For the first few months after Arnott's return Pamela enjoyed once more
the delirious happiness of a second honeymoon. Arnott was very much in
love, very grateful to her for her acceptance of her awkward and
delicate position. He was bent on making good in every way possible.
His love overflowed in floods of grave tenderness: he lavished upon her
unexpected and extravagant gifts. Pamela appreciated his tenderness;
but the gifts--too frequent and haphazard, suggesting that he recognised
the necessity for pleasing and propitiating her--hurt her; it seemed to
her that they represented the price of her degradation. She was
reminded continually that she was no longer a free woman: she was a
man's mistress, bought and owned by hire. The price of the jewels he
heaped upon her might be taken as an estimate of her value. Always he
had been generous to her; he had given her many valuable presents, on
her birthday, on their marriage day, and such like occasions, not, as he
did now, at odd moments as though he had constantly in his mind the
humiliation she endured for his sake, as though he felt the necessity to
express his gratitude in some fashion, to reward her uncomplaining
devotion.
Pamela endured many hours of secret shame over these glittering
evidences of his recognition of their altered relations. But the thing
which wounded her most, wounded her whenever she looked into the clear
eyes of her child, whenever the sound of little feet, the sweet shrill
baby voice, fell upon her ears, was the knowledge that this little
innocent creature--her baby--was born out of wedlock, was a bastard.
Pamela's mind was growing accustomed to the use of ugly terms, which she
recognised fully that the world--if the world ever learnt the truth--
would connect with her name and with her child's. Such terms had once
been an offence in her ears,--now they fitted her; they were no less an
offence, but she accustomed herself to them. She was brutally frank
with herself in the matter of her voluntarily accepted, shameful
position.
But in one matter she determined she would always remain secretive; the
child should never learn the facts of her parents' marriage. Neither
she nor Arnott could ever requite the injury they had done the child.
She had sinned in ignorance, his was the greater sin; but now her
responsibility, her culpability, exceeded his. Her knowledge of the
truth made her duty to the child manifestly clear; but duty had fought
its unequal battle, and was beaten to the dust.
Pamela's honour had gone down into the mud, a beaten and trampled thing.
She had made her first great mistake, and already her punishment was
beginning. In yielding against all her principles of right, though he
had fought his hardest to conquer her scruples of honourable decency,
she had lost to a great extent Arnott's respect. At the moment when
knowledge first came to her, when she had so miserably tried to do what
was right, his respect for her had stood so high, had been so immense
and overwhelming and self-humiliating, that instead of hating her
chastity which threatened to part them, he had only loved her the more
strongly because of it, had admired and wanted her more insistently; now
he recognised that in this weak, yielding woman, whose passion for him
equalled his passion for her, subjugated all her finer qualities, he
held an easy captive; a captive who shrank from freedom, who had ceded
all right to be considered before and above himself.
When the first flush of triumph over his victory had worn off, and with
it his almost humble gratitude for her tender submissiveness, the
quality of his love underwent a change, a change which manifested itself
in surprising and disconcerting ways. The sensualism in his nature,
which he had never allowed her to suspect hitherto, was no longer kept
under; little discourtesies, formerly never practised, became common
with him; on occasions he was openly rude to her. He atoned for these
lapses afterwards with presents and demonstrations of greater affection.
He believed that Pamela forgot these occasions as soon as he did; she
always forgave readily and responded at once to his kinder moods; but
Pamela did not forget. Each act of discourtesy, each rough word, left
its wound in her soul.
She realised, despite Arnott's reiterated insistence that, save for the
distress which this knowledge afforded her, everything remained really
unchanged, that this was not so. The whole fabric of their world was
changed. Their union became a deliberate criminal conspiracy, a furtive
defiance of the laws of the land; it had ceased to be a bond of
comradeship based on mutual esteem,--it had ceased to be a bond in any
sense of the word, save in their dependence on one another. A love
which has once been fine and free and frankly expansive contracts in an
atmosphere of secrecy and shamed suppressions; it loses vitality.
There was in the changed conditions of her life much which influenced
very strongly Pamela's development. Strange new emotions were born in
her with all the anguish of new birth; a deeper understanding and at the
same time a less generous conception of life grew in her. She lost
something of her joyous irresponsibility and acquired a profounder
wisdom. It was as though her mind developed while her soul's growth
remained temporarily arrested. And during the process the girl in her
died for ever and the woman evolved in her stead.
No one can pass through a grave crisis and emerge unchanged from the
devastating floods that submerge one during the process. It depends
entirely on the moral strength of the individual plunged into these deep
waters whether he or she rises above them grandly, or merely flounders
desperately until an insecure footing results as the waters recede. The
calm mind, the braced purpose, of the moral victor, faces the dark hour
and conquers it, and gains even from the bitterest struggle much which
beautifies and is helpful to the soul, much which makes each succeeding
battle to be fought simpler of conquest than the last; on the other
hand, to reject the fight from motives of fear or other reluctance
leaves one not only a loser in the battle, but shorn of the necessary
armour wherewith to face the next fight. Pamela had lost her battle;
she had thrown aside her armour and surrendered, because victory seemed
to promise only an empty reward. She lost more than she knew by her
surrender; not only did she forfeit her self-respect, her purity, her
great gladness in life; she lost too the clean honest delight in
Arnott's love for her, in her love for him; the bright pleasant surface
of things was smudged and dull; she no longer breathed in the open; it
was as though ugly walls enclosed and stifled her soul.
Inexplicably, she blamed the woman who had enlightened her,--Arnott's
wife,--more than she blamed Arnott himself for these miserable new
conditions. She rebelled at being forced to shoulder the responsibility
of her own act. If only she had been left in ignorance! ... From the
bottom of her stricken, aching heart she wished that she had never
received, never opened, that fatal letter. She wanted to go back to the
period of her ignorance, wanted intensely to have her unsullied
happiness again; and that was impossible. The door which has once stood
open no longer conceals what it guards, nor can the surface of a thing
that is tarnished attain to the same pristine beauty as before.
During those first months of knowledge, Pamela passed through many
varied phases; from dull misery, to heroic intention, which ended in a
passive defeat and an acceptance of the new conditions. There followed
a period of shamed, yet glowing, happiness in Arnott's return. This
phase waned all too speedily, and left only discontent and distressful
self-reproach, and a first doubt as to the selflessness of Arnott's
devotion. After a while these emotions also faded, ceased in time to
harass her continually; and she drifted into a state of careless apathy,
a comatose condition of the soul, the result of which only future events
could determine, according to the influences and impressions that were
likely to bear on her life.
It was during this period of indifference, of atrophied emotions, and
moral inertia, that her second child was born to her,--a son. What once
had been the crowning wish of her life was now granted when she had
ceased to desire the gift. The birth of the boy was her final
humiliation.
Arnott, himself, awaited the coming of this child with mixed emotions;
its birth was at once a source of triumph and of disgust to him. The
last remnant of respect he retained for Pamela died at the boy's birth.
He scorned her weakness, yet he rejoiced at it because of the more
complete hold it gave him upon her. She could never reproach him with
being the father of their second child; she must even cease to reproach
him for the past. She was now equally guilty with him.
Pamela had made her first great mistake in refusing to part from him;
her second greater mistake resulted in the birth of their son.
By an odd chance, as though an ironic fate decreed that this child
should perpetuate the older shame of his parents' bigamous marriage with
the later shame of his own birth, the baby was born on the anniversary
of the wedding day. The old custom of keeping up that date as the most
festive day in the year would assuredly have lapsed, even had the boy's
coming not made it an impossibility. Whatever Arnott felt about the
matter, Pamela could not have celebrated with her friends the mock event
which formerly had been to her a glad and sacred rite. She deeply
regretted that the boy's birth fell on the same date. Always she would
be reminded of that date, would be compelled to recognise it. With each
year of the child's growth it would assume an added importance, call for
greater distinctiveness; the child when he grew old enough would insist
on its recognition.
Arnott bought her a diamond bracelet to celebrate the double event; but
he had sense enough not to present his offering until she was downstairs
again and able to take an interest in things. He gave it to her one
afternoon out in the garden.
They had had tea together under the trees, and Pamela lay in her cane
lounge, so still and so unusually silent that he fancied she was drowsy,
and remained quiet also in order not to disturb her. But Pamela was not
asleep; she was lost in thought. Suddenly she opened her eyes and
looked at him fully.
"I have been thinking about a name for baby," she said. "Have you any
preference in the matter?"
"No," he answered.
He thought he detected a slight shade of vexation pass across her face,
and added, after reflection:
"Why not Herbert? ... We've reproduced you."
She flushed faintly.
"That was your wish," she said. "But it seems to me confusing when the
children are christened after the parents."
"Well, it was merely a suggestion," he returned easily.
"I think I should like him called David, after my father," she added
presently. "He was the best man I have ever known."
Arnott made no response. The expression of her reason for her selection
seemed to him in the circumstances uncalled for.
"You don't dislike the name, I hope?" she asked.
"No. I don't say I'd choose it. It's rather Welsh, isn't it?"
"It's British," she replied, "anyway."
"Look here!" he said, dismissing the subject of the baby's name, and
fumbling in his pocket for the present which he had brought out with
him, "I've something here for a good girl."
He leaned forward and dropped the case into her lap. Pamela took it up
and opened it carelessly. She was growing a little bored with having to
express gratitude so frequently for his thought for her.
"Another!" she said, and held the bracelet in a languid hand. She made
no effort to try it on. "You really shouldn't be so extravagant,
Herbert. I have more jewellery than I can possibly wear."
He went round to her chair and slipped the bracelet on her arm and
fastened it.
"It's pretty," he said... "You like it?"
"It's beautiful," she replied.
"And my thanks?" he said.
He leaned over her. Flushed, faintly reluctant Pamela lifted her face
in response. He kissed her eagerly. She always failed to understand
his appreciation of these exacted caresses. It was one of his
peculiarities that he enjoyed what he gained masterfully more than what
was voluntarily ceded.