Читать книгу The Bigamist - F. E. Mills Young - Страница 5

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It was the fifth anniversary of the Arnott’s wedding, and Arnott had presented his wife with the customary present of jewellery: on this occasion it took the form of a rope of pearls. Pamela wore the pearls at the anniversary dinner, which function also had become a custom. It was the one entertainment during the year to which Pamela limited her invitations to the guests she especially liked; and with her careful selection was also particular in limiting the numbers. On this day, if on no other, she informed her husband, she insisted upon enjoying herself.

Arnott was quite satisfied to leave the arrangements to her; and it often transpired that he did not know who his guests were to be until they arrived. But on the day in question he did an entirely unforeseen thing, and astonished Pamela with the announcement—made while drinking tea on the stoep, and eating wedding-cake, which Pamela considered indispensable to the day—that he had met a man in town he knew and had asked him to dine.

“But,” gasped Pamela, “did you forget what day it is?”

“I haven’t had a chance of forgetting,” he replied, smiling. “Dare won’t clash with the harmony. I think you’ll like him.”

“Oh, like him!” she said. “That isn’t the point. He’ll be an odd man. I can’t possibly ask any one to fill up at the eleventh hour. And—good gracious, Herbert!—he’ll bring our numbers up to thirteen. What a deplorable thing for you to have done!”

He looked amused.

“Why shouldn’t thirteen people be as jolly as twelve?” he asked. “You aren’t going to make me believe that you are silly enough to feel superstitious about it; because, if you are, I’ll sit out.”

“That would spoil everything for me,” she said. “I don’t know that I’m exactly superstitious; but other people are; and some one may not like it. It’s—unfortunate.”

“I’ll motor to the Mount Nelson and put him off, if you like,” he suggested.

But Pamela negatived this.

“He’d think it so queer,” she objected.

“Not he. But he would probably conclude I was henpecked.”

“Let him come,” said Pamela resignedly. “Perhaps no one will notice at a round table that we make such an awkward total. But the next time you do a thing like that, do make it a pair.”

Pamela dressed early. She had a new frock for the occasion, white and soft and unrelieved by any colour, and she wore for her sole ornament her husband’s gift of pearls. Arnott surveyed her with critical appreciation when she entered the drawing-room. He held her by the arms under the electric light.

“By Jove! Pam, you look prettier to-night than I’ve ever seen you look,” he remarked. “I’m proud of you.”

She lifted her face to be kissed.

“Just one—on the lips,” she said. “You mustn’t crumple me.”

In the dining-room on the other side of the hall the dinner-table was already rearranged to accommodate the additional guest. A caterer from Cape Town was responsible for everything; so Pamela had no anxiety in regard to the entertainment, and felt almost a guest herself. It was such a delightfully easy way of entertaining. She had peeped into the room to inspect the table decorations, and expressed herself charmed with the whole effect. The floral design was perfect.

This mode of giving parties without any trouble, and not even being worried with the bills, which she never saw, was very agreeable. Pamela’s mind reverted often to the schoolroom days, to the prize award functions, and other entertainments of similar dulness, needing much weary preparation, and she wondered if she had ever really enjoyed those things. At the time, though often tired out with the business of organising and assisting, she had thought them pleasant enough. But she could not go back to that sort of thing, not now. Prosperity had killed her appreciation of simple pleasures.

The guests began to arrive. Dare was the last. He was indeed rather late, which Pamela thought was rude of him, until he explained that his taxi had broken down on the road. He did not make his apology immediately; it came out later in the course of conversation. At the moment of meeting his hostess the thing slipped from his mind. He showed surprise when first confronted with her. It was a very brief betrayal, just a momentary unexpected flash of something which looked like recognition in his grey-blue eyes. It passed almost immediately before she could be certain it had been there; his face was mask-like in its gravity as he shook hands with her.

He murmured something. Pamela did not quite catch what he said; but the main drift of the remark was to the effect that he appreciated the kindness which gave him this opportunity of meeting her in her home. She thought him rather abrupt, and decided that he would not add greatly to the general amusement. Later, she modified this opinion, because, despite a severe appearance and the slight awkwardness he displayed on entering, he proved an excellent conversationalist.

He was a tall man in the early thirties, rather thin, with a clever face, and light keen, extraordinarily penetrating eyes. By profession he was a mining engineer, and Arnott had described him as a particularly smart man at his job. He had met him in Cape Town before his marriage, and had run across him again that day unexpectedly after the lapse of years. The invitation to dinner had been prompted by impulse; he had no particular feeling of friendship for the man.

Dare, who was often in Cape Town, was acquainted with some of the guests present. The Carruthers, who were neighbours of the Arnotts, and with whom Pamela was on terms of greater intimacy than with the majority of her large circle of friends, had known him for years. Mrs Carruthers had once thought of marrying him before she met Carruthers, misled by a certain deferential kindliness he displayed towards all women, being naturally fond of the sex, into thinking he cared for her. She still flirted mildly with him on the occasions when they met; but she had grown out of the belief that her marriage mattered to him.

“I didn’t expect to see you here,” she remarked, when he sought her out after dinner and suggested a stroll in the grounds. “I did not think you knew the Arnotts.”

“I knew Arnott years ago, before he was married,” he answered.

“Then you haven’t met her before? ... They’ve been married five years.”

“So long ago as that, was it?” he observed meditatively. “She is very sweet looking.”

“Yes; she is pretty,” Mrs Carruthers allowed. “They are the most devoted couple in the Peninsula.”

“What’s amiss between you and Dick?” he asked.

“Oh!” she laughed. “I never worshipped Dickie quite so blindly as that. The Arnotts’ is the only case of perennial courtship I’ve ever been privileged to witness... But after all five years is but a step of the journey.”

“I should think a man could continue in love indefinitely with a woman like Mrs Arnott,” he remarked.

“If time stood still for her, perhaps,” she conceded. “But she won’t always be pretty.”

“She will always be sweet,” he returned. “I don’t set great store by looks myself. But I like a woman to be amiable; and a sweet expression suggests a sweet disposition.”

“It may suggest it; it doesn’t necessarily prove that it’s there.”

“Leave me a few of my pleasant beliefs,” he pleaded. “It’s an old-fashioned notion, but I like to think that the world is a good place, and human nature on the whole inclined to charity. It’s a much more comfortable theory than the deliberately cultivated scepticism towards the disinterestedness of human motives. I like to think that what looks sweet, is sweet; just as I like to believe that when a woman is kind to me it is because she feels kindly. That is why I always enjoy being with you.”

“By which subtle flattery you force me to sheathe my claws, and make an effort towards being amiable. You haven’t altered much.”

“Nor have you,” he returned, smiling. “And amiability being one of your many admirable qualities, the effort you propose making on my behalf won’t cost you much.”

Since the time of year was unsuited to sitting indoors, the Arnotts had had the grounds lighted, and engaged some musicians to play at intervals during the evening. Pamela, who possessed a very fine contralto voice, sang once towards the finish of the evening, standing on the brilliantly lighted stoep outside the drawing-room windows, a fair, radiant, girlish figure, singing with extraordinary passion that seductive song from Saint-Saëns’ “Samson et Dalila,” “Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix.”

Dare, a little apart from the rest, took up his position beside a tall bush of gardenias and listened with absorbed attention until the finish of the song, his keen eyes never leaving the singer’s face, lost in a wondering rapture of admiration for the singer as much as for the song.

“Ah! réponds à ma tendresse...”

The seductive words, the seductive tones, thrilled him. He was Samson listening to Delilah,—a Delilah sweet and charming and womanly, without the sting of poison in her passionate entreating.

When the song ended he still remained motionless, not joining in the applause which followed, heedless of everything about him, conscious only of one fair girlish face, of a pair of limpid eyes, blue as the African sky itself, and of the tender curve of sweet lips made for laughter. For five years he had been searching for this face, and he found it here—the centre jewel in another man’s crown of happiness.

“Her price is far above rubies; the heart of her husband doth safely trust in her; her children rise up and call her blessed...” Involuntarily the words came to his mind with a sense of their appropriateness. Where had he heard them? He did not know. But assuredly they were written for her.

He turned his head and glanced at the people near him. With the finish of the song they had started talking again, carrying on the conversations which the music had interrupted. No one seemed to have been impressed, as he had been, with the moving power of the seductive voice. Possibly they had heard it often before: he heard it for the first time, and felt profoundly stirred.

When he looked round again she had moved away, and formed one of a gay group on the stoep. He waited until she left this group, then, when he saw her alone for a moment, he seized his chance and joined her. Her guests had been pressing her to sing again, but she declined. For some reason Dare was glad she refused. He wanted no other song, perhaps with an altogether different sentiment, to sweep away the emotions which the first song had produced in his soul. He was oddly stirred and excited, moved out of his ordinary calm by a sensuous love song finely rendered by a woman who was an artist, and yet surprisingly natural.

He did not compliment her on her singing. It was the obvious thing to do; but Dare seldom did the obvious. If he could have thanked her in his own way for the pleasure she had given, that would have been an altogether different matter. But his way was not consistent with twentieth-century customs, nor was it practicable in the case of a married woman in the company of her husband and friends.

“I’ve been exploring your beautiful grounds, Mrs Arnott,” he said. “What a delightful place you have here.”

“Yes; isn’t it?” returned Pamela, with ingenuous pride in her home. “I’m so glad you like it. I love it.”

“I’m sure you must,” he replied.

“You must come and see the garden in the day time,” she added graciously. “From the lawn the view of the mountain is very fine,—if you admire the mountain. I never tire of watching it. It adapts itself to one’s mood. Or perhaps I should say its varying aspects affect one’s mood. I sit out there and study it for hours at a stretch.”

“I should like to do that,” he said.

“Well, you shall, if you care to. I like to share my mountain.”

“Do you ever visit Johannesburg?” he asked.

“I haven’t been there yet.”

“You ought to,” he said. “It is an interesting city. There are some nice homes there, too—and gardens.”

“You have a good garden, I suppose?” Pamela said. “You must have, because you appreciate them.”

“Ah! there are plenty of things which I appreciate that I haven’t got,” he replied. “I am a bachelor, and live at hotels—when I’m above ground,” he added with a smile. “A fairly unenviable existence, eh?”

“Why not change all that, and marry?” she suggested.

He regarded her contemplatively for a second, and then looked deliberately away.

“I don’t fancy I belong to the marrying sort,” he said.

“Oh, nonsense!” returned Pamela brightly. “Every one is the marrying sort when he meets the right person.”

“Yes! Then I imagine the right person hasn’t revealed herself.”

“You should go in search of her,” she said.

“I did once—five years ago.”

“Yes?” Pamela looked at him with a gleam of feminine interest in her deep eyes. “Five years ago you went in search of her... And then?...”

“She had run away,” he said, “and was married to some one else.”

“Oh!” Her voice had a disappointed ring. This that she was hearing was altogether the wrong kind of a finish to an interesting romance. “Then she wasn’t the right person after all.”

“She was for me,” he replied with quiet conviction. “But, you see, both sides have a voice in these matters.”

“But if she didn’t care for you, she couldn’t have been the right person,” she insisted. “Believe me, the right person is waiting somewhere.”

“In that case,” he said lightly, “when we meet I shall doubtless recognise her. I won’t give her the chance to run away a second time. A man who is dilatory in his love affairs deserves to spend his days underground and his nights in hotels. I’m not complaining.”

Suddenly she laughed.

“I don’t believe you are the least bit in earnest,” she observed. “You are one of these contradictory people who look serious, and are always laughing at life.”

He scrutinised the smiling face with added interest.

“I don’t as a rule take life seriously,” he returned,—“and a very good rule too. If I am not mistaken, Mrs Arnott, it is a rule you practise yourself.”

“I don’t know about that,” Pamela said in her bright, young voice. “I take each day as it comes, and make the most of it. That’s the best way, really.”

“For you, perhaps,” he answered. “But some of us would have a dull time if we had no to-morrow in contemplation. I have no quarrel with to-day, for instance; but there are days in my life I could cheerfully wipe off the calendar.”

“There used to be those kind of days in my life once,” she rejoined. She looked up at him, smiling, so radiant in her gladness that he was forced to smile in sympathy with it. “They make the present so much jollier,” she said.

“You enjoy by comparison,” he returned.

“I suppose that’s it—in a way; yes. When you have followed my advice you will do that too.”

“The same prescription doesn’t fit every case,” he ventured.

“It doesn’t cure every complaint,” she allowed; “but it will cure yours.”

“Mine being?” he asked with an uplift of the brows.

“Loneliness.”

He laughed at this diagnosis, and Pamela laughed with him.

“No woman ought to prescribe for that complaint,” he said, “unless she is prepared to provide the remedy.”

“Ah! the patient has to find that for himself.”

“And suppose it happens to be out of his reach?—suppose it runs away?”

Pamela looked thoughtful.

“There’s an endless supply of the remedy always at hand,” she returned presently.

“That’s merely another version of the fishes in the sea,” he answered. “But when I’ve shaped my appetite to sole, mackerel is no substitute. I’ve hauled in my line... I think you might have offered more original advice than that,” he added, slightly aggrieved.

“I wash my hands of your case,” she said. “You aren’t needing advice. You are entirely satisfied with your life as it is.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “I am borrowing a leaf from your book and enjoying the now.”