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.”