyond view of the others on the lighted stoep, and confine their walking to the limit of the path in front of the house. He had not intended this at the start; he longed for darkness and solitude. The murmur of voices, the little disjointed scraps of conversation overheard as they passed and repassed, disturbed him irritatingly; Arnott’s frequently raised, assertive tones sounded intrusive, broke upon the quiet of the garden discordantly, reminding the two who walked in it of his presence with a needlessly aggressive insistence.
Dare tried to ignore these things, but they jarred his nerves none the less. He had not suspected until recently that he possessed any nerves; but they had made many disquieting manifestations of their actuality of late.
“I can’t grow accustomed to the thought that you are leaving to-morrow,” Pamela said to him presently. Her voice was low, and betrayed unmistakable regret. The back of her hand brushed his lightly as they paced the gravel slowly side by side. The contact gave him immense satisfaction; he was grateful to her for not increasing the space between them and thus denying him this small pleasure. “Of course I knew you were only down for a short while; but your departure is a little unexpected, isn’t it?”
“I came for a week,” he answered with a brief laugh. “It’s been a long one as days are reckoned, but time skips along when one is enjoying oneself... It was sweet of you to say that, to allow me to think that you will miss me a little. We have had some pleasant times together. The worst of these things is there always has to be an end. I shall miss you more than you will miss me.”
“I wonder!” said Pamela.
He turned his head suddenly and looked her squarely in the eyes. The light from the stoep shone on her face and showed it very fair and pale and pure. She turned aside as though unwilling to bear his earnest scrutiny.
“One grows used to people,” she said. “Somehow, I have always felt at home with you. When you go away I have a feeling that you won’t come back. I had that feeling last time.”
“Yet here I am,” he said in a lighter tone.
“Yes,” she said. “I know. It’s stupid of me. I hate losing sight of friends. I have so few.”
“Few!” he echoed. “I expect if I had half the number I should reckon myself rich.”
“You don’t use the word in the sense I do,” she returned. “I meant the friends one can depend upon... who wouldn’t fail one under any circumstances.”
“I understand,” he said, and added quietly: “I am glad you place me in that category.”
“You head the list,” she answered with a faint smile. “I’m not quite sure your name doesn’t stand alone.”
While she was speaking the belief was suddenly confirmed in her that this man was entirely sincere in his protestations of friendship, that even if he heard the shameful story of her life with Arnott, he would not withdraw his friendship. She felt that she could rely on him, trust him implicitly. She also knew that if she needed help at any time he was the one person in the world she would ask for it. He was so sympathetic that she believed he would understand, as no one else without a similar experience could understand, her position. He, at least, would recognise that she had not acted solely from base motives.
“I shouldn’t like to believe that,” he said gently; “but I am proud to top the list. I have a feeling to-night,” he added slowly, unconsciously watching Arnott as the latter leaned forward in excited argument with Mrs Carruthers, “that we shall yet prove our belief in one another’s sincerity. Don’t think I am suggesting all manner of unnameable tragedies in your life,—the proof of loyal friendship is to be helpful also in little things. It’s rather a rotten idea—isn’t it?—that a man can’t be pals with a married woman.”
“I think so,” Pamela answered. “Besides, you’ve disproved that in your friendship with Connie.”
Dare was silent for a moment. There was, he knew, a very substantial difference in the quality of his friendship with Mrs Carruthers and his friendship with Pamela; sentiment was entirely absent in his feeling for the one; in the latter case the whole fabric of his regard was built upon it. He had a fairly strong conviction that he would throw, over Connie, throw over the whole world if need be, for this other woman. But he also realised with an equal certainty that the one thing he would not do was to allow her fair name to be sullied through his indiscretion. If it were necessary to the maintenance of a platonic friendship to remain at a distance, he would avoid any future possibility of their paths crossing. That much he could do for her. It was the strongest proof of his regard.
“Men and women disprove that theory continually,” he returned. “But we only hear of the failures, and that brings discredit on the idea. One might as reasonably argue that the divorce court brings discredit on the married state. The whole thing is absurd.”
“I wonder why you never married,” Pamela said suddenly. “Somehow, I can’t think of you as a married man; and yet you must surely have contemplated marriage. Most men do at some time or another.”
“I suppose,” he said, “that you, like Connie, regard me as an old fogey and past such things?”
“No,” she answered simply. “My husband was older than you when I—when—”
She floundered helplessly, and paused in swift confusion. It was impossible, she found, to refer to her marriage; the word stuck in her throat. Always, it seemed to her in her distress, this galling knowledge that she was not legally married was being forced upon her realisation to her further humiliation. Unable to complete the sentence, she added lamely:
“A man is never too old.”
He laughed.
“You think I might find some one to take pity on me even now?”
“I think,” she returned warmly, “that the woman who wins you will be very fortunate. And you are only quizzing me in respect of age; you are quite young yet.”
“Only recently,” he explained, “I have been called middle-aged, and it hurt my vanity. Age, like most things, is relative. When one is in one’s teens forty appears senility; when one approaches forty it wears quite another aspect,—a comfortably matured, youthful aspect compared with which the teens are puerile. The heart defies wrinkles. I resent being described as middle-aged: it tempts me to the committal of youthful follies.”
They had reached the end of the path and were beyond the circle of light from the stoep. Dare brought up abruptly, and instead of turning, halted, and faced her in the gloom of the overhanging trees. His eyes scrutinised her face in the dimness with tender intensity.
“This is the last lap,” he said. “I’m going to take you back now, and you’ll sing for me. ‘Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix.’ ... Don’t you love the words? They express better than any words in our language could just exactly how the dear particular voice affects one... Oh! little friend, I wish that fate did not decree that our paths in life must diverge just here, and so seldom cross.”
“That bears out what I have felt,” said Pamela slowly, gazing steadily bade at him. “You won’t come again.”
“Who can say?” he returned. “I feel—and I think you do too, though you are too wise and sweet to say so—that it is better I should stay away. I want you to bear me always kindly in your thoughts. And when I am near you I am never quite confident that I shall not say something which may lower me in your esteem. I shouldn’t like to do that. Man is but human, and humanity has some of the brute instincts, though we flatter ourselves we are only a little lower than the angels,—that little makes all the difference. Shall we turn back?”
Pamela acquiesced in silence, and walked in silence to the house. She was conscious that Dare talked, but she scarcely heard what he said in her troubled preoccupation. What he had said beyond there in the shadow of the trees was repeating itself over and over in her mind. She could not misunderstand the purport of his words; and she felt sorry. She liked him so well. She wanted to keep and enjoy his friendship,—wanted him to be in her life, not forced by a recognition of the weakness he hinted at to stand always outside. Why could they not have remained friends in the real sense of the word, as he had first suggested? His admission made it impossible. She felt angry with him. She wanted his friendship so urgently.
“You are not offended with me?” he asked presently, struck by her unheeding silence which insensibly conveyed a hurt resentment. He put the question twice before she answered him.
“No,” she replied. “But—”
“But?” he prompted gently.
“I want your friendship,” she said quickly, with a little nervous catch of her breath. “I thought I had it... And you are making it impossible.”
“Oh! no,” he answered. “I am making it very possible. It is because I feel I may perhaps be useful as a friend that I have been so honest with you. Don’t make any mistake about that.”
She made no response. They were approaching within hearing of the others, and Mrs Carruthers was leaning on the rail of the stoep, watching their slow advance, observing them, it occurred to Pamela, from the concentrated earnestness of her look, with an unaccountable interest. She leaned towards them as they came up.
“I’m on the verge of quarrelling with every one,” she said with remarkable cheerfulness. “You’ve only arrived in time to prevent bloodshed. If you have tired of doing the romantic, come in and let us have some music.”
“Sing to us, Mrs Arnott,” pleaded Carruthers,—“something soothing. My wife has been most extraordinarily aggravating.”
Pamela made some laughing response, and joined him. Mrs Carruthers turned towards Dare, who remained standing alone at the top of the steps.
“I have saved the situation for you this evening,” she said, “and lost my own temper. But I am thankful for three things.”
“And they are?” he inquired.
“That there is no moon,—that you turned back when you did,—and that to-morrow is not many hours off.”
“I never believed before,” he returned drily, “that it was in your nature to be unpleasant.”
She smiled encouragingly.
“You are only beginning,” she said, “to gauge my possibilities.”