with a steady gaze which drew her eyes to his, held them: she remained
looking back at him, listening to him, while he strove to make her
understand the struggle and the despair of those silent years.
He told her of his flight; of the unhinged state of his mind when he
left home; of his physical condition which brought him to the verge of
death; of how he would have died but for the care of a stranger--a poor
white, who later robbed him, and was subsequently buried in his name.
He told her of his slow recovery in a native hut; of the fierce craving
for alcohol which assailed him as soon as he was able once more to get
about.
"I could not write to you then," he said. "I felt unfit to breathe your
name."
He went on to speak of the journey to England, still with his vice in
the ascendant. He had given way to it in England. His illness had
sapped his will-power and he was at the mercy of his desires once more.
Then came the war. He joined up with the intention of making good.
Until he had made good he was resolved that he would not write.
The rest of the story, of his early capture and his ineffectual efforts
to communicate with her, he described briefly. He gave a detailed
account of the period following his release; of his tedious
convalescence; of his longing for her; of his time of probation, during
which he tested his endurance until satisfied that he had won a final
victory over himself. He told of his voyage out; of his wish to break
the news of his return to her himself.
"It was unlikely that you believed me to be still alive," he said. "And
I did not want to give you a shock by writing when, by the exercise of a
little patience, I could tell you all this, and--"
He broke off abruptly. In his imagination he had anticipated her
gladness, had pictured their mutual joy in the reunion, when, with his
arms about her, he would tell her the story of his absence, and with his
kisses comfort her for the sorrow that was past. This home-coming was
so different from anything he had conceived.
"I knew nothing of the finding of the body of a man supposed to be me,"
he said. "That was one of the unforeseen accidents of circumstance
which create an aftermath of deplorable consequences. We are the
victims of circumstance. It is useless to impute blame to any one. The
facts remain. But for Jim's positive testimony you would not have
re-married. Without some proof of my death, you would have gone on
hoping, I believe."
"Paul!--Oh, Paul!" she sobbed, and held out her two hands towards him in
a gesture of pathetic helplessness.
He took them in his. And abruptly with the feel of her hands in his,
his reserve broke down; the hardness went out of his eyes. He gathered
her to him and kissed her and held her close in his embrace.
Book 4--CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE.
What were they to do?
That was the question they asked each other as soon as they were able to
collect their ideas and talk calmly.
Hallam had put her into Jim Bainbridge's swivel-chair; and he sat on a
corner of the writing-table, facing her, holding one of her hands in
his. It was become to him now a matter simply of doing what was best
for her happiness. Whatever she decided he resolved to abide by. She
was the more injured; the settlement of their future must lie in her
hands. His rights, his claim on her, which until now had held a
paramount place in his thoughts, assumed an insignificance which
rendered them negligible beside her supreme right to the direction of
her own life.
"I'll go, Esme,--I'll go now, if you wish it," he said,--"if it would
make things easier for you."
He felt her fingers close round his, and said no more about going.
They sat hand in hand for a long while without speaking. Presently she
moved slightly and lifted her face to his, white and wrung with emotion,
with the stain of much weeping disfiguring it; but the sweetness of her
look, the pathos in the eyes which met his, made her face seem more
beautiful to him than ever before. He leaned over her and pressed his
cheek to hers.
"Paul," she whispered, "if it wasn't for--It breaks my heart when I
think of George."
Sharply, as though her words stung him, he drew back.
"It's going to hurt him badly," she said. "And my baby... My poor
little innocent baby!"
Hallam had nothing to say to that. The culminating disaster, the
biggest and most appalling of the difficulties with which they were
faced, was wrought by the existence of the child. He sat, gripping her
hand hard, speechless and immeasurably disconcerted. What was there to
say in face of her distress?
"I can't think," she said. "I'm all confused. This changes everything.
I don't know what to do. I don't feel that I can go home. I haven't
got a home..."
She reflected awhile.
"George will have to be told. That is the part which is going to hurt.
I can't bear to think of it."
"I'll tell him," Hallam said.
"No; not you."
She spoke with a sort of repressed vehemence, and drew her hand from
his, and sat with it clenched on the desk in front of her, her face
working painfully.
"Oh! whatever made me do it?" she cried. "Why was I not satisfied to
live with my memories? All this distress is of my making. Why did I do
it?"
"God knows!" he returned with sudden bitterness. "If you had died, your
memory would have been sacred to me."
He regretted having said that as soon as the words were spoken. What
right had he to reproach her for inconstancy? It was easy for him to
remain faithful in thought to the wife who had never given him a
moment's pain. She had suffered--he knew that she must have suffered a
great deal--on his account; but her love had remained unchanged through
all the disappointment and the weary years of waiting. He held the
foremost place in her heart. He was still her husband, to whom she had
given the best of her love. She did not withdraw her heart from him.
She wanted him, even as he wanted her: that assurance removed all doubt
from his mind as to what they ought to do. He meant to have her.
He fell to talking quietly and reasonably about the situation. It was
useless to indulge in recrimination and self-reproach: they must take a
common-sense view of their case and make the best of the difficulties.
These were not insoluble after all.
He was still talking, while Esme listened to him with an air of anxious
attention, when Jim Bainbridge walked in. From the clerk he had learned
of the presence of his sister-in-law and of the stranger who had visited
him on the previous day. The cat was out of the bag now for good or
ill: the business of keeping Paul Hallam's return secret had ceased to
be any affair of his. He had wanted to biff the fellow out of it; had
trusted that Hallam would see the inexpediency of his resuscitation
stunt and clear off before the news of his return got about. And here
they were, together--in his office! He was jolly well in the soup this
time.
He came in looking harassed and startled, and stood inside the door,
surveying them in a sort of worried amazement. The appearance of his
sister-in-law shocked him. She looked as if she had been mixed up in
the brawling in the streets; as if she had been rolled in the dust and
badly hurt. His eyes met hers, and read reproach in them as she got up
from his chair and came towards him.
"Jim, why didn't you tell me this last night?" she said.
"I wouldn't have told you, ever, if I'd had my way," he answered, with
the sulky manner of a man receiving an unmerited rebuke. "How did you
come to find one another? If those blasted niggers hadn't started
raising Cain over the arrest of their blackguardly leader, I'd have been
in my place here. Something always happens when I'm not on the spot.
Well, you've settled what you're going to do, I suppose? It's your show
anyhow."
The telephone bell rang at that moment and interrupted the train of his
ideas. He seated himself before his desk and took up the receiver. His
face was a study in expressions while he listened.
"Hullo! ... Yes. She's here all right..."
"It's George speaking," he looked up to remark for the general
information.
"Eh? ... Oh! yes; there's been a devil of a shindy. It's quieting down
now. I think we've seen the worst of it. I hope it will serve to
illustrate how absurdly inadequate our police force is. They've done
wonders. There will be a few funerals over this. One or two Europeans
killed, worse luck! ... You will? ... Right! We'll keep her with us
until you turn up. Good-bye."
He rang off, and looked up at Esme with a wry face.
"They've heard of the row; and George got the wind up about you. He's
motoring in later to fetch you. How did you get through? Were you
roughly handled at all?"
He surveyed the disorder of her hair, her torn and crumpled dress. She
looked as though she had been in the thick of the melee. She nodded.
"If Paul hadn't been near I should have been killed," she answered.
"That was how we met. I was on my way here when a Kaffir got hold of
me. Paul killed him."
"Well!" he said, and sat back and stared from one to the other in
astonished curiosity. "I take it, that about settles it. It
establishes his claim anyway. It seems like an act of Providence that
he should be in the right spot at the right moment. I'm not going
against that."
Hallam put out a hand and drew Esme to his side.
"I'm not for allowing any man to interfere between us," he said in quiet
authoritative tones. "She's mine all right. We're both agreed as to
that."
Jim Bainbridge smiled dryly.
"So it seems. Well, it's the right course, I've no doubt."
He made a mental resolve that he would not be anywhere handy when the
explanation with George took place. Thank Heaven, a man had his club to
retire to in these domestic crises!
"You'd better not show up at the house," he observed to Hallam, "until
we've broken the news to Rose. Shocks aren't good for her. I've had as
much excitement as I care about for one day."
Esme crossed to his chair and stood beside it, resting a hand on his
shoulder.
"There's one thing more, dear," she said, with brightly flushed cheeks,
and eyes carefully averted from Hallam's. "I want you to ring up George
and ask him to bring baby and nurse in the car. I am staying with you
to-night."
"The kid, eh!"
Swiftly he glanced at Hallam. Hallam remained rigid and said nothing.
Book 4--CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX.
The whole world changed for Esme with the return of the husband she had
mourned as dead. But for her sorrow on George Sinclair's account, she
could have found in her heart only room for rejoicing in the knowledge
that Paul was alive and well instead, as she had been led to believe, of
having died mysteriously and alone and been buried in a lonely grave.
But the thought of George, of how this must hit him, haunted her
distressfully. It grieved her to have to hurt him; he was so altogether
fine and good. She felt like a cheat in relation to him. It seemed to
her that she had stolen his love, stolen everything he had to give; and
now she was about to steal his child from him and leave him sad and
alone.
If only she had remained steadfast, and had refused to marry him!
The thought of the child tormented her anew, the child who would never
know a father's love. Fortunately the baby was so young that these
matters could be kept from her knowledge until it seemed expedient to
reveal them to her. Paul, however kind he might be, could never take a
father's place. Instinctively she realised that, though he accepted the
position, he resented it keenly. The knowledge that the child was
Esme's and not his galled him sorely. But from the moment when he was
resolved to have his wife at all costs Hallam had made up his mind that
the child would form a part of the new life. Deep down in his soul he
had a sort of perception that in this mental scourging lay his
punishment and possibly his ultimate salvation. He would be good to the
child for the sake of the woman he loved, and who loved them both.
He drove with Bainbridge and Esme to the top of the hill, where he left
them and walked the few yards to his hotel. The disturbance was over,
and the rioters were in rapid retreat. They swarmed over the Donkin
Reserve on their way to the locations. Many of them were injured, and,
with the blood streaming from their wounds, presented a sufficiently
unpleasant sight. The taxi turned into Havelock Street and stopped
before the house, the door of which was opened promptly, and Rose,
looking concerned and curious, came out upon the step. Her alarm
increased when her eyes discovered Esme's dishevelled appearance.
"Whatever's happened?" she asked, and put out a hand and caught her
sister's arm.
Bainbridge turned from paying the driver and followed them into the
house.
"Don't make a fuss," he said. "She's upset."
There were tears in Esme's eyes; she looked white and altogether
unstrung.
"There's been an accident?" Rose said.
"It came pretty near to being a fatal accident," Jim threw in helpfully.
"One of those black devils got hold of her. If it hadn't been for Paul
she'd be as dead as mutton by now."
"_What_?" Rose ejaculated.
"Paul's turned up," came the laconic information. "Turned up in the
nick of time too. It seems he's been a prisoner of war. Don't say
anything now. We are all feeling jumpy. He's coming over in the
morning."
Rose gasped in her astonishment. Her husband's jerked out sentences,
his perturbed and bothered look, as much as her sister's evident
agitation, kept her from putting the elucidatory questions which she
longed to ask. She could scarcely believe this startling news, so
abruptly given; it seemed to her incredible that Paul Hallam should be
alive, and coming there. Gently she passed an arm about her sister's
shoulders and spoke to her soothingly.
"You poor dear!" was all she said. "You poor dear!"
Mary came running down the stairs, agog with excitement, and manifestly
curious. But at the foot of the stairs she halted abruptly, and
surveyed the group in the hall in wide-eyed amaze. Tactfully she
disregarded Esme's tearful condition and confined her attention to the
dilapidations of her attire.
"You've been in the wars," she said. "Come on up to my room; I'll rig
you out."
Jim Bainbridge, approving of his daughter's handling of an embarrassing
situation, looked after the pair as they went arm in arm up the stairs;
then, in answer to the question in his wife's eyes, he followed her into
the sitting-room and entered into explanations.
Rose took things more calmly than he had expected. The shock of the
news left her bewildered and curiously at a loss for words. She found
some difficulty in collecting her ideas.
"I always said," she remarked once, "that it was ridiculous to swear so
positively to a man's identity by the clothes he happened to be
wearing."
And after reflection she added simply:
"Poor George!"
Bainbridge's sympathies set strongly in the same direction.
"That's how I felt about it when Paul walked into my office yesterday,"
he observed.
"Yesterday!" she repeated. "You knew this yesterday? Why didn't you
tell me?"
"For obvious reasons," he answered. "I hoped when Paul heard of the
second marriage he'd see the wisdom of clearing out. But he didn't. I
wonder how I would have acted had it been my case? Whether, if I had
disappeared and returned to find you married again, I would have slipped
away and left the other fellow in possession? Largely, of course," he
added reflectively, "it would depend on whether I wanted you. _If_ I
had wanted you all right, the other fellow would have had to quit.
That's as plain as print anyway. No doubt I gave Paul fairly rotten
advice. However he didn't take it; so there it is."
"You are positively immoral," Rose exclaimed indignantly. "There is no
question about the matter at all. They are man and wife."
"I wasn't dealing in morality in offering my advice," he answered,
grinning. "I was thinking of the simplest way out of the difficulty."
"The path of least resistance--yes," she said. "And it didn't strike
you that in shirking difficulties one makes others? A fine crop of
criminal complications you would have started. Besides, Paul isn't a
man to take advice."
"No; he is not to be moved from his purpose once his mind is made up.
Incidentally, he's rather a fine chap."
"He drinks," she said.
"I imagine he has learned control," he returned quickly. "You are a
little unfair in your judgment, aren't you?"
"Perhaps I am," she allowed. "I never liked him. I resent his coming
back and upsetting everything. What a talk there'll be!"
"Don't overlook the fact that he saved us a funeral in the family," he
reminded her. "You can't have it both ways. I consider it was
providential his being on the spot. George stood to lose in either
case."
"I hope he will take your philosophic view of the matter," was all she
returned. Then she left him to his reflections and went away to see
about a meal.
Book 4--CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN.
It had been a day of varied experiences of big moments, fraught with
terror and relief, joy and sorrow, inextricably interwoven. The
eventful day was followed by a night of correspondingly deep emotions, a
night of painful revelation and much anguish of mind for Esme, as well
as for the man who was to learn from the lips of the woman he loved, and
whom he believed was his wife, that she had never been legally married
to him, that her husband was alive, that she and the child, which was
his, were leaving him finally.
They talked late into the night, sitting opposite to one another, with a
small table between them on which Rose had placed two cups of coffee,
before she left them alone together, and went softly upstairs to take a
look at the baby, asleep in its improvised cot.
The little house was overcrowded that night, so that John was forced to
sling a hammock on the balcony and sleep out in the open air. It was
also a very quiet house; a house in which every one walked softly and
spoke in whispers and went about with concerned and anxious faces. The
master of the house stayed late at his club, and slipped in quietly on
his return and crept past the sitting-room door and went softly upstairs
to bed.
And the man and the woman within the room talked on fragmentally,
heedless of everything beyond the confines of those four walls which
gave privacy to their interview, to the man's grief, and the woman's
unutterable sympathy with his sorrow.
George Sinclair sat forward in his seat, with his hands dropped between
his knees, staring before him with blurred unseeing eyes. Occasionally
he beat the knuckles of one clenched hand softly with the palm of the
other, with an action pitiful to watch, suggesting, as it did, intense
emotion hardly repressed. He did not say much. The situation had gone
beyond words. He sat there, tense and quiet, trying to grasp the fact
that she was not his wife, never had been his wife, that their married
life had been a sham. And now he had to give way. There was no course
left to him but to pass out of her life altogether. And he loved her,
worshipped her. Life without her would be entirely blank. He could not
realise living without her. To know that she was in the world somewhere
and that he must not see her, speak to her, touch her ever again after
to-day...
The thought was torture. It was also fantastically unreal. He felt
like a man in a dream, faced by an absurdly impossible situation, which
was nevertheless distressing and horrible, which he believed would fade
if he could only wake. But he could not wake; and the dream became more
real, more terribly convincing with every passing moment.
Why, in the name of reason, had he not been shot in France and thus
saved this refinement of torture? It would have spared Esme unnecessary
suffering also. It seemed monstrous that through his love for her he
should hurt her, that by their marriage they should have all
unconsciously injured one another grievously. Wherever she might be,
however happy she was in her love for Paul and for her child, always
there must linger in her mind a regret when she thought of him alone
with his memories of his brief happiness and his enduring sorrow.
"Don't reproach yourself," he said, once, looking up in response to
something she said in self-condemnation, and meeting her saddened eyes
fully. "The trouble is none of your making. I don't see that you are
to blame anyway. I worried you into it. You know,"--he leaned towards
her and took hold of her hands where they lay along the table,--"I can't
regret our marriage, Esme. It's been a wonderful time. It's something
to remember when--when I've nothing else left of you. If it wasn't that
I know you love Paul better than ever you loved me, I'd not give you up.
But the law and your happiness are both on one side. I'm out of the
picture altogether."
She made no reply. She felt that it would not be kindness to urge on
him then how much she cared for him. She loved him, not as she loved
Paul, but with a strong and tender affection that would keep his memory
warm and vivid in her thoughts always.
"I shall never forget you--the sweetness and the dearness of you," he
added. "It's a big blow, Esme, to be forced apart now. Dear, I don't
know how I'll stand it... No matter; we won't think of that part of it.
One gets used to most things, I imagine."
He was silent again for a while. He had released her hands and returned
to his former attitude, and to his action of beating one hand upon the
other. Esme watched him, biting her lip to stop its trembling, and with
difficulty holding back her tears. What could she do, what could she
say, in face of this misery which she was powerless to avert?
Presently she rose from her seat, and went to him, and kneeled on the
carpet beside him, and put her hands over his hands to quiet their
painful movement.
"George," she said softly, "it stabs me to the heart to see you grieve
so. What can I say? You've been so good to me. I love you for your
goodness. I'll remember you with gratitude every day--every hour of
every day, so long as I live. My dear boy! my dear boy! I can't bear
it when you look so sad."
She was sobbing now, sobbing and choking with emotion. He took her face
between his hands and smiled at her, with a smile that was infinitely
sadder than tears, and bent forward and kissed her gently.
"Poor, weary little woman!" he said. "That white face, with its tired
eyes, ought to be on the pillow. Come upstairs, and let me take a look
at the baby before I go."
He helped her on to her feet; and, hand in hand, softly and in silence,
they went upstairs and stood side by side looking down on the
unconscious beauty of their sleeping child.
"She forms a link," he said. "When her blue eyes look into your eyes,
you'll remember."
He bent down and laid his hand over the baby hands and kissed the soft
cheek.
"I'll miss her," he said; and straightened himself and turned away from
the cot abruptly.
Esme followed him to the door.
"No; don't come down. We'll part here. I can let myself out."
He took her by the shoulders and held her a little way off, looking at
her long and earnestly as though he wished to impress her features on
his memory for ever.
"Some time in the far off future we may meet again," he said. "God
knows. Anyhow, you will live always in my heart. Good-bye, and God
bless you."
His hands slipped to the back of her shoulders, drew her to him, held
her. She lifted her face to his; and in the dimly lit room where the
baby slept, and where the man was to part from both wife and child, they
clung together and kissed for the last time, not as lovers, but solemnly
and tenderly, as dear friends embrace, knowing they may never meet
again. Then the man went swiftly down the stairs and let himself
quietly out of the house.
Book 4--CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT.
Sleep was long in coming to Esme that night.
She lay in the little bed in the room where, as a girl, she had slept
soundly in the untroubled days before love had entered into her life,
lay wide-eyed in the hot stillness, with the heavy scent of the oleander
stealing into the room, perfuming the night, filling the little garden
and the surrounding air with its sweetness, bringing back with its
familiar fragrance a rush of memories, shy sweet memories of the days
when Paul was her lover and she slept with his letters beneath her
pillow and sometimes dreamed of him.