Book Four—Chapter Thirty Two.
Jim Bainbridge whistled. He filled his pipe and lighted it, and let it go out again. He repeated this performance until he had exhausted all the matches in his box; then he put the pipe down and sat back in his seat, with his thumbs in his braces, and cogitated.
It was a hell of a mess. No other phrase described the situation so aptly. It was a hell of a mess. He could not see how it was to be cleaned up exactly. Why the devil, instead of being taken prisoner, could not the fellow have stopped a bullet? That would have been a creditable finish. Well, he hadn’t. He was back again; and it looked as though there was going to be the hell of a fuss.
For several minutes Jim Bainbridge ceased from his meditations and coloured the air luridly with the variety and force of his expressions; then he cooled down again, and fell once more into thought. This thing had to be kept from his wife. The fewer the people in possession of the uncomfortable facts the better for the present. There was no need to confess to a cat in the bag until the brute mewed.
It wasn’t his affair anyway.
Suddenly he remembered, with a distinct disinclination to face Esmé in the circumstances, that they were dining at the Sinclairs’ that night. It was a memorable occasion—the baby’s first birthday. A nice sort of birthday surprise he had up his sleeve!
“Blast the baby!” he muttered; and immediately felt ashamed of himself. It was most assuredly none of the baby’s fault.
The case, looked at from any point, looked at all the way round, presented no possible solution to his mind. He had not liked the look in Hallam’s eyes when the latter walked out. He did not feel sure of the man, of how he would act, what his purpose was. There was trouble in the air; the atmosphere was heavy with it. He stared out of the window. It was a bright sunny day, hot and clear; it ought to have been thunder weather; and it was not: the thunder was all within—in the minds of men, in Hallam’s mind in particular. What was he going to do?
Bainbridge kicked the desk in front of him savagely, and got up and put his coat on. If he sat there any longer he would be moved to do something ridiculous. He would go out, walk along the Main Street, and talk with any one he chanced to meet. He must get a grip on himself before he faced Rose, or she would draw the whole thing out of him. And Lord knew what would happen then! For her own sake he wanted to keep his wife in ignorance of this wretched business until secrecy was no longer possible.
“There’s no sense in unfurling an umbrella before the rain falls,” he soliloquised. “There is always a chance that the cloud won’t burst.”
The abstraction of his manner at lunch that day excited general comment. Rose jumped to the conclusion that business was worrying him, and showed immediate concern for the family finances; and so exasperated him that he left the house in a rage and went back to his office in an irritable frame of mind.
“The old man’s temper is getting a bit frayed at the edges,” John observed, with filial candour.
“Oh! daddy’s all right,” said Mary, “if you don’t take his little moods seriously. He is always excitable when he is going to a party.”
The irritability had worn off, but the abstraction deepened when Jim Bainbridge escorted his family to the Sinclairs’ house that evening. It was entirely a family gathering. Sinclair’s sister and her husband were present, beside his wife’s relations; there were no other guests. Jim Bainbridge, when he kissed his sister-in-law, had an odd feeling that there was another uninvited guest there, a hovering presence of which he alone was aware. This sinister, lurking shadow stood between Esmé and the man who, all unconscious of the danger which threatened his happiness, welcomed his wife’s relations with frank cordiality. Bainbridge wrung his hand hard on an impulse of genuine sympathy. He liked George. It distressed him to think of the blow which might fall at any moment. The calm happiness of Esmé’s face, George’s genial smile, arrested his attention, played on his imagination to an unusual degree. It was not his wont to notice such things; but to-night he was stirred out of his phlegmatic indifference to a very vivid and human interest in the concerns of these people, whose lives were overshadowed by a tremendous crisis.
The references to the baby, the laughing congratulations of the guests, jarred on his nerves. He refrained from any mention of the child. And at dinner, when Georgina’s health was drunk in champagne, he alone ignored the toast. For the life of him, he could not have joined in the farce of the general rejoicing. Later, in the drawing-room, Esmé sat down beside him and rallied him on his preoccupation.
“You are bored, Jim,” she said. “I believe you are longing to be home and in bed.”
“No. But I’ve got the toothache,” he lied.
“Poor old dear! I’m sorry. Come upstairs and have a peep at the babe asleep. She looks such a duck in her cot.”
He followed her from the room and upstairs to the nursery. There was a nurse in charge, but she withdrew when they entered, to Jim Bainbridge’s infinite relief. Esmé pulled aside the mosquito net and bent over the cot. Her eyes, the man observed, were soft with mother-love as she leaned down towards the sleeping child. He did not look at the child; he was intent upon her.
“Isn’t she sweet?” she said, and glanced up at him, smiling.
His own face was grave, even stern in expression. He was watching her attentively, wondering about her, wondering how the news of Paul’s return would affect her when she knew.
“I believe you care more for that kid than you do for—any one,” he said gruffly. “If you could go back... If it were possible, say, to begin again—with Paul... Would you be willing to give up the kid—for him?”
Abruptly she straightened herself and stood beside the cot, holding the mosquito net in her hand, and looking at him fixedly with an air of troubled surprise.
“Jim,” she said, and her face saddened, “what put it into your mind to ask me that question? One can never go back. I wish you hadn’t said that—to-night. What brought that idea into your mind?”
“I don’t know.”
He fidgeted nervously with his collar and avoided her gaze. She was looking at him with a puzzled, questioning expression in her eyes, with no suspicion of his purpose in mentioning Paul’s name, but struck by the coincidence that Paul should be in his thoughts, even as he was in hers.
“It’s strange you should have said that,” she continued. “Lately I have been dreaming of Paul. I dream of him nearly every night.”
“Dream of him!” he echoed blankly. “Do you mean that you dream that he’s alive?”
“I dream that I see him looking at me,” she answered. “He looks into my eyes and turns away; and then I wake and lie in the darkness, trembling. The dream is always the same.”
“I say! that’s queer,” he said, staring at her, as earlier in the day he had stared at Hallam, as if he saw a ghost. These things were making him superstitious. “What should make you do that, I wonder?”
“Who can say? It’s a matter of nerves, I suppose.” She dropped the net she was holding and put a hand on his arm and drew him towards the door. “Come along down, old thing,” she said. “We are not good company for one another to-night. For your toothache, and my heartache, we must seek an anodyne in the society of the others.”
But for Bainbridge’s imaginary toothache there was no effective anodyne: the complexities of the situation were altogether beyond his efforts at elucidation. There was nothing for it but to stand by and wait for the blow to fall.
He sat on the stoep and talked with Lake, George’s brother-in-law, about the native labour unrest, and the advisability of adopting strong measures in quelling the agitation.
“This native question is going to be a big problem in the near future,” Lake opined. “We give the coloured man too much power.”
“What other course is possible with a civilised system of government?” Bainbridge contended.
“But the coloured man isn’t properly civilised,” Lake insisted; “that’s the point. He hasn’t grasped the rudiments of citizenship yet.”
“Well, we’ve got to teach him. He’s learning.”
Bainbridge’s mood forced him into a reluctant opposition. He was not in sympathy with the coloured man, but he took up his defence warmly. He and Lake plunged into argument; while in the room behind them Mary sang in a fresh, sweet soprano voice to Esmé’s accompaniment, and the rest sat about and listened and joined in the popular choruses.
And, a few miles away, walking along the shore in the darkness, a man, alone and with a mind black with despair, thought of the wife he had come back to claim, and of a child which was not his...