F.E. Mills Young (continued 5)
Reading edition
“It came pretty near to being a fatal accident,” Jim threw in helpfully. “One of those black devils got hold of her. If it hadn’t been for Paul she’d be as dead as mutton by now.”
“What?” Rose ejaculated.
“Paul’s turned up,” came the laconic information. “Turned up in the nick of time too. It seems he’s been a prisoner of war. Don’t say anything now. We are all feeling jumpy. He’s coming over in the morning.”
Rose gasped in her astonishment. Her husband’s jerked out sentences, his perturbed and bothered look, as much as her sister’s evident agitation, kept her from putting the elucidatory questions which she longed to ask. She could scarcely believe this startling news, so abruptly given; it seemed to her incredible that Paul Hallam should be alive, and coming there. Gently she passed an arm about her sister’s shoulders and spoke to her soothingly.
“You poor dear!” was all she said. “You poor dear!”
Mary came running down the stairs, agog with excitement, and manifestly curious. But at the foot of the stairs she halted abruptly, and surveyed the group in the hall in wide-eyed amaze. Tactfully she disregarded Esmé’s tearful condition and confined her attention to the dilapidations of her attire.
“You’ve been in the wars,” she said. “Come on up to my room; I’ll rig you out.”
Jim Bainbridge, approving of his daughter’s handling of an embarrassing situation, looked after the pair as they went arm in arm up the stairs; then, in answer to the question in his wife’s eyes, he followed her into the sitting-room and entered into explanations.
Rose took things more calmly than he had expected. The shock of the news left her bewildered and curiously at a loss for words. She found some difficulty in collecting her ideas.
“I always said,” she remarked once, “that it was ridiculous to swear so positively to a man’s identity by the clothes he happened to be wearing.”
And after reflection she added simply:
“Poor George!”
Bainbridge’s sympathies set strongly in the same direction.
“That’s how I felt about it when Paul walked into my office yesterday,” he observed.
“Yesterday!” she repeated. “You knew this yesterday? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“For obvious reasons,” he answered. “I hoped when Paul heard of the second marriage he’d see the wisdom of clearing out. But he didn’t. I wonder how I would have acted had it been my case? Whether, if I had disappeared and returned to find you married again, I would have slipped away and left the other fellow in possession? Largely, of course,” he added reflectively, “it would depend on whether I wanted you. If I had wanted you all right, the other fellow would have had to quit. That’s as plain as print anyway. No doubt I gave Paul fairly rotten advice. However he didn’t take it; so there it is.”
“You are positively immoral,” Rose exclaimed indignantly. “There is no question about the matter at all. They are man and wife.”
“I wasn’t dealing in morality in offering my advice,” he answered, grinning. “I was thinking of the simplest way out of the difficulty.”
“The path of least resistance—yes,” she said. “And it didn’t strike you that in shirking difficulties one makes others? A fine crop of criminal complications you would have started. Besides, Paul isn’t a man to take advice.”
“No; he is not to be moved from his purpose once his mind is made up. Incidentally, he’s rather a fine chap.”
“He drinks,” she said.
“I imagine he has learned control,” he returned quickly. “You are a little unfair in your judgment, aren’t you?”
“Perhaps I am,” she allowed. “I never liked him. I resent his coming back and upsetting everything. What a talk there’ll be!”
“Don’t overlook the fact that he saved us a funeral in the family,” he reminded her. “You can’t have it both ways. I consider it was providential his being on the spot. George stood to lose in either case.”
“I hope he will take your philosophic view of the matter,” was all she returned. Then she left him to his reflections and went away to see about a meal.
Book Four—Chapter Thirty Seven.
It had been a day of varied experiences of big moments, fraught with terror and relief, joy and sorrow, inextricably interwoven. The eventful day was followed by a night of correspondingly deep emotions, a night of painful revelation and much anguish of mind for Esmé, as well as for the man who was to learn from the lips of the woman he loved, and whom he believed was his wife, that she had never been legally married to him, that her husband was alive, that she and the child, which was his, were leaving him finally.
They talked late into the night, sitting opposite to one another, with a small table between them on which Rose had placed two cups of coffee, before she left them alone together, and went softly upstairs to take a look at the baby, asleep in its improvised cot.
The little house was overcrowded that night, so that John was forced to sling a hammock on the balcony and sleep out in the open air. It was also a very quiet house; a house in which every one walked softly and spoke in whispers and went about with concerned and anxious faces. The master of the house stayed late at his club, and slipped in quietly on his return and crept past the sitting-room door and went softly upstairs to bed.
And the man and the woman within the room talked on fragmentally, heedless of everything beyond the confines of those four walls which gave privacy to their interview, to the man’s grief, and the woman’s unutterable sympathy with his sorrow.
George Sinclair sat forward in his seat, with his hands dropped between his knees, staring before him with blurred unseeing eyes. Occasionally he beat the knuckles of one clenched hand softly with the palm of the other, with an action pitiful to watch, suggesting, as it did, intense emotion hardly repressed. He did not say much. The situation had gone beyond words. He sat there, tense and quiet, trying to grasp the fact that she was not his wife, never had been his wife, that their married life had been a sham. And now he had to give way. There was no course left to him but to pass out of her life altogether. And he loved her, worshipped her. Life without her would be entirely blank. He could not realise living without her. To know that she was in the world somewhere and that he must not see her, speak to her, touch her ever again after to-day...
The thought was torture. It was also fantastically unreal. He felt like a man in a dream, faced by an absurdly impossible situation, which was nevertheless distressing and horrible, which he believed would fade if he could only wake. But he could not wake; and the dream became more real, more terribly convincing with every passing moment.
Why, in the name of reason, had he not been shot in France and thus saved this refinement of torture? It would have spared Esmé unnecessary suffering also. It seemed monstrous that through his love for her he should hurt her, that by their marriage they should have all unconsciously injured one another grievously. Wherever she might be, however happy she was in her love for Paul and for her child, always there must linger in her mind a regret when she thought of him alone with his memories of his brief happiness and his enduring sorrow.
“Don’t reproach yourself,” he said, once, looking up in response to something she said in self-condemnation, and meeting her saddened eyes fully. “The trouble is none of your making. I don’t see that you are to blame anyway. I worried you into it. You know,”—he leaned towards her and took hold of her hands where they lay along the table,—“I can’t regret our marriage, Esmé. It’s been a wonderful time. It’s something to remember when—when I’ve nothing else left of you. If it wasn’t that I know you love Paul better than ever you loved me, I’d not give you up. 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.”
He was silent again for a while. He had released her hands and returned to his former attitude, and to his action of beating one hand upon the other. Esmé watched him, biting her lip to stop its trembling, and with difficulty holding back her tears. What could she do, what could she say, in face of this misery which she was powerless to avert?
Presently she rose from her seat, and went to him, and kneeled on the carpet beside him, and put her hands over his hands to quiet their painful movement.
“George,” she said softly, “it stabs me to the heart to see you grieve so. What can I say? You’ve been so good to me. I love you for your goodness. I’ll remember you with gratitude every day—every hour of every day, so long as I live. My dear boy! my dear boy! I can’t bear it when you look so sad.”
She was sobbing now, sobbing and choking with emotion. He took her face between his hands and smiled at her, with a smile that was infinitely sadder than tears, and bent forward and kissed her gently.
“Poor, weary little woman!” he said. “That white face, with its tired eyes, ought to be on the pillow. Come upstairs, and let me take a look at the baby before I go.”
He helped her on to her feet; and, hand in hand, softly and in silence, they went upstairs and stood side by side looking down on the unconscious beauty of their sleeping child.
“She forms a link,” he said. “When her blue eyes look into your eyes, you’ll remember.”
He bent down and laid his hand over the baby hands and kissed the soft cheek.
“I’ll miss her,” he said; and straightened himself and turned away from the cot abruptly.
Esmé followed him to the door.
“No; don’t come down. We’ll part here. I can let myself out.”
He took her by the shoulders and held her a little way off, looking at her long and earnestly as though he wished to impress her features on his memory for ever.
“Some time in the far off future we may meet again,” he said. “God knows. Anyhow, you will live always in my heart. Good-bye, and God bless you.”
His hands slipped to the back of her shoulders, drew her to him, held her. She lifted her face to his; and in the dimly lit room where the baby slept, and where the man was to part from both wife and child, they clung together and kissed for the last time, not as lovers, but solemnly and tenderly, as dear friends embrace, knowing they may never meet again. Then the man went swiftly down the stairs and let himself quietly out of the house.
Book Four—Chapter Thirty Eight.
Sleep was long in coming to Esmé that night.
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.
So much had happened since those care-free days to change her, to alter all her views of life, that the girl who had slept there before seemed almost a stranger to her. One quality they shared in common; there was one flaming harmony across their sky amid the wind-swept clouds of discontent and passing griefs and early intolerances, love. The girl had lain there and dreamed of love, and felt love aglow in her heart; the woman lay there with heart and brain filled with love—compassionate love, deep and tender and protective in quality—for her husband, for the man who loved her as a husband, and for the small life which God had given her to complete her world.
These three lives, so intimately and closely associated with her own, asserted each its separate claim. Never could she forget, or cease to think kindly and with grateful heart, of the man who was the father of her child. She would love the child more tenderly through her undying affection for George Sinclair. The child forged a link, as he had said, between them for all time.
But above and beyond everything, like a sun set in the sky amid the lesser luminaries, shone her love for Paul Hallam; a great white flame of love that made the crown and glory of her life.
As she thought of Paul, of his struggle and his suffering, her tears fell freely. His claim was stronger than the other claims, his need of her the greater.
With the dawn her mind became more tranquil, less feverishly alert; the curtain of formless thoughts, of futile striving to understand, hung away from her weary brain; and sleep came to her, calm and peaceful sleep, blotting out the sorrows and the joys which go to the making of every life.
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Book 1 Chapter 1
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Book 1 Chapter 2
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Book 1 Chapter 3
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Book 1 Chapter 4
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Book 1 Chapter 5
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Book 1 Chapter 6
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Book 1 Chapter 7
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Book 1 Chapter 8
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Book 1 Chapter 9
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Book 1 Chapter 10
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Book 1 Chapter 11
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Book 2 Chapter 12
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Book 2 Chapter 13
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Book 2 Chapter 14
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Book 2 Chapter 15
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Book 2 Chapter 16
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Book 2 Chapter 17
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Book 2 Chapter 18
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Book 2 Chapter 19
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Book 3 Chapter 20
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Book 3 Chapter 21
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Book 3 Chapter 22
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Book 3 Chapter 23
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Book 3 Chapter 24
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Book 3 Chapter 25
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Book 3 Chapter 26
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Book 3 Chapter 27
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Book 4 Chapter 28
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Book 4 Chapter 29
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Book 4 Chapter 30
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Book 4 Chapter 31
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Book 4 Chapter 32
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Book 4 Chapter 33
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Book 4 Chapter 34
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Book 4 Chapter 35
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Book 4 Chapter 36
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Book 4 Chapter 37
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Book 4 Chapter 38
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