Part 29 (1/2)

”Was it fair to treat me like that? You had all my love, all my confidence. Surely you might have trusted me! Whatever you were doing, wherever you were, I should have understood. I would have waited patiently. I was prepared to wait after reading your letter. I judged from it that you would not return to me until you were sure of yourself, even though it meant separation for all our lives. But you could have let me know you were alive. It was cruel to keep silent all these years.”

”Yes,” he allowed; ”had it been intentional it would have been.”

He joined her at the window, and stood opposite to her, observing her with a steady gaze which drew her eyes to his, held them: she remained looking back at him, listening to him, while he strove to make her understand the struggle and the despair of those silent years.

He told her of his flight; of the unhinged state of his mind when he left home; of his physical condition which brought him to the verge of death; of how he would have died but for the care of a stranger--a poor white, who later robbed him, and was subsequently buried in his name.

He told her of his slow recovery in a native hut; of the fierce craving for alcohol which a.s.sailed him as soon as he was able once more to get about.

”I could not write to you then,” he said. ”I felt unfit to breathe your name.”

He went on to speak of the journey to England, still with his vice in the ascendant. He had given way to it in England. His illness had sapped his will-power and he was at the mercy of his desires once more.

Then came the war. He joined up with the intention of making good.

Until he had made good he was resolved that he would not write.

The rest of the story, of his early capture and his ineffectual efforts to communicate with her, he described briefly. He gave a detailed account of the period following his release; of his tedious convalescence; of his longing for her; of his time of probation, during which he tested his endurance until satisfied that he had won a final victory over himself. He told of his voyage out; of his wish to break the news of his return to her himself.

”It was unlikely that you believed me to be still alive,” he said. ”And I did not want to give you a shock by writing when, by the exercise of a little patience, I could tell you all this, and--”

He broke off abruptly. In his imagination he had antic.i.p.ated her gladness, had pictured their mutual joy in the reunion, when, with his arms about her, he would tell her the story of his absence, and with his kisses comfort her for the sorrow that was past. This home-coming was so different from anything he had conceived.

”I knew nothing of the finding of the body of a man supposed to be me,”

he said. ”That was one of the unforeseen accidents of circ.u.mstance which create an aftermath of deplorable consequences. We are the victims of circ.u.mstance. It is useless to impute blame to any one. The facts remain. But for Jim's positive testimony you would not have re-married. Without some proof of my death, you would have gone on hoping, I believe.”

”Paul!--Oh, Paul!” she sobbed, and held out her two hands towards him in a gesture of pathetic helplessness.

He took them in his. And abruptly with the feel of her hands in his, his reserve broke down; the hardness went out of his eyes. He gathered her to him and kissed her and held her close in his embrace.

Book 4--CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE.

What were they to do?

That was the question they asked each other as soon as they were able to collect their ideas and talk calmly.

Hallam had put her into Jim Bainbridge's swivel-chair; and he sat on a corner of the writing-table, facing her, holding one of her hands in his. It was become to him now a matter simply of doing what was best for her happiness. Whatever she decided he resolved to abide by. She was the more injured; the settlement of their future must lie in her hands. His rights, his claim on her, which until now had held a paramount place in his thoughts, a.s.sumed an insignificance which rendered them negligible beside her supreme right to the direction of her own life.

”I'll go, Esme,--I'll go now, if you wish it,” he said,--”if it would make things easier for you.”

He felt her fingers close round his, and said no more about going.

They sat hand in hand for a long while without speaking. Presently she moved slightly and lifted her face to his, white and wrung with emotion, with the stain of much weeping disfiguring it; but the sweetness of her look, the pathos in the eyes which met his, made her face seem more beautiful to him than ever before. He leaned over her and pressed his cheek to hers.

”Paul,” she whispered, ”if it wasn't for--It breaks my heart when I think of George.”

Sharply, as though her words stung him, he drew back.

”It's going to hurt him badly,” she said. ”And my baby... My poor little innocent baby!”

Hallam had nothing to say to that. The culminating disaster, the biggest and most appalling of the difficulties with which they were faced, was wrought by the existence of the child. He sat, gripping her hand hard, speechless and immeasurably disconcerted. What was there to say in face of her distress?

”I can't think,” she said. ”I'm all confused. This changes everything.