The Stronger Influence Part 23

He believed that some brain sickness was coming upon him; he felt wretchedly ill; and from the way in which people stared at him when he entered the dining-car he judged that his appearance evidenced his physical and mental debility. Although he forced himself to go to meals he ate little; he had no appet.i.te for food; the smell and the sight of it nauseated him.

He began to think that he would be compelled to leave the train: the confined s.p.a.ce and the heat were making him ill. He found himself falling into the habit of talking to himself. This development horrified him no more than it horrified Mrs Garfield, who overheard him, and communicated her fear to her husband that Hallam was mad. His proximity made her nervous. She lay awake the greater part of one night listening to his mutterings, and fell asleep with the dawn and slept heavily until breakfast time. It came as a great relief to her to discover later that Hallam had left the train in the early morning.

He had alighted at a wayside halt, moved by an inexplicable impulse too strong to resist. Dread of another long day, of another sleepless night on the train, had been the ruling motive. He felt that if he did not get out and walk he would be ill. He was on the verge of a collapse, and in no condition of mind to realise the foolishness of alighting in this barren waste, with no prospect of shelter or refreshment within view. There must be farms somewhere in the neighbourhood, he judged, or at least a native hut where he could procure all he needed. For the moment he required only to walk in the pure air, to exert his muscles, and rid himself of the intolerable strain on his overcharged nerves.

Something had seemed to snap in his brain during the night. He found it increasingly difficult to concentrate his attention on anything for long. But the idea that he must walk obsessed him; and, with his gun-case in hand and his kit across his shoulders, he struck across the veld, turning his back on the permanent way.

It did not greatly matter which direction he took; he had no particular objective in view: he wanted chiefly to shake off this annoying sense of unfitness. He had never been ill in his life before: he did not understand it. It had seemed to him that if he could walk he would be all right, and instead he felt worse. He was giddy, and he could not make any pace. He took a bush for a landmark and noted how long he was in reaching it. It amazed him. He became angrily impatient with his own laggard steps: he wasn't walking, he was crawling--crawling like a sick animal, with a sick animal's instinct to find some hole to creep into.

He looked about him vaguely, with tired eyes. That was what he wanted, all he wanted,--some quiet shelter into which to crawl and rest.

He stumbled on, tripping over the dry scrub, lurching heavily like a drunken man, and clinging tightly to his gun-case, as to something from which he would not be separated, though the weight of it was too great for his failing strength. Twice he came to his knees; but each time he rose again and stumbled blindly on as before.

The sun rose higher in the heavens. It poured its warmth like some molten stream upon the gaping ground. For miles around the veld stretched in unbroken sameness, blackened from the long drought, spa.r.s.e and scrubby, with never a sign of any living thing, save the solitary man's figure, moving slowly, with heavy uncertain gait, in quest of some temporary shelter from the sun's burning rays.

It seemed to Hallam that he walked many miles and for many hours before, a long way off like some wonderful oasis amid the arid waste, he descried signs of water, and the wooded banks of a river which meandered like a green irregular wall across the stark nakedness of the land. The sight of this unexpected fertility gave him fresh heart and stimulated his failing energies to further effort. By sheer force of will he dragged his lagging feet over the uneven ground. He desired only to reach the river and lie down beside it and rest. He longed simply to get to the water, to feel it, to lave his burning brow in its coolness, to moisten his parched lips.

Again he fell, and again he rose and staggered on, covering the intervening s.p.a.ce painfully and slowly. When he was quite close to the bank he fell once more, and this time he failed to rise, despite his persistent efforts. For the first time his hold on his gun-case relaxed. He stared at it regretfully; but he knew that he was powerless to drag it further. He left it lying where it was, and crawled on his hands and knees painfully towards the bushes, crawled between them, and reached the shallow river which had been his goal.

Book 3--CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN.

Esme's accident, and the contemporaneous and mysterious disappearance of Hallam, brought Rose in haste and at great personal inconvenience round to Cape Town. She was terribly worried about her sister, and enormously concerned at Hallam's departure at a time when it seemed to her his presence was urgently needed.

Her concern deepened as the days pa.s.sed, the weeks pa.s.sed, and still there was no word from him, no news of his whereabouts. The information which the Garfields furnished on their return gave a sinister aspect to the look of things. And Esme as she got better was continually asking for her husband. She fretted at his absence; and when ultimately she was allowed to have the letter he had left for her, though she ceased to ask for him, she fretted more than before.

The contents of the letter, which she refused to allow any one else to read, upset her greatly. It elucidated nothing of the mystery of his complete disappearance, but merely informed her that he had gone away for an indefinite time. She felt a.s.sured from her knowledge of him that he would never return until he was master of himself.

Her heart was nigh to breaking with her longing for him, and with pity, pity for the suffering which she knew he was enduring: his agony of mind must be terrible. She wanted to see him, to put her arms about him and bid him think no more of what was past. It was grievous to her to think of him alone with heart and mind heavy with sorrow and remorse. If only she could be with him she would help him to forget. The injury to herself seemed to her so small a part of the trouble; it was so entirely accidental: largely her own carelessness was responsible for her fall; if she had been on her guard it need not have happened. She believed that if she could talk to him she could make him see this. She wanted to help him, to comfort him. And she wanted him beside her, wanted his love, his presence, with a feverish urgency that burned like a fever in her veins, and left her sick with unsatisfied longing as the days dragged by without bringing him, without bringing news of him even. If he had died he could not have vanished more completely out of her life.

Her sister urged her to return with her to the Bay until she was stronger and more fitted to be alone; but Esme preferred to remain in her own home.

"Any day he may return," she said. "I would not like him to come back and find me gone."

"He would understand," Rose said sensibly. "At least he would know where to look for you."

She did not herself believe that her brother-in-law would return. The whole affair was to her mysterious and inexplicable.

"Did you quarrel with Paul?" she asked bluntly.

Esme lifted astonished eyes to the questioner's face.

"Quarrel!" she repeated, aghast at the mere suggestion, and too genuinely surprised to leave any doubt as to the amicable conditions of her relations with her husband in Rose's mind. "Paul and I never quarrelled over anything."

"Then it's a pity you didn't," Rose replied practically. "It lets off steam. You know, my dear," she added, and pa.s.sed a caressing arm round Esme's shoulders, "your husband possesses a very complex nature. Judged from the ordinary standpoint, it's an outrageous thing for him to go away like this; in the circ.u.mstances it is even cruel. Don't you think it would be good for him when he returned to find that you had gone back to your own people?--that you were not content to sit at home and wait for him? I'd show more spirit, Esme. A man like Paul is apt to become neglectful without intending it. He should be made to think. You ought not to be alone until you are strong again."

"I should like him to find his home open," Esme answered, "and a welcome waiting for him when he comes back."

There was no doubt in her own mind that one day he would come back. She believed that he would walk in unexpectedly, quite suddenly as he had gone; and she would feel his strong arms round her, and in their shelter forget all the sorrow and perplexity of their separation. That belief buoyed her up and gave her courage to wait. She would not desert her post while he was absent working out his salvation in his own way.

Rose left her and went back to her home, and so imbued Jim with her doubts that he sought advice on the matter, and eventually instigated a search for Hallam, who was not, in his opinion, responsible for his actions.

Hallam's disappearance seemed as complete as if he had vanished off the face of the earth. For months his whereabouts baffled all inquiries.

People referred to him in the past tense as they might refer to a man who is dead. Generally it was believed that he was dead. From the point where he left the train nothing was known of his movements: no one appeared to have seen him after that; no one in the district, which consisted of a few scattered farms, had heard of or seen any stranger; if he had pa.s.sed through their land he had not made his presence known.

It was thought to be unlikely that he had remained in the district.

Possibly he had changed his mind and taken again to the train.

This theory gained credence when later the body of a man, answering to Hallam's description, was discovered in a lonely spot a day's journey from the halt where he had left the train. There was nothing to show how the man had met his death, and, owing to the state of the body, recognition of the features was impossible; but the clothes were the clothes which Hallam had been wearing, and in the pockets were letters addressed to Hallam, and the watch which had been a present to him from his wife. The facts seemed to point conclusively to this being the missing man; otherwise how came he to be wearing Hallam's clothes, and where was the owner? Had Hallam been alive he would a.s.suredly have come forward to refute the finding at the inquest on the dead man, whose ident.i.ty could only be established by his garments and the papers discovered on him.

There was no doubt in Jim Bainbridge's mind, when he viewed the body, that it was that of Paul Hallam; and, although for a long while Esme refused to believe that her husband was dead, the hope which she cherished of his being alive was a forlorn hope, which faded with the pa.s.sing of time into a reluctant acceptance of the general belief.

It was during the period of uncertainty, when her mind still obstinately rejected the evidence of her husband's death, that Esme decided to give up her house in Cape Town and move to Port Elizabeth in order to be near her sister. She felt too nervous and unstrung to remain alone in a place where her only intimate friends were the Garfields; she wanted to be nearer her own people. To the infinite satisfaction of John and Mary, she took a house, with a good garden attached, in Park Drive, and brought her furniture round with the definite intention of making her home there.

Promptly with her arrival John packed his suit-case and invited himself to stay with her. He could, he informed her, be of considerable use to her in the business of settling in. John at the age of twelve was quite a man of the world. In her loneliness she was glad of his company.

This young kinsman of hers was the most tactful member of her family.

He never distressed her with references to his uncle; he took his disappearance as a matter of course, very much as he had taken his marriage with his aunt. These things were incidental, and a little surprising: they were episodes in the pleasant business of life. Since the loss of his uncle had brought his aunt back he was less concerned about it than he otherwise would have been.

He found it interesting to a.s.sist in moving in, to take over the direction and arrangement of everything. It needed a man to do that.

"Dad's getting old," he informed Esme, when he took up his residence with her. "But you can always count on me when you want a man about."

"That's very nice of you, John," she said. "You are a great help to me."

He came to her one day in the garden, carrying a leggy retriever pup, which he thrust into her arms with an air of magnificent generosity.

"I got a dog for you," he explained. "You must have a watch-dog, you know. George gave me the pick of his litter. When I told him I wanted it for you, he let me have his best pup."

"Oh!" she cried quickly, and put the little beast down and stooped to pat it. "It's sweet; but you must keep it. I won't take your pup."

"We'll share it," John returned magnanimously. "It will stay here. I expect I'll run up most days to see it." He fondled the puppy lovingly.

"Isn't he a beauty? He's called Regret."

"Regret!" she repeated slowly. "I don't think I like that name for a dog. Let us change it, shall we?"

"I thought it a silly sort of name myself," John replied. "But George named it. Perhaps he wouldn't like it changed. We can cut it down to Gret."

She bent down suddenly and kissed him, to his no small surprise. It pleased her that he showed consideration for others in his direct boyish way: she wondered whence he inherited that kindly characteristic.

John suffered the caress, but he looked embarra.s.sed.

"I say," he said; "that's all right when we are alone; but don't do it in front of the others."

And then, in case he had hurt her feelings, he slipped an arm round her waist, and walked with her, carrying the puppy, down the garden path in the brief twilight before the darkness fell.

Book 4--CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT.

Four years pa.s.sed away. They were the years of the Great War, which flung the world into mourning and left a pall of depression like a blighting legacy on its pa.s.sing.

Among the men who left South Africa for Europe to fight for the old country was George Sinclair. He had been one of the first to go; and after three years, the greater part of which was spent in France, he was shot through the lung, and invalided out and sent for treatment to England.

During the years he was away he wrote to Esme regularly. He had begged permission to write to her before he left. He did not ask her to write in reply; and for a long while she received his letters without any thought of answering them. But, as the war progressed and the horrors of war deepened, her sympathy with the man and her admiration for his cheerful courage, moved her to open a correspondence with him.