The Greatest Works of Marie Belloc Lowndes. Marie Belloc Lowndes
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Godfrey Pavely nodded, walked on, and so out and across the High Street. He could not help feeling a little vexed that Oliver and Laura should have driven into Pewsbury—this morning, of all mornings. He wondered if they often did so. It was fortunate that nothing had happened to that stupid child. It would have been very unpleasant for his wife to be compelled to give evidence at an inquest....
He did not enjoy his luncheon as much as he was wont to do. In a sense he was king of the old-fashioned County Club; every member of it was either on good terms with the prosperous banker, or desired to be so. But try as he might he could not get that odious, absurd, anonymous letter out of his mind! He told himself again and again that it was thoughtless and—and yes, unbecoming—of Laura, to drive in and out of Pewsbury with Oliver Tropenell. Somehow it was the sort of thing he would never have thought his wife was likely to do. Again he wondered if she did it often. If yes, such conduct would of course provide ample reason for low, vulgar gossip.
When, at last, Godfrey Pavely walked back across to the Bank, he had come to the point of asking himself whether after all it might not be best to say just a word of caution to Laura. It need not be more than a word—he knew her well enough to know that! She was the kind of woman to shrink with fastidious disgust from the thought of her name being connected, in any vulgar silly way, with that of a man.
But his mind swung backwards and forwards, like a pendulum. The possibility of his agreeable, cordial relations with Oliver Tropenell being in any way jarred or disturbed so upset him that, finally, he made up his mind to say nothing to Laura.
At three o'clock the banker walked up to his head clerk's room. "I think I'll go home early to-day, Privet," he said.
The old man got up from his chair. He was not only fond, he was proud too, of his employer. Mr. Pavely was a model banker, a model worker. He never went home before four, and often stayed on working till five.
"Very good, sir. It's a fine afternoon. I often wonder you stay as long as you do," he said, with that queer touch of affection in his voice which Godfrey Pavely valued perhaps more than he knew.
The walk home seemed much longer than usual. Two miles and a bit? He was proud of the fact that he could do it with ease in five minutes over the half-hour. To-day, as a matter of fact, he walked so quickly that he did it in twenty-seven minutes, but he was not aware of that.
For the first time for months, he passed by Rosedean without as much as giving Katty a thought, and he took a short cut into The Chase instead of going on, up through the great park gates, as he was wont to do. And then, as he went along one of the paths in the walled kitchen garden, he suddenly heard his wife's voice.
"I think that it would be best to have a mass of red and purple just here. Last year we had blues."
He felt a queer, rather unreasoning, shock of relief, of satisfaction. Laura was evidently speaking to one of the gardeners.
Then, as he came round the corner, he saw that the person to whom Laura was speaking was not a gardener, but Oliver Tropenell himself—Oliver, with a spud in his hand, kneeling before Laura, a basket of bulbs by his side. He was looking up eagerly—a jealous onlooker might have said ardently—into her face. In fact, Tropenell looked, so Godfrey Pavely told himself with some heat, "damned absurd." But before Godfrey came right upon the three of them—for little Alice was flitting about behind her mother—Oliver stood up, with the words, "Then I'd better go and get those other bulbs, hadn't I? Will you come too, Alice?"
Godfrey called out "Hullo! Doing some planting?" But his voice sounded odd to himself. Not so, however, to the others. Laura was honestly unaware that Godfrey was very much earlier than his wont, or, if aware, she did not attach any importance to the fact. Still, she felt afraid that Godfrey would interfere with her gardening scheme, and so she shook her head.
As for Oliver Tropenell, no one looking at his dark, set face could have guessed his thoughts. As a matter of fact, he had heard Pavely's footsteps some moments before Pavely spoke. And he had wondered, with quick irritation, why he had come back from Pewsbury—or Rosedean—so much earlier than usual.
Alice, dark-haired, rosy-cheeked, quite curiously unlike either her father or her mother, was the only one of the four who was still happily at ease. She ran up to her father: "Come and see my garden, father!" she cried. "I'm growing some mustard and cress specially for you. You can take it to the Bank in an envelope and have some for your tea!"
The little girl was aware, deep in her sensitive, affectionate heart, that her father and mother were not quite like other fathers and mothers. They were not cosily loving together, as were the father and mother of the two little girls with whom she sometimes went to tea in Pewsbury, neither were they on the happy terms of easy comradeship which even Alice knew was usual with other children's parents.
But she loved her mother with a passionate, unswerving, admiring love, and her father with a stout, proprietary affection. For his sake, and his sake only, she would have liked to be a boy, for then, so she argued secretly within herself, she could be his office boy at the Bank. Up to now she had felt for Oliver Tropenell the easy, unquestioning liking children give to one who comes and goes. But lately she had become dimly aware that occasionally her mother and Mr. Tropenell were too busy talking together to take much heed of her, and this threw a little shadow across her heart.
For Godfrey Pavely there followed days full of discomfort, unease, and rising annoyance. The whole course of his life was changed. As he came and went about the quiet streets of his native town, as he granted business interviews to the townspeople, he was perpetually asking himself if the person he was speaking to was concerned with this odious matter, whether he or she was among those who took his beautiful wife's name lightly.
His object each afternoon was now to get home early, and see for himself what was going on there, and how far Laura was giving cause for low, vulgar gossip.
Laura was not a child! She must know, if she ever brought herself to think of such a thing, that if a married woman allows a man to hang about her, day after day, in the absence of her husband, there is sure to be talk. Pavely regarded Tropenell's share in the matter with a strange toleration—it was his wife whom he blamed with an increasing severity as the minutes, the hours, and the days went by.
He still went to see Katty Winslow, but no longer as often as he had been wont to do. And when in her company he was distrait, uncomfortable, longing to ask if she thought Oliver's constant presence in his house odd or—or peculiar. But he kept a prudent guard over his tongue. One day Katty said something which would have made it easy for him to speak, and which, as a matter of fact, very nearly did cause him to unburden his heart to her. It was a little word, and said quite pleasantly, with, he felt sure, no ulterior motive of any kind.
"It's odd," she said musingly, "to see what good friends Laura has become with Oliver Tropenell! Who would have thought that she would ever like any man as much as she seems to like him? I suppose it's really owing to the fact that he's in partnership with her brother——"
She waited, and as he said nothing, she went on, with a smile, "But then, for the matter of that, you're just as fond of him as she is, aren't you? I can't see the attraction myself, but I admit that it must be there, for two people as unlike you and Laura are to each other both to like him so much."
"Yes, I do like Tropenell," Godfrey spoke very decidedly. "But I can't make out why he gets on so well with Gilbert Baynton. Gillie couldn't run straight if he tried."
"So I've always understood——"
Katty looked at him curiously. She had never been told the real story of the quarrel between the brothers-in-law, but she was clever enough to have reached a very shrewd notion of the truth. Baynton, so much was clear, had done something which Pavely could neither tolerate nor forgive. In the old days, as a girl, Katty had met Gillie Baynton several times, and he had struck her as a very amusing, agreeable sort of young man.
Godfrey had let slip this opportunity of saying anything, and afterwards, as is usually the case, he was glad that he had kept silence. Clever and sympathetic as she was, Katty could do nothing to help him in this horrid, rather degrading business.