Love and hatred Part 4

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 n.o.ble 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, foetid 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 grat.i.tude 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 G.o.dfrey Pavely--jealous in the burning, scorching sense which is so often the terrible concomitant of such a pa.s.sion as that which now possessed him.

G.o.dfrey Pavely's presence in his own house, his slightly tyrannical, often possessive att.i.tude 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.

CHAPTER III

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 G.o.dfrey 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 ma.s.ses of fair, _cendre_ 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.

Her marriage had withdrawn her from the circle of the old friends and neighbours among whom she had been brought up, in a measure because none of them could "do," excepting in a very casual and cursory sense, with G.o.dfrey Pavely. The world of his youth, the little world in and about the country town of Pewsbury, to which he had introduced her as a bride with such exultant complacency, found her not only disagreeably superior, but also dull. Besides, during the early days of her marriage she had been too bewildered by the conditions of her new life, and of her relationship with her husband, to trouble about making new friends, or even new acquaintances.

And so it was that in any intimate sense Mrs. Tropenell was still Laura's only close friend, but the younger woman was rather pathetically aware of how little she really possessed of the older woman's heart, how constantly she was compared, and ever to her detriment, to her dead mother, even how unconscious a rival in the older woman's favour was Laura's own child--merry, cheerful, loving little Alice.

"Aunt Letty? I didn't see you were there."

Laura Pavely had a delightful voice--low, clear, vibrating. It was a voice which sometimes seemed to promise more depth of feeling than its owner ever chose to betray.

As she stooped to kiss Mrs. Tropenell, Laura let herself slide down on to the floor. She knelt there for a moment, and the light gleamed on her fair hair and upturned face. "Alice sent you her love," she said softly, "heaps of love. She's better to-night, though not quite well yet!" And then, as there came a sound of quick footsteps across the hall, she rose, and drew herself up to her full height, with the grace of movement and the absence of flurry which were both so characteristic of her.

Mrs. Tropenell looked up quickly. Had Laura flushed, as she sometimes did flush, with a deep, unbecoming reddening of her pale face, when moved or startled? No, she seemed, if anything, paler, more impa.s.sive than usual, and Oliver's mother asked herself, yet again, what of late she had so often asked herself--if Laura was capable of _any_ feeling, _any_ pa.s.sion, save a feeling of horror, a pa.s.sion of repugnance, for aught which seemed to smirch her own fastidious physical and spiritual ent.i.ty.

That she loved her child, the high-spirited, happy-natured little girl, whose presence alone made life sweet and normal at Lawford Chase, Mrs.

Tropenell could not doubt--she had had proof of how deeply Laura loved her child on the only occasion danger had come near to Alice--during a bout of some childish ailment, when for a few hours the little creature had been in danger of death. She, the older woman, had been frightened, awed, by Laura's terrible, dry-eyed agony....

Oliver Tropenell opened the door, and as he walked across the room, his mother's heart quivered with jealous pain, and even with a feeling of secret, impotent anger, as she saw the eager, rapt look which lighted up his dark face.

Laura held out her ringless right hand, but he only just touched it.

"I'm sorry I'm late!" he exclaimed. "As a matter of fact I was reading a letter just come, by the second post, from Gillie."

"I've written to Gillie to-day," Laura said quietly. It seemed such a long, long time since yesterday morning. She felt as if the extraordinary thing which had happened then had been blotted out.

"Have you sent your letter off?"

"No, not yet," she was surprised at the question.

And then there fell a curious silence on those three people, till at last the door opened, and dinner was announced.

"Oliver! Take in Laura," said Mrs. Tropenell.

On the last occasion when the three had dined alone together there had been a little smiling discussion as to the order in which they should go into the dining-room. But that had been many weeks ago. They were not in such a light mood to-night, and yet--and yet, why should they not be?

The hostess knew of no reason.

The two paired off together, and Oliver's mother asked herself, for perhaps the thousandth time in the last three months, why she had allowed this--this friendship between her son and Laura Pavely to come about? It would have been so easy to arrange that she and her son should spend the summer abroad! When he had first come home there had been a talk of their going away together to Italy, or to France--France, which they had both loved when he was a clever, ardent, headstrong boy, with a strength of brain and originality of mind too big for his boyish boots.

But the harm, what harm there was--sometimes she hoped it was not so very much harm after all--had been done quickly. By the end of that first month at home, Oliver had lost all wish to leave Freshley.

In those early days--or was it that already he was being unconsciously hypocritical as men are wont to be when in such case as that in which he now found himself?--he had seemed to have formed an even closer friendship with G.o.dfrey Pavely than with G.o.dfrey Pavely's wife. They had even made a joint business expedition to town together, G.o.dfrey as Oliver's guest, staying in one of those luxurious hotels which seem equally attractive to the millionaire and the adventurer. But Oliver had at last thrown off, when alone with his mother, any pretence of liking, far less of respecting, G.o.dfrey Pavely. Yet when with the other man he still kept up the sinister fiction. She knew that.

The three sat down in the pretty, octagon-shaped dining-room, and the mother and son talked, Laura saying very little, and never giving, always accepting--in that sense, perhaps, an elemental woman after all!

Even so, she showed, when she did rouse herself to express an opinion, that there was a good deal of thought and of intelligence in her small, beautiful head.

Mrs. Tropenell, sitting at the top of the oval table, told herself that in a primeval sense such a woman as Laura might well be the complement of such a man as was Oliver. He had strength, pa.s.sion, idealism, enough to furnish forth half a dozen ordinary human beings. And he had patience too--patience which is but another name for that self-control in the secret things of pa.s.sion which often brings men's desires to fruition.

It was patience and self-control which had been so lacking in G.o.dfrey Pavely during those early days when Laura had at least desired to fulfil her duty as a wife.

And yet again and again during that uncomfortable half-hour Mrs.

Tropenell caught herself wishing that G.o.dfrey Pavely was there, sitting on her right hand. G.o.dfrey always had plenty to say for himself, especially in that house, and when he felt secure of the discretion of those about him, he would often tell much that he ought, in his character of banker, to have left unsaid. He knew the private business of every one, gentle or simple, for miles round, and took an easy, unaffected interest in it all. It was only when he touched on wider matters, especially on politics, that he grew unbearably tedious and prosy. But then the only person whom Mrs. Tropenell ever listened to with pleasure on such subjects was her old friend, Lord St. Amant, who always knew what he was talking about, and always salted what he knew with happy flashes of wit and humour.