The Stronger Influence Part 19

The frown on his brow deepened.

"You know how I hate that sort of show," he answered. "I've always avoided social functions. They don't interest me."

"Very well," she said. "Then I must decline the invitation."

He swung round on her quickly and caught her up in his arms and held her tightly, muttering against her lips, and punctuating the words with kisses.

"Decline it... yes... I can't let the world--any one--come between you and me. Why should you want interests apart from your home? Your home is here, little one, in the depths of my heart."

She felt his heart thumping against his chest, beating hard and fast as the heart of some one labouring under great excitement; she heard his breath escaping in quick deep gasps, and saw the pa.s.sionate ardour which burned in his eyes; and she gave way, yielding her will to his stronger will, reluctantly, but with a growing sense of the futility of striving against him any longer. He silenced her protests with kisses, holding her head against his shoulder and keeping his lips on hers.

Book 3--CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE.

For a time Hallam kept the social world at arm's length, and continued to monopolise his wife, and to persuade himself that she needed nothing beyond his love to make life perfect for her, as it was for him.

But Esme's more active temperament was not satisfied with the exclusion of every outside influence; and she chafed frequently at the monotony of her life, its gradually narrowing limits. Hallam was a bookworm: he spent much of his time in reading. When he was among his books she longed to go out and amuse herself in the ordinary way as she had done before her marriage; but if she went without consulting him he worried at her absence; when she mentioned that she was going he always laid aside his reading and accompanied her. There were times when this amused her; there were other times when she felt merely exasperated.

It became very clear to her that she would be obliged to make some stand or she would cease to have any life of her own at all. She decided to take up tennis again; and joined the public courts on the advice of a woman with whom she was becoming intimately friendly, and who, despite Hallam's lack of response, continued to call and to bring her husband with her on occasions.

The Garfields considered Hallam eccentric, and pitied his wife. Sophy Garfield held out the hand of friendship, and Esme grasped it readily, and found in her a useful and agreeable acquaintance. When Mrs Garfield proposed that she should join the tennis club, Esme caught at the suggestion eagerly. She did not consult Hallam: she paid her subscription fee and told him later what she had done. Although he did not receive the information graciously he raised no objection. It was the least unpleasant diversion she had sought to impose so far. He joined the club also with a view to accompanying her sometimes. But he did not attend often; and after a while he gave up going and allowed her to develop some slight independence of him. She made friends easily; he neither made nor desired friends. In this respect they differed materially. She wished that he would become more sociable. He talked well when he chose: it would have afforded her immense pleasure to see him in the company of other men more often.

But he kept to his home and his long tramps with her. He bought her a horse and taught her to ride. He was a keen horseman; and when she was sufficiently at home in the saddle they spent long days together, riding, in pursuit of a pleasure that never palled on either: the discovery of fresh and beautiful scenery. In their love of nature they were entirely in accord.

"I wish," Hallam said once, when they sat together on a lonely stretch of beach, with their horses knee-haltered and straying among the coa.r.s.e gra.s.s higher up, "that I had taken you away into the wild somewhere-- Central Africa--anywhere where white faces are rare, instead of making a home in the centre of civilisation. These lonely places grip me. I like to feel you beside me and know that the rest of the world is far off, too remote to trouble us. Would you be happy in the wilds with me?"

"I suppose I should be happy with you anywhere," she answered, and touched his hand caressingly as it lay on the sand close to hers. "But I am not hungering for loneliness, Paul. My instincts are civilised.

I'm nervous in lonely places."

"With me?" he asked.

She met his eyes and smiled faintly.

"Even with you I think I might feel fear at times in such solitude as you describe. I remember how terrified I was at the Zuurberg that day, down the kloof, when you crashed through the bushes. I thought of tigers--oh! of all sorts of horrors. I wasn't shaped on heroic lines, man o' mine. Leave me to the life of the city, with its comfortable laws and protections, its nice, safe orderliness, and the sense of security one gets in the midst of life. What can the solitudes offer more than we already have?"

"The difference between us is that you like crowds and I don't," he answered. "Sometimes I feel that the crowd will get between us."

"Paul!" she remonstrated. She observed him closely as he leaned on his elbow beside her, playing idly with the sand, making patterns on it and effacing these again with his hand. He turned his face towards hers, and his restless hands became still. His keen eyes searched her face.

"That strikes you as exaggerated," he said; "but it's not so. I've watched you, and I see it coming. You have quite a number of friends who are not my friends--"

"They would be your friends if you would let them," she interposed.

"Yes; I know it's my fault; but there it is. You want friends. That's perfectly natural. You ought to have them. You want amus.e.m.e.nt. I hoped you wouldn't need any of these things, that you'd be satisfied, as I am, just to be together. That was expecting too much--"

"Oh! my dear," she said quickly, with a note of pain in her tones. "I don't love you less because I love my kind; I love you better in relation to these others. Paul, why do you say these things? They hurt."

"It wasn't my intention to hurt you," he said. "I was merely trying to get the thing square in my mind. I've got to get used to these things, you see. I've been selfish. When a man loves as I do, he is inclined to grow selfish and exacting. Well, I've got to make a fight against that. I don't like the idea of sharing you with the world at large; but I am forced to consider that as a necessary part of our compact."

"Compact!" she echoed in a puzzled voice.

"We compacted to love one another," he answered quietly. "Love stands for sacrifice. If we cannot give way in little things, the big things become more difficult to relinquish. Your brother-in-law made one observation that was profoundly true, though he did not phrase it happily: love and prayer are synonymous terms. My love for you is as a prayer in my heart. I do not wish to lower it to a mere selfish human pa.s.sion."

"Oh, Paul!" she said. And suddenly she dropped her face to his hand and her lips caressed it where it lay open, palm upward, on the sand.

His talk of sacrifice made her desire to give up things also, to give up her will to him; but the persuasion that it was good for him to throw off his absorption, to adapt his life to the common rule and live more like other men, held her mute. She would accept his sacrifices, all that he offered, and would prove to him in numberless tender ways how great was her appreciation of the unselfish love he gave her; how intense was her pride in it. She had never loved him so much as in that moment when he gave her an insight into what his conception of love was.

He so seldom spoke on the subject, and never before had spoken without reserve; it seemed to her that his talk that day threw a bright ray of light upon his feelings, and revealed to her very clearly the beauty of his ideal of love, hitherto so jealously locked in his inmost thoughts.

A feeling of happiness that was as a song of grat.i.tude warmed her heart.

She pillowed her face on his hand and lay still on the burning sand beside him, undisturbed by the hot sun which beat upon her body, upon her face; loving its warmth which was as the warmth in her heart, a flame that glowed and burned and did not consume.

Hallam rolled over on his elbow and lay watching her in contemplative silence for a s.p.a.ce. The feel of her cheek against his hand pleased him. Her face was flushed and happy, and the look in the soft eyes when they met his moved him to lean over her and kiss their long lashes.

Laughing, she opened them wide and looked up at him.

"Paul, heart of my heart!" she cried. "How you make me love you!"

"Yes!" he said, and kissed her again. "I wonder whose love is the stronger--yours or mine?"

"We cannot prove that," she said.

"Time may," he replied. "The strength of love is tested by its endurance. A great love endures through everything for all time."

"A great love!" she repeated, and brushed his hand caressingly with her cheek. "I never knew, until you taught me, how great love was."

Book 3--CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO.

Marriage, like every other relationship in life, becomes with time a matter of usage. One by one the demands which the ardour of pa.s.sion exacts relax imperceptibly, and love finds its level on a practical basis of mutual interests in the common daily round.

Hallam's marriage was a reversal of the usual order, in which generally it falls to the woman to adapt herself more or less to the altered conditions. In their case the change affected him more materially than it affected Esme: his life had become, as it were, uprooted, and the roots did not strike freely in new soil. The change was not agreeable to him; but his love for his wife was of a quality which helped him to endure with a certain dogged patience many things that formerly he would not have entertained for a moment. He suppressed his own inclinations: to a large extent he suppressed his feelings: mentally his life with her was a series of small deceptions, of pretences practised deliberately for the purpose of misleading her. He feared to disappoint her. His mind became a storehouse of reserved thoughts and inhibitions upon which he turned the key, locking its surprises against her.

In certain respects, though she was unaware of this, he was a stranger to her: one side of his nature remained hidden from her, the weaker side, which most urgently needed her loving sympathy, and which shrank from exposure and misunderstanding with a sensitiveness of which he was conscious and secretly ashamed. He was not the type of man to make an appeal even to the woman he loved. He gave more than he exacted. He gave more than she realised in her ignorance of the sacrifices he made in his attempts to bridge the abysmal gap in temperaments. For her sake he endured many things which were to him boring and annoying in the extreme. He made stupendous efforts to subdue his prejudices and adjust his life to meet the new demands. But the nature of the man remained unchanged and suffered as a result of the artificial conditions of his self-imposed obligations.

Three brief years of married happiness pa.s.sed; and then Hallam began at first moderately, and always secretly to drink again.

For a time Esme was unaware of this relapse on his part; for a further period she suspected it but could not be sure. Then the old symptoms reappeared with terrible convincingness: she saw his hands grow shaky, his whole appearance degenerate, till he looked as she had seen him first on the stoep of the hotel at the Zuurberg, older, ill, nervous and morose, with a disregard for public opinion and a growing indifference as to whether she knew or not.

Esme's eyes opened to the condition of things after a short visit paid to her sister, which Hallam readily agreed to her accepting but refused to accept for himself. He had no wish to see his wife's relations; he preferred to remain at home.

She parted from him reluctantly. A feeling of anxiety gripped her at the thought of leaving him alone. It was their first separation since their marriage. But she wanted to see her sister again. Rose's letter was reproachful; it conveyed the suggestion that the writer was hurt by her neglect. The neglect on Esme's side was not wilful: she had wished to have her sister to stay with her; but Hallam had always seemed so disinclined to entertain any member of her family that she had been obliged to give up the idea. But when Rose's letter came urging her to take a trip round to the Bay, she decided that she ought to go, unless she wished for a complete estrangement between them. Hallam was quite agreeable. He booked her a pa.s.sage and saw her off by the boat; but at the last moment he showed a strong disinclination to part from her, and almost persuaded her to give up the idea and return with him.

"It's too absurd," she said: "we are like a pair of children. Why don't you come with me?"

"No," he said. "I'll wait at home for you. Don't stay longer than you need."

She watched him descend to the quay, and, leaning on the rail, looking down at him, the first intimation that things were not quite as they should be dawned on her, and filled her with a sense of uneasiness which grew with every hour of her separation from him.

In the end she curtailed her visit and returned unexpectedly by train.

She had sent a telegram informing Hallam when to expect her; and she found him on the platform waiting for her, and was struck immediately by the change in him. Her heart sank within her, but she forced a smile to her lips and accompanied him out of the station and got into the waiting taxi. He opened the door for her, fumbling with the catch with unsteady fingers, and got in after her and sat down heavily.