The Stronger Influence Part 17

"When I met you I was drifting. No other influence, I believe, could have pulled me up. It was not merely that you made me realise the folly of wasting my life; you opened my mind to more than that. I have come to see that man has a duty towards his fellow-men; that he has got to serve the community: if he serve it ill, he plays a mean part; if his service be good he doesn't merit praise, he is simply doing his job.

You have pulled me out of the mire; now that I have cleaned some of the mud off I want you to take me by the hand and continue the journey with me. There isn't any need for me to say in words that I love you. I think you guessed that long ago."

He looked down and saw her face all flushed and confused, with eyes, too shy to meet his own, lowered till the lashes touched her cheeks. He longed to take her in his arms and kiss her; but the open road was ill suited to his purpose, and he decided to wait.

"Dear, will you marry me?" he asked.

For one fleeting moment she lifted her eyes to his face, and her look was so sweet and so gravely tender when it met his that his longing increased. Then she looked away again and answered softly:

"Yes."

Bald little monosyllable, which was all her lips could utter though her heart was filled with love for him; but it sufficed for Hallam. He pressed closer to her and bent down over her and touched her hand.

"I want to kiss you," he muttered. "I'm longing to kiss your lips."

She looked up, startled, and moved a little away from him. The pa.s.sionate urgency in his voice was so altogether unexpected and unfamiliar that she felt disquieted. She was afraid of being seen from the hotel.

"Not now," she faltered. "Wait, I haven't got used to the idea yet.

Not now."

He laughed quietly.

"Little duffer!" he said. "Do you suppose I am going to make love to you in front of the windows of the hotel? I'll wait--until we are alone. Then..."

Voice and eyes were eloquent. There was an air of confident mastery about him. She felt increasingly shy of him. He seemed suddenly to loom bigger, to express qualities of a virile and dominating nature which she had not suspected were in him. It was as though he put out a hand and took her heart in it and held it in a firm grasp. It frightened her just a little. Her breath came quicker and her pulses beat fast. They turned about and started to walk back.

"I think we had better go and have some breakfast," he said, with an amused look at her confused face. "If we delay any longer we shall be faced with more awkward questions from young John. After breakfast we will go in search of solitude and have our talk. There are endless things I want to say to you."

They entered the hotel, separating at the door to meet again at the breakfast-table. It was a silent meal so far as they were concerned, as silent as those meals through which they had sat in the early days of their acquaintance, when the man had maintained a moody aloofness painfully embarra.s.sing to his companion. She felt no embarra.s.sment any longer when he did not talk at table, and the chatter of the children made conversation difficult.

She was glad on that particular occasion that she had the children to distract her attention. She felt so extraordinarily shy of the man beside her, shy of the accepted position of their new relations. She felt that she must drag out the meal indefinitely: she wanted to postpone that walk. But Hallam held altogether different views; and presently he got up and prepared to leave the table.

"Hurry up!" he said. "You'll find me waiting for you on the stoep."

Then he went out, and she found herself confronted with the problem of disposing of John and Mary for the morning. They were desirous of accompanying her. The situation held an absorbing interest for them.

"I am going to be your bridesmaid, Auntie," Mary said, fascinated with the prospect of a wedding looming in the near future. "And wear a blue dress," she added.

John's face became grimly resolute.

"Mr Hallam needn't count on me for best man," he announced. "I'm off that."

Esme left them to the discussion of these weighty matters under the sympathetic guardianship of a visitor at the hotel, who had children of her own and did not mind an addition to the party, and joined Hallam.

They set out together on their first walk since their engagement.

For a time they walked in silence, both of them a little impressed with the strangeness of the new situation. Hallam's face was grave and thoughtful, and every now and again he turned to the girl with a curious eagerness in his eyes, and an added tenderness in the look he gave her.

It was altogether a memorable and wonderful occasion. He liked the shyness of her mood. It surprised and amused him to see her eyes droop before his gaze, and the colour come and go in her cheeks. He had known her before only as a very self-possessed young woman; but she revealed to him that morning, as he revealed to her, new and unexpected qualities that were profoundly interesting. Again there came over him the longing to take her in his arms and hold her close against his heart.

He took her hand when they were well away from the hotel, and they walked along together thus and talked disjointedly and a trifle self-consciously of trivial things. Presently Hallam said:

"I am going back with you when you leave. I have to make the acquaintance of your people. That is a necessary preliminary.

Afterwards we will speed matters, and get married without undue delay.

There isn't any object in waiting, is there? I don't feel that I can wait. I want you so."

"I'll have to resign my position as music teacher," she said. "There is nothing else to consider. You know, I can't quite realise it yet. It all seems so strange and wonderful."

"It is wonderful," he answered gravely. "It's wonderful to me that you should love me. It seems more wonderful still that you trust me. Your belief in me has been more helpful than any sermon. It is a sermon.

It's a sort of religion. I've leaned on you... you little thing, whom I could pick up and toss over my shoulder! Dear, you'll never know how much I love you. I can't put it into words."

She squeezed his hand understandingly. It was the same with her. She could never have told him all that was in her heart.

"There isn't any need for words," she said softly.

"No." He looked at her quickly. "You do understand," he said. "You've always understood. From the first we seemed to strike the same thoughts instinctively. We get at one another somehow. I feel as if I had known you all my life."

"And I," she answered with a shy little laugh, "feel that I am only beginning to know you. Each time I am with you something fresh and unexpected leaps to the surface, and I've got to start again from the beginning and reconstruct all my ideas of you. I wonder if it will always be like that?"

"You will find me consistent in one respect anyhow," he answered.

He drew her into the shadow of some trees towards which their steps had been directed, and came to a halt facing her, and dropped her hand and put his arms around her.

"Now..." he said.

He held her closely and for the first time kissed her lips.

Book 2--CHAPTER NINETEEN.

Esme was married from her sister's house very quietly, and with what Rose considered quite unnecessary haste. The whole affair was so sudden and so altogether unexpected that she scarcely knew whether to be the more pleased or the more dismayed by her sister's change of fortune.

She never felt quite at ease with her future brother-in-law, and in her heart she regretted that it was not George Sinclair upon whom Esme's choice had fallen. Marriage with Hallam meant a more complete separation from the old life: it would remove the girl altogether from her former a.s.sociations. While she recognised the worldly advantages of the match she resented this: had Esme married Sinclair they would have continued in touch with one another. But Hallam intended making his home in Cape Town, in one of the suburbs, after a prolonged honeymoon spent in Europe. The honeymoon, she gathered, would extend over a year.

It was all very amazing and rather wonderful. And Esme appeared to be supremely happy; that, after all, was the chief thing.

Rose, while she watched from her seat in church, the girl standing before the altar beside the man whose name she was taking, experienced a curious misgiving which, though she felt it to be unreasonable, she could not shake off. Largely, she believed, she was influenced by something Sinclair had said when she informed him of Esme's engagement.

He had been taken by surprise and was greatly upset by the news. She had very vividly in her memory the sight of his face as he sat and stared at her with stunned, blue eyes, and muttered hoa.r.s.ely:

"My G.o.d! ... Hallam! ... I could have stood it had it been any one else."

She had asked him what he meant, what he knew of Hallam? And he had answered shortly, "Nothing," and gone away hurriedly. She had not seen him since.

That this scene should come back to her now, obtruding itself in the middle of the marriage service, struck her as portentous. What had he meant? Some other emotion deeper than jealousy had moved him surely to speak as he had done. Her eyes rested contemplatively on Hallam's face.

It was a fine face, a strong face, and the keen eyes were rea.s.suring.

The slight stoop of the shoulders and the reserved inward manner of the man suggested the scholar and thinker. Rose believed that he was clever; Jim said so. Neither she nor her husband understood him or felt at ease in his society. He displayed no interest in any of the family, save young John, whose conversation seemed to amuse him. John and he remained on terms of frank friendliness, marked by an air of patronage on John's side and an entire absence of sentiment on the part of both.

But in relation to the rest he was the same silent unsociable man who had stayed for months at the Zuurberg without exchanging remarks with any one.

It puzzled Rose to understand what formed his great attraction in her sister's eyes. That Esme was very deeply in love was evident; she was like a girl suddenly transformed; her face was alight with a glow of happiness which made it beautiful even to Rose's accustomed eyes.

Rose sat and watched her, perplexed and thoughtful, with the strange uneasiness disturbing her mind and distracting her thoughts from the service. Why she should feel anxious she did not know; unless it was the result of Sinclair's speech. But throughout the service the sense of disaster held with her, and later in the vestry, when the bride was signing the register, she experienced an overwhelming desire to cry, and shed a few surrept.i.tious tears with the vexed knowledge that Hallam was observant of her emotion. Her eyes met his critical gaze a little defiantly with a faint hostility in them; and she fancied while she looked back at him that a shadow like a pa.s.sing regret momentarily crossed his face. Then abruptly he turned to his wife and bent down and spoke to her and smiled. The shadow, if it had been there, had left his face unclouded as before.

The wedding party drove to the hotel for lunch, an arrangement which, while it pleased Jim exceedingly and met with the delighted approval of the children, occurred to Rose as altogether irregular. It was not the bridegroom's duty to provide the wedding-breakfast, she had protested.