The Stronger Influence Part 27

It was a memorable occasion--the baby's first birthday. A nice sort of birthday surprise he had up his sleeve!

"Blast the baby!" he muttered; and immediately felt ashamed of himself.

It was most a.s.suredly none of the baby's fault.

The case, looked at from any point, looked at all the way round, presented no possible solution to his mind. He had not liked the look in Hallam's eyes when the latter walked out. He did not feel sure of the man, of how he would act, what his purpose was. There was trouble in the air; the atmosphere was heavy with it. He stared out of the window. It was a bright sunny day, hot and clear; it ought to have been thunder weather; and it was not: the thunder was all within--in the minds of men, in Hallam's mind in particular. What was he going to do?

Bainbridge kicked the desk in front of him savagely, and got up and put his coat on. If he sat there any longer he would be moved to do something ridiculous. He would go out, walk along the Main Street, and talk with any one he chanced to meet. He must get a grip on himself before he faced Rose, or she would draw the whole thing out of him. And Lord knew what would happen then! For her own sake he wanted to keep his wife in ignorance of this wretched business until secrecy was no longer possible.

"There's no sense in unfurling an umbrella before the rain falls," he soliloquised. "There is always a chance that the cloud won't burst."

The abstraction of his manner at lunch that day excited general comment.

Rose jumped to the conclusion that business was worrying him, and showed immediate concern for the family finances; and so exasperated him that he left the house in a rage and went back to his office in an irritable frame of mind.

"The old man's temper is getting a bit frayed at the edges," John observed, with filial candour.

"Oh! daddy's all right," said Mary, "if you don't take his little moods seriously. He is always excitable when he is going to a party."

The irritability had worn off, but the abstraction deepened when Jim Bainbridge escorted his family to the Sinclairs' house that evening. It was entirely a family gathering. Sinclair's sister and her husband were present, beside his wife's relations; there were no other guests. Jim Bainbridge, when he kissed his sister-in-law, had an odd feeling that there was another uninvited guest there, a hovering presence of which he alone was aware. This sinister, lurking shadow stood between Esme and the man who, all unconscious of the danger which threatened his happiness, welcomed his wife's relations with frank cordiality.

Bainbridge wrung his hand hard on an impulse of genuine sympathy. He liked George. It distressed him to think of the blow which might fall at any moment. The calm happiness of Esme's face, George's genial smile, arrested his attention, played on his imagination to an unusual degree. It was not his wont to notice such things; but to-night he was stirred out of his phlegmatic indifference to a very vivid and human interest in the concerns of these people, whose lives were overshadowed by a tremendous crisis.

The references to the baby, the laughing congratulations of the guests, jarred on his nerves. He refrained from any mention of the child. And at dinner, when Georgina's health was drunk in champagne, he alone ignored the toast. For the life of him, he could not have joined in the farce of the general rejoicing. Later, in the drawing-room, Esme sat down beside him and rallied him on his preoccupation.

"You are bored, Jim," she said. "I believe you are longing to be home and in bed."

"No. But I've got the toothache," he lied.

"Poor old dear! I'm sorry. Come upstairs and have a peep at the babe asleep. She looks such a duck in her cot."

He followed her from the room and upstairs to the nursery. There was a nurse in charge, but she withdrew when they entered, to Jim Bainbridge's infinite relief. Esme pulled aside the mosquito net and bent over the cot. Her eyes, the man observed, were soft with mother-love as she leaned down towards the sleeping child. He did not look at the child; he was intent upon her.

"Isn't she sweet?" she said, and glanced up at him, smiling.

His own face was grave, even stern in expression. He was watching her attentively, wondering about her, wondering how the news of Paul's return would affect her when she knew.

"I believe you care more for that kid than you do for--any one," he said gruffly. "If you could go back... If it were possible, say, to begin again--with Paul... Would you be willing to give up the kid--for him?"

Abruptly she straightened herself and stood beside the cot, holding the mosquito net in her hand, and looking at him fixedly with an air of troubled surprise.

"Jim," she said, and her face saddened, "what put it into your mind to ask me that question? One can never go back. I wish you hadn't said that--to-night. What brought that idea into your mind?"

"I don't know."

He fidgeted nervously with his collar and avoided her gaze. She was looking at him with a puzzled, questioning expression in her eyes, with no suspicion of his purpose in mentioning Paul's name, but struck by the coincidence that Paul should be in his thoughts, even as he was in hers.

"It's strange you should have said that," she continued. "Lately I have been dreaming of Paul. I dream of him nearly every night."

"Dream of him!" he echoed blankly. "Do you mean that you dream that he's alive?"

"I dream that I see him looking at me," she answered. "He looks into my eyes and turns away; and then I wake and lie in the darkness, trembling.

The dream is always the same."

"I say! that's queer," he said, staring at her, as earlier in the day he had stared at Hallam, as if he saw a ghost. These things were making him superst.i.tious. "What should make you do that, I wonder?"

"Who can say? It's a matter of nerves, I suppose." She dropped the net she was holding and put a hand on his arm and drew him towards the door.

"Come along down, old thing," she said. "We are not good company for one another to-night. For your toothache, and my heartache, we must seek an anodyne in the society of the others."

But for Bainbridge's imaginary toothache there was no effective anodyne: the complexities of the situation were altogether beyond his efforts at elucidation. There was nothing for it but to stand by and wait for the blow to fall.

He sat on the stoep and talked with Lake, George's brother-in-law, about the native labour unrest, and the advisability of adopting strong measures in quelling the agitation.

"This native question is going to be a big problem in the near future,"

Lake opined. "We give the coloured man too much power."

"What other course is possible with a civilised system of government?"

Bainbridge contended.

"But the coloured man isn't properly civilised," Lake insisted; "that's the point. He hasn't grasped the rudiments of citizenship yet."

"Well, we've got to teach him. He's learning."

Bainbridge's mood forced him into a reluctant opposition. He was not in sympathy with the coloured man, but he took up his defence warmly. He and Lake plunged into argument; while in the room behind them Mary sang in a fresh, sweet soprano voice to Esme's accompaniment, and the rest sat about and listened and joined in the popular choruses.

And, a few miles away, walking along the sh.o.r.e in the darkness, a man, alone and with a mind black with despair, thought of the wife he had come back to claim, and of a child which was not his...

Book 4--CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE.

Throughout that night Hallam tramped along the sh.o.r.e, struck inland, came back to the sea, retraced his steps over the same ground; walking with tireless energy while he considered the position, so hopelessly complicated by the birth of the child.

His feeling for Esme oscillated between love and hate. He thought of her as his dear wife, and wanted her urgently; again he thought of her as the mother of Sinclair's child, and his heart turned from her, grew hard with bitter jealousy and revulsion. The thought of the child infuriated him--the child who stood between him and the woman whom he loved and who belonged to him. She was his wife; he could claim her.

But would she give up the baby for him? Would she forsake all the new love which had come into her life for the sake of the old love, so unexpectedly come back to her, almost like a gift from the grave? He could not tell. Intimately as he knew her nature, confident in his a.s.surance that the best of her love had been given to him, there was yet a side of her character with which he was wholly unfamiliar, the maternal side. He had no means of judging how far her motherhood would influence her. That the maternal instinct was deep-rooted with her he knew; that much she had revealed to him during their married life. She had hungered for a child...

He stood still on the sands, looking seaward, with hands clasped behind him, his shoulders bent. He became suddenly conscious of great physical fatigue. He had walked far and for many hours--walked, as he had been thinking, in a circle which brought him back to the starting point, no whit further advanced towards the solving of the problem which hara.s.sed his mind, and which, on setting forth, he had determined to solve before another dawn broke. And already the first sign of dawn showed in the pallid skyline where it touched the sea. The feel of the air was fresh and pure; it followed upon the hot darkness of the pa.s.sing night like a revivifying breath. Hallam felt its coolness on his forehead and lifted his face to meet it, and beheld the stars glowing fainter, and the darkness yielding reluctantly to the grey of the creeping dawn.

Another day was advancing upon him, another day of perplexity and doubt and bitter torment; creeping upon him like a cold shadow out of the darker shadows, bringing with it no hope, only a deeper sense of despair.

What ought he to do?

Was it clearly his duty, as Bainbridge had sought to indicate, to leave Esme in the undisturbed belief in his death and in her false position as George Sinclair's wife? That course raised so many points, legal and ethical, which made its adoption difficult, if not impossible. There was the question of income. Why should his income, as well as his wife, be enjoyed by the man who, even though unwittingly, had nevertheless robbed him of everything? There was the other resource of collusive divorce. But that was only practicable by agreement, which would involve the disturbing of Esme's peace of mind, and invest her with the responsibility of decision. There was the third course of claiming her as his wife. Here again the difficulty of the child obtruded itself, an insuperable barrier to the happiness of all concerned. He wanted his wife, but he did not want the child; on that point he was firmly resolved. It was the one point in the series of complications upon which he entertained no doubt. The child was not his; he had no thought of adopting it as his: he was jealous of it, more jealous of it than he was of Sinclair. Its very helplessness made it a tremendous factor in the case.

He wondered dully how Esme, when she learned of it, would receive the news of his return? Judged by ordinary standpoints, his manner of leaving her, of allowing her to remain uninformed as to his whereabouts, was unpardonable. Practically it amounted to desertion, as Bainbridge said. But his mental condition at the time he left his home was responsible for his amazing conduct. The voyage to England had been undertaken for the purpose of regaining strength, of regaining control of his nerves; the rest had been due to the unfortunate accident of circ.u.mstances: it might have happened to any one; it had happened to other men. Plenty of fellows reported missing had turned up again. He wondered whether any man, beside himself, had returned to his home to find his wife married again? And, if so, how he had acted? No precedent could have aided him in his dilemma; each case called for individual action which must be governed largely by circ.u.mstances. The big stumbling block in his own case was the child. Everything worked round to that one point and stuck there; it formed a cul-de-sac to every line of thought.

Wearily Hallam returned to his hotel and went to bed and fell into the heavy, unrefreshing sleep of physical and mental exhaustion.

Later in the day he went again to Jim Bainbridge's office. Bainbridge was not in; his return was expected any minute. Hallam decided to wait for him. He waited a long time. No one came to disturb him. His presence was, as a matter of fact, forgotten in the excitement of the unusual doings outside the Court House. The Square and the streets leading to it were choked with natives, agitators, angrily demanding the release of their leader, whom the authorities had arrested as a disturber of, and a menace to, the peace of the community.

Hallam knew of these matters only through the talk overheard at the hotel. He had noticed an unusually large crowd of natives when he descended the hill on his way to see Bainbridge. The crowd had swelled its numbers since then, though it had not yet attained to the dangerous proportions which it did later, when the serious rioting took place, and the ma.s.sed ranks of dark forms surged in ugly rushes upon the building which was held by a brave handful of Europeans.

The angry murmur of the mob rose and died down, and rose again, louder and more continuous. The sounds penetrated to the quiet room where Hallam sat, so engrossed with the turmoil of his own thoughts that these signs of men's pa.s.sions aroused beyond control excited in him merely a faint curiosity. He rose and went out into the street to ascertain what the disturbance was about.