The Greatest Works of Marie Belloc Lowndes. Marie Belloc Lowndes
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out—here and now.
"Do you like Jim Beath?" he asked slowly; "I know you've been seeing a great deal of them this last year. In fact, he mentioned you to-day."
She could read him like a book, and she remained silent long enough to make him feel increasingly suspicious and uncomfortable.
But to-day Katty was not in the mood for a cat-and-mouse game, so she answered deliberately: "No, Godfrey, I can't say that I do like Jim Beath! I've tried to like him. But—well, I do thoroughly understand Nita's feeling towards him. He's so sarcastic—so hard and unsympathetic!" She waited a moment, then added significantly: "Still, I think he's behaving awfully well now. He'd have been quite willing to go on—he told me that himself. But when he saw that Nita was really unhappy, and that she was getting fond of another man, he made up his mind that he would do all he could to make her free."
Katty was playing rather nervously with the edge of the pretty tea-cloth, and Pavely wondered whether she was telling him the whole truth. She was flushed, and she looked unwontedly moved.
"It's a very odd thing for a man to do," he said coldly. "I mean a man being willing to give up his wife to another man."
"Why shouldn't he? When he doesn't love her, and when she positively dislikes him! Nita never understood Jim Beath—she was always afraid of him, and of his sharp, clever tongue. Of course it's sad about their little boy. But they've made a very good arrangement—they're going to share him. Jim will have the child half the year, and Nita the other half, till he goes to school—when they will have him for alternate holidays."
"You talk as if it was all settled!" Katty's visitor exclaimed crossly. "If they say as much to other people as they seem to do to you, they will never get their divorce—the King's Proctor is sure to intervene!"
Katty gave a quick, curious look at her visitor. Godfrey went too far—sometimes.
The thought flashed through her mind that she was wasting her life, her few remaining years of youth, on a man who would never be more to her than he was now, unless—unless, that is, she could bring him to the point of putting himself imaginatively, emotionally into Jim Beath's shoes. Then everything might be changed. But was there any hope of such a thing coming to pass?
But all she said, in a constrained tone, was, "Of course I ought not to have said anything of the matter to you at all. But I'm afraid, Godfrey, that I often do tell you things I ought to keep to myself. You must try and forget what I said."
He was surprised, bewildered, by the sudden steely coldness of her tone. "Of course you can say anything you like to say to me. Why, Katty, I tell you all my secrets!"
"Do you?" She glanced over at him rather sharply. "I don't think you tell me all your secrets, Godfrey."
He looked at her puzzled. "You know that I do," he said in a low voice. "Come, Katty, you're not being fair! It's because I have such a high regard for you, that I feel sorry when you talk as you've been talking just now—as if, after all, the marriage bond didn't matter."
But even as he said these words, Godfrey Pavely felt a wild impulse to throw over the pretty little gimcrack tea-table, take Katty in his arms, and kiss her, kiss her, kiss her! He came back, with an inward start, to hear her exclaim,
"I don't consider the peculiar relations which exist between Nita and Jim Beath a marriage at all! They have nothing in common the one with the other. What interests him doesn't interest her——"
She waited a moment, saw that he was reddening uncomfortably, and then hurried on, driven by some sudden instinct that she was at last playing on the hidden chord she had so often longed to find and strike in Godfrey Pavely's sore heart: "Nita can't bear Jim to touch her—she will hardly shake hands with him! Do you call that a marriage?"
As he remained silent, she suddenly said in a voice so low as to be almost a whisper, "Forgive me, Godfrey. I—I ought not have said that to you."
He answered loudly, discordantly, "I don't know what you mean, Katty! Why shouldn't you say anything you like about these people? They are nothing, and less than nothing to me, and I don't suppose they're very much to you."
Even as he spoke he had got up out of the easy chair into which he had sunk with such happy content a few minutes before. "I must be going now," he said heavily, "Oliver Tropenell's coming in for a game of tennis at six."
She made no effort to keep him, though she longed to say to him: "Oliver Tropenell's been in your house, and in your garden, all afternoon. Both he and Laura would be only too pleased if you stayed on here till dinner-time."
But instead of saying that, she got up, and silently accompanied him to the front door.
There poor Godfrey did linger regretfully. He felt like a child who has been baulked of some promised treat—not by his own fault, but by the fault of those about him. "Will you be in to-morrow?" he asked abruptly. "I think I might come in a little earlier to-morrow, Katty."
"Yes, do come to-morrow! I seem to have a hundred things to say to you. I'm sorry we wasted the little time we had to-day in talking over those tiresome people and their matrimonial affairs."
There was also a look of regret in her face, and suddenly he told himself that he might have been mistaken just now, and that she had meant nothing—nothing in the least personal or—or probing, in what she had said. "Look here!" he said awkwardly. "If there's anything you really want to say—you said you had a hundred things to tell me—would you like me to come back for a few minutes? There's no great hurry, you know—I mean about Tropenell and his game."
She shook her head, and to his moved surprise, the tears came into her pretty brown eyes. "No, not now. I'm tired, Godfrey. It's rather absurd, but I haven't really got over my journey yet; I think I shall have to take your advice, and stay at home rather more."
For a long moment they advanced towards one another as if something outside themselves was drawing them together. Then Godfrey Pavely put out his hand, and grasped hers firmly. It was almost as if he was holding her back—at arm's length.
Katty laughed nervously. She shook her hand free of his, opened the door wide, and exclaimed: "Well! Good-bye till to-morrow then. My love to Laura."
He nodded, and was gone.
She shut the door behind him, and, turning, went slowly upstairs. She felt tired, weak, upset—and, what she did not often feel, restless and unhappy as well. It irritated her—nay, it did more than irritate, it hurt her shrewdly—to think of those three people who were about to spend a pleasant couple of hours together. She could so easily, so safely, have made a fourth at their constant meetings.
If only Laura Pavely were a little less absorbed in herself, a little more what ordinary people called good-natured! It would have been so natural for Laura, when she knew that Oliver Tropenell was coming to dinner, to send across to Rosedean, and ask her, Katty, to make a fourth. It was not as if Laura was at all jealous. She was as little jealous of Godfrey and of Katty—and at that thought Katty gave a queer, bitter little laugh which startled her, for she had laughed aloud—as was Godfrey of Laura and Oliver! With as little or as much reason? Katty would have given a great deal to be able to answer her own question. She thought she knew half the answer—but it was, alas! by far the less important half.
She opened the door of her bedroom, went through into it, and without troubling to take off her pretty blouse and freshly ironed linen skirt, walked deliberately to her bed, lay down, and shut her eyes—not to sleep but to think.
What had been forced upon Katty Winslow's notice during the last few weeks had created a revolution in her mind and in her plans.
For a while, after her return from that dreary period of convalescence in a seaside home, she, who was generally so positive, had doubted the evidence of her own eyes and senses. But gradually that which she would have deemed the last thing likely to happen had emerged, startlingly clear. Oliver Tropenell, to use Katty's own expression, had fallen madly in love with Laura Pavely. No woman could doubt that who saw them together. When Katty had left Rosedean, there had been