Chapter Twenty Five.
Dare paced the little balcony outside his room that night for many hours, plunged in a gloomy reverie so made up of confused conjecture, of scraps of that afternoon’s talk, of memories of other talks he had had with Pamela, and of doubts of Arnott, whose poor remnant of life she might still insist on linking with her own, that connected thought became impossible. His mind was a confusion of conflicting ideas that vied and strove with one another, and offered no solution of the complicated muddle of the human tragedy in which he was so inextricably involved.
On one point alone he was very clear: he did not wish Pamela to consolidate her marriage with Arnott. His love for her assumed proportions of vast magnitude, so that he lost sight of every other consideration save his own longing for her, and his repugnance for the idea of her bright life being passed at the side of the moral and physical wreck who did not want her, who would in all probability make her life with him a perfect hell.
Dare chafed at the picture his imagination conjured up, the picture which Blanche’s words had brought vividly before him, of Arnott paralysed, helpless, dependent as a child upon the care of the woman he had treated so abominably, with nothing of love between them to help in lightening the strain. The idea was intolerable. He brushed it aside with a sense of intense disgust. He felt that something must be done to prevent the horrible injustice of this useless sacrifice on her part. He must bring reason to bear with her, must use every argument to induce her to relinquish this vain belief in a personal sacrifice as the only means of retrieving her former mistake. The thing was monstrous, unthinkable; it must not be.
He went inside, switched on the light, and sat down to write to her.
“My dear,” he began, and found it impossible to address her by name, so let it stand at that. “I hardly know what to say to you,—how to tell you what I have learnt since my arrival here. Things are pretty much as you suspected—worse, indeed. It may be a shock to you, but I don’t feel that it can greatly distress you to hear that your husband is ill. He is never likely to be quite well again, if my information is correct I have yet to verify this account, though I have no reason for doubting its accuracy. I am going on to Pretoria, where he is, to find out what I can. I will write to you again when I am more fully informed.”
He paused, and read the letter through with some dissatisfaction. Then he bent over the paper again, and wrote quickly, with a certain eagerness, as though the impulse which dictated what he wrote were irresistible in the flood of emotions that inspired it.
“It is not a bit of use your thinking of going on with this. The thing is impossible. My dear, it is not just for my own sake I urge you to reconsider your purpose. You can’t do it. I can’t bear the thought of your throwing away all chance of happiness for a man who has left you finally, and is now paralysed and practically helpless. It is self-murder. I won’t permit it. I love you, and I want you badly...”
Suddenly Dare flung down the pen, and tore the letter into fragments, and burnt them with the aid of matches in the fireless grate.
“I can’t write to her,” he muttered. “It reads all wrong somehow. I must go to her. Things don’t sound the same on paper. I’ve got to see her and speak to her. I must see her.”
He went out on the balcony again, and resumed his walk and his troubled reflections, which helped not a whit in the solving of the muddle, but only aggravated his sense of the absurd futility of the sacrifice Pamela contemplated. Her resolve was the outcome, he was convinced, of purely intellectual reasoning. If she would only admit the factor of passion, the cold wisdom of her logic would go down before it, as the hardest of glaciers will dissolve adrift in tropic seas. It remained for him to go to her, and make her feel the powerful influence of human love,—force her to realise that, however much other considerations weighed in the great social scheme, love counted above everything, mattered more than anything else,—was the only thing really which did matter. It was the great fundamental principle of the entire universe. He never doubted that he could persuade her into seeing this thing as he saw it. The circumstances he felt justified him in the attempt.
The following day he took train for Pretoria. Before seeing Pamela it was necessary to investigate the truth of Blanche Maitland’s story. Unless he faced her with facts he could not hope to prevail with her, and his facts must be acquired at first hand.
Dare was essentially a man of action. To decide on a certain course with him was to pursue it without delay to the finish. He meant, if possible, to see Arnott himself. But when he arrived at Pretoria, and applied at the address which Blanche had given, he was confronted with the first difficulty; without the doctor’s sanction he could not be admitted to the invalid’s presence. Arnott’s condition was sufficiently grave to make the most stringent rules with regard to the sick-room absolutely imperative.
It being near the time for the doctor’s visit, he decided to wait in order to see him. He had given up the hope of an interview with Arnott. Clearly the man was not in a condition to discuss the painful subject of his domestic complications. That matter would have to be left in abeyance until he was well enough to cope with such things. The delay irked Dare, but it was unavoidable. He sat in the little waiting-room at the open window, and read a book of epitaphs, intended to be humorous, but which struck him as dreary reading, and an odd selection for the waiting-room of a nursing home. He was relieved when the doctor came in,—a young man with an energetic manner, and a display of haste. His greeting of Dare was somewhat curt: the interviewing of his patients’ friends was not in his opinion part of his day’s work; and he was obviously anxious not to be delayed. He did not sit down. Dare, who had risen, remained standing also.
“I understand,” the doctor said, “that you are a friend of Mr Arnott,—that you wish to see him?”
“I called with the purpose of seeing him,” Dare answered, carefully ignoring the first part of the speech. “His people are anxious for news of him.”
The doctor looked doubtfully at the speaker. He had wondered why, save for the young woman who had called repeatedly during the first days after the patient’s admission to the home, and had manifested great distress at his condition, no one belonging to him had troubled even to make inquiries as to his progress. He had concluded that there was no one sufficiently interested in him to feel concern on his account.
“I am reluctant to allow any one to see him for the present,” he said. “He is getting on; but we have to avoid anything that might be likely to excite him. There is trouble with the brain unfortunately.”
“That is worse than I had anticipated,” Dare said, shocked and disconcerted by this intelligence. “Will you please tell me, so far as it is possible to judge at this stage, what the result of this illness is likely to be? Is he to be an invalid for life?”
“Well, it is paralysis, you know,” the doctor answered, “and a bad case. Chronic alcoholism is mainly responsible. He will be able to walk, we hope—with the aid of sticks, of course. But his brain will never be quite clear. He may, however, live a long while.”
“That is to be regretted in the circumstances,” Dare observed drily.
The doctor agreed with him, but he did not say so. His business was to patch the man up, and he was doing his best to attend to it. He furnished a few more details, and held out vague hopes of an improvement in the mental condition. The patient had a good constitution, though he had done his utmost to ruin it; and if not crossed or excited, or worried with business matters, the brain would become stronger, though it would never be normally active again.
Dare gathered from the fragmentary talk that Arnott was to be a semi-imbecile, just able to crawl about,—a reversion, in short, to childhood with the hideous defects of decrepit age to make the reversion more horrible. The information turned him sick. He was thankful to leave the place and get out again into the sunshine. He no longer desired to see Arnott. To reason with a man in that condition was impossible. Arnott had become a mere cipher in the drama, the finishing act of which had to be decided between Pamela and himself. It was unthinkable that she should persist in devoting the future to his wreck of humanity, to whom she owed no debt of duty, who had merely used her for his pleasure, and discarded her when he tired through his infatuation for a younger woman, which obsession possibly his failing mental faculties were responsible for.
Dare left Pretoria the same day, and started on the long return journey to the coast. He was impatient to see Pamela, and at the same time extremely nervous at the prospect of his interview with her. He did not know what to say to her, how to break to her the brutal fact of Arnott’s contemplated marriage, his determined and ruthless desertion of herself. The man’s actions, before his illness prevented the carrying out of his designs, pointed conclusively to a deranged intellect. With the cunning of latent insanity he had arranged his plans, counting on Pamela’s silence in respect to his bigamous marriage with her, utterly regardless of the stir which the scandal of his marriage with Blanche must create in circles where he was known to have a wife and children already. To a man in full possession of his faculties the impossibility of concealing the crime of bigamy would have been apparent, unless he fled the country and married under an assumed name.
What, he wondered, would Pamela decide upon doing when she learnt the entire truth? He could not tell. The uncertainty was nerve-racking. He fretted and worried himself with conjectures all through that tedious, seemingly unending journey,—during the hot dusty days as the train rushed through the Karroo, and throughout the long sleepless nights when, kept awake by his thoughts, he turned in weary discomfort in his narrow berth in the darkened compartment, and longed for the coming of day.
When he reached the terminus he despatched a telegram to Pamela to inform her of his arrival, and his intention of calling upon her the following morning. Then he took a taxi and drove to the Mount Nelson. He dined and went to bed, and slept soundly for the first time since leaving Pretoria.
Pamela did not sleep at all. The unexpected receipt of Dare’s telegram excited her, and kept her on the rack of expectation. She had not looked for him to return. The telegram was the only communication she had received from him, and it told her nothing, save that he was back and wished to see her. She knew that he must have something of importance to tell her or he would not have turned back so soon.
The thought of the coming interview was vaguely disquieting. So much had passed between her and this man of a painful and intimate nature that all the barriers of conventional friendship were down, and left her exposed, as he was, to the onslaught of each new emotion inspired by their mutual feeling. She had thought of him so much since he had pleaded his cause with her, and she had admitted her own love for him,—had reviewed all their pleasant intercourse of the past, his kind, patient, and unselfish devotion which later, in accepting her decision, had yet lent itself to aid her in her unprotected and difficult position, that the love which she had confessed to bearing for him had strengthened considerably. She looked up to him as to some one strong and fine and worthy of a woman’s entire trust. Never for the man she had believed to be her husband had she felt this reverence of love. She had admired him, had felt grateful to him for his passionate ardour for herself. Their marriage had proved a delirious period of excitement and delight, until his passion cooled; but it had never roused in her a lofty conception of love, or helped her to realise the seriousness of life’s responsibilities. Her life as Arnott’s wife had tended rather to lower the standard of fine thinking, and reduce the principles of living to the sensuous indolence of self-gratification, and an immense concentration upon the importance of purely personal things. She had lived for herself, detached in sympathy from the wider world about her, careless of the joys and sorrows of others as something altogether outside her life. And now sorrow had brought her into touch with the world, had broadened her sympathies and her understanding, and decreased proportionately the sense of her personal significance.
What is any life, however important to itself, however aggrandised by the world’s recognition, however necessary it may appear to others—to one other even, but a breath which expands the lungs of the universe and leaves them temporarily deflated as it passes on into the beyond?