"I"m sure I am."
There came a long silence between them.
Mrs. Tropenell could see her son in outline, as it were, his well-shaped head, and long, lean, finely proportioned body. He was sitting at the further end of the bench, and he was now staring right before him. She found it easier--far easier--to speak of G.o.dfrey than of Laura. And so, musingly, she went on:
"Looking back a dozen years, I can think of several young women whom G.o.dfrey would have done well to consider----"
"I can certainly think of one, mother," he said, and in the darkness there came a bitter little smile over his face.
"You mean Katty Winslow? Yes--I think you"re right, my dear. When G.o.dfrey turned from Katty to Laura, he made a terrible mistake. Katty, in the old days, had very much the same ambitions, and the same social aspirations, as himself. She was really fond of him too! She would have become--what"s the odious word?--"smart." And G.o.dfrey would have been proud of her. By now he would have stood for Parliament, and then, in due course, would have come a baronetcy. Yes, if the G.o.ds had been kind, G.o.dfrey Pavely would have married poor little Katty--he didn"t behave over well to her, you know!"
"It seems to me that Mrs. Winslow has made quite a good thing of her life, mother."
"Do you really think that, Oliver?"
"Yes, I do. She managed very cleverly, so I"m told, to get rid of that worthless husband of hers, and now she"s got that pretty little house, and that charming little garden, and as much of G.o.dfrey as she seems to want." He spoke with a kind of hard indifference.
"Katty"s not the sort of woman to be really satisfied with a pretty little house, a charming little garden, and a platonic share in another woman"s husband."
"Then she"ll marry again. People seem to think her very attractive."
There was a long pause.
"Mother?"
"Yes, my dearest."
"To return to Laura--what should have been _her_ fate had the G.o.ds been kind?"
She left his question without an answer so dangerously long as to create a strange feeling of excitement and strain between them. Then, reluctantly, she answered it. "Laura might have been happiest in not marrying at all, and in any case she should have married late. As to what kind of man would have made her happy, of course I have a theory."
"What is your theory?" He leant towards her, breathing rather quickly.
"I think," she said hesitatingly, "that Laura might have been happy with a man of the world, older than herself, who would have regarded his wife as a rare and beautiful possession. Such a man would have understood the measure of what she was willing and able to give--and to withhold. I can also imagine Laura married to a young idealist, the kind of man whose att.i.tude to his wife is one of worship, whose demands, if indeed they can be called demands, are few, infrequent----"
Mrs. Tropenell stopped abruptly. What she had just said led to a path she did not mean to follow. But she soon realised with dismay that she had said too much, or too little.
"Do you mean," said Oliver hoa.r.s.ely, "that Pavely--that Pavely----" he left his question unfinished, but she knew he meant to exact an answer and she did not keep him waiting long for it. Still she chose her words very carefully.
"I think that G.o.dfrey Pavely, in the matter of his relations to his wife, is a very unfortunate, and, some would say, a very ill-used man, Oliver."
Oliver Tropenell suddenly diminished the distance between his mother and himself. The carefully chosen, vague words she had just uttered had been like balm poured into a festering and intolerably painful wound.
"Poor devil!" he said contemptuously, and there was a rather terrible tone of triumph, as well as of contempt, in the muttered exclamation.
Mrs. Tropenell was startled and, what she seldom was, frightened. She felt she was face to face with an elemental force--the force of hate.
She repeated his last words, but in how different a spirit, in how different a tone! "Poor devil? Yes, Oliver, G.o.dfrey is really to be pitied, and I ask you to believe me, my son, when I say that he does do his duty by Laura according to his lights."
"Mother?" He put out his hand in the darkness and just touched hers.
"Why is it that Laura is so much fonder of you than you are of Laura?
You don"t respect--or even like--G.o.dfrey?"
She protested eagerly. "But I _am_ fond of Laura--very, very fond, Oliver! But though, as you say, I neither really like nor respect G.o.dfrey, I can"t help being sorry for him. He once said to me--it"s a long time ago--"I thought I was marrying a woman, but I"ve married a marble statue. I"m married to something like _that_"--and he pointed to "The Wingless Victory" your father brought me, years ago, from Italy.
G.o.dfrey is an unhappy man, Oliver--come, admit that you know that?"
"I think she"s far, far more unhappy than he is! No man with so thoroughly good an opinion of himself is ever _really_ unhappy. Still, it"s a frightful tangle."
He stopped short for a moment, then in a very low voice, he asked her, "Is there no way of cutting it through, mother?" Suddenly he answered his own question in a curiously musing, detached tone. "I suppose the only way in which such a situation is ever terminated is by death."
"Yes," she said slowly, "but it"s not a usual termination. Still, I have known it happen." More lightly she went on: "If Laura died, G.o.dfrey wouldn"t escape Katty a second time. And one must admit that she would make him an almost perfect wife."
"_And if G.o.dfrey died, mother?_"
Mrs. Tropenell felt a little tremor of fear shoot through her burdened heart. This secret, intimate conversation held in the starry night was drifting into strange, sinister, uncharted channels. But her son was waiting for an answer.
"I don"t know how far Laura"s life would alter for the better if G.o.dfrey died. I suppose she would go on much as she does now. And, Oliver----"
"Yes, mother."
"I should pity and--rather despise the man who would waste his life in an unrequited devotion."
He made an impatient movement. "Then do you regard response as essential in every relationship between a man and a woman?"
"I have never yet known a man who did not regard it as essential," she said quietly, "and that, however he might consciously or unconsciously pretend to be satisfied with--nothing."
"I once knew a man," he said, in a low, tense voice, "who for years loved a woman who seemed unresponsive, who forced him to be content with the merest crumbs of--well, _she_ called it friendship. And yet, mother, that man was happy in his love. And towards the end of her life the woman gave all that he had longed for, all he had schooled himself to believe it was not in her to give--but it had been there all the time!
She had suffered, poor angel, more than he--" his voice broke, and his mother, turning towards him, laid for a moment her hand on his, as she whispered, "Was that woman at all like Laura, my darling?"
"Yes--as far as a Spaniard, and a Roman Catholic, can be like Laura, she was like Laura."
Even as he spoke he had risen to his feet, and during their short walk, from the bench where they had been sitting through the trees and across the lawn, neither spoke to the other. But, as he opened the house door, he said, "Good-night. I"m not coming in now; I"m going for a walk. I haven"t walked all day." He hesitated a moment: "Don"t be worried--I won"t say don"t be frightened, for I don"t believe, mother, that anything could ever frighten you--if you hear me coming in rather late.
I"ve got to think out a rather difficult problem--something connected with my business."
"I hope Gillie hasn"t been getting into any sc.r.a.pe since you"ve come home?"
But she only spoke by way of falling in with his humour. Nothing mattered to her, or to him, just now, except--Laura.
He said hastily, "Oh no, things have been going very well out there. You must remember, mother, that Baynton"s sc.r.a.pes never affect his work."
He spoke absently, and she realised that he wanted to be away, by himself, to think over some of the things she had said to him, and so she turned and went slowly up the staircase, and pa.s.sed through into her own bedroom without turning up the light.
Walking over to her window, she gazed down into the moonlit s.p.a.ce beneath. But she could see no moving shadow, hear no sound. Oliver had padded away across the gra.s.s, making for the lonely downs which encircled, on three sides, the house.
Before turning away from her window, Mrs. Tropenell covered her face with her hands; she was fearfully moved, shaken to the depths of her heart. For the first time Oliver had bared his soul before her. She thrilled with pride in the pa.s.sionate, wayward, in a measure n.o.bly selfless and generous human being whom she had created.
How strange, how amazing that Laura made no response to that ardent, exalted pa.s.sion! But if amazing, then also, from what ought to be every point of view, how fortunate! And yet, unreasonable though it was, Mrs.
Tropenell felt sharply angered with Laura, irritated by that enigmatic, self-absorbed, coldness of hers. What a poor maimed creature, to be so blind, so imperceptive, to the greatest thing in the world! Dislike, a physical distaste for the unlucky G.o.dfrey which seemed sometimes to amount to horror, were this beautiful woman"s nearest approach to pa.s.sion.