Chapter Twenty Seven.
Dare remained in Cape Town for a while. Pamela had written to the doctor at Pretoria; and he waited to learn the result of his report, and hear what she decided upon doing. If she changed her mind about going up he meant to make the journey with her.
The report when it came differed very slightly from what he had told her. Arnott was making steady progress: it would be possible to move him shortly if Mrs Arnott wished. The doctor intimated that if she desired to see her husband there was no reason against it.
Pamela showed the letter to Dare, and discussed with him the question of whether she ought to go, whether in the circumstances it might not do more harm than good. She was obviously reluctant to follow the doctor’s suggestion, and at the same time convinced that it was little less than a duty. Dare felt himself inadequate to advise her.
“In any case,” he said, “you will need to explain to the doctor that your presence might be likely to excite the patient. You can’t keep him in the dark.”
Pamela considered this.
“I think,” she said presently, looking at him a little uncertainly, “it would be easier to explain things personally,—easier than writing. I think perhaps it would be best to go. You think that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” he answered. “If you are going through with the thing, it’s no good jibbing at obstacles. When you have made up your mind I’ll see about tickets, and make all arrangements for the journey.”
“You are going with me?” she asked.
“Of course,” he answered. “You don’t suppose I would allow you to go alone? I’m seeing you through to the finish.”
She looked at him with grateful eyes.
“I am so dreading this,” she said. “I don’t know how I should manage alone. I’m growing altogether to depend on you. It isn’t fair to you.”
But Dare would not allow this.
“It’s the one return you can make me,” he insisted,—“if there is any return called for. I am glad to be of any little service to you.”
To be of service to her was the only thing left him. This journey which he proposed making with her was the last opportunity, he supposed, that he would have of enjoying her society; the end of the journey meant the parting of the ways for them. He had no idea how the prospect of the future appealed to her, but for him it held little in the way of hope or interest. He would go on with his work, and get what satisfaction he could out of that,—it offered scope, and interest of one sort. Had she consented to marry him he would have retired and gone home; there was no necessity for him to follow his profession; but without her, work became a necessity of itself. Too much leisure would only conduce to thought.
He supposed that in time he would become reconciled to his disappointment; but for the present he could only realise the bitterness of the loss of a happiness which fate had seemed to place within his grasp, and had then wrested from him again with wanton caprice. He still held to it that Pamela was wrong in her decision; but while he could not persuade her into recognising her mistake, he was obliged to acquiesce in it. In his brain there lingered a faint hope that the journey to Pretoria would accomplish what he had failed to do,—that the meeting with Arnott would convince her of the impossibility of reuniting their severed lives. Since it was a matter of principle only with her, against which her nature revolted, he did not feel that there was any disloyalty in desiring her defeat. It would be best for her in the long run, and her good mattered to him equally with his own.
If occasionally a doubt crept into Pamela’s mind as to the ultimate result of her journey, she did not encourage it. There were certainly moments when she shrank from her self-imposed task, moments when she longed to give in, to take the happiness Dare offered and let the rest go. But reflection invariably induced a calmer mood, in which the impossibility of surrendering to love, with the past like a black shadow of disgrace between her and the happiness this man could give her, was painfully manifest. She had married Arnott, had clung to him when she knew she was not legally his wife; to refuse her obligation now were to degrade herself to the level of the women who subordinate honour to pleasure, who have neither a sense of responsibility nor any sort of pride. She had trailed her flag in the mud once; it was given to her now to raise it and cleanse it from the mire. She trusted that she would have the strength to go through with her undertaking to the finish.
The question that presented the greatest difficulty in leaving home was how to arrange about the children. To leave them to the sole care of coloured servants was impossible. Mrs Carruthers solved this difficulty as soon as she heard of Pamela’s intended journey. She carried them off to her own home, rather pleased to be enabled by some practical form of usefulness to salve a conscience which reproached her for her hasty and, as she believed, unjust suspicions of Arnott, whose illness, explaining the mystery of his silence, had closed the scandal attending on his disappearance.
Dare, in supplying her with details of the illness, had carefully omitted all mention of Blanche, and her part in Arnott’s life. It would come with all the shock of a fresh scandal if by their subsequent acts they revived the talk which had coupled their names already, and still reflected discreditably on the girl. He felt that the girl had yet to be reckoned with. She might prove a more formidable obstacle in Pamela’s path than the miserable wreck who had deserted her. Since her sole purpose was gain it would perhaps be possible to buy her off. But that eventuality would be a last consideration; purchased silence is expensive, and often dangerous. Dare had no intention of exposing Pamela to blackmail. Any money transaction that passed must be made through himself, and kept from the Arnotts’ knowledge. In the matter of Blanche Maitland he meant to exercise his own discretion. He desired if possible to keep her and Pamela from meeting. It formed one of his reasons for accompanying Pamela on her journey.
Mrs Carruthers, when she heard of this purpose of Dare’s, pronounced it the maddest of the many mad acts he had committed in connection with this affair. He was acting, in her opinion, with amazing indiscretion.
“Does it never occur to you that you are likely to get Pamela talked about?” she asked him.
“What is there to cause talk?” he inquired, feeling oddly irritated at her persistent opposition.
“Well, your devotion isn’t exactly normal.”
“Normal?” he said.
“Usual, if you prefer it,” she conceded. “It’s practically the same thing. Disinterested service is a virtue ordinary human intelligence cannot grasp.”
“That is, perhaps, less the fault of human intelligence,” he returned, “than the misuse of service.”
“No doubt,” she allowed. “Nevertheless, we suffer vicariously through that same misuse. But it’s no good talking. You have made up your mind. If it wasn’t for how you feel about her the thing wouldn’t be so outrageous; but under the circumstances...”
She broke off and looked at him with perplexed, baffled eyes. Dare realised dimly what a puzzle and a disappointment he had become to her. She had at one time, he was aware, regarded herself as an influence in his life. He almost smiled at the thought Influences are only powerful so long as one is satisfied to submit to them; with the first sign of breaking away, control ends.
“I’ll bring her to the station and see you off, anyway,” she finished.
“That will,” he assured her, smiling openly now, “add an air of immense respectability to the adventure.”
The arrival of the little Arnotts, with their nurse, a considerable amount of luggage, and numerous toys, gave Mrs Carruthers something else to think of, and detached her mind successfully from Dare and his misplaced affections. She had suggested that the children should come to her the day before Pamela left in order to see how the plan worked, and also with the object of allowing their mother leisure in which to make her own hurried preparations for the journey. When Carruthers got back that evening he found them already installed in his home; and his wife, who, in making her arrangements, had not consulted him, was reminded at sight of his amazed face that what she regarded in the light of an agreeable duty he might view altogether differently.
“I believe I actually forgot that I possessed a husband,” she said.
She regarded him for a second with bright, amused eyes.
“They’ve come to stay,” she announced. “I’ve adopted them—indefinitely.”
Carruthers demanded an explanation, and emitted a low dismayed whistle when he learnt that their mother was going to Pretoria and might be away some weeks.
“But she hasn’t gone already?” he said, collapsing into a chair on the stoep, and reluctantly submitting to having his foot used for the unnatural purpose of equestrian exercise by Pamela’s small son, who with his sister was enjoying amazingly this unexpected change of residence.
“No. But I thought it advisable to have them on trial before she left. They go to-morrow.”
“They!” Carruthers ejaculated.
“George is going with her,” she explained, with a smiling shrug of her shoulders.
She watched the children, who were sprawling all over her husband to his manifest discomfort, and, surveying the grouping, laughed.
“You look quite nice as the father of a family,” she observed. “I wish they belonged here by right.”
“I don’t,” he answered fervently.
“I kept them up for a romp with you before they go to bed; but I am going to bundle them off now,” she said. “If you make a practice of coming home a little earlier you will have a longer time with them.”
“I shall make a practice of getting back half an hour later in future,” he returned grimly, and rose from his seat in order to shake off his tormentors.
Mrs Carruthers laughed brightly.
“Pamela will be in presently,” she said, and stooped and lifted the boy in her arms. “Tell her to come upstairs to us. She and George dine here to-night.”
She held the boy up for a good-night kiss. Carruthers very unexpectedly put his arm about her shoulders, and drew her with the boy in her arms close to him, and kissed them both. He stared after her as she went inside with the children, and then turned thoughtfully away and sat down again in his former seat.
“God forgive me for a miserable sinner!” he mused. “But I’m not cut out for a family man. Though I suppose if the little beggars really belonged here I’d get accustomed to it.”
Pamela, coming up the garden path a few minutes later, discovered him sitting there with the same lugubrious expression of face, and his hands deep in his pockets, a perplexed and very much worried man.
He rose when she came near, and went to meet her, scrutinising her with greater attentiveness than usual as she advanced, a little pale and preoccupied, but looking surprisingly pretty and sweet and composed. He detected a new quality in her manner, a certain quiet force that was restful rather than assertive, and in her wistful eyes, behind the sorrow that dwelt there lately, shone a tender gleam of happiness that had its secret springs in the realisation and support of an unselfish human love which opened for her a door that had long been closed, and let in a new light and sweetness upon her life. Carruthers supposed, unable otherwise to account for the change in her bearing, that the news of her husband’s illness had softened her, and healed the breach between them.
“Come in to have a look how the crèche you have started here is getting along?” he asked, shaking hands. “My authority in this house is seemingly a negligible quantity, judging from my wife’s act in setting up an orphanage during the brief hours of my absence. She wants to stick to them too.”
“I do hope,” Pamela said, laughing, “that you won’t find them a great nuisance. It is such a comfort to me to leave them here. But I had qualms about you when Connie proposed it.”
“That’s more than she had,” he replied.
“They are fairly good on the whole, you will find,” she said dubiously.
“Every mother thinks that,” he retorted. “I don’t doubt they are as troublesome as the general run of youngsters. They were here five minutes ago, and all over me. Blest, if they don’t seem more at home than I am. Your daughter is a forward little hussy, and as pretty as—well, as her mother. What!”
He smiled at her encouragingly, and leaned with his back against the rail of the stoep, observing her as she stood bareheaded beside him, with only a light wrap over her thin dress.
“So you are going to Pretoria?” he said. “I hope you will find your husband better when you get there. If you want any arrangements made at this end, I’ll see to it. I suppose you intend to bring him down?”
“I hope to,” Pamela answered a little doubtfully. “It depends on—on circumstances.”
“Of course,” he agreed. “No good hurrying him. We’ll look after the youngsters all right. You need not have them on your mind, anyway.”
“No,” she said, with a quick look of gratitude at him. “You have relieved me of that worry entirely.”
“My share in it isn’t much,” he answered, smiling. “As you may have noticed, my wife generally gets her own way. She has always wanted babies, and now she has got ’em. She’s upstairs with them now. I was to tell you to go up. The invitation, I understand, does not extend to me.”
Pamela made a move towards the entrance. At the door she paused and looked back at him over her shoulder.
“You’re a dear,” she said softly, and went inside.
“That’s the worst of these ingratiating women,” Carruthers reflected. “They always contrive to get round one somehow.”