Book One—Chapter Ten.
During the days which followed time sped on amber wings. It sped so swiftly that her fortnight’s holiday seemed to Esmé the shortest fortnight her life had ever known. Oddly, she did not realise why the hours were so mysteriously curtailed. In reality her days were longer than usual; they started at sunrise.
This practice of early rising, which was new to her, developed into a daily habit. If by chance she overslept, as she did occasionally, her day was robbed of its chief pleasure—the early morning walk in Hallam’s company. He never waited for her. He never referred to her absence when she failed to put in an appearance on the stoep at the time he came out, stick in hand, ready for his walk. But he always looked for her; and when he saw her waiting for him he appeared pleased. They set forth together as a matter of course.
He grew to look forward to her companionship. His manner had lost its rough unsociability; he talked to her readily. Occasionally he left the seat, which had come by tacit recognition to be considered especially his, for a chair beside hers on the stoep. His behaviour excited considerable surprise and comment among the other guests; but to Esmé it appeared less remarkable than his former attitude of almost hostile aloofness. She derived a quiet happiness from his society.
As she came to know him better her amazement at his weakness grew enormously. That a man of such striking personality, possessed of considerable will-power, should yield himself to the influence of a sordid vice, be dominated by it, surprised her beyond words. It was the one thing about him which she hated. It was ugly and inconsistent and degrading. She never saw him drink; he took nothing but milk and soda with his meeds. In the daytime he always appeared perfectly sober; but at night, after dinner, it was his invariable custom to disappear, where she did not know; but sometimes she heard his stumbling step going along the stoep after every one else was in bed. She would lie awake and listen for these sounds, but it was only occasionally she heard him go unsteadily to his room. Then her heart would beat faster, and the tears would come to her eyes, and always, she offered up a prayer for him in the quiet darkness of her little room. Her pity for him and her liking grew like a flower, unconscious of its expansion as it opens to the sun.
When first it occurred to Esmé to use her influence to wean Hallam from his nightly practice was uncertain; doubtless her desire had leaned that way from the beginning of their acquaintance; but it was not until she was well into the second week of her holiday that she summoned up sufficient courage one evening while they sat at dinner to propose that he should accompany her for a walk. It was too beautiful a night to spend indoors, she urged.
The man hesitated. She believed that he was going to refuse. It was easy to see that her suggestion was not acceptable to him. It took him aback, and for quite an appreciable while he did not reply to her. Then he said, somewhat brusquely:
“Have you not had walking enough for one day?”
“Come and sit with me on the stoep,” she said, “if you do not care to walk.”
Some quality in her voice, something, too, in the expression of her face, when he turned his face to look at her, arrested his attention. He scrutinised her more closely, and into his eyes, as he watched her, leapt a light of understanding.
“I never met any one quite so indefatigable as you,” he said. “If you really desire exercise, of course I’ll accompany you. There will be a moon to-night. She is young, but she will serve our purpose. Why do you want to walk?”
The question was jerked out abruptly. There was an inflection of curiosity in his tones. Esmé answered quietly, without looking at him.
“I suppose because I feel it is a sin to remain indoors on such a night.”
Had not her eyes been averted from his face she must have seen his lips compress themselves at her words. A sort of hardness came into his voice.
“Your language is somewhat exaggerated,” he returned. “The physical benefit is more obvious than the moral, I think. However, if it gives you a sense of righteousness, so much the better. I will lend myself readily to further that end. What do you usually do in the evenings?”
“Sit on the stoep generally. I don’t care about cards. When Mr Sinclair was here we used to walk.”
“Sinclair!—yes... The fellow who fancied he possessed all the virtues because he had not certain vices. You must miss him.”
“That isn’t a very kind description,” she said.
“I was not trying to be kind,” he answered. “I am not of a kindly disposition. You may observe that I do not lay claim to any of the virtues. It is safe to conclude that what you don’t claim will never be conceded to you. These facts once grasped simplify life enormously. But I waste time in attempting to teach you worldly wisdom. You live in a world of illusions.”
He spoke very little during the remainder of the time he sat at table. His manner was preoccupied, and his face looked grim. Esmé felt that he regretted having yielded to her request; he resented interference with his routine. When he rose from the table, which he did before any of the others, he turned to her and said in his curt way:
“Please be ready in half an hour from now.”
Then he pushed his chair back and walked quickly from the room.
The old gentleman on her right asked Esmé to make a fourth at bridge. He looked disappointed when she declined. She explained that she was going for a walk.
“It is good to be young. But don’t overdo it,” he counselled.
“The air is so wonderful; I am never tired up here,” she replied.
“I have heard that said of the air in other places,” he said, and smiled. “If I were twenty years younger I would go with you.”
The old gentleman was not on the stoep to see Esmé start on her walk. He would have been astonished equally with the rest who viewed her departure to see Hallam come out of the house and join her and walk with her into the road. The people on the stoep who witnessed these things, wondered, and spoke of their wonder to one another. No one before had seen Hallam in the evenings after he left the dinner table. No one, except this girl, who seemed on terms of easy friendliness with him, ever spoke to him. It is not easy to talk to a man who deliberately ignores your existence. It was plain that he wanted to be left alone: yet he made an exception in favour of the girl. There was only one construction likely to be placed on this amazing preference. And so the people at the hotel looked after the disappearing figures, and criticised the growing intimacy between the man and girl long after they had vanished from sight amid the shadows of the early dusk.
When they were well away from the hotel Hallam took the pipe from his mouth and looked down at the girl’s unconscious face and smiled dryly. He wondered whether she realised that they were objects of curiosity to the people they had left behind, whether, if she did realise it, it would trouble her at all? Her eyes, lifted to his in response to his steady scrutiny, showed darkly shadowed in the uncertain light; they smiled frankly up at him. He knew while he gazed down at her that he would miss her when she had gone, that life would seem emptier, more purposeless, than before. From the first he had realised the danger of the acquaintance; yet he had drifted into it with very little effort to evade the danger. He had not made the advances, but he had responded to them; and now he was regretting, with a sense of bitter futility, the folly of allowing her to become a significant influence in his life. He could not end the thing now; he did not want to; her companionship had become necessary to him.
But he could prevent her liking for him from developing, could, if he chose, crush it outright. To crush it outright was perhaps the wiser course.
“You know,” he said quietly, “those people who watched us away are deploring your indiscretion in associating with me. I am not resenting it. They are perfectly right. I am not a desirable companion for any one. Why did you first speak to me? Why do you persist in the acquaintance? I often wonder. Don’t you know what I am?”
“Perhaps I do,” she answered in so low a voice that, but for the stillness of the night, he would scarce have heard the faltered words. “I think that is one reason why I spoke to you.”
“You mean,” he said, “that you were sorry? That’s kind of you. But I am not conscious of needing sympathy. What other reason had you?”
“Isn’t it only natural to talk to people one meets daily?” she asked. “I talk to every one in the hotel.”
He smiled.
“I have observed that. But you don’t walk with them. Why did you insist on my coming out to-night?”
“Oh!” she said, and felt her face aflame, and was grateful for the darkness which concealed her confusion. “I cannot give a reason for every impulse that moves me. I wanted to walk.”
“Excuse me if I accuse you once more of insincerity,” he said. “It was no impulse that prompted you to ask me. It was a deliberate and premeditated request which cost you some effort to make. Your concern for me is very flattering. But you waste your sympathy. What do you imagine you accomplish by this display of energy? You will overtire yourself, that is all. For me, it is merely a long time between drinks.”
Tears came into her eyes. She hoped he did not see them, but she could not have kept them back. He hurt her even more than he intended to.
“I don’t care,” she said, a little unsteadily, “how hard you box my ears. I am glad I asked you to come. I’m glad you came.” She raised her face suddenly and lifted defiant eyes to his.
“I am sorry I was insincere. You got me there. I didn’t know you were so observant. In future I’ll be absolutely frank with you. I’ll be frank now, even if it angers you. I asked you to come out because I think it is a shame for you to spend your evenings as you do. I think it is a shame that you should waste your life. I’m not so much sorry for you as savage with you. It’s hateful in you. It’s the one thing which spoils you from being absolutely fine.”
She broke off abruptly, startled at her own vehemence, immensely embarrassed, and horrified with herself. The man was staring at her, staring in amazement, incredulous and almost bewildered by the surprising rush of words. He had never in his life been so thunderstruck, nor had he ever before listened to such plain speaking. He was silent in face of this retort for which he had been in no sense prepared.
“Oh, dear!” she exclaimed, aghast at her own daring. “What must you think of me? I never meant to attack you like this. It’s—abominable.”
“Whatever I think of you,” he answered, “I can never again call you insincere. You have hurled truths at me to-night. You were quite right in everything you said; but—forgive me—you were quite wrong in saying them. However, largely that’s my own fault for provoking you. It was inconsiderate to push my inquiries; it would be illogical if I complained because you answered them. We’ll wipe the incident out. At least we understand one another. In future, when I see you making your social effort, I shall recognise that you are started on your morality campaign.”
“Please don’t,” she said falteringly, with a catch so suggestive of repressed emotion in her tones that he repented the ill-nature of his words.
He glanced down at her as she walked beside him along the dim road, hatless, with the soft hair shading her partly averted face; then he straightened his stooping shoulders with a jerk, and looked about him at the darkening landscape, and up at the sky, where the young moon rode serenely in a star-strewn cloudless sky. It was a fine night, warm and still; the wan moonlight pierced the dusk palely, revealing the road cutting like a path of silver across the velvety darkness of the veld.
Some softening quality in the quiet beauty of the night, or it may have been in the sight of the partly turned face, with its look of hurt distress, penetrated the man’s consciousness. His mood changed; a kinder note banished the harshness from his voice. He had wounded her deliberately, and he regretted it.
“I’m a brute,” he said in altered tones. “Don’t heed my roughness; it is not meant. I had no wish to offend.”
“You did not offend,” she answered. “But I am afraid that I did.”
“No,” he said, but without conviction, she thought. “I asked for truth, and I got it. Perhaps that is what surprised me. The last thing a man expects to hear is the truth about himself. I didn’t credit you with the possession of so much courage.”
“It has all evaporated,” she said.
“The courage!” he laughed. “Oh! I think not. It has merely gone under for the time.”
And then he turned the conversation, and closed the matter, as she felt, finally. She had no means of knowing whether his resentment of her plain speaking still rankled. A sort of constraint had fallen between them. She felt self-conscious, and rather like a child who has been rebuked. But she did not regret having spoken as she had done. The barriers of pretence were down; there existed a clear understanding between them. As she walked rather silently with him in the moonlight she resolved that on the morrow she would invite him to accompany her again.