Chapter Twenty Four.During tea, though there was ample opportunity for private talk at the little table where they sat alone, Dare was careful to avoid any reference to the business which had moved him to seek her out. He exerted himself to entertain her; and for the time it seemed as though Blanche actually forgot her discontent in enjoyment of the moment. But when on paying the score Dare would have bought her a box of chocolates, to his surprise the girl with hasty ungraciousness declined the gift. She hated sweets, she said.His action in purchasing chocolates for her had reminded her of Arnott and the similar gifts he had showered on her in the past. The incident jarred upon her; and a return of her former reserve ensued. Already she regretted having accepted the invitation for this outing. It was not that she disliked the man, or that she mistrusted him; but she had a presentiment that he would urge her to tell him things which it might be against her own interests to disclose. She sought to reassure herself with the thought that he could not force her confidence. Nevertheless she experienced a doubt as to her powers of reticence; she had already allowed him against her better judgment to discover that she was to a certain extent acquainted with Arnott’s doings. And she had confessed to some authority as to his actions. That positive affirmation of the line he would be likely to take had been an indiscretion.Dare was himself so quietly confident that the girl, having nothing to conceal, would aid him with any information which it lay in her power to give that he did not anticipate difficulty in persuading her to disclose her knowledge. He believed that she also would wish to have the scandal in which her name was concerned allayed finally. It could not be agreeable for her to know the opprobrious things that were being said of her in connection with the man. For her own sake she would wish that stopped.They re-entered the car and continued the journey. When they were well out into the country, Blanche said, turning to him suddenly:“Don’t let us stop... What’s the use? I don’t want to walk; it’s pleasanter driving. And I must not be late in getting back.”“I will see that you are back in ample time,” he answered. “But I want you to get out here. You needn’t walk far. I’ll tell the man to wait for us at the bottom of this hill.”He spoke to the chauffeur, and the car stopped. Dare got out and helped the girl to alight. She looked at him with faint resentment in her eyes, as they remained standing together beside the road while the car drove swiftly away.“I asked you not to,” she said protestingly.“I know,” he said. “Forgive me for disregarding the request. I wanted to talk with you more privately. Plainly we couldn’t discuss this matter before a third person.”“I don’t wish to discuss it,” she returned, getting off the road and beginning to walk in the direction taken by the car. “I fail to see why you, who are almost a stranger to me, should persist in discussing a subject which you must know is unpleasant for me to listen to. It is ungenerous of you to have brought me out with such an object.”“Oh! no,” he replied. “I can’t see it in that light. It is to your interest, as well as to Mrs Arnott’s, to clear up this matter.”“Please leave me out of it. Would you,” she asked, looking at him deliberately, “have taken so much trouble on my account?”“Possibly not,” he admitted. “But since it is my intention to get to the bottom of this business, I could wish at the same time to be of service to you. It is not good for a girl to have her name coupled with that of a married man. You would be well advised in helping me to stop the thing.”“It is easier to float a scandal than to stop one,” she returned impassively.She glanced up at him as they strolled along over the coarse grass, and smiled strangely.“If you are acting for Mrs Arnott,” she said, “you will have quite enough to do in covering the traces of an older scandal.”He looked down at her quickly, and their eyes met in a long gaze of challenge and inquiry. There was so much of significance in the girl’s tones, in her eyes, and in her peculiarly malicious smile, that Dare had an uncomfortable conviction that she knew more of the Arnotts’ affairs than he had supposed. He began to think that she was not as guileless as he had believed.“To what do you refer?” he asked.She stopped abruptly and confronted him with an air of sullen defiance, an increase of angry colour in her cheeks. Dare, perforce, halted also, and faced her, perplexed beyond measure and distinctly annoyed. This sudden change of mood, with its suggestion of open antagonism, took him aback. He was conscious of a revulsion of feeling which amounted almost to disgust. He regretted that he had wasted his time in seeking her.“I don’t know by what right you question me,” she said. “If you want me to tell you certain things, you must explain your reasons. Confidence for confidence, Mr Dare.”“Very good,” he answered coolly. “I want you to furnish me with Mr Arnott’s present address, to save me trouble in discovering it for myself.”“Why do you want his address?” she inquired.“I thought we had gone into that already,” he replied. “I wish to persuade him to return to his home as the best and quickest means of ending this scandal.”She shook her head.“He won’t,” she answered positively. “He can’t... He’s ill.”This information moved Dare to a show of surprise. For a moment he was inclined to discredit the announcement; but the girl’s manner gave no indication that she was attempting to impose on him, and he accepted the statement as true. It was just possible that his illness accounted for Arnott’s silence.“I left him at Pretoria,” she said, starting to walk again. “He is in a nursing home.” She furnished the address. “They won’t let you see him, if you go there,” she added abruptly.He made a note of the address on the back of an envelope, and scrutinised her with puzzled uncertainty as he returned the envelope to his pocket.“What’s the matter with him?” he asked.“Paralysis.” She spoke curtly, with a kind of hard anger in her voice. “He will get better, but he will never be quite well. It will be a case for nursing—always.”He observed a rush of tears to her eyes, but there was no softening in her manner as she went on in dull, resentful tones:“Everything that happens to me ends like that. If it hadn’t been for this we were to have been married.”“Married!” he repeated, amazed. “You! ... But—”“Oh! don’t pretend,” she interrupted impatiently, “that you don’t know they aren’t properly married... His wife is dead. I made him show me proofs of that when he asked me to marry him... He thinks I am going to marry him still.”“And are you?” he asked.“I don’t know... I hate sickness. But—he’s rich. Money makes things so much easier.”He made a gesture of repulsion.“You couldn’t do a thing so vile as that, surely?” he said.The horror and disgust he experienced at her callous reasoning revealed itself in his voice, in his eyes as he stared down at her, scarce able to credit what he heard. She looked back at him fiercely.“How dare you talk to me like that? ... Can’t you see all that such a marriage means to a girl like me? Why shouldn’t I consider myself?”“I was thinking of the woman who for years believed herself to be his wife,” he replied coldly. “Now that he is free to marry her she has a right to demand that he should fulfil his obligation.”“He won’t,” she declared.“I think he will,” he answered confidently.“You mean—” she began, and stopped, eyeing him with quick suspicion. “I wish I hadn’t told you where he is,” she cried passionately. “But they won’t let you see him. He’s not in a condition to be worried. You can’t bully a man in his condition.”“I have no intention of bullying him,” he answered, placing considerable restraint upon himself. “I am going to offer him the choice between two alternatives. If he is wise he will accept the only decent course open to him. The consequences of refusal will be awkward for him.”“You don’t take into consideration,” she said, with bitter anger in her voice, “that the threat with which you would intimidate him for your purpose is one which I also can use to oblige him to oppose you, if I wish. You are overlooking me.”“I simply never dreamed of insulting you by harbouring such a thought,” he returned. “Even though you have flung the challenge, I couldn’t believe you capable of that.”“You will need to reconstruct your theories on human nature,” she said cynically.“Oh! no. One instance of failure doesn’t damn the race. I am not going to take up your challenge. I am going to regard it as a thing uttered with ill-considered haste. How you came by your knowledge puzzles me; but one point I feel fairly confident on is that you won’t use it. Women don’t do these things, Miss Maitland, whatever they may say in moments of anger.”“Oh! Women!” she exclaimed contemptuously. “You are fond of generalising. But in this case, it isn’t women; it’s just myself. I have got the chance I have always longed for. Do you think I am likely to let it slip? ... When he was taken ill so suddenly, and I feared he was going to die, I was nearly mad with anxiety. Then they told me he wouldn’t die, that he would probably live for many years—with care... It was almost as great a shock to know that he was going to live and be—like that always. Do you think that woman, who calls herself his wife, will want him like that? ... Will be ready to devote her life to nursing him? I don’t... Not when she learns the whole story.”“We will leave it to her to decide,” he answered quietly.The picture she drew of Arnott as a helpless invalid was not pleasant to dwell upon. It appealed to Dare in the light of a horrible injustice that Pamela should sacrifice herself to the care of an invalid husband, a man who had deceived and deserted her, who needed to be urged even then to return to her,—might possibly refuse to return. She would be wiser to yield to his entreaties and become his wife. He was not quite clear what legal relationship existed between Pamela and the man who had married her bigamously; but he had an idea that before she could be free of him it would be necessary for her to instigate divorce proceedings. He was not at all sure she would do that, even if Arnott refused to return to her. The whole affair was horribly complicated.“The decision won’t rest with her, nor with you,” Blanche observed after a brief pause. “You can’t coerce a man like Mr Arnott. He won’t allow you to arrange his life.”She spoke with a sort of furtive admiration of the man whose dominating qualities and virile personality had first attracted her to him, and ultimately conquered her reluctance to the extent of gaining her consent to his proposal of marriage. She had left his home to protect herself from his less honourable intentions, had fled because she was afraid of him and uncertain of herself; and he had followed, determined to possess her at all costs. Finding her still obdurate, and less accessible than when she had lived beneath his roof, he had suggested marriage. His passion for her had become so imperative that it would brook no denial. No argument which prudence suggested could deter him from carrying out his purpose. He flung every consideration aside, as he had done once before when inflamed with his desire for Pamela; and Blanche, tempted by all that he could give her, as much as by the reciprocal passion he inspired, consented readily to his proposal. His sudden illness had interfered with the plan, had made it for the time being impracticable; but though she hesitated, appalled at the thought of a querulous invalid, husband in place of the vigorous man whose imperious strength had formed a large part of his attractiveness, Blanche had by no means abandoned the intention of marrying him. The worldly considerations which had influenced her in the past proved a strong inducement still.With a sudden desire to end the talk, she increased the pace at which they were proceeding. Dare, as he kept step with her, maintained a constrained silence. He felt inadequate to cope with the ugly, sinister turn this affair had taken. He did not know what to say to the girl. There was nothing he could say that might not give fresh offence. She glanced up at him frowningly, incensed at this show of mute disapproval, and remarked:“I’ve told you things it would have been wiser to have kept to myself. I don’t know why I told you. You must treat what I have said as confidential, please.”“I can’t promise that,” he answered. “But I will keep your name out of this business as far as it is possible to do so. After all, there is nothing that you have told me that was not bound to come out. You couldn’t marry a man who is known to have a wife and family, without the whole story coming to light. As soon as the facts are known Arnott will have to take his trial on a charge of bigamy.”She turned pale as she listened to him. It was borne in upon her that this man was going to prove a determined and implacable enemy. She felt instinctively that he meant to oppose her with all his strength.“She will never prosecute him,” she said, sullenly defiant.“She won’t need to,” he answered convincingly. “The Crown will do that.”“You are trying to intimidate me,” she exclaimed with sudden passion. “You have no right to threaten me.”He looked at her deliberately with a faint uplift of his brows.“I am doing nothing of the sort,” he answered. “I am merely making a plain statement of facts in order to show you what you will bring on the man you talk of marrying if you carry out your determination to encourage him in his cruel desertion of the woman he married. Only through you will the story of his crime ever come to be known.”She walked on with lowered gaze, making no reply.
During tea, though there was ample opportunity for private talk at the little table where they sat alone, Dare was careful to avoid any reference to the business which had moved him to seek her out. He exerted himself to entertain her; and for the time it seemed as though Blanche actually forgot her discontent in enjoyment of the moment. But when on paying the score Dare would have bought her a box of chocolates, to his surprise the girl with hasty ungraciousness declined the gift. She hated sweets, she said.
His action in purchasing chocolates for her had reminded her of Arnott and the similar gifts he had showered on her in the past. The incident jarred upon her; and a return of her former reserve ensued. Already she regretted having accepted the invitation for this outing. It was not that she disliked the man, or that she mistrusted him; but she had a presentiment that he would urge her to tell him things which it might be against her own interests to disclose. She sought to reassure herself with the thought that he could not force her confidence. Nevertheless she experienced a doubt as to her powers of reticence; she had already allowed him against her better judgment to discover that she was to a certain extent acquainted with Arnott’s doings. And she had confessed to some authority as to his actions. That positive affirmation of the line he would be likely to take had been an indiscretion.
Dare was himself so quietly confident that the girl, having nothing to conceal, would aid him with any information which it lay in her power to give that he did not anticipate difficulty in persuading her to disclose her knowledge. He believed that she also would wish to have the scandal in which her name was concerned allayed finally. It could not be agreeable for her to know the opprobrious things that were being said of her in connection with the man. For her own sake she would wish that stopped.
They re-entered the car and continued the journey. When they were well out into the country, Blanche said, turning to him suddenly:
“Don’t let us stop... What’s the use? I don’t want to walk; it’s pleasanter driving. And I must not be late in getting back.”
“I will see that you are back in ample time,” he answered. “But I want you to get out here. You needn’t walk far. I’ll tell the man to wait for us at the bottom of this hill.”
He spoke to the chauffeur, and the car stopped. Dare got out and helped the girl to alight. She looked at him with faint resentment in her eyes, as they remained standing together beside the road while the car drove swiftly away.
“I asked you not to,” she said protestingly.
“I know,” he said. “Forgive me for disregarding the request. I wanted to talk with you more privately. Plainly we couldn’t discuss this matter before a third person.”
“I don’t wish to discuss it,” she returned, getting off the road and beginning to walk in the direction taken by the car. “I fail to see why you, who are almost a stranger to me, should persist in discussing a subject which you must know is unpleasant for me to listen to. It is ungenerous of you to have brought me out with such an object.”
“Oh! no,” he replied. “I can’t see it in that light. It is to your interest, as well as to Mrs Arnott’s, to clear up this matter.”
“Please leave me out of it. Would you,” she asked, looking at him deliberately, “have taken so much trouble on my account?”
“Possibly not,” he admitted. “But since it is my intention to get to the bottom of this business, I could wish at the same time to be of service to you. It is not good for a girl to have her name coupled with that of a married man. You would be well advised in helping me to stop the thing.”
“It is easier to float a scandal than to stop one,” she returned impassively.
She glanced up at him as they strolled along over the coarse grass, and smiled strangely.
“If you are acting for Mrs Arnott,” she said, “you will have quite enough to do in covering the traces of an older scandal.”
He looked down at her quickly, and their eyes met in a long gaze of challenge and inquiry. There was so much of significance in the girl’s tones, in her eyes, and in her peculiarly malicious smile, that Dare had an uncomfortable conviction that she knew more of the Arnotts’ affairs than he had supposed. He began to think that she was not as guileless as he had believed.
“To what do you refer?” he asked.
She stopped abruptly and confronted him with an air of sullen defiance, an increase of angry colour in her cheeks. Dare, perforce, halted also, and faced her, perplexed beyond measure and distinctly annoyed. This sudden change of mood, with its suggestion of open antagonism, took him aback. He was conscious of a revulsion of feeling which amounted almost to disgust. He regretted that he had wasted his time in seeking her.
“I don’t know by what right you question me,” she said. “If you want me to tell you certain things, you must explain your reasons. Confidence for confidence, Mr Dare.”
“Very good,” he answered coolly. “I want you to furnish me with Mr Arnott’s present address, to save me trouble in discovering it for myself.”
“Why do you want his address?” she inquired.
“I thought we had gone into that already,” he replied. “I wish to persuade him to return to his home as the best and quickest means of ending this scandal.”
She shook her head.
“He won’t,” she answered positively. “He can’t... He’s ill.”
This information moved Dare to a show of surprise. For a moment he was inclined to discredit the announcement; but the girl’s manner gave no indication that she was attempting to impose on him, and he accepted the statement as true. It was just possible that his illness accounted for Arnott’s silence.
“I left him at Pretoria,” she said, starting to walk again. “He is in a nursing home.” She furnished the address. “They won’t let you see him, if you go there,” she added abruptly.
He made a note of the address on the back of an envelope, and scrutinised her with puzzled uncertainty as he returned the envelope to his pocket.
“What’s the matter with him?” he asked.
“Paralysis.” She spoke curtly, with a kind of hard anger in her voice. “He will get better, but he will never be quite well. It will be a case for nursing—always.”
He observed a rush of tears to her eyes, but there was no softening in her manner as she went on in dull, resentful tones:
“Everything that happens to me ends like that. If it hadn’t been for this we were to have been married.”
“Married!” he repeated, amazed. “You! ... But—”
“Oh! don’t pretend,” she interrupted impatiently, “that you don’t know they aren’t properly married... His wife is dead. I made him show me proofs of that when he asked me to marry him... He thinks I am going to marry him still.”
“And are you?” he asked.
“I don’t know... I hate sickness. But—he’s rich. Money makes things so much easier.”
He made a gesture of repulsion.
“You couldn’t do a thing so vile as that, surely?” he said.
The horror and disgust he experienced at her callous reasoning revealed itself in his voice, in his eyes as he stared down at her, scarce able to credit what he heard. She looked back at him fiercely.
“How dare you talk to me like that? ... Can’t you see all that such a marriage means to a girl like me? Why shouldn’t I consider myself?”
“I was thinking of the woman who for years believed herself to be his wife,” he replied coldly. “Now that he is free to marry her she has a right to demand that he should fulfil his obligation.”
“He won’t,” she declared.
“I think he will,” he answered confidently.
“You mean—” she began, and stopped, eyeing him with quick suspicion. “I wish I hadn’t told you where he is,” she cried passionately. “But they won’t let you see him. He’s not in a condition to be worried. You can’t bully a man in his condition.”
“I have no intention of bullying him,” he answered, placing considerable restraint upon himself. “I am going to offer him the choice between two alternatives. If he is wise he will accept the only decent course open to him. The consequences of refusal will be awkward for him.”
“You don’t take into consideration,” she said, with bitter anger in her voice, “that the threat with which you would intimidate him for your purpose is one which I also can use to oblige him to oppose you, if I wish. You are overlooking me.”
“I simply never dreamed of insulting you by harbouring such a thought,” he returned. “Even though you have flung the challenge, I couldn’t believe you capable of that.”
“You will need to reconstruct your theories on human nature,” she said cynically.
“Oh! no. One instance of failure doesn’t damn the race. I am not going to take up your challenge. I am going to regard it as a thing uttered with ill-considered haste. How you came by your knowledge puzzles me; but one point I feel fairly confident on is that you won’t use it. Women don’t do these things, Miss Maitland, whatever they may say in moments of anger.”
“Oh! Women!” she exclaimed contemptuously. “You are fond of generalising. But in this case, it isn’t women; it’s just myself. I have got the chance I have always longed for. Do you think I am likely to let it slip? ... When he was taken ill so suddenly, and I feared he was going to die, I was nearly mad with anxiety. Then they told me he wouldn’t die, that he would probably live for many years—with care... It was almost as great a shock to know that he was going to live and be—like that always. Do you think that woman, who calls herself his wife, will want him like that? ... Will be ready to devote her life to nursing him? I don’t... Not when she learns the whole story.”
“We will leave it to her to decide,” he answered quietly.
The picture she drew of Arnott as a helpless invalid was not pleasant to dwell upon. It appealed to Dare in the light of a horrible injustice that Pamela should sacrifice herself to the care of an invalid husband, a man who had deceived and deserted her, who needed to be urged even then to return to her,—might possibly refuse to return. She would be wiser to yield to his entreaties and become his wife. He was not quite clear what legal relationship existed between Pamela and the man who had married her bigamously; but he had an idea that before she could be free of him it would be necessary for her to instigate divorce proceedings. He was not at all sure she would do that, even if Arnott refused to return to her. The whole affair was horribly complicated.
“The decision won’t rest with her, nor with you,” Blanche observed after a brief pause. “You can’t coerce a man like Mr Arnott. He won’t allow you to arrange his life.”
She spoke with a sort of furtive admiration of the man whose dominating qualities and virile personality had first attracted her to him, and ultimately conquered her reluctance to the extent of gaining her consent to his proposal of marriage. She had left his home to protect herself from his less honourable intentions, had fled because she was afraid of him and uncertain of herself; and he had followed, determined to possess her at all costs. Finding her still obdurate, and less accessible than when she had lived beneath his roof, he had suggested marriage. His passion for her had become so imperative that it would brook no denial. No argument which prudence suggested could deter him from carrying out his purpose. He flung every consideration aside, as he had done once before when inflamed with his desire for Pamela; and Blanche, tempted by all that he could give her, as much as by the reciprocal passion he inspired, consented readily to his proposal. His sudden illness had interfered with the plan, had made it for the time being impracticable; but though she hesitated, appalled at the thought of a querulous invalid, husband in place of the vigorous man whose imperious strength had formed a large part of his attractiveness, Blanche had by no means abandoned the intention of marrying him. The worldly considerations which had influenced her in the past proved a strong inducement still.
With a sudden desire to end the talk, she increased the pace at which they were proceeding. Dare, as he kept step with her, maintained a constrained silence. He felt inadequate to cope with the ugly, sinister turn this affair had taken. He did not know what to say to the girl. There was nothing he could say that might not give fresh offence. She glanced up at him frowningly, incensed at this show of mute disapproval, and remarked:
“I’ve told you things it would have been wiser to have kept to myself. I don’t know why I told you. You must treat what I have said as confidential, please.”
“I can’t promise that,” he answered. “But I will keep your name out of this business as far as it is possible to do so. After all, there is nothing that you have told me that was not bound to come out. You couldn’t marry a man who is known to have a wife and family, without the whole story coming to light. As soon as the facts are known Arnott will have to take his trial on a charge of bigamy.”
She turned pale as she listened to him. It was borne in upon her that this man was going to prove a determined and implacable enemy. She felt instinctively that he meant to oppose her with all his strength.
“She will never prosecute him,” she said, sullenly defiant.
“She won’t need to,” he answered convincingly. “The Crown will do that.”
“You are trying to intimidate me,” she exclaimed with sudden passion. “You have no right to threaten me.”
He looked at her deliberately with a faint uplift of his brows.
“I am doing nothing of the sort,” he answered. “I am merely making a plain statement of facts in order to show you what you will bring on the man you talk of marrying if you carry out your determination to encourage him in his cruel desertion of the woman he married. Only through you will the story of his crime ever come to be known.”
She walked on with lowered gaze, making no reply.
Chapter Twenty Five.Dare paced the little balcony outside his room that night for many hours, plunged in a gloomy reverie so made up of confused conjecture, of scraps of that afternoon’s talk, of memories of other talks he had had with Pamela, and of doubts of Arnott, whose poor remnant of life she might still insist on linking with her own, that connected thought became impossible. His mind was a confusion of conflicting ideas that vied and strove with one another, and offered no solution of the complicated muddle of the human tragedy in which he was so inextricably involved.On one point alone he was very clear: he did not wish Pamela to consolidate her marriage with Arnott. His love for her assumed proportions of vast magnitude, so that he lost sight of every other consideration save his own longing for her, and his repugnance for the idea of her bright life being passed at the side of the moral and physical wreck who did not want her, who would in all probability make her life with him a perfect hell.Dare chafed at the picture his imagination conjured up, the picture which Blanche’s words had brought vividly before him, of Arnott paralysed, helpless, dependent as a child upon the care of the woman he had treated so abominably, with nothing of love between them to help in lightening the strain. The idea was intolerable. He brushed it aside with a sense of intense disgust. He felt that something must be done to prevent the horrible injustice of this useless sacrifice on her part. He must bring reason to bear with her, must use every argument to induce her to relinquish this vain belief in a personal sacrifice as the only means of retrieving her former mistake. The thing was monstrous, unthinkable; it must not be.He went inside, switched on the light, and sat down to write to her.“My dear,” he began, and found it impossible to address her by name, so let it stand at that. “I hardly know what to say to you,—how to tell you what I have learnt since my arrival here. Things are pretty much as you suspected—worse, indeed. It may be a shock to you, but I don’t feel that it can greatly distress you to hear that your husband is ill. He is never likely to be quite well again, if my information is correct I have yet to verify this account, though I have no reason for doubting its accuracy. I am going on to Pretoria, where he is, to find out what I can. I will write to you again when I am more fully informed.”He paused, and read the letter through with some dissatisfaction. Then he bent over the paper again, and wrote quickly, with a certain eagerness, as though the impulse which dictated what he wrote were irresistible in the flood of emotions that inspired it.“It is not a bit of use your thinking of going on with this. The thing is impossible. My dear, it is not just for my own sake I urge you to reconsider your purpose. You can’t do it. I can’t bear the thought of your throwing away all chance of happiness for a man who has left you finally, and is now paralysed and practically helpless. It is self-murder. I won’t permit it. I love you, and I want you badly...”Suddenly Dare flung down the pen, and tore the letter into fragments, and burnt them with the aid of matches in the fireless grate.“I can’t write to her,” he muttered. “It reads all wrong somehow. I must go to her. Things don’t sound the same on paper. I’ve got to see her and speak to her. I must see her.”He went out on the balcony again, and resumed his walk and his troubled reflections, which helped not a whit in the solving of the muddle, but only aggravated his sense of the absurd futility of the sacrifice Pamela contemplated. Her resolve was the outcome, he was convinced, of purely intellectual reasoning. If she would only admit the factor of passion, the cold wisdom of her logic would go down before it, as the hardest of glaciers will dissolve adrift in tropic seas. It remained for him to go to her, and make her feel the powerful influence of human love,—force her to realise that, however much other considerations weighed in the great social scheme, love counted above everything, mattered more than anything else,—was the only thing really which did matter. It was the great fundamental principle of the entire universe. He never doubted that he could persuade her into seeing this thing as he saw it. The circumstances he felt justified him in the attempt.The following day he took train for Pretoria. Before seeing Pamela it was necessary to investigate the truth of Blanche Maitland’s story. Unless he faced her with facts he could not hope to prevail with her, and his facts must be acquired at first hand.Dare was essentially a man of action. To decide on a certain course with him was to pursue it without delay to the finish. He meant, if possible, to see Arnott himself. But when he arrived at Pretoria, and applied at the address which Blanche had given, he was confronted with the first difficulty; without the doctor’s sanction he could not be admitted to the invalid’s presence. Arnott’s condition was sufficiently grave to make the most stringent rules with regard to the sick-room absolutely imperative.It being near the time for the doctor’s visit, he decided to wait in order to see him. He had given up the hope of an interview with Arnott. Clearly the man was not in a condition to discuss the painful subject of his domestic complications. That matter would have to be left in abeyance until he was well enough to cope with such things. The delay irked Dare, but it was unavoidable. He sat in the little waiting-room at the open window, and read a book of epitaphs, intended to be humorous, but which struck him as dreary reading, and an odd selection for the waiting-room of a nursing home. He was relieved when the doctor came in,—a young man with an energetic manner, and a display of haste. His greeting of Dare was somewhat curt: the interviewing of his patients’ friends was not in his opinion part of his day’s work; and he was obviously anxious not to be delayed. He did not sit down. Dare, who had risen, remained standing also.“I understand,” the doctor said, “that you are a friend of Mr Arnott,—that you wish to see him?”“I called with the purpose of seeing him,” Dare answered, carefully ignoring the first part of the speech. “His people are anxious for news of him.”The doctor looked doubtfully at the speaker. He had wondered why, save for the young woman who had called repeatedly during the first days after the patient’s admission to the home, and had manifested great distress at his condition, no one belonging to him had troubled even to make inquiries as to his progress. He had concluded that there was no one sufficiently interested in him to feel concern on his account.“I am reluctant to allow any one to see him for the present,” he said. “He is getting on; but we have to avoid anything that might be likely to excite him. There is trouble with the brain unfortunately.”“That is worse than I had anticipated,” Dare said, shocked and disconcerted by this intelligence. “Will you please tell me, so far as it is possible to judge at this stage, what the result of this illness is likely to be? Is he to be an invalid for life?”“Well, it is paralysis, you know,” the doctor answered, “and a bad case. Chronic alcoholism is mainly responsible. He will be able to walk, we hope—with the aid of sticks, of course. But his brain will never be quite clear. He may, however, live a long while.”“That is to be regretted in the circumstances,” Dare observed drily.The doctor agreed with him, but he did not say so. His business was to patch the man up, and he was doing his best to attend to it. He furnished a few more details, and held out vague hopes of an improvement in the mental condition. The patient had a good constitution, though he had done his utmost to ruin it; and if not crossed or excited, or worried with business matters, the brain would become stronger, though it would never be normally active again.Dare gathered from the fragmentary talk that Arnott was to be a semi-imbecile, just able to crawl about,—a reversion, in short, to childhood with the hideous defects of decrepit age to make the reversion more horrible. The information turned him sick. He was thankful to leave the place and get out again into the sunshine. He no longer desired to see Arnott. To reason with a man in that condition was impossible. Arnott had become a mere cipher in the drama, the finishing act of which had to be decided between Pamela and himself. It was unthinkable that she should persist in devoting the future to his wreck of humanity, to whom she owed no debt of duty, who had merely used her for his pleasure, and discarded her when he tired through his infatuation for a younger woman, which obsession possibly his failing mental faculties were responsible for.Dare left Pretoria the same day, and started on the long return journey to the coast. He was impatient to see Pamela, and at the same time extremely nervous at the prospect of his interview with her. He did not know what to say to her, how to break to her the brutal fact of Arnott’s contemplated marriage, his determined and ruthless desertion of herself. The man’s actions, before his illness prevented the carrying out of his designs, pointed conclusively to a deranged intellect. With the cunning of latent insanity he had arranged his plans, counting on Pamela’s silence in respect to his bigamous marriage with her, utterly regardless of the stir which the scandal of his marriage with Blanche must create in circles where he was known to have a wife and children already. To a man in full possession of his faculties the impossibility of concealing the crime of bigamy would have been apparent, unless he fled the country and married under an assumed name.What, he wondered, would Pamela decide upon doing when she learnt the entire truth? He could not tell. The uncertainty was nerve-racking. He fretted and worried himself with conjectures all through that tedious, seemingly unending journey,—during the hot dusty days as the train rushed through the Karroo, and throughout the long sleepless nights when, kept awake by his thoughts, he turned in weary discomfort in his narrow berth in the darkened compartment, and longed for the coming of day.When he reached the terminus he despatched a telegram to Pamela to inform her of his arrival, and his intention of calling upon her the following morning. Then he took a taxi and drove to the Mount Nelson. He dined and went to bed, and slept soundly for the first time since leaving Pretoria.Pamela did not sleep at all. The unexpected receipt of Dare’s telegram excited her, and kept her on the rack of expectation. She had not looked for him to return. The telegram was the only communication she had received from him, and it told her nothing, save that he was back and wished to see her. She knew that he must have something of importance to tell her or he would not have turned back so soon.The thought of the coming interview was vaguely disquieting. So much had passed between her and this man of a painful and intimate nature that all the barriers of conventional friendship were down, and left her exposed, as he was, to the onslaught of each new emotion inspired by their mutual feeling. She had thought of him so much since he had pleaded his cause with her, and she had admitted her own love for him,—had reviewed all their pleasant intercourse of the past, his kind, patient, and unselfish devotion which later, in accepting her decision, had yet lent itself to aid her in her unprotected and difficult position, that the love which she had confessed to bearing for him had strengthened considerably. She looked up to him as to some one strong and fine and worthy of a woman’s entire trust. Never for the man she had believed to be her husband had she felt this reverence of love. She had admired him, had felt grateful to him for his passionate ardour for herself. Their marriage had proved a delirious period of excitement and delight, until his passion cooled; but it had never roused in her a lofty conception of love, or helped her to realise the seriousness of life’s responsibilities. Her life as Arnott’s wife had tended rather to lower the standard of fine thinking, and reduce the principles of living to the sensuous indolence of self-gratification, and an immense concentration upon the importance of purely personal things. She had lived for herself, detached in sympathy from the wider world about her, careless of the joys and sorrows of others as something altogether outside her life. And now sorrow had brought her into touch with the world, had broadened her sympathies and her understanding, and decreased proportionately the sense of her personal significance.What is any life, however important to itself, however aggrandised by the world’s recognition, however necessary it may appear to others—to one other even, but a breath which expands the lungs of the universe and leaves them temporarily deflated as it passes on into the beyond?
Dare paced the little balcony outside his room that night for many hours, plunged in a gloomy reverie so made up of confused conjecture, of scraps of that afternoon’s talk, of memories of other talks he had had with Pamela, and of doubts of Arnott, whose poor remnant of life she might still insist on linking with her own, that connected thought became impossible. His mind was a confusion of conflicting ideas that vied and strove with one another, and offered no solution of the complicated muddle of the human tragedy in which he was so inextricably involved.
On one point alone he was very clear: he did not wish Pamela to consolidate her marriage with Arnott. His love for her assumed proportions of vast magnitude, so that he lost sight of every other consideration save his own longing for her, and his repugnance for the idea of her bright life being passed at the side of the moral and physical wreck who did not want her, who would in all probability make her life with him a perfect hell.
Dare chafed at the picture his imagination conjured up, the picture which Blanche’s words had brought vividly before him, of Arnott paralysed, helpless, dependent as a child upon the care of the woman he had treated so abominably, with nothing of love between them to help in lightening the strain. The idea was intolerable. He brushed it aside with a sense of intense disgust. He felt that something must be done to prevent the horrible injustice of this useless sacrifice on her part. He must bring reason to bear with her, must use every argument to induce her to relinquish this vain belief in a personal sacrifice as the only means of retrieving her former mistake. The thing was monstrous, unthinkable; it must not be.
He went inside, switched on the light, and sat down to write to her.
“My dear,” he began, and found it impossible to address her by name, so let it stand at that. “I hardly know what to say to you,—how to tell you what I have learnt since my arrival here. Things are pretty much as you suspected—worse, indeed. It may be a shock to you, but I don’t feel that it can greatly distress you to hear that your husband is ill. He is never likely to be quite well again, if my information is correct I have yet to verify this account, though I have no reason for doubting its accuracy. I am going on to Pretoria, where he is, to find out what I can. I will write to you again when I am more fully informed.”
He paused, and read the letter through with some dissatisfaction. Then he bent over the paper again, and wrote quickly, with a certain eagerness, as though the impulse which dictated what he wrote were irresistible in the flood of emotions that inspired it.
“It is not a bit of use your thinking of going on with this. The thing is impossible. My dear, it is not just for my own sake I urge you to reconsider your purpose. You can’t do it. I can’t bear the thought of your throwing away all chance of happiness for a man who has left you finally, and is now paralysed and practically helpless. It is self-murder. I won’t permit it. I love you, and I want you badly...”
Suddenly Dare flung down the pen, and tore the letter into fragments, and burnt them with the aid of matches in the fireless grate.
“I can’t write to her,” he muttered. “It reads all wrong somehow. I must go to her. Things don’t sound the same on paper. I’ve got to see her and speak to her. I must see her.”
He went out on the balcony again, and resumed his walk and his troubled reflections, which helped not a whit in the solving of the muddle, but only aggravated his sense of the absurd futility of the sacrifice Pamela contemplated. Her resolve was the outcome, he was convinced, of purely intellectual reasoning. If she would only admit the factor of passion, the cold wisdom of her logic would go down before it, as the hardest of glaciers will dissolve adrift in tropic seas. It remained for him to go to her, and make her feel the powerful influence of human love,—force her to realise that, however much other considerations weighed in the great social scheme, love counted above everything, mattered more than anything else,—was the only thing really which did matter. It was the great fundamental principle of the entire universe. He never doubted that he could persuade her into seeing this thing as he saw it. The circumstances he felt justified him in the attempt.
The following day he took train for Pretoria. Before seeing Pamela it was necessary to investigate the truth of Blanche Maitland’s story. Unless he faced her with facts he could not hope to prevail with her, and his facts must be acquired at first hand.
Dare was essentially a man of action. To decide on a certain course with him was to pursue it without delay to the finish. He meant, if possible, to see Arnott himself. But when he arrived at Pretoria, and applied at the address which Blanche had given, he was confronted with the first difficulty; without the doctor’s sanction he could not be admitted to the invalid’s presence. Arnott’s condition was sufficiently grave to make the most stringent rules with regard to the sick-room absolutely imperative.
It being near the time for the doctor’s visit, he decided to wait in order to see him. He had given up the hope of an interview with Arnott. Clearly the man was not in a condition to discuss the painful subject of his domestic complications. That matter would have to be left in abeyance until he was well enough to cope with such things. The delay irked Dare, but it was unavoidable. He sat in the little waiting-room at the open window, and read a book of epitaphs, intended to be humorous, but which struck him as dreary reading, and an odd selection for the waiting-room of a nursing home. He was relieved when the doctor came in,—a young man with an energetic manner, and a display of haste. His greeting of Dare was somewhat curt: the interviewing of his patients’ friends was not in his opinion part of his day’s work; and he was obviously anxious not to be delayed. He did not sit down. Dare, who had risen, remained standing also.
“I understand,” the doctor said, “that you are a friend of Mr Arnott,—that you wish to see him?”
“I called with the purpose of seeing him,” Dare answered, carefully ignoring the first part of the speech. “His people are anxious for news of him.”
The doctor looked doubtfully at the speaker. He had wondered why, save for the young woman who had called repeatedly during the first days after the patient’s admission to the home, and had manifested great distress at his condition, no one belonging to him had troubled even to make inquiries as to his progress. He had concluded that there was no one sufficiently interested in him to feel concern on his account.
“I am reluctant to allow any one to see him for the present,” he said. “He is getting on; but we have to avoid anything that might be likely to excite him. There is trouble with the brain unfortunately.”
“That is worse than I had anticipated,” Dare said, shocked and disconcerted by this intelligence. “Will you please tell me, so far as it is possible to judge at this stage, what the result of this illness is likely to be? Is he to be an invalid for life?”
“Well, it is paralysis, you know,” the doctor answered, “and a bad case. Chronic alcoholism is mainly responsible. He will be able to walk, we hope—with the aid of sticks, of course. But his brain will never be quite clear. He may, however, live a long while.”
“That is to be regretted in the circumstances,” Dare observed drily.
The doctor agreed with him, but he did not say so. His business was to patch the man up, and he was doing his best to attend to it. He furnished a few more details, and held out vague hopes of an improvement in the mental condition. The patient had a good constitution, though he had done his utmost to ruin it; and if not crossed or excited, or worried with business matters, the brain would become stronger, though it would never be normally active again.
Dare gathered from the fragmentary talk that Arnott was to be a semi-imbecile, just able to crawl about,—a reversion, in short, to childhood with the hideous defects of decrepit age to make the reversion more horrible. The information turned him sick. He was thankful to leave the place and get out again into the sunshine. He no longer desired to see Arnott. To reason with a man in that condition was impossible. Arnott had become a mere cipher in the drama, the finishing act of which had to be decided between Pamela and himself. It was unthinkable that she should persist in devoting the future to his wreck of humanity, to whom she owed no debt of duty, who had merely used her for his pleasure, and discarded her when he tired through his infatuation for a younger woman, which obsession possibly his failing mental faculties were responsible for.
Dare left Pretoria the same day, and started on the long return journey to the coast. He was impatient to see Pamela, and at the same time extremely nervous at the prospect of his interview with her. He did not know what to say to her, how to break to her the brutal fact of Arnott’s contemplated marriage, his determined and ruthless desertion of herself. The man’s actions, before his illness prevented the carrying out of his designs, pointed conclusively to a deranged intellect. With the cunning of latent insanity he had arranged his plans, counting on Pamela’s silence in respect to his bigamous marriage with her, utterly regardless of the stir which the scandal of his marriage with Blanche must create in circles where he was known to have a wife and children already. To a man in full possession of his faculties the impossibility of concealing the crime of bigamy would have been apparent, unless he fled the country and married under an assumed name.
What, he wondered, would Pamela decide upon doing when she learnt the entire truth? He could not tell. The uncertainty was nerve-racking. He fretted and worried himself with conjectures all through that tedious, seemingly unending journey,—during the hot dusty days as the train rushed through the Karroo, and throughout the long sleepless nights when, kept awake by his thoughts, he turned in weary discomfort in his narrow berth in the darkened compartment, and longed for the coming of day.
When he reached the terminus he despatched a telegram to Pamela to inform her of his arrival, and his intention of calling upon her the following morning. Then he took a taxi and drove to the Mount Nelson. He dined and went to bed, and slept soundly for the first time since leaving Pretoria.
Pamela did not sleep at all. The unexpected receipt of Dare’s telegram excited her, and kept her on the rack of expectation. She had not looked for him to return. The telegram was the only communication she had received from him, and it told her nothing, save that he was back and wished to see her. She knew that he must have something of importance to tell her or he would not have turned back so soon.
The thought of the coming interview was vaguely disquieting. So much had passed between her and this man of a painful and intimate nature that all the barriers of conventional friendship were down, and left her exposed, as he was, to the onslaught of each new emotion inspired by their mutual feeling. She had thought of him so much since he had pleaded his cause with her, and she had admitted her own love for him,—had reviewed all their pleasant intercourse of the past, his kind, patient, and unselfish devotion which later, in accepting her decision, had yet lent itself to aid her in her unprotected and difficult position, that the love which she had confessed to bearing for him had strengthened considerably. She looked up to him as to some one strong and fine and worthy of a woman’s entire trust. Never for the man she had believed to be her husband had she felt this reverence of love. She had admired him, had felt grateful to him for his passionate ardour for herself. Their marriage had proved a delirious period of excitement and delight, until his passion cooled; but it had never roused in her a lofty conception of love, or helped her to realise the seriousness of life’s responsibilities. Her life as Arnott’s wife had tended rather to lower the standard of fine thinking, and reduce the principles of living to the sensuous indolence of self-gratification, and an immense concentration upon the importance of purely personal things. She had lived for herself, detached in sympathy from the wider world about her, careless of the joys and sorrows of others as something altogether outside her life. And now sorrow had brought her into touch with the world, had broadened her sympathies and her understanding, and decreased proportionately the sense of her personal significance.
What is any life, however important to itself, however aggrandised by the world’s recognition, however necessary it may appear to others—to one other even, but a breath which expands the lungs of the universe and leaves them temporarily deflated as it passes on into the beyond?
Chapter Twenty Six.Pamela was alone and waiting for Dare when he presented himself at the house on the following morning. She turned slowly when the door of the room opened, and advanced to meet him with a look of inquiry and of welcome in her eyes.She looked better, he observed, than when he had last seen her; the anxiety that had sharpened her features and shadowed her face with an expression of dread had yielded to a new calm, which suggested a mind braced and prepared to meet and accept whatever offered. Her composure helped him enormously in quieting his nervousness, which before, and at the moment of, his entry had been excessive. He took her extended hand and held it.“You bring me bad news?” she said, observing his grave face with a watchful scrutiny, and speaking in that quiet, level voice that one uses sometimes in discussing things too serious and strange for ordinary emotion. “I felt it must be bad news when your telegram arrived... You’ve seen him?”“No,” he answered.He led her to the sofa near the French window on which he had sat with her before when they had had their last interview. The memory of that former occasion was present in his mind. It was possibly present in Pamela’s mind also; but the recollection caused no sense of embarrassment. Her love for, and confidence in, him had swept all feeling of constraint away. He seated himself beside her.“I wrote to you,” he said; “but I decided not to send the letter. I felt it was best to come down and explain. Mr Arnott is in Pretoria. I went there for the purpose of seeing him; but he is ill, and unable to see any one. I had an interview with the doctor who is attending his case. I thought you would wish to know exactly how matters are with him.”He paused. Pamela was gazing at him with wide serious eyes. She showed less surprise than he had expected. She appeared somehow prepared, and extraordinarily calm. It made the telling easier. It was as though she had passed the final stage of emotionalism, had come through all the stresses of anguished uncertainty, of distressed and tormented doubt and wounded love, and emerged calm-eyed and efficient, amazingly controlled, and clear as to her judgment. She listened attentively without interrupting him. When he paused, she said:“You are not preparing me to hear that he is dead?”“No,” he answered. His feelings got the better of him, and he added bluntly,—“I would to God I were! Life—all that is left of it for him—isn’t worth the having. And anyway, living or dead, he isn’t worthy of one thought of your compassion.”“Then he did go away with Blanche?” she said quietly.“He followed her. He meant to marry her—means to marry her still, if her statement is to be believed. I saw her in Bloemfontein. It was she who told me of his illness.”“What is the matter with him?” she asked, her earnest eyes holding his, questioning his, refusing, it occurred to him, to allow what he was telling her to bias her ultimate judgment. She had accustomed herself to ugly truths; she was not shocked or dismayed any longer, only anxious to have her worst fears confirmed or disproved. She desired to hear the whole truth, whatever it held of pain or humiliation. At least it could hold no disillusion for her.“He has had a stroke of paralysis, they tell me,” Dare answered, avoiding her eyes.He was conscious of a sudden movement on her part, of a quick, inaudible exclamation which was followed by a sharp indrawing of her breath. He did not look at her; he felt, without seeing them, that there were tears of pity and of horror shining in her eyes. He counted for something to her still. She was sorry for the man. Dare felt unreasonably incensed.“There is hope of a partial recovery,” he continued dully, trying to keep under the sudden sharp jealousy that gripped him as nothing he had experienced in all their former talks had gripped and hurt. “He’ll get about again, they think... walk a little. His brain is affected—slightly. That will never be quite clear again...”He broke off abruptly, and turned to her in protesting surprise. She was weeping. The tears were welling in her eyes and coursing down her cheeks. Arnott ill—broken—touched the deepest springs of her compassion. All the bitterness in her heart against the man who had so cruelly wronged her melted into sorrow for him in his terrible affliction. She no longer experienced any anger against him, only a great pity,—pity for the miserable wreckage of his health, which stood, it seemed to her, as a symbol of the wreckage of their love,—all the promise and the strength and the beauty gone for evermore,—only the dead ashes remaining in the furnace of life.“Your tears are a big return for his cruelty to you,” he said, trying with ill success to hide the twinge of jealousy which caused him to wince at sight of her grief. “Some people might consider his condition a perfectly just retribution. You owe him nothing—not even pity.”“One doesn’t only render what is due,” she said, wiping her eyes slowly. “That would make life too hard. Could you expect me to hear unmoved what you have just told me? I thought I had schooled myself to bear anything; but this is too awful. I would rather have heard that he was well and happy—with her.”“She is going to him,” he said, bluntly.“Going to him? ... Now?” Pamela’s tone expressed wonder. “You mean, she loves him sufficiently to marry him—ill—like that?”“I mean,” he returned, watching her narrowly, “that she loves herself sufficiently to put up with his condition on account of his wealth. She admitted that almost in as many words. It’s as much as he has any right to expect.”“Oh! no,” she said quickly. “He is giving her more than that.”She was silent for a moment, looking thoughtfully beyond him towards the garden which showed through the aperture of the long window, a fair and peaceful background, in striking contrast to the tension within the room and the unquiet of her mind. Dare’s gaze never left her face. He was watching her continually, trying to gauge her intention from his study of her expression. The slow tears still fell at intervals; but they became fewer, and she wiped them mechanically with a small drenched handkerchief, making no effort at concealment from him. It seemed as if in her preoccupation she was scarcely conscious of his presence.“It’s a sordid story,” he said. “I am sorry to have to distress you with it; but you had to know... It closes everything, you see,—puts a finish to your part in his life. He has flung aside his responsibilities deliberately. A man like that, devoid of all moral sense, cannot be influenced. I doubt you would accomplish anything, if you went to him.”“At least, I must make the effort,” she said slowly. She turned to him, a look of sad entreaty in her eyes, as though she would appeal to him to help, instead of making things more difficult for her. “Don’t try to dissuade me,” she pleaded earnestly. “Don’t fail me. I am relying so much on your help.”“But,” he urged gently, “don’t you realise how impossible this thing has become? Think, even if you succeeded in persuading him to return—which I doubt strongly you could succeed in doing—what would your life be like with him,—half-imbecile, helpless, an invalid always? ... It’s too horrible to contemplate.”She shuddered at the picture of Arnott which he drew, and hid her white face in her hands and said nothing.“It’s not as though you owe him anything,” he insisted. “It’s not as though you love him any longer, or can even give him what he wants—that girl, however little she brings him, can give him more than you. You are for defeating happiness all round, you see. It’s not worth it. I understand your reason for wishing to do this, but I can’t feel it justifies it in any sense.”He put an arm about her and drew her to him and held her close.“Cut it, Pamela,” he said. “I’ll take you home to England. We’ll be married quietly over there—or in Europe somewhere. It will be better for the children in the long run, dear, believe me. I can’t get reconciled anyhow to the idea of giving you up. You belong to me. I’ve a right to you. I have loved you always, from the day I saw you first at that tournament so many years ago. Arnott robbed me of you then. I can’t let him step in a second time and take you from me... Believe me, Pamela, I wouldn’t try to stand between you and what you consider to be a duty if I saw any possible chance of happiness in it for you at all,—if even I could feel that the result might justify the sacrifice. It won’t. It will be just death in life for you both. And it’s going to be pretty hard on me too. I could put up with that, if it spelt happiness for you; but it doesn’t. Pamela, is it worth it? cheating ourselves for a principle that isn’t going to work any solid good for any one?”He drew her head to his shoulder, and gathered her closer in his arms and kissed her, keeping his face pressed to the tear-wet cheek, feeling the trembling of her body lying passive in his arms, and the little choking sobs which escaped her as she wept in his embrace. Would she yield, he wondered? Had she not in surrendering to his caresses partly yielded already?“It is asking too much of human nature to expect us to give up everything,” he said. “I want you. I am lonely without you. It isn’t a case of making love,—a phase of feverish emotions. I love you honestly, earnestly. I want you day after day. I want your companionship. I want you to fill my life, as I shall hope to fill yours. I want you at my side—always. Pamela, my dearest, you are not going to snatch my hope away from me for no more solid reason than the fulfilment of an imaginary duty which is going to benefit no one? Life—without you—is empty for me.”“Oh! my dear!” she sobbed. She lifted her face to his and kissed his lips. “I want to do as you wish. I want to take the easy course; but the other is the right course. It isn’t just happiness that is at stake. It is neither love for him, nor any sense of obligation to him, that makes me desire to marry the father of my children... It’s just the knowledge of what is due to them. They count first. They have to be considered. Do you think I don’t realise,” she added passionately, withdrawing herself from his arms, “that I shall hate my life with him,—that—God forgive me I—I shall possibly hate him? ... hate him more every year, until even pity for him dies beneath the strain of constant weariness, daily resentment. What you offer tempts me sorely. It’s just dragging me to pieces to refuse you. Life with you would be a good and happy thing. I want it, and I can’t have it. But it is denying you which hurts more than denying myself. My dear!—my dear! I wish you didn’t care so much. What can I do? ... What can I say?”“You can do,” he answered, looking at her steadily, “what I ask you to do, and leave the future of the children more safely in my hands than in their father’s. His example can be no possible guide for them. His influence in the home will tend neither towards their happiness nor their good. At most, you can give them his name—they have a right to that, as it is. Think, Pamela... Isn’t your idea of what is right for them merely a morbid fancy? Let the man go. You’ve lost your hold on him. Leave him to finish the muddle he has made of his life in his own way. He has proved himself incapable of faithfulness. It isn’t decent that you should continue to live with him. I show you a way out,—take it. Put yourself unreservedly in my hands.”“That’s shirking,” she said. “I’ve always shirked.”“What else is there for you to do?” he asked. “You can’t straighten a muddle which is none of your making. There’s a duty you owe to yourself,—you’re overlooking that Shake yourself free of this life which is hurtful to you in every sense, and give me the right to protect you, to act and think for you. I can’t countenance what you think of doing. I’m going to use my utmost effort to dissuade you. See here,” he said. He took a note-book from his pocket, and wrote the address of the Pretoria Home upon a page which he tore out and handed to her. “Write to the doctor there, and ask him to give you all particulars of Arnott’s case. He will possibly tell you more than he told me.”“His condition makes no difference,” she answered, reading the address he handed to her before putting the paper away. “Ill or well, it doesn’t affect the main point.”“I know,” he said. “But you ought to ascertain what you can before taking any decisive step. Then, if you wish to see him, I will take you there.”At this suggestion, which she had not before considered, she glanced at him in quick dismay.“I don’t think—I could go to him,” she said, hesitating nervously. “I... He must come home.”“That, of course,” Dare answered, infinitely relieved, “is as you wish.”The possibility of Arnott consenting to return occurred to him as very unlikely.“You’ve got to face the chance of his refusal,” he added abruptly. He leaned towards her. “If he refuses, Pamela?—He may, you know.”She turned to him and laid a hand impulsively upon his arm.“Don’t tempt me to hope he will do that,” she said. “Be strong for both of us... I want you to be strong.”He took her face in his hands and held it for a moment looking deeply into her eyes.“Aren’t you demanding rather much of me,” he asked, “to insist that I should aid you in my own defeat? I’m only human, Pamela.”She answered nothing, but placing her hands on his wrists, she pulled his hands from her face and carried them to her lips. At this unexpected act on her part Dare coloured awkwardly. The next moment he had seized her in his arms and covered her face with kisses. As abruptly as he had seized her, he released her and stood up. He pulled himself together with an effort, and walked as far as the window, where he paused for a second or so, and then turned and came slowly bade, and stood above her, looking down into the sweet, upturned face.“When I came to you this morning,” he said, “I had only one purpose,—to win you,—to make you see that the only thing that really matters is our love for one another. I feel that still. It’s the only thing that counts with me. But I’m not going to worry you any more. You’ve got to follow your conscience in this. I think you’re wrong... time may prove you wrong. If it does, or if you fail in this, I count on you to let me know. I shall always be at hand—waiting. You’ll summon me, Pamela, when the time comes?”“Yes,” she whispered.She gazed into the strong face above her, sad now, and rather stern; and the thought of all that she was losing in sending him out of her life gripped her heart like icy fingers closing about the happiness of life. And while she sat there, and he stood over her, gravely silent, the gay sound of childish laughter broke upon the stillness, followed by the quick patter of little feet along the stoep. Dare looked round.“Well, at any rate,” he said, “you’ve got them.”The bitterness in his voice did not escape her. She understood what he was feeling, and, rising, she went to him and placed a hand gently on his arm.“The best thing that life has given me is your love,” she said. “There is no sting of bitterness in that at all.”
Pamela was alone and waiting for Dare when he presented himself at the house on the following morning. She turned slowly when the door of the room opened, and advanced to meet him with a look of inquiry and of welcome in her eyes.
She looked better, he observed, than when he had last seen her; the anxiety that had sharpened her features and shadowed her face with an expression of dread had yielded to a new calm, which suggested a mind braced and prepared to meet and accept whatever offered. Her composure helped him enormously in quieting his nervousness, which before, and at the moment of, his entry had been excessive. He took her extended hand and held it.
“You bring me bad news?” she said, observing his grave face with a watchful scrutiny, and speaking in that quiet, level voice that one uses sometimes in discussing things too serious and strange for ordinary emotion. “I felt it must be bad news when your telegram arrived... You’ve seen him?”
“No,” he answered.
He led her to the sofa near the French window on which he had sat with her before when they had had their last interview. The memory of that former occasion was present in his mind. It was possibly present in Pamela’s mind also; but the recollection caused no sense of embarrassment. Her love for, and confidence in, him had swept all feeling of constraint away. He seated himself beside her.
“I wrote to you,” he said; “but I decided not to send the letter. I felt it was best to come down and explain. Mr Arnott is in Pretoria. I went there for the purpose of seeing him; but he is ill, and unable to see any one. I had an interview with the doctor who is attending his case. I thought you would wish to know exactly how matters are with him.”
He paused. Pamela was gazing at him with wide serious eyes. She showed less surprise than he had expected. She appeared somehow prepared, and extraordinarily calm. It made the telling easier. It was as though she had passed the final stage of emotionalism, had come through all the stresses of anguished uncertainty, of distressed and tormented doubt and wounded love, and emerged calm-eyed and efficient, amazingly controlled, and clear as to her judgment. She listened attentively without interrupting him. When he paused, she said:
“You are not preparing me to hear that he is dead?”
“No,” he answered. His feelings got the better of him, and he added bluntly,—“I would to God I were! Life—all that is left of it for him—isn’t worth the having. And anyway, living or dead, he isn’t worthy of one thought of your compassion.”
“Then he did go away with Blanche?” she said quietly.
“He followed her. He meant to marry her—means to marry her still, if her statement is to be believed. I saw her in Bloemfontein. It was she who told me of his illness.”
“What is the matter with him?” she asked, her earnest eyes holding his, questioning his, refusing, it occurred to him, to allow what he was telling her to bias her ultimate judgment. She had accustomed herself to ugly truths; she was not shocked or dismayed any longer, only anxious to have her worst fears confirmed or disproved. She desired to hear the whole truth, whatever it held of pain or humiliation. At least it could hold no disillusion for her.
“He has had a stroke of paralysis, they tell me,” Dare answered, avoiding her eyes.
He was conscious of a sudden movement on her part, of a quick, inaudible exclamation which was followed by a sharp indrawing of her breath. He did not look at her; he felt, without seeing them, that there were tears of pity and of horror shining in her eyes. He counted for something to her still. She was sorry for the man. Dare felt unreasonably incensed.
“There is hope of a partial recovery,” he continued dully, trying to keep under the sudden sharp jealousy that gripped him as nothing he had experienced in all their former talks had gripped and hurt. “He’ll get about again, they think... walk a little. His brain is affected—slightly. That will never be quite clear again...”
He broke off abruptly, and turned to her in protesting surprise. She was weeping. The tears were welling in her eyes and coursing down her cheeks. Arnott ill—broken—touched the deepest springs of her compassion. All the bitterness in her heart against the man who had so cruelly wronged her melted into sorrow for him in his terrible affliction. She no longer experienced any anger against him, only a great pity,—pity for the miserable wreckage of his health, which stood, it seemed to her, as a symbol of the wreckage of their love,—all the promise and the strength and the beauty gone for evermore,—only the dead ashes remaining in the furnace of life.
“Your tears are a big return for his cruelty to you,” he said, trying with ill success to hide the twinge of jealousy which caused him to wince at sight of her grief. “Some people might consider his condition a perfectly just retribution. You owe him nothing—not even pity.”
“One doesn’t only render what is due,” she said, wiping her eyes slowly. “That would make life too hard. Could you expect me to hear unmoved what you have just told me? I thought I had schooled myself to bear anything; but this is too awful. I would rather have heard that he was well and happy—with her.”
“She is going to him,” he said, bluntly.
“Going to him? ... Now?” Pamela’s tone expressed wonder. “You mean, she loves him sufficiently to marry him—ill—like that?”
“I mean,” he returned, watching her narrowly, “that she loves herself sufficiently to put up with his condition on account of his wealth. She admitted that almost in as many words. It’s as much as he has any right to expect.”
“Oh! no,” she said quickly. “He is giving her more than that.”
She was silent for a moment, looking thoughtfully beyond him towards the garden which showed through the aperture of the long window, a fair and peaceful background, in striking contrast to the tension within the room and the unquiet of her mind. Dare’s gaze never left her face. He was watching her continually, trying to gauge her intention from his study of her expression. The slow tears still fell at intervals; but they became fewer, and she wiped them mechanically with a small drenched handkerchief, making no effort at concealment from him. It seemed as if in her preoccupation she was scarcely conscious of his presence.
“It’s a sordid story,” he said. “I am sorry to have to distress you with it; but you had to know... It closes everything, you see,—puts a finish to your part in his life. He has flung aside his responsibilities deliberately. A man like that, devoid of all moral sense, cannot be influenced. I doubt you would accomplish anything, if you went to him.”
“At least, I must make the effort,” she said slowly. She turned to him, a look of sad entreaty in her eyes, as though she would appeal to him to help, instead of making things more difficult for her. “Don’t try to dissuade me,” she pleaded earnestly. “Don’t fail me. I am relying so much on your help.”
“But,” he urged gently, “don’t you realise how impossible this thing has become? Think, even if you succeeded in persuading him to return—which I doubt strongly you could succeed in doing—what would your life be like with him,—half-imbecile, helpless, an invalid always? ... It’s too horrible to contemplate.”
She shuddered at the picture of Arnott which he drew, and hid her white face in her hands and said nothing.
“It’s not as though you owe him anything,” he insisted. “It’s not as though you love him any longer, or can even give him what he wants—that girl, however little she brings him, can give him more than you. You are for defeating happiness all round, you see. It’s not worth it. I understand your reason for wishing to do this, but I can’t feel it justifies it in any sense.”
He put an arm about her and drew her to him and held her close.
“Cut it, Pamela,” he said. “I’ll take you home to England. We’ll be married quietly over there—or in Europe somewhere. It will be better for the children in the long run, dear, believe me. I can’t get reconciled anyhow to the idea of giving you up. You belong to me. I’ve a right to you. I have loved you always, from the day I saw you first at that tournament so many years ago. Arnott robbed me of you then. I can’t let him step in a second time and take you from me... Believe me, Pamela, I wouldn’t try to stand between you and what you consider to be a duty if I saw any possible chance of happiness in it for you at all,—if even I could feel that the result might justify the sacrifice. It won’t. It will be just death in life for you both. And it’s going to be pretty hard on me too. I could put up with that, if it spelt happiness for you; but it doesn’t. Pamela, is it worth it? cheating ourselves for a principle that isn’t going to work any solid good for any one?”
He drew her head to his shoulder, and gathered her closer in his arms and kissed her, keeping his face pressed to the tear-wet cheek, feeling the trembling of her body lying passive in his arms, and the little choking sobs which escaped her as she wept in his embrace. Would she yield, he wondered? Had she not in surrendering to his caresses partly yielded already?
“It is asking too much of human nature to expect us to give up everything,” he said. “I want you. I am lonely without you. It isn’t a case of making love,—a phase of feverish emotions. I love you honestly, earnestly. I want you day after day. I want your companionship. I want you to fill my life, as I shall hope to fill yours. I want you at my side—always. Pamela, my dearest, you are not going to snatch my hope away from me for no more solid reason than the fulfilment of an imaginary duty which is going to benefit no one? Life—without you—is empty for me.”
“Oh! my dear!” she sobbed. She lifted her face to his and kissed his lips. “I want to do as you wish. I want to take the easy course; but the other is the right course. It isn’t just happiness that is at stake. It is neither love for him, nor any sense of obligation to him, that makes me desire to marry the father of my children... It’s just the knowledge of what is due to them. They count first. They have to be considered. Do you think I don’t realise,” she added passionately, withdrawing herself from his arms, “that I shall hate my life with him,—that—God forgive me I—I shall possibly hate him? ... hate him more every year, until even pity for him dies beneath the strain of constant weariness, daily resentment. What you offer tempts me sorely. It’s just dragging me to pieces to refuse you. Life with you would be a good and happy thing. I want it, and I can’t have it. But it is denying you which hurts more than denying myself. My dear!—my dear! I wish you didn’t care so much. What can I do? ... What can I say?”
“You can do,” he answered, looking at her steadily, “what I ask you to do, and leave the future of the children more safely in my hands than in their father’s. His example can be no possible guide for them. His influence in the home will tend neither towards their happiness nor their good. At most, you can give them his name—they have a right to that, as it is. Think, Pamela... Isn’t your idea of what is right for them merely a morbid fancy? Let the man go. You’ve lost your hold on him. Leave him to finish the muddle he has made of his life in his own way. He has proved himself incapable of faithfulness. It isn’t decent that you should continue to live with him. I show you a way out,—take it. Put yourself unreservedly in my hands.”
“That’s shirking,” she said. “I’ve always shirked.”
“What else is there for you to do?” he asked. “You can’t straighten a muddle which is none of your making. There’s a duty you owe to yourself,—you’re overlooking that Shake yourself free of this life which is hurtful to you in every sense, and give me the right to protect you, to act and think for you. I can’t countenance what you think of doing. I’m going to use my utmost effort to dissuade you. See here,” he said. He took a note-book from his pocket, and wrote the address of the Pretoria Home upon a page which he tore out and handed to her. “Write to the doctor there, and ask him to give you all particulars of Arnott’s case. He will possibly tell you more than he told me.”
“His condition makes no difference,” she answered, reading the address he handed to her before putting the paper away. “Ill or well, it doesn’t affect the main point.”
“I know,” he said. “But you ought to ascertain what you can before taking any decisive step. Then, if you wish to see him, I will take you there.”
At this suggestion, which she had not before considered, she glanced at him in quick dismay.
“I don’t think—I could go to him,” she said, hesitating nervously. “I... He must come home.”
“That, of course,” Dare answered, infinitely relieved, “is as you wish.”
The possibility of Arnott consenting to return occurred to him as very unlikely.
“You’ve got to face the chance of his refusal,” he added abruptly. He leaned towards her. “If he refuses, Pamela?—He may, you know.”
She turned to him and laid a hand impulsively upon his arm.
“Don’t tempt me to hope he will do that,” she said. “Be strong for both of us... I want you to be strong.”
He took her face in his hands and held it for a moment looking deeply into her eyes.
“Aren’t you demanding rather much of me,” he asked, “to insist that I should aid you in my own defeat? I’m only human, Pamela.”
She answered nothing, but placing her hands on his wrists, she pulled his hands from her face and carried them to her lips. At this unexpected act on her part Dare coloured awkwardly. The next moment he had seized her in his arms and covered her face with kisses. As abruptly as he had seized her, he released her and stood up. He pulled himself together with an effort, and walked as far as the window, where he paused for a second or so, and then turned and came slowly bade, and stood above her, looking down into the sweet, upturned face.
“When I came to you this morning,” he said, “I had only one purpose,—to win you,—to make you see that the only thing that really matters is our love for one another. I feel that still. It’s the only thing that counts with me. But I’m not going to worry you any more. You’ve got to follow your conscience in this. I think you’re wrong... time may prove you wrong. If it does, or if you fail in this, I count on you to let me know. I shall always be at hand—waiting. You’ll summon me, Pamela, when the time comes?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
She gazed into the strong face above her, sad now, and rather stern; and the thought of all that she was losing in sending him out of her life gripped her heart like icy fingers closing about the happiness of life. And while she sat there, and he stood over her, gravely silent, the gay sound of childish laughter broke upon the stillness, followed by the quick patter of little feet along the stoep. Dare looked round.
“Well, at any rate,” he said, “you’ve got them.”
The bitterness in his voice did not escape her. She understood what he was feeling, and, rising, she went to him and placed a hand gently on his arm.
“The best thing that life has given me is your love,” she said. “There is no sting of bitterness in that at all.”
Chapter Twenty Seven.Dare remained in Cape Town for a while. Pamela had written to the doctor at Pretoria; and he waited to learn the result of his report, and hear what she decided upon doing. If she changed her mind about going up he meant to make the journey with her.The report when it came differed very slightly from what he had told her. Arnott was making steady progress: it would be possible to move him shortly if Mrs Arnott wished. The doctor intimated that if she desired to see her husband there was no reason against it.Pamela showed the letter to Dare, and discussed with him the question of whether she ought to go, whether in the circumstances it might not do more harm than good. She was obviously reluctant to follow the doctor’s suggestion, and at the same time convinced that it was little less than a duty. Dare felt himself inadequate to advise her.“In any case,” he said, “you will need to explain to the doctor that your presence might be likely to excite the patient. You can’t keep him in the dark.”Pamela considered this.“I think,” she said presently, looking at him a little uncertainly, “it would be easier to explain things personally,—easier than writing. I think perhaps it would be best to go. You think that, don’t you?”“Yes,” he answered. “If you are going through with the thing, it’s no good jibbing at obstacles. When you have made up your mind I’ll see about tickets, and make all arrangements for the journey.”“You are going with me?” she asked.“Of course,” he answered. “You don’t suppose I would allow you to go alone? I’m seeing you through to the finish.”She looked at him with grateful eyes.“I am so dreading this,” she said. “I don’t know how I should manage alone. I’m growing altogether to depend on you. It isn’t fair to you.”But Dare would not allow this.“It’s the one return you can make me,” he insisted,—“if there is any return called for. I am glad to be of any little service to you.”To be of service to her was the only thing left him. This journey which he proposed making with her was the last opportunity, he supposed, that he would have of enjoying her society; the end of the journey meant the parting of the ways for them. He had no idea how the prospect of the future appealed to her, but for him it held little in the way of hope or interest. He would go on with his work, and get what satisfaction he could out of that,—it offered scope, and interest of one sort. Had she consented to marry him he would have retired and gone home; there was no necessity for him to follow his profession; but without her, work became a necessity of itself. Too much leisure would only conduce to thought.He supposed that in time he would become reconciled to his disappointment; but for the present he could only realise the bitterness of the loss of a happiness which fate had seemed to place within his grasp, and had then wrested from him again with wanton caprice. He still held to it that Pamela was wrong in her decision; but while he could not persuade her into recognising her mistake, he was obliged to acquiesce in it. In his brain there lingered a faint hope that the journey to Pretoria would accomplish what he had failed to do,—that the meeting with Arnott would convince her of the impossibility of reuniting their severed lives. Since it was a matter of principle only with her, against which her nature revolted, he did not feel that there was any disloyalty in desiring her defeat. It would be best for her in the long run, and her good mattered to him equally with his own.If occasionally a doubt crept into Pamela’s mind as to the ultimate result of her journey, she did not encourage it. There were certainly moments when she shrank from her self-imposed task, moments when she longed to give in, to take the happiness Dare offered and let the rest go. But reflection invariably induced a calmer mood, in which the impossibility of surrendering to love, with the past like a black shadow of disgrace between her and the happiness this man could give her, was painfully manifest. She had married Arnott, had clung to him when she knew she was not legally his wife; to refuse her obligation now were to degrade herself to the level of the women who subordinate honour to pleasure, who have neither a sense of responsibility nor any sort of pride. She had trailed her flag in the mud once; it was given to her now to raise it and cleanse it from the mire. She trusted that she would have the strength to go through with her undertaking to the finish.The question that presented the greatest difficulty in leaving home was how to arrange about the children. To leave them to the sole care of coloured servants was impossible. Mrs Carruthers solved this difficulty as soon as she heard of Pamela’s intended journey. She carried them off to her own home, rather pleased to be enabled by some practical form of usefulness to salve a conscience which reproached her for her hasty and, as she believed, unjust suspicions of Arnott, whose illness, explaining the mystery of his silence, had closed the scandal attending on his disappearance.Dare, in supplying her with details of the illness, had carefully omitted all mention of Blanche, and her part in Arnott’s life. It would come with all the shock of a fresh scandal if by their subsequent acts they revived the talk which had coupled their names already, and still reflected discreditably on the girl. He felt that the girl had yet to be reckoned with. She might prove a more formidable obstacle in Pamela’s path than the miserable wreck who had deserted her. Since her sole purpose was gain it would perhaps be possible to buy her off. But that eventuality would be a last consideration; purchased silence is expensive, and often dangerous. Dare had no intention of exposing Pamela to blackmail. Any money transaction that passed must be made through himself, and kept from the Arnotts’ knowledge. In the matter of Blanche Maitland he meant to exercise his own discretion. He desired if possible to keep her and Pamela from meeting. It formed one of his reasons for accompanying Pamela on her journey.Mrs Carruthers, when she heard of this purpose of Dare’s, pronounced it the maddest of the many mad acts he had committed in connection with this affair. He was acting, in her opinion, with amazing indiscretion.“Does it never occur to you that you are likely to get Pamela talked about?” she asked him.“What is there to cause talk?” he inquired, feeling oddly irritated at her persistent opposition.“Well, your devotion isn’t exactly normal.”“Normal?” he said.“Usual, if you prefer it,” she conceded. “It’s practically the same thing. Disinterested service is a virtue ordinary human intelligence cannot grasp.”“That is, perhaps, less the fault of human intelligence,” he returned, “than the misuse of service.”“No doubt,” she allowed. “Nevertheless, we suffer vicariously through that same misuse. But it’s no good talking. You have made up your mind. If it wasn’t for how you feel about her the thing wouldn’t be so outrageous; but under the circumstances...”She broke off and looked at him with perplexed, baffled eyes. Dare realised dimly what a puzzle and a disappointment he had become to her. She had at one time, he was aware, regarded herself as an influence in his life. He almost smiled at the thought Influences are only powerful so long as one is satisfied to submit to them; with the first sign of breaking away, control ends.“I’ll bring her to the station and see you off, anyway,” she finished.“That will,” he assured her, smiling openly now, “add an air of immense respectability to the adventure.”The arrival of the little Arnotts, with their nurse, a considerable amount of luggage, and numerous toys, gave Mrs Carruthers something else to think of, and detached her mind successfully from Dare and his misplaced affections. She had suggested that the children should come to her the day before Pamela left in order to see how the plan worked, and also with the object of allowing their mother leisure in which to make her own hurried preparations for the journey. When Carruthers got back that evening he found them already installed in his home; and his wife, who, in making her arrangements, had not consulted him, was reminded at sight of his amazed face that what she regarded in the light of an agreeable duty he might view altogether differently.“I believe I actually forgot that I possessed a husband,” she said.She regarded him for a second with bright, amused eyes.“They’ve come to stay,” she announced. “I’ve adopted them—indefinitely.”Carruthers demanded an explanation, and emitted a low dismayed whistle when he learnt that their mother was going to Pretoria and might be away some weeks.“But she hasn’t gone already?” he said, collapsing into a chair on the stoep, and reluctantly submitting to having his foot used for the unnatural purpose of equestrian exercise by Pamela’s small son, who with his sister was enjoying amazingly this unexpected change of residence.“No. But I thought it advisable to have them on trial before she left. They go to-morrow.”“They!” Carruthers ejaculated.“George is going with her,” she explained, with a smiling shrug of her shoulders.She watched the children, who were sprawling all over her husband to his manifest discomfort, and, surveying the grouping, laughed.“You look quite nice as the father of a family,” she observed. “I wish they belonged here by right.”“I don’t,” he answered fervently.“I kept them up for a romp with you before they go to bed; but I am going to bundle them off now,” she said. “If you make a practice of coming home a little earlier you will have a longer time with them.”“I shall make a practice of getting back half an hour later in future,” he returned grimly, and rose from his seat in order to shake off his tormentors.Mrs Carruthers laughed brightly.“Pamela will be in presently,” she said, and stooped and lifted the boy in her arms. “Tell her to come upstairs to us. She and George dine here to-night.”She held the boy up for a good-night kiss. Carruthers very unexpectedly put his arm about her shoulders, and drew her with the boy in her arms close to him, and kissed them both. He stared after her as she went inside with the children, and then turned thoughtfully away and sat down again in his former seat.“God forgive me for a miserable sinner!” he mused. “But I’m not cut out for a family man. Though I suppose if the little beggars really belonged here I’d get accustomed to it.”Pamela, coming up the garden path a few minutes later, discovered him sitting there with the same lugubrious expression of face, and his hands deep in his pockets, a perplexed and very much worried man.He rose when she came near, and went to meet her, scrutinising her with greater attentiveness than usual as she advanced, a little pale and preoccupied, but looking surprisingly pretty and sweet and composed. He detected a new quality in her manner, a certain quiet force that was restful rather than assertive, and in her wistful eyes, behind the sorrow that dwelt there lately, shone a tender gleam of happiness that had its secret springs in the realisation and support of an unselfish human love which opened for her a door that had long been closed, and let in a new light and sweetness upon her life. Carruthers supposed, unable otherwise to account for the change in her bearing, that the news of her husband’s illness had softened her, and healed the breach between them.“Come in to have a look how the crèche you have started here is getting along?” he asked, shaking hands. “My authority in this house is seemingly a negligible quantity, judging from my wife’s act in setting up an orphanage during the brief hours of my absence. She wants to stick to them too.”“I do hope,” Pamela said, laughing, “that you won’t find them a great nuisance. It is such a comfort to me to leave them here. But I had qualms about you when Connie proposed it.”“That’s more than she had,” he replied.“They are fairly good on the whole, you will find,” she said dubiously.“Every mother thinks that,” he retorted. “I don’t doubt they are as troublesome as the general run of youngsters. They were here five minutes ago, and all over me. Blest, if they don’t seem more at home than I am. Your daughter is a forward little hussy, and as pretty as—well, as her mother. What!”He smiled at her encouragingly, and leaned with his back against the rail of the stoep, observing her as she stood bareheaded beside him, with only a light wrap over her thin dress.“So you are going to Pretoria?” he said. “I hope you will find your husband better when you get there. If you want any arrangements made at this end, I’ll see to it. I suppose you intend to bring him down?”“I hope to,” Pamela answered a little doubtfully. “It depends on—on circumstances.”“Of course,” he agreed. “No good hurrying him. We’ll look after the youngsters all right. You need not have them on your mind, anyway.”“No,” she said, with a quick look of gratitude at him. “You have relieved me of that worry entirely.”“My share in it isn’t much,” he answered, smiling. “As you may have noticed, my wife generally gets her own way. She has always wanted babies, and now she has got ’em. She’s upstairs with them now. I was to tell you to go up. The invitation, I understand, does not extend to me.”Pamela made a move towards the entrance. At the door she paused and looked back at him over her shoulder.“You’re a dear,” she said softly, and went inside.“That’s the worst of these ingratiating women,” Carruthers reflected. “They always contrive to get round one somehow.”
Dare remained in Cape Town for a while. Pamela had written to the doctor at Pretoria; and he waited to learn the result of his report, and hear what she decided upon doing. If she changed her mind about going up he meant to make the journey with her.
The report when it came differed very slightly from what he had told her. Arnott was making steady progress: it would be possible to move him shortly if Mrs Arnott wished. The doctor intimated that if she desired to see her husband there was no reason against it.
Pamela showed the letter to Dare, and discussed with him the question of whether she ought to go, whether in the circumstances it might not do more harm than good. She was obviously reluctant to follow the doctor’s suggestion, and at the same time convinced that it was little less than a duty. Dare felt himself inadequate to advise her.
“In any case,” he said, “you will need to explain to the doctor that your presence might be likely to excite the patient. You can’t keep him in the dark.”
Pamela considered this.
“I think,” she said presently, looking at him a little uncertainly, “it would be easier to explain things personally,—easier than writing. I think perhaps it would be best to go. You think that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” he answered. “If you are going through with the thing, it’s no good jibbing at obstacles. When you have made up your mind I’ll see about tickets, and make all arrangements for the journey.”
“You are going with me?” she asked.
“Of course,” he answered. “You don’t suppose I would allow you to go alone? I’m seeing you through to the finish.”
She looked at him with grateful eyes.
“I am so dreading this,” she said. “I don’t know how I should manage alone. I’m growing altogether to depend on you. It isn’t fair to you.”
But Dare would not allow this.
“It’s the one return you can make me,” he insisted,—“if there is any return called for. I am glad to be of any little service to you.”
To be of service to her was the only thing left him. This journey which he proposed making with her was the last opportunity, he supposed, that he would have of enjoying her society; the end of the journey meant the parting of the ways for them. He had no idea how the prospect of the future appealed to her, but for him it held little in the way of hope or interest. He would go on with his work, and get what satisfaction he could out of that,—it offered scope, and interest of one sort. Had she consented to marry him he would have retired and gone home; there was no necessity for him to follow his profession; but without her, work became a necessity of itself. Too much leisure would only conduce to thought.
He supposed that in time he would become reconciled to his disappointment; but for the present he could only realise the bitterness of the loss of a happiness which fate had seemed to place within his grasp, and had then wrested from him again with wanton caprice. He still held to it that Pamela was wrong in her decision; but while he could not persuade her into recognising her mistake, he was obliged to acquiesce in it. In his brain there lingered a faint hope that the journey to Pretoria would accomplish what he had failed to do,—that the meeting with Arnott would convince her of the impossibility of reuniting their severed lives. Since it was a matter of principle only with her, against which her nature revolted, he did not feel that there was any disloyalty in desiring her defeat. It would be best for her in the long run, and her good mattered to him equally with his own.
If occasionally a doubt crept into Pamela’s mind as to the ultimate result of her journey, she did not encourage it. There were certainly moments when she shrank from her self-imposed task, moments when she longed to give in, to take the happiness Dare offered and let the rest go. But reflection invariably induced a calmer mood, in which the impossibility of surrendering to love, with the past like a black shadow of disgrace between her and the happiness this man could give her, was painfully manifest. She had married Arnott, had clung to him when she knew she was not legally his wife; to refuse her obligation now were to degrade herself to the level of the women who subordinate honour to pleasure, who have neither a sense of responsibility nor any sort of pride. She had trailed her flag in the mud once; it was given to her now to raise it and cleanse it from the mire. She trusted that she would have the strength to go through with her undertaking to the finish.
The question that presented the greatest difficulty in leaving home was how to arrange about the children. To leave them to the sole care of coloured servants was impossible. Mrs Carruthers solved this difficulty as soon as she heard of Pamela’s intended journey. She carried them off to her own home, rather pleased to be enabled by some practical form of usefulness to salve a conscience which reproached her for her hasty and, as she believed, unjust suspicions of Arnott, whose illness, explaining the mystery of his silence, had closed the scandal attending on his disappearance.
Dare, in supplying her with details of the illness, had carefully omitted all mention of Blanche, and her part in Arnott’s life. It would come with all the shock of a fresh scandal if by their subsequent acts they revived the talk which had coupled their names already, and still reflected discreditably on the girl. He felt that the girl had yet to be reckoned with. She might prove a more formidable obstacle in Pamela’s path than the miserable wreck who had deserted her. Since her sole purpose was gain it would perhaps be possible to buy her off. But that eventuality would be a last consideration; purchased silence is expensive, and often dangerous. Dare had no intention of exposing Pamela to blackmail. Any money transaction that passed must be made through himself, and kept from the Arnotts’ knowledge. In the matter of Blanche Maitland he meant to exercise his own discretion. He desired if possible to keep her and Pamela from meeting. It formed one of his reasons for accompanying Pamela on her journey.
Mrs Carruthers, when she heard of this purpose of Dare’s, pronounced it the maddest of the many mad acts he had committed in connection with this affair. He was acting, in her opinion, with amazing indiscretion.
“Does it never occur to you that you are likely to get Pamela talked about?” she asked him.
“What is there to cause talk?” he inquired, feeling oddly irritated at her persistent opposition.
“Well, your devotion isn’t exactly normal.”
“Normal?” he said.
“Usual, if you prefer it,” she conceded. “It’s practically the same thing. Disinterested service is a virtue ordinary human intelligence cannot grasp.”
“That is, perhaps, less the fault of human intelligence,” he returned, “than the misuse of service.”
“No doubt,” she allowed. “Nevertheless, we suffer vicariously through that same misuse. But it’s no good talking. You have made up your mind. If it wasn’t for how you feel about her the thing wouldn’t be so outrageous; but under the circumstances...”
She broke off and looked at him with perplexed, baffled eyes. Dare realised dimly what a puzzle and a disappointment he had become to her. She had at one time, he was aware, regarded herself as an influence in his life. He almost smiled at the thought Influences are only powerful so long as one is satisfied to submit to them; with the first sign of breaking away, control ends.
“I’ll bring her to the station and see you off, anyway,” she finished.
“That will,” he assured her, smiling openly now, “add an air of immense respectability to the adventure.”
The arrival of the little Arnotts, with their nurse, a considerable amount of luggage, and numerous toys, gave Mrs Carruthers something else to think of, and detached her mind successfully from Dare and his misplaced affections. She had suggested that the children should come to her the day before Pamela left in order to see how the plan worked, and also with the object of allowing their mother leisure in which to make her own hurried preparations for the journey. When Carruthers got back that evening he found them already installed in his home; and his wife, who, in making her arrangements, had not consulted him, was reminded at sight of his amazed face that what she regarded in the light of an agreeable duty he might view altogether differently.
“I believe I actually forgot that I possessed a husband,” she said.
She regarded him for a second with bright, amused eyes.
“They’ve come to stay,” she announced. “I’ve adopted them—indefinitely.”
Carruthers demanded an explanation, and emitted a low dismayed whistle when he learnt that their mother was going to Pretoria and might be away some weeks.
“But she hasn’t gone already?” he said, collapsing into a chair on the stoep, and reluctantly submitting to having his foot used for the unnatural purpose of equestrian exercise by Pamela’s small son, who with his sister was enjoying amazingly this unexpected change of residence.
“No. But I thought it advisable to have them on trial before she left. They go to-morrow.”
“They!” Carruthers ejaculated.
“George is going with her,” she explained, with a smiling shrug of her shoulders.
She watched the children, who were sprawling all over her husband to his manifest discomfort, and, surveying the grouping, laughed.
“You look quite nice as the father of a family,” she observed. “I wish they belonged here by right.”
“I don’t,” he answered fervently.
“I kept them up for a romp with you before they go to bed; but I am going to bundle them off now,” she said. “If you make a practice of coming home a little earlier you will have a longer time with them.”
“I shall make a practice of getting back half an hour later in future,” he returned grimly, and rose from his seat in order to shake off his tormentors.
Mrs Carruthers laughed brightly.
“Pamela will be in presently,” she said, and stooped and lifted the boy in her arms. “Tell her to come upstairs to us. She and George dine here to-night.”
She held the boy up for a good-night kiss. Carruthers very unexpectedly put his arm about her shoulders, and drew her with the boy in her arms close to him, and kissed them both. He stared after her as she went inside with the children, and then turned thoughtfully away and sat down again in his former seat.
“God forgive me for a miserable sinner!” he mused. “But I’m not cut out for a family man. Though I suppose if the little beggars really belonged here I’d get accustomed to it.”
Pamela, coming up the garden path a few minutes later, discovered him sitting there with the same lugubrious expression of face, and his hands deep in his pockets, a perplexed and very much worried man.
He rose when she came near, and went to meet her, scrutinising her with greater attentiveness than usual as she advanced, a little pale and preoccupied, but looking surprisingly pretty and sweet and composed. He detected a new quality in her manner, a certain quiet force that was restful rather than assertive, and in her wistful eyes, behind the sorrow that dwelt there lately, shone a tender gleam of happiness that had its secret springs in the realisation and support of an unselfish human love which opened for her a door that had long been closed, and let in a new light and sweetness upon her life. Carruthers supposed, unable otherwise to account for the change in her bearing, that the news of her husband’s illness had softened her, and healed the breach between them.
“Come in to have a look how the crèche you have started here is getting along?” he asked, shaking hands. “My authority in this house is seemingly a negligible quantity, judging from my wife’s act in setting up an orphanage during the brief hours of my absence. She wants to stick to them too.”
“I do hope,” Pamela said, laughing, “that you won’t find them a great nuisance. It is such a comfort to me to leave them here. But I had qualms about you when Connie proposed it.”
“That’s more than she had,” he replied.
“They are fairly good on the whole, you will find,” she said dubiously.
“Every mother thinks that,” he retorted. “I don’t doubt they are as troublesome as the general run of youngsters. They were here five minutes ago, and all over me. Blest, if they don’t seem more at home than I am. Your daughter is a forward little hussy, and as pretty as—well, as her mother. What!”
He smiled at her encouragingly, and leaned with his back against the rail of the stoep, observing her as she stood bareheaded beside him, with only a light wrap over her thin dress.
“So you are going to Pretoria?” he said. “I hope you will find your husband better when you get there. If you want any arrangements made at this end, I’ll see to it. I suppose you intend to bring him down?”
“I hope to,” Pamela answered a little doubtfully. “It depends on—on circumstances.”
“Of course,” he agreed. “No good hurrying him. We’ll look after the youngsters all right. You need not have them on your mind, anyway.”
“No,” she said, with a quick look of gratitude at him. “You have relieved me of that worry entirely.”
“My share in it isn’t much,” he answered, smiling. “As you may have noticed, my wife generally gets her own way. She has always wanted babies, and now she has got ’em. She’s upstairs with them now. I was to tell you to go up. The invitation, I understand, does not extend to me.”
Pamela made a move towards the entrance. At the door she paused and looked back at him over her shoulder.
“You’re a dear,” she said softly, and went inside.
“That’s the worst of these ingratiating women,” Carruthers reflected. “They always contrive to get round one somehow.”