Читать книгу The Bigamist - F. E. Mills Young - Страница 7

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The morning found Arnott recovered from his overnight depression; and Pamela’s determination to inquire into things was less positive than on the previous evening. On reflection she decided to wait a little longer. Perhaps if she waited he would broach the matter himself. It might be that she was exaggerating the importance of this thing. In any case she would exercise patience and see what the next mail day brought forth; if his letters caused him annoyance again she would ask him to confide in her the nature of this worry which, while not allowed to share it, was becoming her trouble too. She could not look on and see him bothered without feeling bothered in a measure also; and her entire ignorance as to the nature of the trouble was worrying of itself.

Pamela held modern ideas as to a wife’s right to share her husband’s confidence. Marriage unless a mental as well as a physical union was no marriage in her opinion. She desired to face life at her husband’s side, and take all that it offered fearlessly, the bad as well as the good. It had been all good up to the present; but no sky is always cloudless: eternal sunshine would dry up the generous fountains of life, as unbroken happiness will narrow the sympathies and shrivel the best emotions of the heart. Pamela had a healthy appreciation of the blue skies, but she was not in the least afraid of the rain. So long as she had her husband’s love, so long as they were together, she believed that she could meet any trouble, bear any sorrow bravely in the strengthening knowledge of his great love for her.

So long as they were together... She dwelt on that thought, smiling and confident. They were together, that was very certain; it seemed equally certain that nothing could happen to separate them. It was indeed such an assured impossibility that she encouraged herself to consider it for the pleasure of proving its absurdity. Herbert, himself, had declared that only death could divide them; and at twenty-six death looms very indistinct along the vista of years.

Wandering in the garden, waiting for her husband who was going to motor her out to Sea Point, Pamela speculated on these things with the easy optimism natural to her, and indulged the happy conceit of creating purely imaginary and highly impossible situations for the satisfaction of filling them effectively,—a habit of make-believe which endured from schoolroom days. The appearance of the postman in the drive awoke her from her dreaming to the realisation that the morning was slipping away. Something must be detaining Herbert, possibly something to do with the car.

She took the letters from the postman and went indoors. One of the letters was for herself. It was addressed to her in her name before she married, the name she had neither signed nor seen written for five years. It puzzled her that the writer of the letter should be familiar with her present address and yet be ignorant of her change of name. She could not recall having seen the handwriting before. The postmark was London. It was doubtless due to the mistake in the name on the envelope that the letter had not found its way into Arnott’s box at the post office, and so have been collected by him when he fetched his own letters on the previous evening.

She went into the sitting-room, and seated herself near the window, and turned the envelope about in her hands. Flailing to identify her correspondent from the superscription, she finally opened it, and withdrawing the closely written sheet of foreign paper, glanced first at the signature. “Lucy Arnott” was written in clear, firm characters at the foot of the page.

Pamela’s amazement was unbounded. Who was Lucy Arnott? And why should a connection of her husband address her as Miss Horton? She concluded that it must be a connection of her husband; it was such an unlikely accident that a stranger of the same name would write to her.

Curious, and vaguely troubled, Pamela began to read. She read the letter through, read with white, set face, and a mind which failed to grasp the significance of what the cold, formal phrases expressed with perfect lucidity. It occurred to her that the thing was a cruel hoax, a wicked, malicious lie. She could not credit the truth of the writer’s assertion that she was Herbert Arnott’s lawful wife, and that therefore Pamela was not a wife at all—was not legally married...

Pamela tried to realise this abomination, and then thrust the horror from her as too terrible for credence. It could not be. She knew that she was married. She had her marriage certificate. Everything had been done in order. Whoever Lucy Arnott was, she could not disprove that.

“I don’t know,” the writer said, “whether you were aware of my existence when you consented to pose as Herbert’s wife. I only heard recently that he was living with a wife at Wynberg; therefore I cannot judge whether you have been deceived, or are simply a willing accomplice. If it is a case of deception, you have my sympathy; if the latter, you will not need, and would not appreciate, it. I may state at once, in the event of your cherishing the hope that I will divorce him, that I have no intention of doing so. I have no respect for the divorce laws, which are man-made and for their own convenience, and I have no wish to have my name dragged before the public. I shall take no proceedings against Herbert; it is a matter of entire indifference to me what he does, or how he lives. After this letter you will not hear from me again. Having informed you of what I felt it right you should know, I leave it to you to act as your conscience dictates. If, as I am inclined to fear from a too intimate knowledge of Herbert’s character, you have been cruelly duped, you may, if you stand in need of a friend, count on me as a woman who has suffered also at the same hands and can therefore feel for another.”

Pamela sat with the letter in her lap and stared at the page unseeingly. A little choking sound escaped her; it was scarcely a sob, more nearly it resembled a catching of the breath. She made no other sound.

For a long while she sat there motionless, holding the letter in her lap between her limp, shaking hands. It wasn’t true... It couldn’t be true... This thought reiterated itself persistently in her bewildered mind; but behind the thought, companioning it always, a doubt chilled her unbelief in the writer’s veracity,—a doubt which came, and came again, until finally it asserted its right to a place in her thoughts; and instead of the reiterated: It can’t be true, the phrase shaped itself: Suppose this thing were true? Suppose this were the secret worry which had troubled Herbert’s peace of late...

And then suddenly she heard his voice calling her name, and, looking up, saw him advancing towards her along the stoep. He was looking hot and slightly out of humour. He had taken off his cap in order to cool his brow; he carried it in his hand.

“It’s no go, Pam,” he said; “the drive is off for this morning. There is something wrong with the engine. It’s beyond me; the car will have to go into town for repair.”

He came up to the window, and stood in the aperture, and gazed at her in surprise. Never had he seen Pamela wear such a look as she wore then. Her face was white; the blue eyes, dilated and dark with pain, stared back into his own with the dazed, unseeing look of a sleep-walker. For the moment he believed she was ill; and he stepped through the window hurriedly and bent over her with anxious solicitude.

“Pam!” he said... “My dear, what is it?”

Then his eyes fell on the letter in her hands, and his face reddened and then went very white. It was evident that the handwriting was perfectly familiar to him.

Pamela put the letter into his hand.

“Read it,” she said dully.

“Good God!” he cried, and turned the thing he held in hands only a little less unsteady than her own. “How did you get hold of this?”

“It came by the post—just now.”

“Damn!” he muttered under his breath, and read the letter deliberately. When he had read it he crushed it in his palm and thrust it into his pocket.

“I would have died sooner than you had read this,” he said.

He made no attempt, she observed, to refute the charge. Somehow she had not expected him to; from the moment when his eye had fallen upon the letter she realised that the information contained in it was true. His first wife was not dead.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she said. She looked at him resentfully with her darkened, pain-filled eyes. “It wasn’t fair to me... You’ve cheated me... You—Oh!”

She broke off piteously, and looked away from him out through the window; and he saw that she was weeping. The tears ran down her cheeks, and splashed unheeded on the hands that lay clenched in her lap and made no move to check the bitter rain. Arnott turned his eyes from the piteous face.

“I couldn’t tell you,” he muttered... “I loved you. I dared not risk losing you,—and I believed you would never know.”

“It’s—bigamy,” she said, and caught her breath again sharply.

“Yes.”

His voice was sullen.

“But that’s punishable,” Pamela said, and scrutinised him with wide, distressed eyes... “Isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

He made a sudden movement. Before she could stay him he was on his knees beside her, with his arms about her, holding her closely.

“I wanted you so badly,” he said. “It was the only way. Oh! Pamela, believe me, I never meant to hurt you... I never meant you to know. My dear—Oh! my dear, don’t turn from me. Forget that you’ve read that letter,—forget that you ever received it. Let things be as they were before.”

“But they can’t be,” she insisted. “I’m not—”

She broke off and stared at him, frightened and dismayed.

“I’m not even married,” she added, the horror of this truth revealing itself in her tones.

“You are,” he asserted sullenly. “I married you...”

“But you couldn’t,” she persisted, “with your wife alive. The law can punish you for bigamy.”

“Do you want the law to punish me?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “That wouldn’t help me. And... there’s the child.”

He frowned.

“You are distressing yourself unnecessarily, Pamela,” he said. “There is no difference really. You felt quite secure until to-day. Your position is as assured now as it ever was. You are more my wife than the woman who wrote that letter. She has a legal right to my name; but we were never mated as you and I are. My first marriage was a bitter mistake which I have ceased to consider long ago. She stands for nothing in my life. You are everything to me—everything. I’d fight to keep you with my last breath.”

“You ought not to have done it,” Pamela said, and wrung her hands. He put his hand over hers and stayed her. “You ought to have left me in peace... What peace is there for me now? Any hour this thing may come out. It’s not our secret,—yours and mine alone.”

“It’s yours and mine and hers,” he said. “She won’t speak.”

“How can you be sure?” Pamela cried passionately. “She told me.”

“Yes—damn her!” he returned, and stood up abruptly. “She has been threatening to do that for months. But I thought I could intercept the letter. I never dreamed of her writing to you like this... But she has done what she meant to. She will be silent now.”

“But things can’t go on as they have been,” Pamela said piteously. “I can’t stay here, now I know. I—Don’t you see, Herbert?—it wouldn’t be right. I should feel—”

She shivered suddenly, and broke down again and wept bitterly.

“Oh, dear heaven!” she wailed. “What am I to do?”

“Do you mean,” he said in a hard voice, “that you think of leaving me?” Then, his calmness deserting him, he went to her and took her in his arms and kissed her tenderly. “Pamela,” he whispered brokenly, “what I have done, I did out of love for you. It may be that I did you a wrong in marrying you; but,—to give you up! ... I couldn’t. Oh! my dearest, believe me, I have fought hard... I fought against my love for you; but it was too strong; it broke down every barrier. It would have broken me if I could not have had you... Dearest, speak to me... Tell me that you forgive me,—that you’ll stick to me. You can’t leave me, Pam,—you can’t leave me. My dear, I couldn’t let you go.”

Pamela freed herself from his embrace, and sat bade looking at him with her miserable tear-blurred eyes. She put up a hand and swept the hair back from her brow.

“It wouldn’t be right,” she said, and stirred restlessly... “I don’t know... I must think.”

She got up and passed him and walked towards the door. He made no attempt to stop her.

“I want to be alone,” she said slowly... “I want to think...”

She passed out, and the man, rising also and looking after her, stood with a heavy frown darkening his face, his shaking hand pulling nervously at his moustache. The blow which he had so long dreaded had fallen like a thunderbolt and threatened to destroy his home. He could not feel sure how Pamela would act now that she knew the truth. Of her love for him he had no shadow of a doubt; but women like Pamela possessed scruples, queer principles of honour which hardened into obstinacy when the question of right manifested itself beyond all argument. When a thing became a matter of conscience with such women, it was all a toss up, he reflected, whether the woman will not deliberately sacrifice herself to her sense of equity. That as a general rule on smaller matters she is less sensitive in regard to points of honour, inclines her in moments of a serious decision to a greater severity. For the life of him he could not determine what Pamela would decide to do after reflection. The fact that she had insisted on thinking the thing out alone occurred to him as the first step in a moral victory which might spell disaster to the happiness of both.