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?