Chapter Fourteen.
It seemed as though Arnott, after years of indifference, had abruptly awoke to his duties as a father. He began to take a quite extraordinary interest in his children. Exercise in the car ceased to be an astounding treat and became an almost daily custom. He even penetrated into the nursery, usually when the children were in bed. He bought sweets for them, and chose this hour for presenting his gifts.
Pamela looked on, puzzled. She refrained from any comment; she was on the whole pleased; but she was not confident as to the staying qualities of this sudden show of interest; and she awaited developments with a doubt as to his entire sincerity in the new pose. Not for a long time did she connect the change in his attitude with the presence of Miss Maitland in the nursery. It spoke eloquently for Arnott’s discretion that Pamela was so blind to his intimacy with her children’s governess; had he been at all indiscreet in his conduct before the children they would have carried tales. It was in order to avoid the disconcerting evidence of sharp eyes and small ears that he usually visited the nursery when they were in bed.
During these visits he contrived to snatch a few minutes alone with Blanche in the playroom, having previously closed the door between it and the night-nursery. These interviews began by being entirely commonplace. Arnott was carefully feeling his way; he had no desire to precipitate matters; and the girl was shy. He was satisfied that this was not a pose; the girl really was shy. She was also, he perceived, pleasantly flattered by his attentions.
He began his overtures towards a greater familiarity by addressing her by fanciful names. He bought her elaborate boxes of chocolates, which he gave her with some jesting remark about all little girls liking sweets. One day he gave her a brooch. Blanche looked utterly confused at receiving this present, and pushed it back hastily into his hand.
“Oh, no, please! I can’t take it,” she said.
For a moment he looked disconcerted.
“Why not?” he asked.
The rich blood was showing under her skin in the way he enjoyed seeing it, and the dark, mystery-eyes, as he called them, were lowered in quick embarrassment. She was obviously much distressed. His annoyance vanished.
“Please don’t think me ungracious,” she pleaded; “but I would rather you didn’t give me things like that.”
He slipped the trinket into his pocket, and possessed himself of her hand.
“Then I won’t,” he said. “But I am sorry you won’t let me.”
He hesitated for a moment, studying her downcast face; then he bent forward and kissed her lips. She looked more confused than before, but she did not draw back. He kissed her again.
“Just to show that you are not vexed,” he said.
After which he released her, and went downstairs with an air of elation, and his pulses beating at a great rate with pleasurable excitement. He walked on to the stoep, whistling softly. She didn’t seem to mind, he reflected. He wondered why he had not kissed her before.
That evening, when she came downstairs, he spoke very little to her, and studiously avoided looking at her. She played accompaniments for Pamela part of the time; and he sat alone on the stoep and smoked and watched them through the French windows. Once Pamela put her arm round the girl’s shoulders, and remained in this position while she sang. Inexplicably her attitude jarred Arnott. The girl sat very stiffly. She did not, he observed, once lift her eyes from the sheet of music she was reading.
Shortly before her usual time for retiring he left his seat, and went upstairs, and waited on the landing until she appeared. He heard the drawing-room door open and close. Then the piano sounded again, and Pamela’s voice, rich, and full, and sweet, came to his ears as he stood there in the gloom of the landing, listening for Blanche’s light ascending footfall.
Presently she appeared, and stood, a dusky figure in the half light, her simple white dress revealing soft full throat and rounded arms, and a surprisingly graceful form. She paused, startled at seeing him there, and instinctively threw out a protesting hand. He caught her to him, and kissed her passionately, holding her strained against his breast.
“Oh, don’t!” she gasped, a little frightened at the steel-like pressure of his arms.
She was trembling from head to foot. Never had she been kissed like this in all her life before. His passion scorched her, terrified her, left her quivering with shame and mortification. And yet she was not angry. These hot kisses raining upon her lips, his kisses earlier in the day, roused in her the desire to be kissed. An unemotional, loveless girlhood had repressed, but not slain, the inherent qualities of a passionate nature; Arnott’s virile love-making was calling these repressed emotions to life. She wanted to be loved; she wanted to be kissed; wanted to be made to feel that she counted in some one’s life,—was important,—necessary to some one.
At the moment of offering her feeble protest, when she yet yielded to his caresses, it did not occur to her that Arnott had no right to make her of account in his life. That aspect of the case appealed to her later, when she lay in bed unable to sleep for the unwholesome excitement which fired her brain and quickened the beating of her heart. When she considered Arnott in the light of a married man, and realised that his making love to her was an insult, it sickened her. She felt angry—angry with him, and fiercely jealous of Pamela. She hated Pamela,—hated her for having all the things which she desired and had not got,—hated her for her fair smiling prettiness, her kindness, her utter lack of appreciation—as it seemed to Blanche—of all the good she possessed. Why should Pamela have everything, and she only the stealthy kisses of a man whose kisses were an insult?
As she felt again in imagination the close pressure of his lips upon hers, the grip of his arms, which had hurt her, frightened her, and yet given her a thrill of sensuous pleasure, she turned her face to the pillow and pressed her mouth against its coolness and cried weakly. How dared he kiss her like that? ... How dared he endeavour to make her love him when he could never be anything closer in her life than at present? It was cruel and mean of him...
Yet, despite her realisation of his baseness, she could not hate the man. Already he had succeeded beyond his expectation in rousing in her a hungry craving for him, which, if he persisted in his selfish persecution, could only end disastrously for her. And he had no intention to desist. The game which he had started idly for his own amusement was becoming absorbingly interesting. That was how he regarded the affair. In his ungenerous pursuit of amusement he lost sight of the girl’s youth, of her helpless position in his household, exposed to the evil influence of his attentions, and unable to protect herself save by giving up her post, which he was comfortably assured from the moment she suffered his caresses she would not have the strength of mind to do.
He was not in love with her. He was merely gratifying a sensual impulse to take advantage of the moment. It seemed absurd, he told himself, to have a girl, eager for initiation, at hand and refrain from using the opportunity. She could stop him if she chose.
When she broke away from him on the landing, he went downstairs and returned quietly to his seat on the stoep. Pamela was still singing. She ceased presently, and closed the piano and joined him.
“I believe you were asleep,” she said, and perched herself on his knee.
His eyes flashed open instantly. He had been leaning back with them closed, lost in a comfortable reverie; her unexpected action startled him into sudden alertness.
“Something very near it,” he admitted. “I believe, myself, I’ve been dreaming.”
“Pleasant dreams?” she demanded.
He took her chin in his hand.
“Confused,” he answered. “I’m not fully awake now... Am I an old fogey, Pam?”
“No,” she replied, smiling. “But you are not exactly a boy.”
“Not a dashing hero,” he rejoined. “Then my dreams were deceptive. Dreaming after dinner suggests age. I’ll have to buck up.”
“Buck up now, and talk to me,” Pamela said. “You’ve been very slow this evening.”
“Have I?” He took hold of her wrist and spanned it with his fingers. “You are growing abominably thin,” he remarked irrelevantly.
Involuntarily, he compared her slimness with Blanche Maitland’s generous lines, and decided that thinness was unbecoming.
“I never was plump,” Pamela answered calmly, quite satisfied with her own proportions, and unconscious of his comparison.
“No... ‘A rag and a bone and a hank of hair’ ... How does the thing go?”
“I don’t think I want to hear any more of it,” she said.
He laughed.
“Then don’t grow any thinner. You are getting to be all angles.”
She got off his knee and took a chair some little distance from him.
“These unflattering remarks are not soothing,” she said. “I think I prefer your silence.”
Arnott felt carelessly amused.
“You needn’t get ratty,” he returned. “It is only concern for your well-being that is responsible for my criticisms. The fact is, you need a change, Pam. I have half a mind to shut up the house and cart the lot of you off to the seaside for a fortnight—Muizenberg, or somewhere handy, so that I can get in every day and see that things here are going on all right. Miss Maitland could look after the kiddies, and you and I could motor around, and forget all about Wynberg. What do you say to my plan?”
Pamela sat forward in her chair, her face alight with pleasure.
“Oh! that would be good,” she said. “I should love it? Let it be Muizenberg, Herbert. The sea is so safe and warm there. You could teach Pamela to swim. She hasn’t a scrap of fear.”
The suggestion took Arnott’s fancy. It occurred to him that he might derive a good deal of pleasure in this way. Surf bathing at Muizenberg was noted. He would have them all in the sea, and teach the governess as well as Pamela aquatic accomplishments.
“Then that’s settled,” he said. “I will secure rooms at the hotel before the holiday rush. If we get bored, we can return and leave the children there.”
“I shan’t get bored,” she said. “I shall sit on the sands all day and revel in idleness. You can’t think what a joy it will be to me to have the children always. I shan’t want to go motoring. One can do that any time.”
“You shall please yourself,” he returned with unusual good humour. “It’s your holiday. If you want to build castles in the sand, I’ll help you. You must get yourself a bathing dress—we must all have bathing dresses, and we will become amphibious.”
“I really believe,” observed Pamela, looking at him with a quiet smile, “that you are actually keen on this adventure.”
“I am,” he replied. “I told you I was dreaming myself youthful again. I want to roll in the surf, and do all manner of foolish things... Why have we never done these things before?”
“It never occurred to me that you would agree to an annual seaside trip,” she answered. “And I shouldn’t care to go without you. It is only lately,” she added thoughtfully, “that you have shown any disposition to be bothered with the children. You wouldn’t let yourself get interested in them before; and now I believe you realise that you have missed a lot. They are dear wee things.”
“Oh! they are jolly little cards,” he answered carelessly. “I am grateful to them in a sense. They are the raison d’être for this excursion after all. An old fogey like myself couldn’t submit to the indignity of paddling in the surf without the legitimate excuse of the necessity for his presence in order to smack the little Arnotts with their own spades when they become unruly. It won’t be all heaven, I expect.”
Pamela spent the next few days in preparing for the wonderful holiday, assisted by her small excited family, and a silent and detached governess, who looked on, while Pamela shopped extensively for every one, with a furtive disapproval in her dark eyes, as though disliking the idea of this change to the sea, and her compulsory participation in it.
When Pamela presented her with a smart bathing costume she at first declined the gift.
“I can’t swim,” she protested. “And I’m afraid of the sea. I shouldn’t like to bathe—really.”
“Oh! but,” said Pamela, feeling unaccountably disappointed, “we shall all bathe. You won’t be afraid with Mr Arnott; he will teach you to swim in no time. It will be half the fun.”
Blanche blushed at this suggestion that Arnott should teach her to swim, and looked with greater disfavour than ever at the ridiculous garment in Pamela’s hand.
“I’m too big a coward to learn,” she said. “I should hate it. Please don’t ask me.”
Miss Maitland was, Pamela decided, a most unsatisfactory girl to deal with.
She told Arnott of the difficulty, and held up the amazing garment of navy alpaca and white braid for his inspection.
“It is so pretty,” she said. “And she looked at it as though it were indecent.”
He laughed.
“As a sex you are all more or less mock modest,” he announced. “You will half undress of an evening, and blush to be discovered in a perfectly decorous petticoat. Pack the thing in with your own clothes, and I’ll undertake to state when she sees every one else in the water she will yearn to get in too. We will cure her of her distaste for salt water.”
And so the bathing dress went to Muizenberg in Pamela’s trunk.