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.
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.