Читать книгу The Bigamist - F. E. Mills Young - Страница 4

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In the handsome room, softly lighted with shaded electric lamps, a man sat in a low chair, his legs stretched out compass-wise, his brow resting on his hand. He had the appearance of being asleep, save that every now and again the fingers pressing his brow pressed harder or were momentarily relaxed; he made no other movement: for fully half an hour he had not altered his pose. The only other occupant of the room, a woman, tall and slender, with a wealth of golden hair crowning her small head, stood at the long open window with her back to the room, her pose as still as the man’s, but considerably less absorbed.

The girl, she was little more than a girl, despite the five years of happy married life, and the tiny mite of four asleep in the nursery overhead, turned from the open window and the soft darkness of the summer night and faced the lighted room. So long the man had sat there silent, motionless, plunged in thought, that she had almost forgotten his presence in a pleasant reverie of her own till roused by the extraordinary quiet, as effectually as though recalled by some unexpected sound. She turned her head and regarded him with surprised, inquiring eyes.

“Worried, Herbert?” she asked.

He started at the sound of her voice, and roused himself with an effort.

“What makes you ask that?” he said, without looking at her.

“I don’t know... You are so quiet,” she answered. “And at dinner I fancied you seemed a little put out.”

She crossed to his chair and knelt beside him, resting her clasped hands on his shoulders, her face lifted to his. He put out a hand and touched her hair.—“Pamela,” he said abruptly, “you’ve been happy with me? You’ve—I’ve made you happy?” he insisted.

She looked surprised: a faint questioning showed in the blue eyes and the slight puckering of the finely pencilled brows.

“My dear!” she said. “You know that.” She pulled his face down to hers and kissed him. “You never doubted me?” she asked.

“No,” he answered,—“no.”

Suddenly he caught her to him and held her strained against his breast.

“Oh! but it’s good to have you,” he cried. “You are the best thing that life has given me. I’d fight till my last breath to keep you.”

“Well, but there isn’t any fear of your losing me,” she said, and drew back to regard him, perplexed at this unusual demonstration from a man who, save in moments of passionate excess, was habitually rather reserved. “Silly person! Did you think I was going to run away?”

“You couldn’t,” he answered confidently. “You are chained here to my side with invisible, unbreakable bonds.”

“Oh; there’s the divorce court,” she remarked with light-hearted flippancy.

“I wasn’t referring to social laws,” he answered gravely. “The bond that holds you is the strength of our love. It is the one invincible power in the world. Whatever happened, you would never cease to love me, Pamela.”

He made the statement with a look which seemed to question her. Pamela responded to the look.

“No,” she answered, her sweet face grown suddenly very earnest. “I could never cease to love you. That’s the surest thing in heaven or earth to me.”

He set her aside and stood up. Then he lifted her to her feet and put his arm about her and drew her towards the open window.

“Come into the garden,” he said. “The air indoors stifles me. I don’t want to talk. I want to be in the open and feel you near.”

She pressed his hand sympathetically.

“There’s certainly a little worry of some sort,” she said.

“Yes, there’s a little worry,” he answered in an evasive tone which discouraged inquiries. “But it needn’t concern you.”

Pamela was not naturally curious. Her husband seldom discussed his affairs with her. She did not resent this lack of confidence, but attributed it to the disparity of their ages: Pamela was twenty-six, and Herbert Arnott was forty, and rather staid and settled. He had been a widower when he married Pamela; but he never spoke of his first wife. He had been married when he was quite young and had made a hash of his early life. She knew that because he had told her when they became engaged: he did not refer to the subject again; and Pamela never knew what the first wife was like nor who her people were. Arnott was reserved about his past, and, so far as his wife knew, he was without ties or relations. He had put the old life behind him entirely when he quitted his native land; and very early Pamela learnt that it was not wise to try to get him to talk about himself and the days before she knew him. He was a man whose past was a closed book to the world, nor would he allow his wife to turn over the pages.

He had first met Pamela on board the vessel in which he sailed for South Africa. She was going out to a post as governess in a girl’s college at Port Elizabeth. He had sat next her at meals in the saloon and found her congenial. When he left the ship at Cape Town he had asked her to write to him. Subsequently he had journeyed round the coast to see her, and shortly afterwards they were married. That was five years ago, and during those five years Pamela had been extraordinarily happy. She had never had even a trivial disagreement with her husband; the usual petty domestic worries had not intruded into their pleasant, easy home life. Arnott made an admirable husband, and Pamela’s disposition was naturally sunny and contented. Moreover, this life of luxurious comfort as the wife of a wealthy man of independent means formed a delightful contrast to the old days of poverty and constant struggle, with nothing more inspiring ahead than a succession of years of continuous teaching, and then old age and uselessness, and a small pittance at the end. She felt grateful to Arnott for having saved her from that.

The Arnotts lived at Wynberg, that beautiful suburb of Cape Town; a place of tree-lined avenues and shady woods, dominated by the grand old mountain, its bosky slopes presenting every varying shade of colour as the seasons came and passed; its grey summit, gilded by the sunlight or shrouded softly in billowy mists, standing out against the blue remoteness of the heavens, an eternal symbol of imperishable greatness which the sea in its retreat has left in a grand isolation towering over the city and the outlying districts spreading away at its base.

Pamela was the proud and happy mistress of a fine house, and a staff of inefficient native servants. She had tried the European variety, but found them too superior, and so had fallen back on the native article whose inefficiency was qualified by unfailing good temper, though the system of British training and education was making them fairly independent too. In the years to come the dark man will compete with the white man and question his authority, perhaps even his right to rule in the land which is the heritage of the seed of Ham. The early history of Africa is written in blood, and its history is still in its infancy.

Arnott was not particularly popular in Wynberg: he was too reserved to make friends easily; but his hospitality was lavish and attracted people to the house; and his wife was a general favourite. Men admired her for her sparkling prettiness, and women took to her readily: she was easy to get on with, and she gave pleasant parties. She did not, however, form particular friendships with her own sex; she was a little shy with women and preferred male society, which is not unusual in the case of a woman whose life has been spent in schoolrooms in the unexciting transition from student to teacher, surrounded always with an atmosphere of immature femininity. Pamela never quite grasped the feminine mind, and had little sympathy with its restricted outlook. This inability to comprehend the sex of which she was a representative, she attributed to the fact that, having been saturated with feminine principles from her youth up, she had become so confused with its mass of inconsistencies that she failed utterly to realise its finer qualities. The brain of the woman teacher is usually developed on one-sided lines. Indeed, the chief failing of the average woman lies in the fact that she refuses to look at life all round, but persists in regarding it from her sole point of view; and the point of the woman is to ignore realities if by chance they happen to affront her. A want of sincerity therefore mars the beautiful vision of life.

Pamela did not consciously look at life from any particular point. So far the world had treated her well; and she accepted the pleasant condition of things, and was undemonstratively grateful.

One cloud there was in her serene sky of happiness, and that was that she had no son; the pretty little girl in the nursery had been a disappointment. Arnott, himself, had not desired children: the birth of the baby had vexed him, and Pamela’s hunger for a male addition was a further aggravation. He could not understand, he told her, why one kid would not suffice. Children were a responsibility, and gave more trouble than pleasure. Certainly he derived no pleasure from his child, and Pamela was very careful that it should not be a trouble to him. She seldom had the child with her when he was present: small children possibly worried him, she decided; when the baby grew older she would make a place for herself in his heart.

“And then,” she reflected, with a little rueful smile, “my nose will be out of joint.”

It was odd what a pang this prospective jealousy caused her. She could not bear the thought of sharing her husband’s love, even with her child. And yet there was room in her own heart for both.

“I am so happy, Herbert,” she said, as they paced the garden path together in the summer dusk. “It doesn’t seem right, somehow, to be so entirely satisfied. I feel at times that it is too good to last. How can it? One can’t go on being happy for ever.”

“Why not?” he said gruffly. “So long as one has health one can always enjoy.”

“Ah! but it needs more than health,” she returned. “We have such a lot of other things. Surely we shall be required to pay back some day?”

“Rot!” he answered testily. “Why should one pay for one’s rights? Happiness is a right. We’ve got it. We’ll keep it. Hold fast to it, little girl, and don’t encourage morbid superstition.”

He stood still in the path, and took her face between his hands, and held it so, imprisoned.

“By God!” he cried, with sudden, swift vehemence, “no power on earth shall wrest mine from me. My happiness is bound up in you, and only death can take it from me. You aren’t going to escape me that way, Pam,—you are so exuberantly alive.”

Pamela laughed softly, and twined her arms about his neck, drawing closer to him.

“But you’d love me sick, dear?” she said... “You’d love me sick just the same? If you were bed-ridden I’d only love you the more tenderly.”

“Fishing as usual,” he returned, and kissed her. “A fine emotional scene for a middle-aged married man. One would suppose we had been married five months instead of five good years.”

“Five good years!” Pamela repeated, and added presently, “And they have been good. I wonder if I had never met you what I should be doing now?”

“You’d have met some one else,” he answered. “Matrimony is so much more your forte than anything else.”

“And you?” she hazarded. “Would you have met some one too?”

“No,” he replied with a convincing directness which gratified her immensely, so that she desired to kiss him again, and only refrained from fear of irritating him with an excess of emotionalism. “I didn’t set out with that idea in my mind. I should be exploring the interior, as I purposed doing—and probably have become a physical wreck with fever and other ills. You saved me from that when you bewitched me on the outward voyage.”

“I didn’t know I was doing it,” she returned, with a quiet, satisfied laugh. “You were such a grave, reserved person. I always felt proud when you came and talked with me.”

“You don’t feel that now,” he said banteringly.

“Not proud, no.” She slipped a hand into his. “But happy always,” she said, pressing his hand.

“Not so bad an admission after five years of it,” he remarked with reflective complacency. “I take it that proves fairly conclusively that we were meant for each other. I don’t profess to understand this old riddle of a universe, Pam; but I’ve grasped the human need at least; and it doesn’t fit in with the world’s decree that the individual should be judged according to established custom. The entire social scheme, with its restrictions and its definite rules, is nothing but a well-intentioned muddle. At the back of the new law stands the great primeval laws which refuse to be set aside.”

He broke off abruptly with a short, constrained laugh, and added jerkily:

“Which windy exposition, reduced to bald commonplace, amounts to the certainty that, having discovered my need of you and your need of me, we were bound to come together whatever forces opposed... You believe that, Pamela?”

“I—don’t—know,” Pamela answered slowly. She turned her face and searched his by the faint light of the stars. “I’m glad there weren’t any opposing forces,” she said.

“Little coward!” he responded in lighter tones... “I would face any amount of opposition for you.”

“Now—yes,” Pamela answered. “So could I for you. But—before we were married... I don’t know...”