The Greatest Works of Marie Belloc Lowndes. Marie Belloc Lowndes
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"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