Book Three—Chapter Twenty.
The fulness of life made perfect by a perfect human love lifted Esmé so completely out of the past that all her life which had gone before seemed as a dream, a thing indistinct and distant, with the haunting sense of unreality which clings to dreams in defiance of the vivid impression sometimes left on the mind. To look back on the days of her girlhood was like looking back on the life of some one else. The little hot bedroom, shaded by the pink oleander tree, the life of continuous discords in her sister’s home, the daily drudgery of instructing unmusical pupils in an art they would never acquire, these things were as remote as if they had never been. She looked back on those days wonderingly, comparing them with the present; and the present seemed the more beautiful by comparison with those earlier years.
After their year of wandering Hallam and his wife returned to the Cape. No country they had seen appealed to either with the same magnetic attraction which the Peninsular held for both. The house which Hallam took was not large; but it was luxurious in its appointments, and was beautifully situated, high, and surrounded with fine old trees which afforded shade and coolness on the hottest day. From the windows of her new home, as from the garden, Esmé had a view of the wide blue Atlantic stretching away endlessly to the far horizon; while, like a giant wall, rugged and grey, and towering in its immensity above the house, as it towered above the city, was the great square mountain, blue-grey in the sunlight, patterned gorgeously with the flowers which carpeted its slopes. And at night there was the sea still, darkly swelling, mysterious, remote, restless, a black expanse moving ceaselessly under the motionless star-lit darkness above; beating with passionate energy upon the shore and tossing its foam-flecked waters against the rocks: there, too, was the mountain, stark and dominating, black and sharply defined against the sky.
Always these wonders were there, and always they assumed fresh guises, revealed themselves in new and surprising aspects with the varying seasons and the shifting light. It was good to sit out on the stoep in the warm still dusk and enjoy these things together in an intimate and undisturbed solitude. They needed nothing else for the present, desired no companionship but each other’s. Hallam was no less misanthropic than before his marriage; but his life was happier and full of interest. He was passionately in love; and his passion poured itself out in daily worship of this woman who gave him a full return, whose passion answered to his, equalled his in everything save its absorbed concentration on the individual to the exclusion of every other interest in life. To shut out the world from her thoughts entirely, as Hallam did, was not possible to Esmé. She loved life and her fellow-beings. Because she loved Paul better than all the world, with a love which was an emotion apart and different in quality from anything she had ever known before, she could not close her heart to every outside interest. She was glad always to be with him, glad during the first months in their own home to have him to herself with no interruptions from the world beyond their walls. But she did not desire to lead that shut in life always. She wanted to go about among people, and to have him go with her; and she made this clear to him after a while to his no inconsiderable dismay.
People called on her, and she returned their calls—alone; Hallam refused definitely to have any share in that. She waived the point. So many men evaded this social duty that it did not seem to her of great importance. But when dinner and other invitations began to arrive, and he as flatly declined to accept them, she felt disappointed and showed it. She wanted to take part in these things, and his objection made her participation impossible.
“Why should you want to go?” he asked, with passionate resentment in his tones, on an occasion when she pressed him to accept an invitation to a private dance. “I don’t want to go to these things. I don’t care about them. I want only you. Why can’t you be content with your home and me? Why are you not satisfied?”
“Oh, Paul!” she said, and entwined his arm with both her arms and leaned against him confidingly. “You know I’m satisfied. But we are living in the world, dear; we can’t shut ourselves off from it entirely. We can’t live just for ourselves.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“But,”—she protested, and looked up at him with puzzled eyes. “How can we?” she asked. “We must take our part, like other people. It isn’t good to live shut off: it’s cramping. I love you, I love my home; but I want other things. I want to see and talk with people. I want to meet other women. I want to—gossip—about the things women love discussing. I want to show off my clothes.”
“You show them off to me,” he said.
She laughed softly.
“To you!—you unappreciative male! I’ve everything in life to make a woman proud and glad and happy; and I want the world to know it. I long to parade my happiness, as a manikin parades the fashions, to the admiration and the envy of all beholders. Why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t I dance, boy? I love dancing. I’d love to dance with you.”
“I can’t dance,” he answered. “I don’t do any of these things.”
“I’ll teach you,” she volunteered. “It’s altogether simple. You’ve no idea how simple it is, nor how lovely, till you try.”
He smiled involuntarily.
“At my time of life! Imagine it! I wonder what you’ll ask me to do next?”
“Well, you need not dance,” she urged. “You can go to the card room.”
“I don’t care about cards,” he answered obstinately and with a note of hard decision in his voice. “And I don’t like the idea of your dancing with other men. Can’t you give up these things—for me?”
His objection surprised and vexed her. It was to her absurd that he should feel jealous, even slightly jealous, at the thought of her dancing with any one else. She felt hurt. Surely he had sufficient evidence of her love to trust her? She would have trusted him in any circumstances in her confident assurance of his love for her. She did not understand the temper of his love. It was not mistrust of her that moved him to object: it was dislike of the thought of any other man touching her, holding her in his arms even in the legitimate exercise of dancing. His passion had more than a touch of the primitive male in its quality. He wanted her to himself, shut away from the world, content to be alone with him always. And that was not in the least Esmé’s view of things: her outlook was entirely modern and wholly free from self-consciousness. She saw no reason why she should not enjoy herself in the same way in which other women enjoyed life. She wanted to cure Paul of his misanthropy, not to cultivate it herself. It was not an engaging quality; it was even a little ridiculous.
“I would give up anything for you, Paul, if there was a good reason for the sacrifice,” she said. “But I think you are merely prejudiced. You’ve spent so much time alone that you’ve grown used to solitude; but it isn’t good for you. It isn’t good for any one. We can’t live like that—shunning people as if we had something to hide. I want to go out, and I want to invite people here—not very often, but occasionally. Dear, be sensible. You gave up your solitude when you married me. I can’t let you slip back again.”
He moved restlessly and disengaged his arm from hers and stood looking across the garden into space and frowning heavily. She watched him with anxious eyes. After more than a year of married life this was the first cloud to gather in their radiant sky.
“You can go where you please,” he said ungraciously. “I never supposed you cared so much for these things.”
“I can’t go without you,” she insisted.
The frown on his brow deepened.
“You know how I hate that sort of show,” he answered. “I’ve always avoided social functions. They don’t interest me.”
“Very well,” she said. “Then I must decline the invitation.”
He swung round on her quickly and caught her up in his arms and held her tightly, muttering against her lips, and punctuating the words with kisses.
“Decline it... yes... I can’t let the world—any one—come between you and me. Why should you want interests apart from your home? Your home is here, little one, in the depths of my heart.”
She felt his heart thumping against his chest, beating hard and fast as the heart of some one labouring under great excitement; she heard his breath escaping in quick deep gasps, and saw the passionate ardour which burned in his eyes; and she gave way, yielding her will to his stronger will, reluctantly, but with a growing sense of the futility of striving against him any longer. He silenced her protests with kisses, holding her head against his shoulder and keeping his lips on hers.