"My dear Laura,—Godfrey suggests that I should act as your trustee, in succession to Mr. Blackmore. Am I to understand that this suggestion has yourapproval? If yes, I will of course consent to act. But please do not think I shall be offended if you decide otherwise. You may prefer some woman of your acquaintance. Women, whatever Godfrey may tell you, make excellent men of business. They are, if anything, over-prudent, over-cautious where money is concerned; but that is a very good fault in a trustee."
"My dear Laura,—Godfrey suggests that I should act as your trustee, in succession to Mr. Blackmore. Am I to understand that this suggestion has yourapproval? If yes, I will of course consent to act. But please do not think I shall be offended if you decide otherwise. You may prefer some woman of your acquaintance. Women, whatever Godfrey may tell you, make excellent men of business. They are, if anything, over-prudent, over-cautious where money is concerned; but that is a very good fault in a trustee."
His handwriting was small and clear, but he had left large spaces between the lines, and now he was at the end of the sheet of paper. There was just room for another sentence and his signature. He waited, hesitating and of two minds, till the ink was dry, and then he began again, close to the bottom of the sheet:—
"Before we meet again I wish to say one further thing."
"Before we meet again I wish to say one further thing."
He put this first sheet aside, and took another of the same size from the box by his side:—
"You said something to-day which affected me painfully. You spoke as if what I have done for your brother caused you to carry a weight of almost intolerable gratitude. So far as any such feeling should exist between us, the gratitude should be on my side. In sober truth Gillie has been invaluable to me."I remain,"Yours sincerely,"
"You said something to-day which affected me painfully. You spoke as if what I have done for your brother caused you to carry a weight of almost intolerable gratitude. So far as any such feeling should exist between us, the gratitude should be on my side. In sober truth Gillie has been invaluable to me.
"I remain,
"Yours sincerely,"
Then very rapidly Oliver Tropenell made an "O" and a "T," putting the T across the O so that any one not familiar with his signature would be hard put to it to know what the two initials were.
He read over the words he had just written. They seemed poor, inadequate, and he felt strongly tempted to write the letter again, and word it differently. Then he shook his head—no, let it stand!
Slowly he put the second sheet of the letter aside, and placed the first one, on which the ink was dry, before him. Then he looked round, with a queer, furtive look, and, getting up, made sure the door was locked.
Coming back to the writing-table, he took out of the despatch-box lying there a small, square, crystal-topped flagon of the kind that fits into an old-fashioned dressing-case. The liquid in it was slightly, very slightly, coloured, and looked like some delicate scent.
From the despatch-box also he now brought out a crystal penholder with a gold nib. He dipped it in the flagon, and began to write in between the lines of the letter he had just written. As the liquid dried, the slight marks made by the pen on the paper vanished, for Oliver Tropenell was writing in invisible ink.
"The decks are cleared between us, Laura, for you know now that I love you. You said, 'Oh, but this is terrible!' Yes, Laura, love is terrible. It is not only cleansing, inspiring, and noble, it is terrible also. Why is it that you so misunderstand, misjudge, the one priceless gift, the only bit of Heaven which God or Nature—I care not which—has given to man and woman? What you, judging by your words to-day, take to be love is as little like that passion as a deep draught of pure cold water to a man dying of thirst, is like the last glass of drugged beer imbibed by some poor sot already drunk."
"The decks are cleared between us, Laura, for you know now that I love you. You said, 'Oh, but this is terrible!' Yes, Laura, love is terrible. It is not only cleansing, inspiring, and noble, it is terrible also. Why is it that you so misunderstand, misjudge, the one priceless gift, the only bit of Heaven which God or Nature—I care not which—has given to man and woman? What you, judging by your words to-day, take to be love is as little like that passion as a deep draught of pure cold water to a man dying of thirst, is like the last glass of drugged beer imbibed by some poor sot already drunk."
Oliver Tropenell waited awhile. There were still two spaces, before the bottom of the page of notepaper was reached, and again he dipped the pen into the strange volatile liquid.
"God bless you, my dear love," he wrote, "and grant you the peace which seems the only thing for which you crave."
"God bless you, my dear love," he wrote, "and grant you the peace which seems the only thing for which you crave."
He waited till the words had quite vanished, and then he took up the two sheets of paper, folded them in half, and put them in a large envelope which fitted the paper when so folded. He wrote on the outside, "Mrs. Pavely, Lawford Chase."
And then, turning out the light with a quick, nervous gesture, he got up and went over to the long, low, garret window.
For a few moments he saw nothing but darkness, then the familiar scene unrolled below him and took dim shape in the starlit night.
Instinctively his sombre eyes sought the place where, far away to the right, was a dark patch of wood. It was there, set amidst a grove of high trees, that stood Lawford Chase, the noble old house which had been his mother's early home, and which now contained Laura Pavely, the woman to whom he had just written two such different letters, and who for nearly three months had never been out of his waking thoughts.
As his eyes grew more and more accustomed to the luminous darkness, he saw the group of elms under which this very day a word had unsealed the depths of his heart, and where he had had the agony of seeingLaura shrink, shudder, wilt as does a flower in a breath of hot, fœtid air, under his avowal of love.
Violently he put that memory from him, and staring out into the splendour of this early autumn night, he tried to recapture the mixture of feelings with which he had regarded Laura Pavely the first time they had met since her marriage—the first time indeed since she had been a shy, quiet little girl, and he an eager, highly vitalised youth, five years older than herself.
Looking back now he realised that what had predominated in his mind on that hot, languorous June afternoon was astonishment at her utter unlikeness to her brother, his partner, Gillie Baynton. It was an astonishment which warred with the beckoning, almost uncanny, fascination which her gentle, abstracted, aloof manner effortlessly exercised over him. And yet she had been (he knew it now, he had not known it then) amazingly forthcoming—for her! As Mrs. Tropenell's son he would have had a right to Laura Pavely's regard, but he knew now that what had set ajar the portals of her at once desolate and burdened heart had been his kindness to, even his business relationship with, her brother.
Gillie Baynton? Yes, it was to that disconcerting and discordant human chord that their two natures—his and Laura's—had perforce vibrated and mingled. Remembering this, Oliver Tropenell reproved himself for his past discontent with the partner who, whatever his failings, had always shown him both gratitude and a measure of such real affection as a man seldom shows another in a business relationship. In spite of Gillie's faults—nay, vices—he, Tropenell, now often foundhimself favourably comparing Laura's brother with Laura's husband.
Oliver Tropenell was acutely, intolerably, jealous of Godfrey Pavely—jealous in the burning, scorching sense which is so often the terrible concomitant of such a passion as that which now possessed him. Godfrey Pavely's presence in his own house, his slightly tyrannical, often possessive attitude to Laura, the perpetual reminder that he was, after all, the father of the child Laura had borne, and who seemed to fill her heart to the exclusion of all else—all this was for this man who loved her an ever-recurring ordeal which might well have satisfied the sternest moralist.
That night Oliver Tropenell dreamt of Laura. He thought that he was pursuing her through a maze of flowering shrubs and trees. She was fleeing from him, yet now and again she would turn, and beckon....
His first waking thought was that they would meet to-night—here, in his mother's house. But before that happened a long day would have to be lived through, for he had made up his mind not to go to The Chase till Laura again asked him to do so.
THE door of Mrs. Tropenell's long low drawing-room opened very quietly, and Laura Pavely came through into the room.
She had left a brightly lighted hall for a room of which the only present illumination radiated from a shaded reading lamp standing on a little table behind which sat her hostess. Thus, for perhaps as long as half a minute, Laura thought herself alone.
During that half minute Mrs. Tropenell, with eyes well accustomed to the shaded light, gazed at her visitor with an eager, searching look, the look of one who wishes to see more, and to see further, than she has ever seen before.
But what she saw—all she saw—was the Laura she knew with a knowledge that was at once so superficially close, and so little intimate. A woman whose stillness of manner—a manner which at times made her appear almost inanimate—covered, as Mrs. Tropenell had secret reason to know, an extraordinary force of negative will power. It was a force which had even pierced Godfrey Pavely's complacency, and shattered his firm belief in all the rights that English law bestows on the man who has the good or ill fortune to be a husband.
As Laura advanced into the room her hostess saw that her visitor's beautifully shaped head, set proudly and freely on the slender shoulders, was thrown back in a characteristic gesture of attention, and, with atouch of reluctance, she admired afresh the masses of fair,cendréhair drawn back from the forehead in a way which to most women would have been trying, yet which to this woman lent an air of eighteenth-century charm and distinction.
There was no colour in Laura Pavely's face, but her eyes, heavy-lidded, and fringed with eyelashes darker than her hair, were deeply blue.
To-night she was wearing a very simple evening dress, a white chiffon tea-gown with a long black lace coat. The under dress was almost high to the throat, but beneath the black lace the wearer's arms, soft, dimpled, and rounded, were bare to the shoulder, and gleamed palely, revealingly.
Mrs. Tropenell wondered whether Laura knew that her arms were unusually lovely; then, for she was a very honest woman, her conscience rebuked her. Laura's faults with regard to men were faults of omission, not of commission. Of course she was aware—she could not help being aware—that she was a singularly attractive and distinguished-looking creature. But she had always taken her own beauty, her own distinction, just as she did the rare, distinctive features of her garden, and the perhaps over-studied charm of her house—as something to be tended and kept beautiful, but also to be guarded from alien indifferent eyes.
Perhaps because in these days every intelligent woman claims to be picturesque and witty—beauty, sheer beauty, is somewhat under the weather. Laura Pavely, to use the current jargon of her day, was not a "success." She was thought to be affected, "deep,"prudish, whereas she was simply indifferent to the more commonplace human elements about her.
Her marriage had withdrawn her from the circle of the old friends and neighbours among whom she had been brought up, in a measure because none of them could "do," excepting in a very casual and cursory sense, with Godfrey Pavely. The world of his youth, the little world in and about the country town of Pewsbury, to which he had introduced her as a bride with such exultant complacency, found her not only disagreeably superior, but also dull. Besides, during the early days of her marriage she had been too bewildered by the conditions of her new life, and of her relationship with her husband, to trouble about making new friends, or even new acquaintances.
And so it was that in any intimate sense Mrs. Tropenell was still Laura's only close friend, but the younger woman was rather pathetically aware of how little she really possessed of the older woman's heart, how constantly she was compared, and ever to her detriment, to her dead mother, even how unconscious a rival in the older woman's favour was Laura's own child—merry, cheerful, loving little Alice.
"Aunt Letty? I didn't see you were there."
Laura Pavely had a delightful voice—low, clear, vibrating. It was a voice which sometimes seemed to promise more depth of feeling than its owner ever chose to betray.
As she stooped to kiss Mrs. Tropenell, Laura let herself slide down on to the floor. She knelt there for a moment, and the light gleamed on her fair hair and upturned face. "Alice sent you her love," she saidsoftly, "heaps of love. She's better to-night, though not quite well yet!" And then, as there came a sound of quick footsteps across the hall, she rose, and drew herself up to her full height, with the grace of movement and the absence of flurry which were both so characteristic of her.
Mrs. Tropenell looked up quickly. Had Laura flushed, as she sometimes did flush, with a deep, unbecoming reddening of her pale face, when moved or startled? No, she seemed, if anything, paler, more impassive than usual, and Oliver's mother asked herself, yet again, what of late she had so often asked herself—if Laura was capable ofanyfeeling,anypassion, save a feeling of horror, a passion of repugnance, for aught which seemed to smirch her own fastidious physical and spiritual entity.
That she loved her child, the high-spirited, happy-natured little girl, whose presence alone made life sweet and normal at Lawford Chase, Mrs. Tropenell could not doubt—she had had proof of how deeply Laura loved her child on the only occasion danger had come near to Alice—during a bout of some childish ailment, when for a few hours the little creature had been in danger of death. She, the older woman, had been frightened, awed, by Laura's terrible, dry-eyed agony....
Oliver Tropenell opened the door, and as he walked across the room, his mother's heart quivered with jealous pain, and even with a feeling of secret, impotent anger, as she saw the eager, rapt look which lighted up his dark face.
Laura held out her ringless right hand, but he only just touched it. "I'm sorry I'm late!" he exclaimed."As a matter of fact I was reading a letter just come, by the second post, from Gillie."
"I've written to Gillie to-day," Laura said quietly. It seemed such a long, long time since yesterday morning. She felt as if the extraordinary thing which had happened then had been blotted out.
"Have you sent your letter off?"
"No, not yet," she was surprised at the question.
And then there fell a curious silence on those three people, till at last the door opened, and dinner was announced.
"Oliver! Take in Laura," said Mrs. Tropenell.
On the last occasion when the three had dined alone together there had been a little smiling discussion as to the order in which they should go into the dining-room. But that had been many weeks ago. They were not in such a light mood to-night, and yet—and yet, why should they not be? The hostess knew of no reason.
The two paired off together, and Oliver's mother asked herself, for perhaps the thousandth time in the last three months, why she had allowed this—this friendship between her son and Laura Pavely to come about? It would have been so easy to arrange that she and her son should spend the summer abroad! When he had first come home there had been a talk of their going away together to Italy, or to France—France, which they had both loved when he was a clever, ardent, headstrong boy, with a strength of brain and originality of mind too big for his boyish boots.
But the harm, what harm there was—sometimes she hoped it was not so very much harm after all—hadbeen done quickly. By the end of that first month at home, Oliver had lost all wish to leave Freshley.
In those early days—or was it that already he was being unconsciously hypocritical as men are wont to be when in such case as that in which he now found himself?—he had seemed to have formed an even closer friendship with Godfrey Pavely than with Godfrey Pavely's wife. They had even made a joint business expedition to town together, Godfrey as Oliver's guest, staying in one of those luxurious hotels which seem equally attractive to the millionaire and the adventurer. But Oliver had at last thrown off, when alone with his mother, any pretence of liking, far less of respecting, Godfrey Pavely. Yet when with the other man he still kept up the sinister fiction. She knew that.
The three sat down in the pretty, octagon-shaped dining-room, and the mother and son talked, Laura saying very little, and never giving, always accepting—in that sense, perhaps, an elemental woman after all! Even so, she showed, when she did rouse herself to express an opinion, that there was a good deal of thought and of intelligence in her small, beautiful head.
Mrs. Tropenell, sitting at the top of the oval table, told herself that in a primeval sense such a woman as Laura might well be the complement of such a man as was Oliver. He had strength, passion, idealism, enough to furnish forth half a dozen ordinary human beings. And he had patience too—patience which is but another name for that self-control in the secret things of passion which often brings men's desires tofruition. It was patience and self-control which had been so lacking in Godfrey Pavely during those early days when Laura had at least desired to fulfil her duty as a wife.
And yet again and again during that uncomfortable half-hour Mrs. Tropenell caught herself wishing that Godfrey Pavely was there, sitting on her right hand. Godfrey always had plenty to say for himself, especially in that house, and when he felt secure of the discretion of those about him, he would often tell much that he ought, in his character of banker, to have left unsaid. He knew the private business of every one, gentle or simple, for miles round, and took an easy, unaffected interest in it all. It was only when he touched on wider matters, especially on politics, that he grew unbearably tedious and prosy. But then the only person whom Mrs. Tropenell ever listened to with pleasure on such subjects was her old friend, Lord St. Amant, who always knew what he was talking about, and always salted what he knew with happy flashes of wit and humour.
Oliver accompanied the two ladies back into the drawing-room, and his mother did not know whether to be glad or sorry that she had not had a few minutes alone with the younger woman. Sometimes it seemed as if she and Laura never were alone together now. Was it possible that of late Laura was deliberately avoiding her? As this half suspicion came into Mrs. Tropenell's mind she looked up and saw her son's eyes fixed on her face.
There was something imperious, imploring, commanding, in the look he bent on her. She saw thathe was willing her to go away—to leave him, alone, with Laura....
Under the spell of that look she got up. "I must go upstairs for my work," she said quietly. "And I have a letter to write too. I shan't be very long."
It was as if Oliver made but one swift step to the door, and, as he held it open, his mother turned her head away, lest he should see that tears had come into her eyes—tears of pain, and yes, of fear.
How was all this to end?
After walking slowly forward into the square brightly lighted hall she suddenly stayed her steps, and clasped her hands together.
A terrible temptation—terrible, almost unbelievable to such a woman as was Letitia Tropenell—held her in its grip. She longed with a fearful, gasping longing, to go back and listen at the door which had just closed behind her.
So strong was this temptation that she actually visualised herself walking across to a certain corner, turning down the electric light switch, then, in the darkness, creeping to the drawing-room door, and there gently, gently—pushing it open, say half an inch, in order to hear what those two were now saying, the one to the other....
At last, thrusting the temptation from her, she again began walking across the brightly lighted hall, and so, slowly, made her way up the staircase which led to her bedroom.
What Mrs. Tropenell would have heard, had she yielded to that ignoble temptation, would not have told her anything of what she had so longed to know.
After he had shut the door on his mother, Oliver Tropenell walked back to the place where he had stood a moment ago. But he did not come any nearer than he had been before to his guest, and his manner remained exactly what it had been when they had been three, instead of being, as they were now, two, in that dimly lighted room.
Still, both he and Laura, in their secret, hidden selves, were profoundly conscious that Mrs. Tropenell's absence made a great, if an intangible, difference. It was the first time they had been alone that day, for it was the first day for many weeks past that Oliver had not walked over to The Chase, either in the morning or in the afternoon or, as was almost always the case, both after breakfast and about teatime.
At last, when the silence had become almost oppressive, he spoke, with a certain hard directness in his voice.
"In the letter I received from Gillie to-day he tells me that he can easily be spared for a few weeks, and I've already telephoned a cable telling him to start at once. I've said that if he thinks it advisable I myself will leave for Mexico as soon as I hear from him."
"Oh, but I don't want you to do that!" Laura Pavely looked up at him dismayed. "I thought you meant to stay in England right up to Christmas?"
"Yes, so I did, and I feel almost certain that he won't think it necessary for me to go back. But the important thing is Gillie's and your holiday. Why shouldn't he take you and Alice to France or Italy for a month?"
He saw her face, the face in which there had beena certain rigid, suffering gravity, light up, soften, and then become overcast again. Moving a little nearer to the low chair on which she was sitting—"Yes?" he asked, looking down at her. "What is it you wish to say, Laura?"
"Only that Godfrey would never let me go away with Gillie." She spoke in a sad, low voice, but she felt far more at her ease than she had yet felt this evening.
The last time she and Oliver had been alone, they had parted as enemies, but now there was nothing to show that he remembered their interchange of bitter, passionate words.
He answered quietly,
"I wonder why you feel so sure of that? I believe that if it were put to Godfrey in a reasonable way, he could not possibly object to your going abroad with your brother. It's time they made up that foolish old quarrel."
"Ah, if only I could get away with Gillie and my little Alice!"
Laura looked up as she spoke, and Oliver Tropenell was moved, almost unbearably so, by the look which came over her face. Was it the mention of her child, of her brother, or the thought of getting away from Godfrey for a while, which so illumined her lovely, shadowed eyes?
He went on, still speaking in the quiet, measured tones which made her feel as if the scene of yesterday had been an evil dream. "I've even thought of suggesting that Godfrey should come out with me to Mexico, while your little jaunt with Gillie takes place. We could all be back here by Christmas!"
She shook her head. "I'm afraid Godfrey would never go away except in what he considers his regular holiday time."
"Not even if I made it worth his while?"
She looked up, perplexed. And then a wave of hot colour flamed up in her face. Her conscience, in some ways a very delicate and scrupulous conscience, smote her.
Was it her fault that Oliver Tropenell had come so to despise Godfrey?
But he went on, speaking more naturally, that is quickly, eagerly—more like his pre-yesterday self, "No, I'm not joking! I think I can put Godfrey in the way of doing some really good business out there. We've spoken of it more than once—only yesterday afternoon we spoke of it."
"You don't mean with Gillie there?" There was a note of incredulity in Laura's voice.
"No." They were on dangerous ground now. "Not exactly with Gillie there—though it seems to me, Laura, that Godfrey ought to make it up with Gillie."
Slowly, musingly, as if speaking to herself, she said, "If Godfrey ever goes to Mexico I think he would want me to come too—he always does." And this was true, for Godfrey Pavely in some ways was curiously uxorious. Little as they were to one another, Laura's husband never allowed her to go away by herself, or even with her child, for more than a very few days.
"You come too—to Mexico?" There was surprise, doubt, in Oliver Tropenell's voice, and suddenly Laura did a strange thing, imprudent, uncalled-for in the circumstances in which she found herself with this man; yet she did it with no trace of what is ordinarilycalled coquetry. Lifting up her head, she said rather plaintively, "Surely you wouldn't mind my coming too, Oliver?"
"Does that mean that you've forgiven me?" he asked.
She got up from the low chair where she had been sitting, and, facing him, exclaimed impulsively, "I want us both to forget what happened yesterday! I was wrong, very wrong, in saying what I did about Godfrey," her voice faltered, and slowly she added, "But with you, who seemed to somehow understand everything without being told, I felt, I felt——"
He raised a warning hand, for his ears had caught the sound of light footfalls in the hall. "Mother's coming back," he said abruptly. "Don't say anything to her of my cable to Gillie." And at once, without any change in his voice, he went on: "There's a great deal that would interest you, quite as much as Godfrey, out there——"
The door opened, and he turned round quickly. "I'm trying to persuade Laura to come out to Mexico," he exclaimed. "Godfrey has practically promised to pay me a visit, and I don't see why she shouldn't come too!"
Mrs. Tropenell made no answer. She knew, and she believed that both the people standing there knew as well as she did, that such an expedition could never take place so long as Gilbert Baynton was Oliver's partner. Baynton and Pavely were bitter enemies. There had never been even the semblance of a reconciliation between them.
But as her son bent his eyes on her as if demanding an answer, she forced herself to say lightly: "I expectthey both will, some day, and while they are away I can have my dear little Alice!"
When, a little later, Mrs. Tropenell accompanied Laura out into the hall, she said, "Do come in to-morrow or Sunday, my dear. I seem to see so little of you now."
"I will—I will!" and as she kissed the older woman, Laura murmured, "You're so good to me, Aunty Letty—you've always been so very, very good to me!"
Oliver opened wide the door giving into the garden. He was now obviously impatient to get Laura once more alone to himself....
After she went back to her drawing-room, Mrs. Tropenell walked straight across to a window, and there, holding back the heavy curtain, she watched the two figures moving in the bright moonlight across the lawn, towards the beech avenue which would presently engulf them.
What were their real relations the one to the other? Was Laura as blind to the truth as she seemed to be, or was she shamming—as women, God or the devil helping them—so often sham?
Slowly, feeling as if she had suddenly become very, very old, Mrs. Tropenell dropped the curtain, and walking back to her usual place, her usual chair, took up her knitting.
LAURA and Oliver Tropenell walked across the grass in silence, and still in silence they passed through under the great dark arch formed by the beech trees.
Laura was extraordinarily moved and excited. Her brother, her dear, dear Gillie, coming home? She had taken the surprising news very quietly, but it had stirred her to the depths of her nature. Without even telling her of what he was going to do, the man now walking by her side had brought about the thing that for years she had longed should come to pass.
In her husband Laura had become accustomed to a man who was cautious and deliberate to a fault, and who, as so often happens, carried this peculiarity even more into the affairs of his daily life than into his business. Often weeks would go by before Godfrey would make up his mind to carry out some small, necessary improvement connected with the estate.
Yet here was Oliver, who, without saying a word to her about it, had decided that Gillie should come to England just to see the sister he had not seen for seven years! Laura began to think it possible that after all Godfreywouldmake it up with her brother. Oliver Tropenell had an extraordinary influence over Godfrey Pavely; again and again, as regarded small matters, he had, as it were, made Godfrey's mind up for him.
A feeling of deep gratitude welled up in her heartfor the silent man by her side. She longed for him to speak now, as he had spoken to her, kindly, conciliatingly, but a few minutes ago, in the drawing-room.
But Oliver stalked along dumbly in the intense darkness.
And then suddenly she remembered, with a miserable feeling of discomfort, and yes, of shame, that she could hardly expect him to be as usual. And so it was she who, making a great effort, at last broke the unnatural silence.
"I've never thanked you for your letter," she said nervously. "But I'm very much obliged to you, Oliver, for consenting to be my trustee. And I know that Godfrey will be! I hope it won't give you much trouble—the trusteeship, I mean. I know that Mr. Blackmore, for years past, left it all to Godfrey."
He answered slowly, meditatively, and to her intense relief, quite in his old way. "Yes, I think Godfrey will be pleased. To tell you the truth, Laura, I thought I would take advantage of his pleasure to suggest that plan about Gillie—I mean that you and Gillie and Alice should all go abroad together."
"If only you can persuade Godfrey to let me have Gillie here for a while, I shall be more than content!" She spoke with a rather piteous eagerness.
They were walking very, very slowly. Oliver had now turned on his electric torch, and it threw a bright patch of light on the path immediately before them, making all the darkness about them the blacker and the more intense.
In a hard voice he exclaimed: "Of course Gillie must come here, and stay here! His being anywhereelse would be preposterous——" And then, once more, he fell into that strange, disconcerting silence.
The last time they two had walked down under the beeches at night had been some three weeks ago. Laura and Godfrey had dined with the Tropenells, and then Godfrey had said that he had to go home and do some work, leaving her to stay on, for nearly an hour, with the mother and son.
Oliver's torch had gone out that evening, and he had suggested, a little diffidently, that Laura should take his arm; smiling, she had laid the tips of her fingers lightly on his sleeve. She had felt so happy then, so happy, and absolutely at her ease, with her companion....
Tears welled up in her eyes. She was grateful for the darkness, but her trembling voice betrayed her as she exclaimed, "Oliver? I do again ask you to forget what happened yesterday, and to forgive me for the things I said. I'm very sorry that I spoke as I did."
He stopped walking, and put out his torch. "Don't be sorry," he said, in a low, constrained voice. "It's far better that I should know exactly how you feel. Of course I was surprised, for I'd always had a notion that women regarded love from a more ideal standpoint than men seem able to do. But I see now that I was mistaken." Some of the bitterness with which his heart was still full and overflowing crept into his measured voice. "I think you will believe me when I say that I did not mean to insult you——"
He was going on, but she interrupted him.
"—I'm sorry—sorry and ashamed too, Oliver, of what I said. Please—please forget what happened——"
He turned on her amid the dark shadows.
"IfIforget, willyou?" he asked sombrely.
And she answered, "Yes, yes—indeed I will! But before we put what happened yesterday behind us forever, do let me tell you, Oliver, that Iamgrateful, deeply grateful, for your——" she hesitated painfully, and then murmured "your affection."
But Oliver Tropenell did not meet her half-way, as she had perhaps thought he would. He was torn by conflicting feelings, cursing himself for having lost his self-control the day before, and yet, even so, deep in his subtle, storm-tossed mind, not altogether sorry for what had happened.
And so it was she who went on, speaking slowly and with difficulty: "I know that I have been to blame! I know that I ought never to have spoken of Godfrey as I have sometimes allowed myself to do to you. According to his lights, he is a good husband, and I know that I have been—that I am—a bitter disappointment to him."
He muttered something—she did not hear what it was, and she hurried on: "What I have wanted—and oh, Oliver, I have wanted it so much—is a friend," almost he heard the unspoken words, "not a lover."
She put out her hand in the darkness and laid it, for a moment, on his arm. And then, suddenly, in that moment of, to him, exquisite, unhoped-for contact, Oliver Tropenell swore to himself most solemnly that he would rest satisfied with what she would, and could, grant him. And so—
"I know that," he said in measured, restrained tones. "And I have made up my mind to be that friend, Laura. We will both forget what happened yesterday.If you are ashamed, I am a hundred times more so! And do believe me when I tell you that what you said about Godfrey—why, I've forgotten it already—had nothing to do with my outburst. I'm a lonely man, my dear, and somehow, without in the least meaning it, I know, you crept into my heart and filled it all. But already, since yesterday, I've come to a more reasonable frame of mind."
He waited a moment, despising himself for uttering such lying words, and then he went on, this time honestly meaning what he said: "Henceforth, Laura, I swear that I'll never again say a word to you that all the world might not hear. I never did, till yesterday——"
"I know, I know," she said hurriedly. "And that was why I was so surprised."
"Let's put it all behind us and go back to 'as we were'!" He was speaking now with a sort of gruff, good-humoured decision, and Laura sighed, relieved, and yet—so unreasonable a being is woman—unsatisfied.
The light from his torch flashed again, and they walked on, under the dark arch of leaves and branches, till they were close to the open road.
And there Laura said, "I wish you would leave me here, Oliver. I feel sure that Aunt Letty is waiting up for you."
He answered her at once. "It won't make more than five minutes' difference. I'll only walk as far as the lodge. It's a lonely little stretch of road."
"Lonely?" she repeated. "Why, there isn't a bit of it that isn't within hail of Rosedean!"
And then, determined to go back to their old easycompanionship, that companionship which had lately become so easy and so intimate that when with him she had often spoken a passing thought aloud, "Katty came home to-day. I must try and see her to-morrow. She's a plucky creature, Oliver! I wish that Aunt Letty liked her better than she does."
He answered idly, "There's nothing much either to like or dislike in Mrs. Winslow—at least so it always seems to me."
But she answered quickly, defensively, "There's a great deal to like in her—when I think of Katty Winslow I feel ashamed of myself. I've known her do such kind things! And then she's so good about Godfrey—I don't know what Godfrey would do without her. They knew each other as children. It's as if she was his sister. All that little Pewsbury world which bores me so, is full of interest to them both. I'm always glad when she's at Rosedean. I only wish she didn't go away so often—Godfrey does miss her so!"
"Yes, I know he does," he said drily.
They walked on in silence till they were close to the low lodge.
Laura Pavely held out her hand, and Oliver Tropenell took it in his cool, firm grasp for a moment.
"Good-night," he said. "I suppose we shall meet some time to-morrow?"
She answered eagerly. "Yes, do come in, any time! Alice and I shall be gardening before lunch. Godfrey won't be back till late, for he's sure to go straight to the Bank from the station. He'll be so much obliged to you about that trusteeship, Oliver. It's really very good of you to take so much trouble."
Oliver Tropenell answered slowly, "Yes, I thinkGodfrey will be pleased; and as I've already told you, I'll certainly take advantage of his pleasure, Laura, to suggest the plan about Gillie."
Once more she exclaimed: "If only you can persuade Godfrey to let me have Gillie at The Chase for a while, I shall be more than content!"
There was a thrill of excitement, of longing, in her low voice, as, without waiting for an answer, she walked away, leaving him looking after her. The patch of whiteness formed by the hem of her gown moved swiftly along—against the moonlit background of grass, trees, and sky. He stood and watched the moving, fluttering bit of whiteness till it vanished in the grey silvery haze. Then, slowly, he turned on his heel and made his way back home.
It was nearly a quarter of a mile from the lodge to The Chase, as the house was always called, but there was a rather shorter way across the grass, through trees; and Laura, when she came to where she knew the little path to be, left the carriage way, and stepped up on to the grass.
She felt oppressed, her soul filled with a piteous lassitude and weariness of life, in spite of the coming return home of her only brother. She had been moved and excited, as well as made acutely unhappy, by what had happened yesterday morning. Mrs. Tropenell, as almost always happens in such a case, was not fair to Laura Pavely. Laura had been overwhelmed with surprise—a surprise in which humiliation and self-rebuke were intolerably mingled—and yes, a certain proud anger.
The words Oliver had said, and alas! that it shouldbe so, the bitter, scornful words she had uttered in reply, had, she felt, degraded them both—she far, far more than him. At the time she had been too deeply hurt, too instinctively anxious to punish him, to measure her words. And now she told herself that she had spoken yesterday in a way no man would ever forget, and few, very few men would ever forgive. Though he had been kind to-night—very, very kind—his manner had altered, all the happy ease had gone.
Tears came into Laura Pavely's eyes; they rolled down her cheeks. Suddenly she found herself sobbing bitterly.
She stopped walking, and covered her face with her hands. With a depth of pain, unplumbed till now, she told herself that she would never, never be able to make Oliver understand why she had said those cruel stinging words. Without a disloyalty to Godfrey of which she was incapable, she could not hope to make him understand why she had so profound a distaste, ay, and contempt, for that which, if he had spoken truly yesterday, he thought the greatest thing in the world. With sad, leaden-weighted conviction she realised that there must always be between a man and a woman, however great their friendship and mutual confidence, certain barriers that nothing can force or clear.
She had believed, though as a matter of fact she had not thought very much about it, that Oliver Tropenell, in some mysterious way, was unlike ordinary men. As far as she knew, he had never "fallen in love." Women, who, as she could not help knowing, had always played so great a part in her brother Gillie's life, seemed not to exist—so far as Oliver Tropenellwas concerned. He had never even seemed attracted, as almost every man was, by pretty Katty Winslow, the innocentdivorcéenow living at his very gates. So she, Laura, had allowed herself to slip into a close, intimate relationship which, all unknowingly to her, had proved most dangerous to him....
Still crying bitterly, she told herself that she had been too happy all this summer. Godfrey had been kinder, less, less—she shrank from putting it into words—but yes, less ill-tempered, mean, and tiresome than usual. Oliver had had such a good effect on Godfrey, and she had honestly believed that the two were friends.
But how could they be friends if—if it was true that Oliver loved her? Laura Pavely knew nothing of the well-worn byways of our poor human nature.
Suddenly she threw her head back and saw the starlit sky above her. Somehow that wonderful ever-recurring miracle of impersonal, unearthly beauty calmed and comforted her. Drying her eyes, she told herself that something after all had survived out of yesterday's wreck. Her friend might be a man—a man as other men were; but he was noble, and singularly selfless, for all that. On the evening of the very day on which she had grievously offended and wounded him, he had written her a kindly letter, offering to be her trustee.
There had been moments to-day when she had thought of writing Mrs. Tropenell a note to say she did not feel well—and that she would not dine at Freshley that night. But oh, how glad she was now that a mixture of pride and feminine delicacy had prompted her to behave just as if nothing had happened,as if words which could never be forgotten had not been uttered between herself and Oliver! She had thought he would punish her this evening by being sulky and disagreeable—that was her husband's invariable method of showing displeasure. But with the exception of a word or two uttered very quietly, and more as if she, rather than he, had something to forgive, he had behaved as if yesterday had never been. He had heaped coals of fire upon her head, making it plain that even now he was only thinking of her—of her and of Gillie, of how he could pleasure them both by securing her a holiday with her only brother.
Every word of that restrained, not very natural, conversation held just now under the beech trees re-echoed in her ears. She seemed to hear again the slowly uttered, measured words, "I am going to be your friend, Laura"....
And then there came over Laura Pavely an extraordinary sensation of moral and mental disturbance. Once more everything which had happened to-day was blotted out, and she went back to yesterday morning. Again she lived through those moments during which Oliver Tropenell had offered her what was to him the greatest thing man has it in him to bestow—love, even if illicit, unsanctified. And she had rejected the gift with a passion of scorn, spurning it as she would have done a base and unclean thing.
Years and years ago, in her quiet, shadowed youth, she too had believed love to be the most precious, beautiful thing in life. Then, with marriage to Godfrey Pavely had come the conviction that love was not beautiful, but very, very ugly—at its best oneof those dubious gifts to man by which old Dame Nature works out certain cunning designs of her own. And yet, when something of what she believed to be the truth had been uttered by her during that terrible tense exchange of words, she had seen how she, in her turn, had shocked, and even repelled, Oliver Tropenell.
Once more sobs welled up from her throat, once more she covered her face with her hands....
At last, feeling worn out with the violence of an emotion which, unknown to her, vivified her whole being, she walked on till the fine Tudor front of the old house which was at once so little and so much her home, rose before her. It was an infinite comfort to know that Godfrey would not be there waiting for her, and that she would be able to make her way up alone through the sleeping house to the room which opened into her child's nursery.
MRS. TROPENELL, waiting for Oliver to come back, lost count of time, and yet not much more than half an hour had gone by before she heard the sound of a glazed door, which opened on to the garden from a distant part of the house, burst open.
In that sound she seemed to hear all the impatience, all the pain, all the frustrated longing she divined in her son.
She got up from her chair and stood listening. Would he go straight upstairs—as she, in her stormy, passionate youth, would have done in his place?
But no—with a feeling of rushing, unreasoning joy she heard him coming across the hall. A moment later he walked through into the room and came and stood before her.
"Mother," he said, "it's a beautiful night. Would you care to come into the garden for a few minutes?"
As soon as they had stepped out of the French window into the darkness, she took his arm.
"You don't feel it cold?" he asked solicitously.
"Oh no," she said, surprised. "I'm so little cold, Oliver, that I shouldn't at all mind going over to the blue bench, and sitting down."
They went across the grass, to a curious painted Italian bench which had been a gift of the woman who was so much in both their thoughts.
And there, "I want to ask you a question," he said slowly. "What led to the marriage of Laura Bayntonand Godfrey Pavely? From something she once said to me, I gather she thinks that you approved of it."
She felt as if his eyes were burning her in the darkness, and as she hesitated, hardly knowing what to say, he went on, and in his voice there was something terribly accusing.
"Didyoumake the marriage, mother? Did you really advise her to take that fellow?"
The questions stung her. "No," she answered coldly. "I did nothing of the kind, Oliver. If you wish to know the truth, the person who was most to blame was your friend Gillie, Laura's brother. Laura adored her brother. There was nothing in the world she wouldn't have done for him, and she married Godfrey—it seems a strange thing to look back on now—to please Gillie."
"But she met Pavely here?"
"Yes, of course she did. As you know, she very often stayed with me after her father died, and when Gillie Baynton, instead of making a home for her, was getting into scrape after scrape, spending her money as well as his own."
He muttered, "Gillie knew she was to have money later."
She went on: "And then Godfrey Pavely in love is a very different person from Godfrey Pavely—well, out of love. He was set on marrying Laura, and that over years. He first asked her when she was seventeen, and they married when she was twenty-one. In the interval he had done Gillie many good turns. In fact Godfrey bought Laura from Gillie. That, Oliver, is the simple truth."
She waited for him to make some kind of comment,but he said nothing, and she went on, a tinge of deep, yearning sadness in her voice, "Don't let your friends, or rather their incompatibility of temper—" she hesitated, and then rather solemnly ended her sentence with the words, "affectourrelations, my son."
"I'm sorry, mother." Tropenell's voice altered, softened. "Forgive me for the way I spoke just now! I had got it into my head—I didn't know quite exactly why—that you had promoted the marriage. I see now that you really had nothing to do with it."
"I won't say that! It's difficult to remember exactly what did happen. Godfrey never wearied in his slow, inexorable pursuit of Laura. I think that at last she was touched by his constancy. She knew nothing then of human nature—she knows nothing of it now."
He muttered, "Poor girl! Poor unfortunate girl!" and his way of uttering the commonplace words hurt his mother shrewdly.
Suddenly she made up her mind to say at least one true thing to him. It was a thing she knew well no one but herself would ever say to Oliver.
"I am in a position to know," she said, "and I want you to believe it when I tell you, that if Laura is to be as much pitied as you believe her to be—so too, I tell you, Oliver, is Godfrey! If I had known before the marriage, even an hour before the actual wedding, what I learnt afterwards—I mean as to their amazingly different ideals of life—I would have doneanythingto stop it!"
"What d'you mean exactly, mother, by different ideals of life?"
As he asked the question he moved away from hera little, but he turned round and bent his eyes on to her face—dimly, whitely, apparent in the starlit, moonlit night.
She did not speak at once. It seemed to her that the question answered itself, and yet she felt that he was quivering with impatience for her answer.
"The French," she said in a low voice, "have a very good phrase to describe the kind of man Godfrey is. Godfrey Pavely is ale moyen homme sensuel—the typical man of his kind and class, Oliver—the self-satisfied, stolid, unimaginative upper middle-class. Such men feel that the world, their English world at any rate, has been made for them, built up by the all-powerful entity they call God in their personal interest. They know scarcely anything of what is going on, either above or below them, and what is more, they do not really care, as long as they and their like prosper."
Oliver nodded impatiently. He knew all that well enough!
His mother went on: "Godfrey Pavely ought to have married some rather clever, rather vulgar-natured, rather pretty girl, belonging to his own little world of Pewsbury. Then, instead of being what he now is, an uncomfortable, not over contented man, he would have been, well—what his worthy father was before him. That odd interest in queer, speculative money dealings, is the unfortunate fellow's only outlet, Oliver, for what romance is in him."
"I wonder if you're right, mother?"
"I'm sure I am."
There came a long silence between them.
Mrs. Tropenell could see her son in outline, as itwere, his well-shaped head, and long, lean, finely proportioned body. He was sitting at the further end of the bench, and he was now staring right before him. She found it easier—far easier—to speak of Godfrey than of Laura. And so, musingly, she went on:
"Looking back a dozen years, I can think of several young women whom Godfrey would have done well to consider——"
"I can certainly think of one, mother," he said, and in the darkness there came a bitter little smile over his face.
"You mean Katty Winslow? Yes—I think you're right, my dear. When Godfrey turned from Katty to Laura, he made a terrible mistake. Katty, in the old days, had very much the same ambitions, and the same social aspirations, as himself. She was really fond of him too! She would have become—what's the odious word?—'smart.' And Godfrey would have been proud of her. By now he would have stood for Parliament, and then, in due course, would have come a baronetcy. Yes, if the gods had been kind, Godfrey Pavely would have married poor little Katty—he didn't behave over well to her, you know!"
"It seems to me that Mrs. Winslow has made quite a good thing of her life, mother."
"Do you really think that, Oliver?"
"Yes, I do. She managed very cleverly, so I'm told, to get rid of that worthless husband of hers, and now she's got that pretty little house, and that charming little garden, and as much of Godfrey as she seems to want." He spoke with a kind of hard indifference.
"Katty's not the sort of woman to be really satisfied with a pretty little house, a charming little garden,and a platonic share in another woman's husband."
"Then she'll marry again. People seem to think her very attractive."
There was a long pause.
"Mother?"
"Yes, my dearest."
"To return to Laura—what should have beenherfate had the gods been kind?"
She left his question without an answer so dangerously long as to create a strange feeling of excitement and strain between them. Then, reluctantly, she answered it. "Laura might have been happiest in not marrying at all, and in any case she should have married late. As to what kind of man would have made her happy, of course I have a theory."
"What is your theory?" He leant towards her, breathing rather quickly.
"I think," she said hesitatingly, "that Laura might have been happy with a man of the world, older than herself, who would have regarded his wife as a rare and beautiful possession. Such a man would have understood the measure of what she was willing and able to give—and to withhold. I can also imagine Laura married to a young idealist, the kind of man whose attitude to his wife is one of worship, whose demands, if indeed they can be called demands, are few, infrequent——"
Mrs. Tropenell stopped abruptly. What she had just said led to a path she did not mean to follow. But she soon realised with dismay that she had said too much, or too little.
"Do you mean," said Oliver hoarsely, "that Pavely—thatPavely——" he left his question unfinished, but she knew he meant to exact an answer and she did not keep him waiting long for it. Still she chose her words very carefully.
"I think that Godfrey Pavely, in the matter of his relations to his wife, is a very unfortunate, and, some would say, a very ill-used man, Oliver."
Oliver Tropenell suddenly diminished the distance between his mother and himself. The carefully chosen, vague words she had just uttered had been like balm poured into a festering and intolerably painful wound.
"Poor devil!" he said contemptuously, and there was a rather terrible tone of triumph, as well as of contempt, in the muttered exclamation.
Mrs. Tropenell was startled and, what she seldom was, frightened. She felt she was face to face with an elemental force—the force of hate.
She repeated his last words, but in how different a spirit, in how different a tone! "Poor devil? Yes, Oliver, Godfrey is really to be pitied, and I ask you to believe me, my son, when I say that he does do his duty by Laura according to his lights."
"Mother?" He put out his hand in the darkness and just touched hers. "Why is it that Laura is so much fonder of you than you are of Laura? You don't respect—or even like—Godfrey?"
She protested eagerly. "But Iamfond of Laura—very, very fond, Oliver! But though, as you say, I neither really like nor respect Godfrey, I can't help being sorry for him. He once said to me—it's a long time ago—'I thought I was marrying a woman, but I've married a marble statue. I'm married to something likethat'—and he pointed to 'The WinglessVictory' your father brought me, years ago, from Italy. Godfrey is an unhappy man, Oliver—come, admit that you know that?"
"I think she's far, far more unhappy than he is! No man with so thoroughly good an opinion of himself is everreallyunhappy. Still, it's a frightful tangle."
He stopped short for a moment, then in a very low voice, he asked her, "Is there no way of cutting it through, mother?" Suddenly he answered his own question in a curiously musing, detached tone. "I suppose the only way in which such a situation is ever terminated is by death."
"Yes," she said slowly, "but it's not a usual termination. Still, I have known it happen." More lightly she went on: "If Laura died, Godfrey wouldn't escape Katty a second time. And one must admit that she would make him an almost perfect wife."
"And if Godfrey died, mother?"
Mrs. Tropenell felt a little tremor of fear shoot through her burdened heart. This secret, intimate conversation held in the starry night was drifting into strange, sinister, uncharted channels. But her son was waiting for an answer.
"I don't know how far Laura's life would alter for the better if Godfrey died. I suppose she would go on much as she does now. And, Oliver——"
"Yes, mother."
"I should pity and—rather despise the man who would waste his life in an unrequited devotion."
He made an impatient movement. "Then do you regard response as essential in every relationship between a man and a woman?"
"I have never yet known a man who did not regard it as essential," she said quietly, "and that, however he might consciously or unconsciously pretend to be satisfied with—nothing."
"I once knew a man," he said, in a low, tense voice, "who for years loved a woman who seemed unresponsive, who forced him to be content with the merest crumbs of—well,shecalled it friendship. And yet, mother, that man was happy in his love. And towards the end of her life the woman gave all that he had longed for, all he had schooled himself to believe it was not in her to give—but it had been there all the time! She had suffered, poor angel, more than he—" his voice broke, and his mother, turning towards him, laid for a moment her hand on his, as she whispered, "Was that woman at all like Laura, my darling?"
"Yes—as far as a Spaniard, and a Roman Catholic, can be like Laura, she was like Laura."
Even as he spoke he had risen to his feet, and during their short walk, from the bench where they had been sitting through the trees and across the lawn, neither spoke to the other. But, as he opened the house door, he said, "Good-night. I'm not coming in now; I'm going for a walk. I haven't walked all day." He hesitated a moment: "Don't be worried—I won't say don't be frightened, for I don't believe, mother, that anything could ever frighten you—if you hear me coming in rather late. I've got to think out a rather difficult problem—something connected with my business."
"I hope Gillie hasn't been getting into any scrape since you've come home?"
But she only spoke by way of falling in with hishumour. Nothing mattered to her, or to him, just now, except—Laura.
He said hastily, "Oh no, things have been going very well out there. You must remember, mother, that Baynton's scrapes never affect his work."
He spoke absently, and she realised that he wanted to be away, by himself, to think over some of the things she had said to him, and so she turned and went slowly up the staircase, and passed through into her own bedroom without turning up the light.
Walking over to her window, she gazed down into the moonlit space beneath. But she could see no moving shadow, hear no sound. Oliver had padded away across the grass, making for the lonely downs which encircled, on three sides, the house.
Before turning away from her window, Mrs. Tropenell covered her face with her hands; she was fearfully moved, shaken to the depths of her heart. For the first time Oliver had bared his soul before her. She thrilled with pride in the passionate, wayward, in a measure nobly selfless and generous human being whom she had created.
How strange, how amazing that Laura made no response to that ardent, exalted passion! But if amazing, then also, from what ought to be every point of view, how fortunate! And yet, unreasonable though it was, Mrs. Tropenell felt sharply angered with Laura, irritated by that enigmatic, self-absorbed, coldness of hers. What a poor maimed creature, to be so blind, so imperceptive, to the greatest thing in the world! Dislike, a physical distaste for the unlucky Godfrey which seemed sometimes to amount to horror, were this beautiful woman's nearest approach to passion.