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 creche 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."