PART ONE
CHAPTER I
OH, but this is terrible——"
Laura Pavely did not raise her voice, but there was trembling pain, as well as an almost incredulous surprise, in the way she uttered the five words which may mean so much—or so little.
The man whose sudden, bare avowal of love had drawn from her that low, protesting cry, was standing just within the door of the little summer-house, and he was looking away from her, straight over the beautiful autumnal view of wood and water spread out before him.
He was telling himself that five minutes ago—nay, was it as long as five minutes?—they had been so happy! And yet, stop—he had not been happy. Even so he cursed himself for having shattered the fragile, to him the already long perished, fabric, of what she no doubt called their "friendship."
It was she—it always is the woman—who, quite unwittingly, had provoked the words which now could never be unsaid. She had not been thinking at all of him when she did so—she had spoken out of her heart, the heart which some secret, sure instinct bade him believe capable of depths of feeling, which he hoped, with a fierce hope, no man had yet plumbed. …
What had provoked his avowal had been the most innocent, in a sense the most beautiful, feeling of which a woman is capable—love for her child.
"The doctor says Alice ought to have a change, that she ought to go to the sea, for a little while. I asked Godfrey if I might take her, but he said he didn't think it necessary." She had added musingly, "It's odd, for he really is devoted to the child."
They had been walking slowly, sauntering side by side, very close to one another, for the path was only a narrow track among the trees, towards the summerhouse where they were now—she sitting and he standing.
He had answered in what, if she had been less absorbed in herself and her own concerns, she might have realised was a dangerously still voice: "I think I can persuade Godfrey to let her go. Apart from the child altogether, you ought to have a change." And then—then she had said, rather listlessly, not at all bitterly, "Oh, it doesn't matter about me!"
Such a simple phrase, embodying an obvious truth, yet they had forced from him the words: "I think it does matter about you, Laura. At least I know it matters a good deal to me, for, as of course you know by now, I love you."
And if his voice had remained quite low and steady, she had seen the blazing, supplicating eyes. …
But he had looked away, at once, when he had uttered those irrevocable words; and after a few moments, which had seemed to him an eternity, had come that low, heart-felt cry, "Oh, but this is terrible——"
"Terrible? Why, Laura?" He crossed his arms, and turning, gazed straight down at her bowed figure.
Again there came a long, unnatural pause.
And then she lifted up her face, and under the shadow cast by her wide-brimmed garden hat he saw that even her forehead was flushed. There was an anguished look in the large, deeply blue eyes, which were to him the most exquisite and revealing feature of her delicately drawn face.
"Perhaps I ought not to have said 'terrible,'" she said at last in a low voice, "but—but degrading, ignoble, hateful, Oliver." She added, her false calm giving way, "And to me such a bitter, bitter disappointment!"
"Why?" he asked harshly. "Why a disappointment, Laura? Most women, nay, all wise human beings, value love—any kind of love offered by even the most unworthy—as the most precious thing in the world!"
His face had become expressionless, and the measured, carefully chosen words made her feel suddenly ashamed, but with a shame merged in an eager hope that she had cruelly misunderstood her—friend.
She stood up and took a step towards him. "Oliver," she said diffidently; "forgive me! I was stupid not to understand. Of course we love one another," she was on firm ground now. "All friends love one another, and you've been such a good friend to me, and more, far more, than a good friend to my poor brother—to Gillie."
He withdrew his gaze from her beseeching eyes, and looked away once more. Now was his chance to play the hypocrite, to eat the words which had given her so much offence. …
Hardly knowing that he spoke aloud, he muttered hoarsely, "I can't!" And then he turned to her: "Listen, Laura. I owe you the truth. I have loved you, yes, and in the sense you think so ignoble and so degrading, almost from the first day we met. As time went on, I thought it impossible that you did not know that."
"I did not know it! I trusted you absolutely! I thought that we were all three, friends—you and I and Godfrey! It was the very first time that Godfrey and I had ever had a friend in common, and it made me so happy."
"Did it indeed?" His words cut like a whip.
"But it's true that you are Godfrey's friend?" she spoke a little wildly. "I've never known him as fond of any man as he is now of you, Oliver."
"His fondness is not returned."
"Then it ought to be!" she cried. "For you've made him like you, Oliver."
She hardly knew what she was saying, distressed, humiliated, wounded as she was in her pride and sense of personal dignity. But what was he saying—this challenging, wrathful stranger who, but a few moments ago, had been her dear, dear friend?
"I would rather, Laura, that you did not bring your husband into this matter."
"But I must bring him in!" She became suddenly aware that here ready to her hand was a weapon with which she could hurt and punish this man who was looking at her with so inscrutable a look—was it a look of love or of hatred?
"I'm sorry now," she went on rapidly, "bitterly, bitterly sorry and ashamed that I ever said a word to you of Godfrey and his—his rather tiresome ways. I ought not to have done it. It was disloyal. I've never spoken of Godfrey to any other man—but somehow I thought you were different from other men."
"Different?" he interjected. "How so, Laura? What right had you to think me different from other men?"
"Because I trusted you," she said inconsequently. "Because somehow you seemed really to care for me—" her voice broke, but she forced herself to go on: "You're not the first man, Oliver, who's made love to me since I married—" she covered her face with her hands.
It seemed to her that some other woman was being driven to make these intimate confidences—not the fastidious, refined, reserved Laura Pavely, who had an almost morbid dislike of the betrayal of any violent or unseemly emotion. But this other woman, who spoke through her lips, had been, was being, wantonly insulted. …
Hanging her head as a child might have done, she said defiantly: "I suppose you're surprised?"
"No, I'm not surprised. Why should I be? Go on—" He clenched his hands together. What was it she was going to tell him?
Speaking in short, broken sentences, she obeyed him:
"It was when we used to go about much more than we do now—in the first two or three years after our marriage. I suppose that every woman—who isn't quite happy with her husband—is exposed to that kind of thing. I used to loathe it when I saw it coming. I used to try and fend it off. Sometimes I succeeded—more often I failed. But I never, never expected anything of the sort to happen with you, Oliver. We were such friends—such good, happy friends—you and I and my little Alice," and then she burst into a passion of weeping.
And at that what self-control Oliver Tropenell had retained departed. A flood of burning, passionate words burst from his lips—of endearment, of self-abasement, and promises which he intended, come what might, should be kept.
And she listened shrinkingly, with averted face, absorbed in her own bewildered pain and disappointment.
"I must go back to the house," she said at last. "The doctor will be here in half an hour." And she forced herself to add: "Perhaps you'll be coming over this afternoon?" (How often she had said these words in the last three months—but in how different a tone!).
"I think not. My mother said something about wishing me to stay in to-day—Lord St. Amant may be coming over." As she made no comment, he concluded quietly, "Well, I suppose I had better be going now. Good-bye, Laura."
"Good-bye," she said. And without taking her hand he left her.
She watched his tall figure making its way quickly down through the rough ground to the wood where, ultimately, he would find a path which would lead him to his mother's house.
It was late in the afternoon of the same day. From where she was sitting, under a great cedar tree, Mrs. Tropenell at last saw her son Oliver and Godfrey Pavely come out of Freshley Manor.
Though the glory and warmth of the summer were now over, Mrs. Tropenell still spent many hours of each day in her garden. She had always been an out-of-door woman from the days when she was an eager, impetuous, high-spirited girl, till now, when youth had gone, though something of the eager impetuosity of youth remained with her concealed from strangers by a manner marked by a strong sense of personal dignity.
The two men began walking, slowly, down the grass path leading to the beech avenue which was the glory of Freshley Manor, as well as a short cut to Lawford Chase, Godfrey Pavely's larger property.
It was more than an hour since a servant had come out to say that Mr. Pavely was waiting to see Mr. Tropenell in the library. The man had added that Mr. Pavely had had tea before leaving the Bank, and only wanted to see Mr. Tropenell for a few minutes on his way home. And Oliver, with "I don't think he'll keep me long, mother; I suppose you'll still be here when I come back?" had stridden off with a certain reluctance towards the house.
It had always been his mother's joy, but now for many years past her infrequent joy, to fall in with even the least reasonable of her son's wishes, and so she had gone on sitting out there, waiting for him to come back, long after the tea-things had been taken away. There was a book on the low garden table by her side—such a book as she loved, telling of great adventure by one of the adventurers—but she left it where it was.
Mrs. Tropenell felt a vague, exasperating sense of restlessness and unease. At the back of her heart—that heart which, if no longer that of a young woman, could still thrill with many varied emotions and a very passion of maternal love—was the dull ache of a secret, unacknowledged sense of fear and pain.
She had every reason to be happy to-day—not only happy in her son's company, but in the coming back, after a long absence on the Continent, of her old friend, Lord St. Amant. To him she could, perhaps, bring herself to say something of what was touching her so deeply, and he, she knew, would reassure her and make light of her fears. St. Amant was what is called in ordinary parlance a man of the world—the last man, that is, to be horrified, still less frightened, by a tale of illicit love, especially when, as the mother honestly believed, it was a love likely to remain unrequited.
Yes, she would tell her one trusted friend of these besetting fears, of her more than suspicion that her son Oliver was deep in love with Laura Pavely, and St. Amant would laugh at her, persuade her maybe to laugh with him.
And yet? Yet, even so, she asked herself again and again during that long time of waiting, what these two men who, if of life-long acquaintanceship and now at any rate nominally intimate friends, were so unlike the one to the other, could have to talk about, indoors, for over an hour? Godfrey Pavely and Oliver Tropenell met very often—too often to her thinking—so why should Godfrey have pursued Oliver home to-day, just when Oliver had had an hour to spare for his mother?
It was now Thursday, and her son had already dined with the Pavelys twice this week. To-morrow night Godfrey Pavely was to be in London, and it had been arranged that his wife, Laura, should spend the evening here. But that, or so Mrs. Tropenell had quickly reminded herself, had been Laura's usual custom, long before Oliver had come home from Mexico for the holiday which had now already lasted nearly four months. In her long life Mrs. Tropenell had only had one beloved woman friend, and that friend, that more than sister, had been Laura's mother.
Even now Godfrey Pavely did not seem eager to go home. The two men were close to the furthest edge of the wide lawn, but they were still talking earnestly.
Mrs. Tropenell gazed across, with a painful scrutiny, at her son's visitor.
Godfrey Pavely was a neatly made, neatly dressed, neatly mannered man—in a way not ill-looking. His reddish-brown hair toned in oddly with his light, ginger-coloured eyes. He had become rather particular about his health of late, and went to some trouble to keep himself fit, and in good condition. Yet he looked more like a townsman than like the countryman he certainly was. For if the fortunate inheritor of a successful county banking business, which so far he had managed with such skill as to save it from any thought of amalgamation, he was also the owner of a fine old property.
Lawford Chase had belonged to Mrs. Tropenell's ancestors for centuries—for almost as many centuries as the years in which he, Godfrey, had owned it. But her father had been careless and extravagant during his long, happy life, so the owner of Pavely's Bank had bought up the mortgages on Lawford Chase, and finally foreclosed.
All this was ancient history now, and Mrs. Tropenell felt no bitterness on that account. Indeed, she had rejoiced, with a sense of real joy, when her friend's daughter had become mistress of her own old home.
The two men whom she was watching went on talking for what seemed to the onlooker a very long time; but, at last, Godfrey Pavely, turning on his heel, walked on, to be at once engulfed by the dark green arch formed by the high beech trees. Then Mrs. Tropenell saw her son, all her heart welcoming him, come striding towards her across the long stretch of short, green turf.
Once more she asked herself what possible link there could be between men so utterly unlike. Her Oliver—more hers now, she felt, than ever before, and that though for the first time he was making her secretly, miserably jealous—was a creature of light and air, of open spaces, if need be of great waters. He was built, like herself, on a big and powerful plan; and yet so tall, so spare, so sinewy, that though he was broad he looked slim, and though four-and-thirty years of age he might have been taken, even at this small distance from where she sat, for a long-limbed youth. His life for the last twelve years had been one that often ages a man—but it had not aged him. His vigour was unbroken, his vitality—the vitality which had made him so successful, and which attracted men and women of such very different types—unimpaired.
Mrs. Tropenell had been touched, perhaps in her secret heart little surprised, at the pleasure—one might almost have said the enthusiasm—with which her neighbours for miles round had welcomed Oliver home again, after what had been so long an absence from England. The fact that he had come back a very wealthy man, and that during those years of eclipse he had managed to do some of them good turns, of course counted in his popularity, and she was too open-eyed a woman not to be well aware of that.
The mother knew that her son was not the downright, rather transparent, good-natured fellow that he was now taken to be. No man she had ever known—and she had ever been one of those women of whom men make a confidant—could keep his own or another's secrets more closely than could Oliver. He had once written to her the words: "You are the only human being, mother, to whom I ever tell anything," and she had instinctively known this to be true.
Yet their relationship was more like that of two friends than of mother and son. She knew all there was to know of his thoughts, and of his doubts, concerning many of the great things which trouble and disturb most thinking modern men. Of the outward life he led in the Mexican stretch of country of which he had become the administrator and practical ruler, she also knew a great deal, indeed surprisingly much, for he wrote by each mail long, full letters; and the romance of his great business had become an ever continuous source of interest, of amusement, and of pride to the mother who now only lived for him.
But of those secret things which had moved his heart, warred with his passions, perchance seared his conscience, he had never told her anything. Only once had the impenetrable mist of reserve been lightened, as it were pierced for a moment—and that was now a long time ago, on his second visit home five years before. He had then come to England meaning to stay a month. But at the end of ten days he had received a telegram—what he called, in the American fashion, a cable—and within an hour he had gone, saying as he kissed his mother good-bye, "A friend of mine—a woman who has been ill a long time—is now dying. I must go, even if I'm not in time to see her alive."
In the letters which had followed his return to Mexico, there had been no word more—nothing even implying sorrow, or a sense of loss—only a graver note, of which the mother might have remained unaware but for that clue he had left to sink deep in her mother-heart.
He was now close to her, looking down out of his dark, compelling eyes—eyes which were so like her own, save that now hers shone with a softer light.
"Pavely stayed a long time," he said abruptly. "Are you tired? D'you want to go in yet, mother?"
She shook her head. "I'd rather stay out here till it's time to dress."
As she spoke she lifted her face to his, and he told himself what a beautiful, and noble face it was, though each delicate, aquiline feature had thickened, and the broad low forehead was now partially concealed by thick bands of whitening hair. It was a lined, even a ravaged face—the face of a woman who had lived, had loved, had suffered. But of that Oliver was only dimly conscious, for his mother's nature if impetuous and passionate was almost as reserved and secretive as was his own.
It may be doubted, even, if Oliver Tropenell knew how much his mother loved him, for it may be doubted if any son ever knows how much his mother—even if she appear placid or careless—loves him. One thing Oliver did know, or confidently believed he knew, and that was that his mother loved him more than she had ever loved anything in the world. There he was quite content to leave it.
"Pavely wants me to become trustee to Laura's marriage settlement, in succession to old Mr. Blackmore."
When with Godfrey Pavely, Oliver Tropenell always called the other man by his Christian name, but behind his back he always spoke of him as "Pavely."
As his mother remained silent, he went on, a little hurriedly: "The powers vested in the trustee are very wide, and it seems that money which was later added to the trust—a matter of seventeen thousand pounds or so—is invested in some queer form of security."
They both smiled—he a little drily, she with a kind of good-humoured contempt.
"He's cautious and successful—in spite of that odd, gambling propensity," she spoke a little defensively. Then, "I suppose you've consented to act?"
She waited anxiously for his answer; and at last it came, uttered in a tone of elaborate unconcern: "I said I'd think it over. But I think I'll take it on, mother. Pavely made rather a personal favour of it—after all, there's some kind of relationship."
"Yes," agreed Mrs. Tropenell, "yes, there is certainly a connection, hardly a relationship, between ourselves and Laura."
Her son sat down. He began poking about an invisible stone, lying in among the grass, with his stick.
"You cared for Laura's mother as if she had been your sister—didn't you, mother? And yet I can't imagine you with a great woman friend, I mean, of course, a friend of your own age."
She turned and looked at him. "Ah, my dear—those are the friends that count!" and she nearly added, "Don't you find it so?" But, instead, she went on quickly, "Yes, I loved Laura's mother dearly, dearly—and it was for her sake that I asked you to be good to her son, to Gillie."
"Laura's extraordinarily fond of Gillie——" There always came a curious change over Oliver Tropenell's voice when he uttered the name "Laura." It became as it were softer, infused with feeling—or so his mother thought.
She waited a moment; then answered slowly, "Women generally are fond of their only brothers."
"Oh, but it's more than that!"
As she remained silent, he went on musingly: "And Gillie, in his queer way, is very fond of Laura—though I don't believe he writes to her once in three months!"
"I suppose Gillie still hates Godfrey?" she said hesitatingly. "Godfrey behaved so—so—well, not so much badly perhaps, as meanly and even stupidly—about that unfortunate affair." It was almost as if Mrs. Tropenell were speaking to herself. Her son turned and looked at her squarely.
"Yes! Gillie still hates Pavely. And yet, mother, since I came home this time I've wondered sometimes if Pavely was so very unreasonable about it after all. You see, Gillie must have been about the most troublesome and—well, the most dangerous brother-in-law an unlucky country banker could well have had!"
"And but for you he'd be so still," she said quietly. "From something Godfrey said the other day I gather that he's really grateful to you, Oliver?"
Oliver Tropenell got up. "Yes," he said shortly, "he's certainly grateful. In fact, he seems to think I've limitless power of getting people out of scrapes——" there was an undercurrent of triumph in his deep, even tones.
"I suppose the real reason he came to-day was that he's afraid to let a stranger be Laura's trustee?" There was only the slightest touch of interrogation in Mrs. Tropenell's voice, and she went on: "Perhaps he'd be kinder to poor Gillie now—" a curious smile played round her mouth. It was a full-lipped, generous mouth, but it was the least refined feature of her face.
"No, no. It's not as bad as that! But well, yes, Pavely has used this portion of Laura's fortune in a way he had no business to do, knowing it was trust money."
"And you——?"
"Oh, I'm going to buy out her interest in the concern."
"Will that cost you seventeen thousand pounds?"
"Yes, it will. But I don't mind—it's quite a likely gamble. Have you ever heard of Greville Howard?"
"You mean the great money-lender?"
"He's retired now. But Pavely and he seem to be in a kind of secret partnership—queer isn't it? Pavely's a clever chap about money, but oh, mother! he's such an insufferable cad!"
Mrs. Tropenell felt a sudden tremor of fear sweep over her. She had lately come to what she now realised was a quite wrong conclusion—she had believed, that is, that Oliver, in a queer, contemptuous way, had grown fond of Godfrey, as Godfrey had certainly grown fond of Oliver. But now, all at once, her son had opened a dark window into his soul—or was it into his heart? There was an under-current of hatred, as well as of the contempt to which she was accustomed, in the way Oliver had just spoken of his "friend"—of the man, at once fortunate and unfortunate, who was Laura Pavely's husband.
She stood up, and put her hand through her son's arm. "It's getting very cold," she said, and shivered.
He turned on her with quick concern: "I left you too long! I ought to have sent him away before—but he was such a long time getting it out—" under his breath he muttered "Damn him!"
MOTHER and son dined alone together, and then, rather early, Mrs. Tropenell went upstairs.
For a while, perhaps as long as an hour, she sat up in bed, reading. At last, however, she turned off the switch of her electric reading lamp, and, lying back in her old-fashioned four-post bed, she shut her eyes for a few moments. Then she opened them, widely, on to her moonlit room.
Opposite to where she lay the crescent-shaped bow-window was still open to the night air and the star-powdered sky. On that side of Freshley Manor the wide lawn sloped down to a belt of water meadows, and beyond the meadows there rose steeply a high, flat-topped ridge.
Along this ridge Oliver Tropenell was now walking up and down smoking. Now and again his mother saw the shadow-like figure move across the line of her vision.
At one moment, last winter, she had feared that he would not be able to come back this year, as troubles had arisen among his cattle-men. But, as was Oliver's way, he had kept his promise. That he had been able to so do was in no small measure owing to his partner, Gilbert Baynton.
Gilbert Baynton—Laura Pavely's brother? Of that ne'er-do-weel Oliver had made from a failure a success; from a waster—his brother-in-law, Godfrey Pavely, would have called him by a harsher name—an acute and a singularly successful man of business.
Lying there, her brain working quickly in the darkness, Oliver's mother told herself that the Pavelys, both Godfrey and Laura, had indeed reason to be grateful, not only to Oliver, but to her, Oliver's mother! It was to please her, not them, that Oliver, long years ago, had accepted the dubious gift of Gilbert Baynton, and the small sum Gilbert's brother-in-law had reluctantly provided to rid himself of an intolerable incubus and a potential source of disgrace. Godfrey Pavely was certainly grateful, and never backward in expressing it. And Laura? Laura was one of your silent, inarticulate women, but without doubt Laura must be grateful too.
At last Oliver left the ridge, and Mrs. Tropenell went on gazing at the vast expanse of luminous sky which merged into the uplands stretching away for miles beyond the boundaries of her garden.
She lay, listening intently, and very soon she heard the cadence of his firm footfalls on the stone path below the window. Then came the quiet unlatching of the garden door. Now he was coming upstairs.
Her whole heart leapt out to him—and perchance it was this strong shaft of wordless longing that caused Oliver Tropenell's feet to linger as he was going past his mother's door.
Following a sudden impulse, she, who had trained herself to do so few things on impulse, called out, "Is that you, my darling?"
The door opened. "Yes, mother. Here I am. May I come in?"
He turned and shut out the bright electric light on the landing, and walked, a little slowly and uncertainly in the darkness, towards where he knew the bed to be. For a moment she wondered whether she should turn on the lamp which was at her elbow, then some sure, secret instinct made her refrain.
She put out her hand, and pulled him down to her, and he, so chary of caress, put his left arm round her.
"Mother?" he said softly. "This dear old room! It's years since I've been in this room—and yet from what I can see, it's exactly the same as it always was!"
And, as if answering an unspoken question, she spoke in very low tones, "Hardly altered at all since the day you were born here, my dearest, on the happiest day of my life."
His strong arm tightened about her a little, and, still looking straight before her, but leaning perhaps a little closer into the shelter of his arm, she said tremulously, inconsequently it might have seemed: "Oliver? Are you going to accept Lord St. Amant's invitation?"
With a sharp shoot of hidden pain she felt his movement of recoil, but all he said was, very quietly, "I've not quite made up my mind, mother."
"It would give me pleasure if you were to do so. He has been a very good and loyal friend to me for a long, long time, my dear."
"I know that."
She waited a moment, then forced herself to go on: "You were never quite fair to St. Amant, Oliver."
"I—I feared him, mother."
And then, as she uttered an inarticulate murmur of pain and of protest, he went on quickly, "The fear didn't last very long—perhaps for two or three years. You see I was so horribly afraid that you were going to marry him." In the darkness he was saying something he had never meant, never thought to say.
And she answered, "It was a baseless fear."
"Was it? I wonder if it was! Oh, of course I know you are telling me the truth as you see it now—but, but surely, mother?"
"Surely no, Oliver. It is true that St. Amant wished, after his wife's death, that I should marry him, but he soon saw that I did not wish it, that nothing was further from my wish—then."
"Then?" he cried. "What do you mean, mother? Lady St. Amant only died when I was fifteen!"
"I would like to tell you what I mean. And after I have told you, I wish never to speak of this subject to you again. But I owe it to myself as well as to you, to tell you the truth, Oliver. Where is your hand?" she said, "let me hold it while I tell you."
And then slowly and with difficulty she began speaking, with a hesitation, a choosing of her words, which were in sharp contrast to her usual swift decision.
"I want to begin by telling you," her voice was very low, "that according to his lights—the lights of a man of the world and of, well yes, of an English gentleman—St. Amant behaved very well as far as I was concerned. I want you to understand that, Oliver, to understand it thoroughly, because it's the whole point of my story. If St. Amant had behaved less well, I should have nothing to tell—you."
She divined the quiver of half-shamed relief which went through her son. It made what she wished to say at once easier and more difficult.
"As I think you know, I first met St. Amant when I was very young, in fact before I was 'out,' and he was the first really clever, really attractive, and, in a sense, really noted man I had ever met. And then"—she hesitated painfully.
"And then, mother?" Oliver's voice was hard and matter-of-fact. He was not making it easy for her.
"Well, my dear, very very soon, he made of me his friend, and I was of course greatly flattered, but at that time, in the ordinary sense of the word, St. Amant never made love to me." She went on more firmly. "Of course I soon came to know that he cared for me in a way he did not care for the other women with whom his name was associated. I knew very soon too, deep in my heart, that if his wife—his frivolous, mean-natured, tiresome wife—died, he certainly would wish to marry me, and for years, Oliver, for something like six years, I daily committed murder in my heart."
And then something happened which troubled and greatly startled the woman who was making this painful confession. Her son gave a kind of cry—a stifled cry which was almost a groan. "God! How well I understand that!" he said.
"Do you, Oliver—do you? And yet I, looking back, cannot understand it! All that was best, indeed the only good that was in St. Amant to give I had then, and later, after I became a widow, I had it again."
"I suppose he was much the same then as later, or—or was he different then, mother?"
She knew what he meant. "He was the same then," she said quietly, "but somehow I didn't care! Girls were kept so ignorant in those days. But of course the whole world knew he was a man of pleasure, and in time I grew to know it too. But still it wasn't that which made me unhappy, for I did not realise what the phrase meant, still less what was implied by it. But even so, as time went on I was very unhappy. Mine was a false position—a position which hurt my pride, and, looking back, I suppose that there must have soon been a certain amount of muffled talk. If I was not jealous, other women were certainly jealous of me."
She waited for a few moments; the stirring of these long-dead embers was hurting her more than she would have thought possible.
At last she went on: "Sometimes months would pass by without our meeting, but he wrote to me constantly, and on his letters—such amusing, clever, and yes, tender letters—I lived. My aunt, my father, both singularly blind to the state of things, were surprised and annoyed that I didn't marry, and, as for me, I grew more and more unhappy."
"Poor mother!" muttered Oliver. And she sighed a sigh of rather piteous relief. She had not thought he would understand.
"I don't know what I should have done but for two people, your father, who of course was living here then, our nearest neighbour, and, what meant very much more to me just then, Laura's mother, Alice Tropenell. Though she was only a very distant relation, she was like a daughter in this house. Alice was my one friend. She knew everything about me. She was—well, Oliver, I could never tell you what she was to me then!"
"I suppose," he said slowly, "that Laura is like her?"
"Laura?" Mrs. Tropenell could not keep the surprise out of her low voice. "Oh no, my dear, Laura is not in the least like her mother. But Laura's child is very like Alice—even now."
"Laura's child?" Oliver Tropenell visioned the bright, high-spirited, merry little girl, who somehow, he could not have told her why, seemed often to be a barrier between himself and Laura.
"Alice—my friend Alice—was full of buoyancy, of sympathy for every living thing. She possessed what I so much lacked in those days, and still alas! lack—sound common-sense. And yet she, too, had her ideals, ideals which did not lead her into a very happy path, for Robert Baynton, high-minded though he may have been, was absorbed in himself—there was no room for any one else." Had she been telling her story to any one but her son, Mrs. Tropenell would have added, "Laura is very like him."
Instead, she continued, "No one but Alice would have made Robert Baynton happy, or have made as good a thing of the marriage as she did—for happy they were. I think it was the sight of their happiness that made me at last long for something different, for something more normal in my life than that strange, unreal tie with St. Amant. So at last, when I was four-and-twenty, I married your father." Oliver remained silent, and she said a little tremulously, "He was very, very good to me. He made me a happy woman. He gave me you."
There was a long, long pause. Mrs. Tropenell had now come to what was the really difficult part of the task she had set herself.
"You are thinking, my boy, of afterwards." And as she felt him move restlessly, she went on pleadingly, "As to that, I ask you to remember that I was very lonely after your father died. Still, if you wish to know the real truth"—she would be very honest now—"that friendship which you so much disliked stood more in the way of your having a stepfather than anything else could have done."
"I see that now," he said sombrely, "but I did not see it then, mother."
"Even if Lady St. Amant had not lived on, as she did, all those years, I should not have married St. Amant—I think I can say that in all sincerity. So you see, Oliver, you need not have been afraid, when at last he became free."
She sighed a long, unconscious sigh of relief.
"I gather you still see him very often when he's at Knowlton Abbey?"
"Yes, it's become a very comfortable friendship, Oliver. But for St. Amant I should often feel very lonely, my dear."
She longed to go on—to tell Oliver how hard it had been for her to build up her life afresh—after he had finally decided to stay on in Mexico. But she doubted if he would understand. …
Suddenly he turned and kissed her.
"Good-night," he said. "I'm grateful to you for having told me all—all that you have told me, mother."
Oliver Tropenell hurried up the silent house. By his own wish the large garret to which he had removed all his own treasures and boyish belongings after a delicate childhood spent in a room close to his mother's, was still in his room, and it had been very little altered.
It was reached by a queer, narrow, turning staircase across which at a certain point a beam jutted out too low. Tropenell never forgot to duck his head at that point—indeed he generally remembered as he did so how proud he had been the first time he had found himself to be too tall to pass under it straightly! But, strange to say, to-night he did forget—and for a moment he saw stars. … Fool! Fool that he was to allow his wits to go wool-gathering in this fashion!
With eyes still smarting, he leapt up the last few steps to the little landing which he shared with no one else. Opening the door he turned the switch of the lamp on the writing-table which stood at a right angle to the deep-eaved window.
Then he shut the door and locked it, and, after a moment of indecision, walked across to the book-case which filled up the space between the fireplace and the inner wall of the long, rafted room.
He did not feel in the mood to go to bed, and idly he let his eyes run over the long rows of books which he had read, in the long ago, again and again, for like most lonely boys he had been a great reader. They were a good selection, partly his mother's, partly his own, partly Lord St. Amant's. He knew well enough—he had always known, albeit the knowledge gave him no pleasure, that he had owed a great deal, as boy and man, to his mother's old friend. Lord St. Amant had really fine taste. It was he who had made Oliver read Keats, Blake, Byron, Poe, among poets; he who had actually given him Wuthering Heights, Vanity Fair, The Three Musketeers, Ali Baba of Ispahan. There they were all together.
He had not taken his books with him when he had first gone to Mexico, for he had not meant to stay there. But at last he had written home to a great London bookseller and ordered fresh copies of all his old books at home. The bookseller had naturally chosen good editions, in some cases rare first editions. But those volumes had never been read, as some of these had been read, over and over and over again.
But now, to-night, he did not feel as if he could commune with any comfort even with one of these comfortable, unexacting friends. He felt too restless, too vividly alive. So suddenly he turned away from the bookcase, and looked about him. A large French box-bed had taken the place of the narrow, old-fashioned bedstead of his youth; and his mother had had moved up to this room a narrow writing-table from the study on the ground floor which no one ever used.
He walked over to that writing-table now, and sat down. On it, close to his left hand, stood a large despatch-box. He opened and took out of it a square sheet of paper on which was embossed his Mexican address. Drawing two lines across that address, and putting in the present date, September 19th, he waited, his pen poised in his hand for a full minute.
Then he began writing rather quickly, and this is what he wrote:—
"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 your approval? 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."
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,"
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."
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."
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 seeing Laura 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 found himself 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 a touch of reluctance, she admired afresh the masses of fair, cendré hair 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.