Secrecy is a delicious concomitant of love." She heard the added, whispered words, uttered as if to his own heart, "At least so I have ever found it." And they were words which a little troubled Laura.
Surely she was the first woman he had ever loved?
"Aunt Letty has a right to know," she murmured. "But no one else, Oliver, must know, till January is past." And then she hung her head, perchance a little ashamed of this harking back to the conventions of her everyday life.
He was surprised to hear her say further and with an effort, "I would rather Lord St. Amant didn"t know. We shall be staying at Knowlton Abbey together in December."
"We shall," he said exultantly. "For that I thank G.o.d!"
Then suddenly he released her from out of his strong encompa.s.sing arms, and stooping down very low he kissed the hem of her long black gown....
After they had parted Oliver Tropenell waited on and on in the dark garden till he heard Lord St. Amant"s car drive away. Then he walked quickly across the lawn and back into his mother"s drawing-room.
"Mother?" he said briefly. "Laura and I are going to be married. But we do not wish any one to know this till--till February."
Even now he could not wholly banish G.o.dfrey Pavely"s intrusive presence from his Laura-filled heart.
CHAPTER XXIII
To any imaginative mind there is surely something awe-inspiring in the thought of the constant secret interlocking of lives which seem as unlikely ever to meet, in a decisive sense, as are two parallel lines.
How amazed, how bewildered, Laura Pavely would have been could she have visioned even a hundredth part of the feeling concerning herself which filled her nearest neighbour, Katty Winslow"s, heart!
Even in the old days Katty had disliked Laura, and had regarded her with a mixture of contempt and envy. And now that Oliver Tropenell had come back--now that Katty suspected him of being Laura"s potential, if not actual, lover--she grew to hate the woman who had always been kind to her with an intense, calculating hate.
It seemed as if she hardly ever looked out of one of her windows without seeing Oliver on his way to The Chase, or Laura on her way to Freshley--and this although the secret lovers behaved with great discretion, for Oliver was less, rather than more, with Laura than he used to be in the old days when G.o.dfrey was alive. Also, wherever Laura happened to be, her child--cheerful, eager little Alice--was sure to be close by.
Laura, so much Katty believed herself to have discovered, was now happy, in her cold, unemotional way, in the possession of a man"s ardent devotion, while she, Katty, who had asked so comparatively little of life, had been deprived of the one human being who could, and perhaps in time would, have given her all she wanted.
Poor G.o.dfrey Pavely! No one ever spoke of him now, in that neighbourhood where once he had counted for so much. Already it was as if he had never been. But to Katty Winslow he was still an insistent, dominating presence. Often she brooded over his untimely death, and sometimes she upbraided herself for not having made some sort of effort to solve the mystery. The reward was still in being, but one day, lately, when she had made some allusion to it in Laura"s presence, Laura, reddening, had observed that she was thinking of withdrawing it.
"Lord St. Amant and the Scotland Yard people never approved of it," she said, "and as you know, Katty, it has led to nothing."
Early in October, Laura, Oliver and Alice, pa.s.sing by Rosedean one day, turned in through the gate. "Why shouldn"t we go in and ask Katty to come to tea?" It was Laura"s suggestion. Somehow she was sorry for Katty--increasingly sorry. Yet she could not help feeling glad when Harber coldly informed her that Mrs. Winslow had left home, and would not be back for ten days.
At the very time that happy little group of people was at her door, Katty herself was standing in a queue of people waiting to take her ticket at York station.
Though Mrs. Winslow would have been honestly surprised had any one told her she was sentimental, she had actually come down by an earlier train than was necessary in order that she might retrace the ways that she and her friend had trodden together a year ago in January.
She had first gone to the Minster, moving swiftly along the paved streets where she had walked and talked slowly, pleasantly, with the dead man. Then she had wandered off to the picturesque thoroughfare lined with curiosity shops. How kind, how generous G.o.dfrey had been to her just here! Every time she looked up in her pretty little drawing-room at Rosedean, his gift met her eye.
While she was engaged on this strange, painful pilgrimage, there welled up in Katty"s heart a flood of agonised regret and resentment. She told herself bitterly that G.o.dfrey"s death had aged her--taken the spring out of her. Small wonder indeed that in these last few weeks she should have come to hate Laura with a steady, burning flame of hate....
So it was that Katty Winslow was in a queer mental and physical state when she returned to the big railway station to complete her journey.
She did not feel at all in the mood to face the gay little houseparty where she was sure of an uproarious, as well as of an affectionate, welcome.
As she stood in the queue of rather rough North-country folk, waiting to take her third-cla.s.s ticket, there swept over her a sudden, vivid recollection of that incident--the hearing of a voice which at the time had seemed so oddly familiar--which had happened on the day she had parted from G.o.dfrey Pavely for the last time.
And then--as in a blinding, yet illuminating flash--there came to her the conviction, nay, more, the certain knowledge, as to whose voice it had been that she had heard on the last occasion when she had stood there, in the large, bare booking office. The voice she had heard--she was quite, _quite_ sure of it now, it admitted of no doubt in her mind at all--had been the peculiar, rather high-pitched, voice of Gillie Baynton....
She visualised the arresting appearance of the man who had been the owner of the voice, and who had gazed at her with that rather impudent, jeering glance of bold admiration. Of course it was Gillie, but Gillie disguised--Gillie with his cheeks tinted a curious greenish-orange colour, Gillie with his fair hair dyed black, Gillie--her brain suddenly supplied the link she was seeking for feverishly--_exactly answering to the description of the sinister Fernando Apra--the self-confessed murderer of G.o.dfrey Pavely_. Katty left the queue in which she was standing, and walked across to a bench.
There she sat down, and, heedless of the people about her, put her chin on her hand and stared before her.
What did her new knowledge portend? What did it lead to? Was Laura a.s.sociated with this extraordinary, bewildering discovery of hers? But the questions she put to herself remained unanswered. She failed to unravel even a little strand of the tangled skein.
Slowly she got up again, and once more took her place in the queue outside the booking office. It would be folly to lose her train because of this discovery, astounding, illuminating, as it was.
She was so shaken, so excited, that she longed to confide in one of the Haworths, brother or sister, to whose house she was going--but some deep, secretive instinct caused her to refrain from doing that. Still, she was so far unlike herself, that after her arrival the members of the merry party all commented to one another on the change they saw in her.
"She"s as pretty as ever," summed up one of them at last, "but somehow she looks different."
All that night Katty lay awake, thinking, thinking--trying to put together a human puzzle of which the pieces would not fit. Gillie Baynton, even if he disliked his brother-in-law, had no motive for doing the awful thing she was now beginning to suspect he had done. She found herself floating about in a chartless sea of conjectures, of suspicions....
She felt better, more in possession of herself, the next morning. Yet she was still oppressed with an awful sense of bewilderment and horror, uncertain, too, as to what use she could make of her new knowledge.
Should she go straight up to town and tell Sir Angus Kinross of what had happened to her yesterday? Somehow she shrank from doing that. He would suspect her of simply trying to s.n.a.t.c.h the reward. Katty had never been quite at ease with the Commissioner of Police--never quite sure as to what he knew, or did not know, of her past relations to G.o.dfrey Pavely.
And yet those relations had been innocent enough, in all conscience!
Sometimes Katty, when thinking of those terrible times last January, had felt sorry she had not told Sir Angus the truth as to that joint journey to York. But, having hidden the fact at first, she had been ashamed to confess it later--and now she would have to confess it.
She was still in this anxious, debating-within-herself frame of mind when, at luncheon, something happened which seemed to open a way before her.
Her host, Tony Haworth, was talking of the neighbourhood, and he said, rather ruefully: "Of course a man like that old rascal who calls himself Greville Howard is worse than no good as a neighbour! For one thing he"s a regular recluse. He hardly ever goes outside his park gates. I suppose the conscience of a man who"s done so many naughty deeds in a good world is apt to make him feel a bit nervous!"
"How far off does he live from here?" asked Katty slowly. The scene at the inquest rose up before her, especially that moment when "Greville Howard"s" affidavit, accompanied by his doctor"s certificate, had been read aloud amid a ripple of amus.e.m.e.nt from the general public present.
"About four miles--but no one ever sees him. He"s more or less of an invalid. It"s a beautiful old house, and they say he"s got some wonderful pictures and furniture there."
"Does he live quite alone?"
Her host hesitated. "Well, yes--but sometimes he has a lady of sorts there. He brought one back from France last June (he has a villa at Monte Carlo), and then--" Tony Haworth hesitated again, but Katty was looking at him eagerly--"then something dreadful happened! The poor woman died. She got a chill, developed pneumonia, and, to do the old rascal justice, he got down the biggest man he could from town. But it was no good--she died just the same! As far as I know, he"s quite alone now--and precious lonely he must find it!"
Katty was very silent for the rest of the meal, and after luncheon she drew her host aside.
"Look here," she said abruptly. "I"ve something to tell you, Tony. I want to see that person we were speaking about--I mean Greville Howard.
I want to see him about G.o.dfrey Pavely. You know he is one of the few people who actually saw the man who killed G.o.dfrey. At the time of the inquest he was ill, and so couldn"t attend--I think the police thought he shammed illness. Sir Angus Kinross was convinced (and so was Lord St.
Amant) that this Greville Howard knew a great deal more about Fernando Apra than he was willing to tell."
Tony Haworth was much taken aback.
"My dear girl, I don"t think there"s a chance of your getting at him!
However, of course you shall be driven over as soon as you like. He _may_ see you--_you"re_ not the sort of person he"s afraid of."
He looked at her a little sharply. "You never had any money dealings with him, had you, Katty? Now, honour bright----"