“That is worse than I had anticipated,” Dare said, shocked and disconcerted by this intelligence. “Will you please tell me, so far as it is possible to judge at this stage, what the result of this illness is likely to be? Is he to be an invalid for life?”
“Well, it is paralysis, you know,” the doctor answered, “and a bad case. Chronic alcoholism is mainly responsible. He will be able to walk, we hope—with the aid of sticks, of course. But his brain will never be quite clear. He may, however, live a long while.”
“That is to be regretted in the circumstances,” Dare observed drily.
The doctor agreed with him, but he did not say so. His business was to patch the man up, and he was doing his best to attend to it. He furnished a few more details, and held out vague hopes of an improvement in the mental condition. The patient had a good constitution, though he had done his utmost to ruin it; and if not crossed or excited, or worried with business matters, the brain would become stronger, though it would never be normally active again.
Dare gathered from the fragmentary talk that Arnott was to be a semi-imbecile, just able to crawl about,—a reversion, in short, to childhood with the hideous defects of decrepit age to make the reversion more horrible. The information turned him sick. He was thankful to leave the place and get out again into the sunshine. He no longer desired to see Arnott. To reason with a man in that condition was impossible. Arnott had become a mere cipher in the drama, the finishing act of which had to be decided between Pamela and himself. It was unthinkable that she should persist in devoting the future to his wreck of humanity, to whom she owed no debt of duty, who had merely used her for his pleasure, and discarded her when he tired through his infatuation for a younger woman, which obsession possibly his failing mental faculties were responsible for.
Dare left Pretoria the same day, and started on the long return journey to the coast. He was impatient to see Pamela, and at the same time extremely nervous at the prospect of his interview with her. He did not know what to say to her, how to break to her the brutal fact of Arnott’s contemplated marriage, his determined and ruthless desertion of herself. The man’s actions, before his illness prevented the carrying out of his designs, pointed conclusively to a deranged intellect. With the cunning of latent insanity he had arranged his plans, counting on Pamela’s silence in respect to his bigamous marriage with her, utterly regardless of the stir which the scandal of his marriage with Blanche must create in circles where he was known to have a wife and children already. To a man in full possession of his faculties the impossibility of concealing the crime of bigamy would have been apparent, unless he fled the country and married under an assumed name.
What, he wondered, would Pamela decide upon doing when she learnt the entire truth? He could not tell. The uncertainty was nerve-racking. He fretted and worried himself with conjectures all through that tedious, seemingly unending journey,—during the hot dusty days as the train rushed through the Karroo, and throughout the long sleepless nights when, kept awake by his thoughts, he turned in weary discomfort in his narrow berth in the darkened compartment, and longed for the coming of day.
When he reached the terminus he despatched a telegram to Pamela to inform her of his arrival, and his intention of calling upon her the following morning. Then he took a taxi and drove to the Mount Nelson. He dined and went to bed, and slept soundly for the first time since leaving Pretoria.
Pamela did not sleep at all. The unexpected receipt of Dare’s telegram excited her, and kept her on the rack of expectation. She had not looked for him to return. The telegram was the only communication she had received from him, and it told her nothing, save that he was back and wished to see her. She knew that he must have something of importance to tell her or he would not have turned back so soon.
The thought of the coming interview was vaguely disquieting. So much had passed between her and this man of a painful and intimate nature that all the barriers of conventional friendship were down, and left her exposed, as he was, to the onslaught of each new emotion inspired by their mutual feeling. She had thought of him so much since he had pleaded his cause with her, and she had admitted her own love for him,—had reviewed all their pleasant intercourse of the past, his kind, patient, and unselfish devotion which later, in accepting her decision, had yet lent itself to aid her in her unprotected and difficult position, that the love which she had confessed to bearing for him had strengthened considerably. She looked up to him as to some one strong and fine and worthy of a woman’s entire trust. Never for the man she had believed to be her husband had she felt this reverence of love. She had admired him, had felt grateful to him for his passionate ardour for herself. Their marriage had proved a delirious period of excitement and delight, until his passion cooled; but it had never roused in her a lofty conception of love, or helped her to realise the seriousness of life’s responsibilities. Her life as Arnott’s wife had tended rather to lower the standard of fine thinking, and reduce the principles of living to the sensuous indolence of self-gratification, and an immense concentration upon the importance of purely personal things. She had lived for herself, detached in sympathy from the wider world about her, careless of the joys and sorrows of others as something altogether outside her life. And now sorrow had brought her into touch with the world, had broadened her sympathies and her understanding, and decreased proportionately the sense of her personal significance.