F. E. Mills Young

“ But the law and your happiness are both on one side. I’m out of the picture altogether.”
She made no reply. She felt that it would not be kindness to urge on him then how much she cared for him. She loved him, not as she loved Paul, but with a strong and tender affection that would keep his memory warm and vivid in her thoughts always.
“I shall never forget you—the sweetness and the dearness of you,” he added. “It’s a big blow, Esmé, to be forced apart now. Dear, I don’t know how I’ll stand it... No matter; we won’t think of that part of it. One gets used to most things, I imagine.” ”

“ The rose pink in the sky deepened, spread itself warmly over the blue expanse, reflected warmly upon the silent, neutral tinted world; changed the face of the land as it changed the face of the sky; brightening and intensifying the colour in the grass, in the leaves of the trees, painting the flowers wonderfully; transforming everything with the glow and warmth of life. The world threw off its lethargy of slumber and lifted its face wakefully to the flood of sunlight which broke through the rose and azure in a flash of gold.
Esmé stood transfixed, with eyes turned to the sunrise. ”

“ Esmé, his wife,—with a child—which was not his! The thing would not bear thinking about. And yet it stuck in his thoughts, tormented his thoughts, would not be dismissed however much he strove to thrust it aside. In the moment when Jim Bainbridge let fall this bomb Hallam’s feeling for his wife underwent a sudden revulsion. It seemed to him that his love died as surely as if it had never been. It seemed to him, too, though he knew the thought to be an injustice, that the wife he had loved was unworthy, was no better than a light woman. She had consoled herself very speedily. ”

“ She lay awake in the hot stuffy darkness of her little room, which the kitchen stove abetted the sun in keeping hot by day, while the warm slates of the too adjacent roof prevented any appreciable decrease in temperature during the night—lay awake with her mind filled with the thought of one man, and her imagination afire with the memory of splashes of moonlight on a heaving mass of water that stretched away endlessly and laved the moonlit, rock-strewn beach of a little bay along the coast. Then, with the dawn, she fell asleep and dreamed of the moonlight and of Paul Hallam. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It seemed to Esmé as they walked rapidly along in the clear light air that nature revealed herself in her fairest mood that morning. Surely never had sunlight shone more golden, never had the blue of the sky appeared more intense, nor the veld glowed with such splendour of colour. A blue haze, liquid in the golden light, quivered before her vision like a thing alive with iridescent wings outspread in the untempered sunlight that poured itself out upon the earth with a brilliance hurtful to the eyes. Everywhere her gaze turned some fresh wonder met the view. ”

“ She lay in the little bed in the room where, as a girl, she had slept soundly in the untroubled days before love had entered into her life, lay wide-eyed in the hot stillness, with the heavy scent of the oleander stealing into the room, perfuming the night, filling the little garden and the surrounding air with its sweetness, bringing back with its familiar fragrance a rush of memories, shy sweet memories of the days when Paul was her lover and she slept with his letters beneath her pillow and sometimes dreamed of him. ”

“ Throughout that night Hallam tramped along the shore, struck inland, came back to the sea, retraced his steps over the same ground; walking with tireless energy while he considered the position, so hopelessly complicated by the birth of the child.
His feeling for Esmé oscillated between love and hate. He thought of her as his dear wife, and wanted her urgently; again he thought of her as the mother of Sinclair’s child, and his heart turned from her, grew hard with bitter jealousy and revulsion. ”

“ I love the brooding silence and the warmth and the soft mountain air. There is health in every breath of it. Down at the Bay the winds rend one. It’s all heat and noise and rush.”
“Oh! the Bay’s not half a bad place,” he protested. “Most people at the beginning of a holiday feel as you do; but it wears off. You will be jolly well bored at the end of a fortnight. Travelling always along one old road grows monotonous. And whichever way you go it’s the same old road. You may strike across the veld, but sooner or later you have to come back to the road.” ”

“ Esmé had a tiny bedroom at the back, overlooking a cemented yard. There was one beauty in this yard, a huge oleander tree, the dark green leaves of which and the clusters of sweet-scented pink blossoms reared themselves against her window and shaded and perfumed her little room. If the oleander had been stricken by drought, or any other mischance had befallen it to cause it to die, the house would have been unbearable to the girl. As it was, the oleander made life possible, even when the children were troublesome, and when her sister and her husband quarrelled. They quarrelled frequently ”

“ George is honest, and he loves you. It’s a pity to throw away a really good chance of happiness.”
“To marry a man when you love another would not bring happiness,” Esmé said, facing her sister in the moonlight, half undressed, and with her hair falling about her shoulders and shading her face. “And it wouldn’t be fair to George.”
“I expect George, like most people, would prefer half a loaf to no bread,” Rose answered. She opened the door. “Good-night, dear,” she said softly. “You go to sleep, and don’t bother your head about any of them. Men aren’t worth half the tears women waste on them.” ”

“ Book Two—Chapter Seventeen. “To revisit a familiar spot is like walking among tombstones. Every point recalls a memory, and memory belongs to the past.”
Very vividly, like something heard long ago but never before realised, these words which Hallam had uttered on the morning she left the Zuurberg all those weary months before, echoed in Esmé’s thoughts when she made her second journey up the mountain road. The truth of them struck her like a thing which hurts. ”

“ The minutes ticked on relentlessly, and the clock on the mantelpiece chimed the half-hour after one. A light footfall descending the stairs, so light that it could not be heard above the noise of the wind, did not disturb the reader; nor did he appear to see when the door of the room was pushed wider and Esmé with a dressing-gown worn over her nightdress and her hair in a heavy plait over her shoulder, stood framed in the doorway, a shrinking slender figure, looking towards him with wide, anguished eyes. ”

“ The old gentleman was not on the stoep to see Esmé start on her walk. He would have been astonished equally with the rest who viewed her departure to see Hallam come out of the house and join her and walk with her into the road. The people on the stoep who witnessed these things, wondered, and spoke of their wonder to one another. No one before had seen Hallam in the evenings after he left the dinner table. No one, except this girl, who seemed on terms of easy friendliness with him, ever spoke to him. It is not easy to talk to a man who deliberately ignores your existence. ”

“ Rose responded; “he doesn’t underrate his power to win your love. You’ll grow very fond of him, Esmé; he is a lovable fellow.”
“I am fond of him,” Esmé answered. “Do you suppose I would marry him otherwise? I am bidding good-bye to the old life to-night, my dear; I am not dragging it with me into the life which begins to-morrow. I feel as though I were beginning all over again. It’s a big break, you know.”
“I know.”
Rose’s gaze travelled round the comfortable, homelike room, which from to-morrow would be deserted, and would ultimately pass to strangers. ”

“ Never in all her life had she met any one who interested her so profoundly, who so deeply stirred her pity. She wanted to help this man—with her friendship. There was no other thought in her mind. And he would not let her. He demanded simply to be left alone. A girl could not thrust her friendship on a man who did not want it. But she could defend him in her thoughts and in her speech without fear of his resentment.
“I think Mr Hallam is a very remarkable man,” she said. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The baby ruled the household, and tyrannised over its parents, and made slaves of its godparents, who were amazingly interested in this small cousin of theirs. Mary, a pretty girl of nineteen, with all her sex’s partiality for babies, worshipped at the shrine of the new arrival; John, with masculine mistrust of humanity in miniature, regarded the infant doubtfully, until, with its further development, it captivated him with its smile. From the moment when the baby first smiled at him, John lost his awe of it. He found it infinitely more amusing than any puppy. ”

“ Why cannot a man and a girl be friends?”
“I should have thought your own case furnished an answer to that,” Rose said. “In a friendship between a man and a girl one of them invariably falls in love. You can’t get away from nature. The eternal question of sex hides behind all these unequal friendships. That’s what makes them interesting. But these interesting relationships can spoil one’s life. I wish that you had never met this man. I feel uneasy about it.”
Esmé sat in an attitude of disturbed attention, and kept her eyes studiously averted from her sister’s. ”

“ Mr Huntley was silent. He took up from the desk before him, and put down again, a little sheaf of papers, and fidgeted with a pen lying beside the blotting-pad. He looked as he felt, immensely embarrassed.
“My dear Hallam,” he burst forth at length, “I don’t wish to appear to criticise your actions, but your absence—your complete disappearance, in fact, seems to me inexplicable. That is how it would strike any unbiassed person. Whatever your private reasons were for leaving your home, you might at least have kept us informed as to your whereabouts. ”

“ If Esmé did not find the same deep happiness which she had known in her life with Paul Hallam, she was at least care free. George was a normal healthy-minded mail, popular with his fellows, and possessed of keen powers of appreciation and enjoyment; and he succeeded, in rousing her to a new interest in things. His devotion touched her deeply. She began to realise that without being passionately in love, it was possible to love tenderly. Her life with George promised to be a satisfying and peaceful one. ”

“ With the cessation of the sounds a deeper hush than before seemed to settle upon the night; even the crickets became less insistent: the world slept; every one slept, save herself. She alone of all the household kept wakeful vigil until the dawn broke, and brought with its hopeful promise of a new day rest and forgetfulness to her weary brain.
Esmé woke late, and had barely time to dress before the gong sounded for breakfast. ”

“ Would you be happy in the wilds with me?”
“I suppose I should be happy with you anywhere,” she answered, and touched his hand caressingly as it lay on the sand close to hers. “But I am not hungering for loneliness, Paul. My instincts are civilised. I’m nervous in lonely places.”
“With me?” he asked.
She met his eyes and smiled faintly.
“Even with you I think I might feel fear at times in such solitude as you describe. I remember how terrified I was at the Zuurberg that day, down the kloof, when you crashed through the bushes. I thought of tigers—oh! of all sorts of horrors. ”

“ The hotel was fairly full; there were men and women on the stoep and several children. The girl was too shy to note any of these people particularly; she took them in collectively at a glance and passed on and went inside. A woman stepped forward out of the gloom of the narrow passage, took her name and conducted her to her room.
Left alone in her room, Esmé crossed to the open window and stood looking out upon the wild bit of garden with its kei-apple hedge and the small vley quite close to the window. ”

“ He laughed shortly.
“I’ve a feeling that my turn will come,” he said, and turned about abruptly and left the room, left the house, with a sore heart, and his sense of exasperation deepening as he thought of the girl he loved tied to a drunkard who was not man enough to conquer his particular vice.
And the girl he pitied was blaming herself for not having gone with her man into the wilds, for not having allowed him to follow the life he preferred, hunting and exploring along the unbeaten track. Had life offered him a sufficient interest this relapse might have been averted. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But Esmé’s mind at the moment was detached from her surroundings. She was thinking very earnestly of the man who held aloof from friendship, who seemed to regard with mistrust, almost with dislike, every one about him. She had never before met any one who was at enmity with mankind. The experience interested her immensely, troubled her. It occurred to her as altogether sad and incomprehensible that a man should shun his fellows and enclose himself in a stronghold of impenetrable reserve. She longed to pierce the hard crust of his egotism, to draw him out of himself. ”

“ Whereupon Esmé lifted her face and turned her tear-wet eyes on the speaker in wide amaze.
“You knew!” she said. “Well, I didn’t. I wish I had known. I thought he was just a pal.”
“A pal makes a good husband,” Rose said thoughtfully, with the first glimmer of doubt in her mind as to what answer her sister had returned. “It’s all right, isn’t it?”
“It’s all wrong,” Esmé answered ruefully, and dabbed at her eyes,—“just as wrong as it can be. He’s hurt; and I hate hurting him. I like him so well. But I don’t love him, Rose.” ”

“ I’d show more spirit, Esmé. A man like Paul is apt to become neglectful without intending it. He should be made to think. You ought not to be alone until you are strong again.”
“I should like him to find his home open,” Esmé answered, “and a welcome waiting for him when he comes back.”
There was no doubt in her own mind that one day he would come back. She believed that he would walk in unexpectedly, quite suddenly as he had gone; and she would feel his strong arms round her, and in their shelter forget all the sorrow and perplexity of their separation. ”