Book Two—Chapter Nineteen.
Esmé was married from her sister’s house very quietly, and with what Rose considered quite unnecessary haste. The whole affair was so sudden and so altogether unexpected that she scarcely knew whether to be the more pleased or the more dismayed by her sister’s change of fortune. She never felt quite at ease with her future brother-in-law, and in her heart she regretted that it was not George Sinclair upon whom Esmé’s choice had fallen. Marriage with Hallam meant a more complete separation from the old life: it would remove the girl altogether from her former associations. While she recognised the worldly advantages of the match she resented this: had Esmé married Sinclair they would have continued in touch with one another. But Hallam intended making his home in Cape Town, in one of the suburbs, after a prolonged honeymoon spent in Europe. The honeymoon, she gathered, would extend over a year.
It was all very amazing and rather wonderful. And Esmé appeared to be supremely happy; that, after all, was the chief thing.
Rose, while she watched from her seat in church, the girl standing before the altar beside the man whose name she was taking, experienced a curious misgiving which, though she felt it to be unreasonable, she could not shake off. Largely, she believed, she was influenced by something Sinclair had said when she informed him of Esmé’s engagement. He had been taken by surprise and was greatly upset by the news. She had very vividly in her memory the sight of his face as he sat and stared at her with stunned, blue eyes, and muttered hoarsely:
“My God! ... Hallam! ... I could have stood it had it been any one else.”
She had asked him what he meant, what he knew of Hallam? And he had answered shortly, “Nothing,” and gone away hurriedly. She had not seen him since.
That this scene should come back to her now, obtruding itself in the middle of the marriage service, struck her as portentous. What had he meant? Some other emotion deeper than jealousy had moved him surely to speak as he had done. Her eyes rested contemplatively on Hallam’s face. It was a fine face, a strong face, and the keen eyes were reassuring. The slight stoop of the shoulders and the reserved inward manner of the man suggested the scholar and thinker. Rose believed that he was clever; Jim said so. Neither she nor her husband understood him or felt at ease in his society. He displayed no interest in any of the family, save young John, whose conversation seemed to amuse him. John and he remained on terms of frank friendliness, marked by an air of patronage on John’s side and an entire absence of sentiment on the part of both. But in relation to the rest he was the same silent unsociable man who had stayed for months at the Zuurberg without exchanging remarks with any one.
It puzzled Rose to understand what formed his great attraction in her sister’s eyes. That Esmé was very deeply in love was evident; she was like a girl suddenly transformed; her face was alight with a glow of happiness which made it beautiful even to Rose’s accustomed eyes.
Rose sat and watched her, perplexed and thoughtful, with the strange uneasiness disturbing her mind and distracting her thoughts from the service. Why she should feel anxious she did not know; unless it was the result of Sinclair’s speech. But throughout the service the sense of disaster held with her, and later in the vestry, when the bride was signing the register, she experienced an overwhelming desire to cry, and shed a few surreptitious tears with the vexed knowledge that Hallam was observant of her emotion. Her eyes met his critical gaze a little defiantly with a faint hostility in them; and she fancied while she looked back at him that a shadow like a passing regret momentarily crossed his face. Then abruptly he turned to his wife and bent down and spoke to her and smiled. The shadow, if it had been there, had left his face unclouded as before.
The wedding party drove to the hotel for lunch, an arrangement which, while it pleased Jim exceedingly and met with the delighted approval of the children, occurred to Rose as altogether irregular. It was not the bridegroom’s duty to provide the wedding-breakfast, she had protested. But her husband talked her objections down and overruled them.
“Hallam can afford to do it,” he insisted. “Why shouldn’t he? We can’t give them a champagne breakfast anyhow.”
Besides the Bainbridges there was only one other guest, in the person of the best man, who was called Watkin, and whose acquaintance with the bridegroom seemed of the slightest. The absence of any relation or intimate friend of Hallam was a further aggravation to Rose. She looked at everything through dark-coloured glasses that day: no one else did: even John, whose respect for Hallam had decreased with the latter’s deliberate committal of matrimony, allowed that there was considerable enjoyment to be got out of other people’s weddings; the lunch at the “Grand” in particular appealed to him.
Hallam bore himself well through the ordeal. Whatever his feelings were in regard to his wife’s relations he managed on the whole to conceal them fairly well. Although he did not like Jim Bainbridge, and did not understand Rose in the remotest degree—he thought her disagreeable and commonplace and as unlike her sister as it was possible for a person intimately related to another to be—it pleased him to entertain them, and to note that they did full justice to his hospitality.
Jim drank champagne, to which he was unaccustomed, and became surprisingly talkative and rather noisy; and Rose, responding to the same genial influence, relaxed, and forgot for a time her apprehensions.
They made quite a merry party at their flower-decked table by the window, which opened on to the stoep and looked out upon the well-kept garden beyond. It was so near the finish of that part of Esmé’s life that Hallam was content to see her happily surrounded with her people, and to do his share in making himself agreeable; but he longed to be through with it and started on the journey to Cape Town, where he proposed staying for a week before embarking for England. When the talk was at its noisiest he felt Esmé’s hand reaching out under the table and touching his knee; his own hand went down and closed over it warmly while their eyes met in an understanding smile. She felt grateful to him for the effort she knew he was making for her sake to play his part well.
“Weddings,” Jim remarked in a reminiscent vein, “always recall to my mind the day I took the plunge. Odd sensation, getting married—uncertain business—rather like backing an outsider in a race. You hope you’ve drawn a prize; but it’s all a chance whether you have or not. It’s tying a knot with your lips which you can’t untie with your teeth. A man gets let in for this sort of thing. He can’t help himself. He gets a sort of brain fever, and there it is—done.”
His wife directed a meaning glance towards his glass and smiled dryly. Hallam took up the challenge.
“I think it is sometimes the woman who backs an outsider,” he said. “But a light hand on the rein brings many a doubtful mount past the winning post.”
“You’ve got the fever all right,” Jim returned. “I know all about that. I had it in its most acute form.”
“Never mind that old complaint,” Rose said soothingly. “You are quite cured now.”
“That’s all you know about it,” he replied almost aggressively. “That fever is recurrent. Every married man who has ever experienced it knows that the germ once there lies latent for all time. You hear of married people drifting apart... Well, they do, you know—often; but generally they drift back again—or want to. It’s usage. You get fed up—like you get fed up with saying your prayers every night.”—Young John pricked up his ears and became interested in the talk.—“You leave ’em off. Well, some time or other you come back to them. You want to come back to them. Prayer and love—they’re pretty much about on a par.”
John’s interest waned. He helped himself to fruit and disregarded the company.
“You are getting somewhat beyond my depths,” the best man remarked. “These things haven’t come my way.”
“They will,” Jim ventured to predict.
The best man looked at the bride and laughed.
“I hope so,” he answered gallantly; and introduced, with the ease of the man of the world, a lighter note into the talk.
The entire party drove down to the jetty to see Hallam and his bride embark. When she stood on the steps and watched her sister seated beside Hallam in the bobbing launch, smiling and radiantly happy, Rose’s former misgivings reasserted themselves and remained with her while she looked after the crowded launch steering its course towards the mail boat, which lay far out amid the ships on the sunlit blue of the sea.
Hallam turned to the girl, when they were well away from the shore, with a look of glad relief, and saw her eyes, happy and loving and trustful, lifted to his in sympathetic understanding. He smiled down at her.
“It’s good to get off, to be alone together,” he said. “The thought of this moment has kept me going. I believed we should never be through with it all.”
“I know,” she said with a little laugh. “But it’s over. We are together, Paul... for all our lives.”
“For all our lives,” he repeated; and, oblivious of the crowd about them, pressed closer against her on the narrow seat.