The Greatest Works of Marie Belloc Lowndes. Marie Belloc Lowndes
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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 one of 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.
Chapter V
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 Baynton and 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.
"Did you make 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, "affect our relations, 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 done anything to stop it!"
"What d'you mean exactly, mother, by different ideals of life?"
As he asked the question he moved away from her a 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