The Stronger Influence Part 18

But her husband talked her objections down and overruled them.

"Hallam can afford to do it," he insisted. "Why shouldn't he? We can't give them a champagne breakfast anyhow."

Besides the Bainbridges there was only one other guest, in the person of the best man, who was called Watkin, and whose acquaintance with the bridegroom seemed of the slightest. The absence of any relation or intimate friend of Hallam was a further aggravation to Rose. She looked at everything through dark-coloured gla.s.ses that day: no one else did: even John, whose respect for Hallam had decreased with the latter's deliberate committal of matrimony, allowed that there was considerable enjoyment to be got out of other people's weddings; the lunch at the "Grand" in particular appealed to him.

Hallam bore himself well through the ordeal. Whatever his feelings were in regard to his wife's relations he managed on the whole to conceal them fairly well. Although he did not like Jim Bainbridge, and did not understand Rose in the remotest degree--he thought her disagreeable and commonplace and as unlike her sister as it was possible for a person intimately related to another to be--it pleased him to entertain them, and to note that they did full justice to his hospitality.

Jim drank champagne, to which he was unaccustomed, and became surprisingly talkative and rather noisy; and Rose, responding to the same genial influence, relaxed, and forgot for a time her apprehensions.

They made quite a merry party at their flower-decked table by the window, which opened on to the stoep and looked out upon the well-kept garden beyond. It was so near the finish of that part of Esme's life that Hallam was content to see her happily surrounded with her people, and to do his share in making himself agreeable; but he longed to be through with it and started on the journey to Cape Town, where he proposed staying for a week before embarking for England. When the talk was at its noisiest he felt Esme's hand reaching out under the table and touching his knee; his own hand went down and closed over it warmly while their eyes met in an understanding smile. She felt grateful to him for the effort she knew he was making for her sake to play his part well.

"Weddings," Jim remarked in a reminiscent vein, "always recall to my mind the day I took the plunge. Odd sensation, getting married-- uncertain business--rather like backing an outsider in a race. You hope you've drawn a prize; but it's all a chance whether you have or not.

It's tying a knot with your lips which you can't untie with your teeth.

A man gets let in for this sort of thing. He can't help himself. He gets a sort of brain fever, and there it is--done."

His wife directed a meaning glance towards his gla.s.s and smiled dryly.

Hallam took up the challenge.

"I think it is sometimes the woman who backs an outsider," he said.

"But a light hand on the rein brings many a doubtful mount past the winning post."

"You've got the fever all right," Jim returned. "I know all about that.

I had it in its most acute form."

"Never mind that old complaint," Rose said soothingly. "You are quite cured now."

"That's all you know about it," he replied almost aggressively. "That fever is recurrent. Every married man who has ever experienced it knows that the germ once there lies latent for all time. You hear of married people drifting apart... Well, they do, you know--often; but generally they drift back again--or want to. It's usage. You get fed up--like you get fed up with saying your prayers every night."--Young John p.r.i.c.ked up his ears and became interested in the talk.--"You leave 'em off. Well, some time or other you come back to them. You want to come back to them. Prayer and love--they're pretty much about on a par."

John's interest waned. He helped himself to fruit and disregarded the company.

"You are getting somewhat beyond my depths," the best man remarked.

"These things haven't come my way."

"They will," Jim ventured to predict.

The best man looked at the bride and laughed.

"I hope so," he answered gallantly; and introduced, with the ease of the man of the world, a lighter note into the talk.

The entire party drove down to the jetty to see Hallam and his bride embark. When she stood on the steps and watched her sister seated beside Hallam in the bobbing launch, smiling and radiantly happy, Rose's former misgivings rea.s.serted themselves and remained with her while she looked after the crowded launch steering its course towards the mail boat, which lay far out amid the ships on the sunlit blue of the sea.

Hallam turned to the girl, when they were well away from the sh.o.r.e, with a look of glad relief, and saw her eyes, happy and loving and trustful, lifted to his in sympathetic understanding. He smiled down at her.

"It's good to get off, to be alone together," he said. "The thought of this moment has kept me going. I believed we should never be through with it all."

"I know," she said with a little laugh. "But it's over. We are together, Paul... for all our lives."

"For all our lives," he repeated; and, oblivious of the crowd about them, pressed closer against her on the narrow seat.

Book 3--CHAPTER TWENTY.

The fulness of life made perfect by a perfect human love lifted Esme so completely out of the past that all her life which had gone before seemed as a dream, a thing indistinct and distant, with the haunting sense of unreality which clings to dreams in defiance of the vivid impression sometimes left on the mind. To look back on the days of her girlhood was like looking back on the life of some one else. The little hot bedroom, shaded by the pink oleander tree, the life of continuous discords in her sister's home, the daily drudgery of instructing unmusical pupils in an art they would never acquire, these things were as remote as if they had never been. She looked back on those days wonderingly, comparing them with the present; and the present seemed the more beautiful by comparison with those earlier years.

After their year of wandering Hallam and his wife returned to the Cape.

No country they had seen appealed to either with the same magnetic attraction which the Peninsular held for both. The house which Hallam took was not large; but it was luxurious in its appointments, and was beautifully situated, high, and surrounded with fine old trees which afforded shade and coolness on the hottest day. From the windows of her new home, as from the garden, Esme had a view of the wide blue Atlantic stretching away endlessly to the far horizon; while, like a giant wall, rugged and grey, and towering in its immensity above the house, as it towered above the city, was the great square mountain, blue-grey in the sunlight, patterned gorgeously with the flowers which carpeted its slopes. And at night there was the sea still, darkly swelling, mysterious, remote, restless, a black expanse moving ceaselessly under the motionless star-lit darkness above; beating with pa.s.sionate energy upon the sh.o.r.e and tossing its foam-flecked waters against the rocks: there, too, was the mountain, stark and dominating, black and sharply defined against the sky.

Always these wonders were there, and always they a.s.sumed fresh guises, revealed themselves in new and surprising aspects with the varying seasons and the shifting light. It was good to sit out on the stoep in the warm still dusk and enjoy these things together in an intimate and undisturbed solitude. They needed nothing else for the present, desired no companionship but each other's. Hallam was no less misanthropic than before his marriage; but his life was happier and full of interest. He was pa.s.sionately in love; and his pa.s.sion poured itself out in daily worship of this woman who gave him a full return, whose pa.s.sion answered to his, equalled his in everything save its absorbed concentration on the individual to the exclusion of every other interest in life. To shut out the world from her thoughts entirely, as Hallam did, was not possible to Esme. She loved life and her fellow-beings. Because she loved Paul better than all the world, with a love which was an emotion apart and different in quality from anything she had ever known before, she could not close her heart to every outside interest. She was glad always to be with him, glad during the first months in their own home to have him to herself with no interruptions from the world beyond their walls. But she did not desire to lead that shut in life always. She wanted to go about among people, and to have him go with her; and she made this clear to him after a while to his no inconsiderable dismay.

People called on her, and she returned their calls--alone; Hallam refused definitely to have any share in that. She waived the point. So many men evaded this social duty that it did not seem to her of great importance. But when dinner and other invitations began to arrive, and he as flatly declined to accept them, she felt disappointed and showed it. She wanted to take part in these things, and his objection made her partic.i.p.ation impossible.

"Why should you want to go?" he asked, with pa.s.sionate resentment in his tones, on an occasion when she pressed him to accept an invitation to a private dance. "I don't want to go to these things. I don't care about them. I want only you. Why can't you be content with your home and me?

Why are you not satisfied?"

"Oh, Paul!" she said, and entwined his arm with both her arms and leaned against him confidingly. "You know I'm satisfied. But we are living in the world, dear; we can't shut ourselves off from it entirely. We can't live just for ourselves."

"Why not?" he asked.

"But,"--she protested, and looked up at him with puzzled eyes. "How can we?" she asked. "We must take our part, like other people. It isn't good to live shut off: it's cramping. I love you, I love my home; but I want other things. I want to see and talk with people. I want to meet other women. I want to--gossip--about the things women love discussing.

I want to show off my clothes."

"You show them off to me," he said.

She laughed softly.

"To you!--you unappreciative male! I've everything in life to make a woman proud and glad and happy; and I want the world to know it. I long to parade my happiness, as a manikin parades the fashions, to the admiration and the envy of all beholders. Why shouldn't I? Why shouldn't I dance, boy? I love dancing. I'd love to dance with you."

"I can't dance," he answered. "I don't do any of these things."

"I'll teach you," she volunteered. "It's altogether simple. You've no idea how simple it is, nor how lovely, till you try."

He smiled involuntarily.

"At my time of life! Imagine it! I wonder what you'll ask me to do next?"

"Well, you need not dance," she urged. "You can go to the card room."

"I don't care about cards," he answered obstinately and with a note of hard decision in his voice. "And I don't like the idea of your dancing with other men. Can't you give up these things--for me?"

His objection surprised and vexed her. It was to her absurd that he should feel jealous, even slightly jealous, at the thought of her dancing with any one else. She felt hurt. Surely he had sufficient evidence of her love to trust her? She would have trusted him in any circ.u.mstances in her confident a.s.surance of his love for her. She did not understand the temper of his love. It was not mistrust of her that moved him to object: it was dislike of the thought of any other man touching her, holding her in his arms even in the legitimate exercise of dancing. His pa.s.sion had more than a touch of the primitive male in its quality. He wanted her to himself, shut away from the world, content to be alone with him always. And that was not in the least Esme's view of things: her outlook was entirely modern and wholly free from self-consciousness. She saw no reason why she should not enjoy herself in the same way in which other women enjoyed life. She wanted to cure Paul of his misanthropy, not to cultivate it herself. It was not an engaging quality; it was even a little ridiculous.

"I would give up anything for you, Paul, if there was a good reason for the sacrifice," she said. "But I think you are merely prejudiced.

You've spent so much time alone that you've grown used to solitude; but it isn't good for you. It isn't good for any one. We can't live like that--shunning people as if we had something to hide. I want to go out, and I want to invite people here--not very often, but occasionally.

Dear, be sensible. You gave up your solitude when you married me. I can't let you slip back again."

He moved restlessly and disengaged his arm from hers and stood looking across the garden into s.p.a.ce and frowning heavily. She watched him with anxious eyes. After more than a year of married life this was the first cloud to gather in their radiant sky.

"You can go where you please," he said ungraciously. "I never supposed you cared so much for these things."

"I can't go without you," she insisted.