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 G.o.dfrey 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, G.o.dfrey. 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 G.o.dfrey 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 G.o.dfrey and of Katty--and at that thought Katty gave a queer, bitter little laugh which startled her, for she had laughed aloud--as was G.o.dfrey 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 the beginnings of--well, not exactly a flirtation, but a very pleasant friendship between Tropenell and herself. Now he hardly seemed to know that she existed.
But if it was only too plain to see how matters stood with Oliver, this was far from being the case as regarded Laura. Katty owned herself quite ignorant of Laura"s real nature, and, as is so often the case with those who know nothing, she was inclined to believe that there was nothing to know.
Perhaps, after all, it was only because this man was the son of her friend that Laura allowed him to be always with her. They were always together--not always alone, for Oliver seemed to be at The Chase quite as much when G.o.dfrey was at home, as at other times. But with Katty, she being the manner of woman she was, it was the other times which impressed her imagination. In the six short weeks she, Katty, had been away, Oliver Tropenell had evidently become a component part of Laura Pavely"s life.
She knew, vaguely, how the two spent their time, and the knowledge irked her--the more that it suggested nothing of their real relations. Thus gardening was one of Laura"s favourite occupations and few pleasures; and Oliver, who could never have gardened before--what gardening could there be to do in Mexico?--now spent hours out of doors with Laura, carrying out her behests, behaving just as an under-gardener would behave, when working under his mistress"s directions.
And G.o.dfrey, instead of objecting to this extraordinary state of things, seemed quite pleased. Oliver, so much was clear, had become G.o.dfrey Pavely"s friend almost as much as he was Laura"s.
As she lay there, straight out on her bed, Katty told herself with terrible bitterness that it was indeed an amazing state of things to which she had come back--one which altered her own life in a strange degree. She had not realised, till these last few weeks, how much G.o.dfrey Pavely was to her, and how jealous she could become even of such an affection as his cordial liking of Oliver Tropenell.
Yet when G.o.dfrey was actually with her, she retained all her old ascendency over him; in certain ways it had perhaps even increased. It was as if his unsuspecting proximity to another man"s strong, secret pa.s.sion warmed his sluggish, cautious nature.
But that curious fact had not made his friend Katty"s part any the more easy of late. Far from it! There was no pleasing G.o.dfrey in these days.
He was hurt if she was cold; shocked, made uneasy in his conscience, if she responded in ever so slight a way to the little excursions in sentiment he sometimes half-ashamedly permitted himself.
Tears came into her eyes, and rolled slowly down her cheeks, as she recalled what had happened a few moments ago in the hall. He had been aching to take her in his arms and kiss her--kiss her as he had been wont to do, in the old days, in the shabby little lodging where she lived with her father. Poor little motherless girl, who had thought herself so clever. At that time she had believed herself to be as good as engaged to "young Mr. Pavely," as the Pewsbury folk called him. Even now she could remember, as if it had happened yesterday, the bitter humiliation, as well as the pain which had shaken her, when she had learnt, casually, of his sudden disappearance from Pewsbury.
What hypocrites men were! The fact that often they were unconscious hypocrites afforded Katty little consolation.
It was plain that G.o.dfrey was quite unaware of Oliver"s growing absorption in Laura, but that surely was not to his credit. A man of his age, and with his experience of life, ought to have known, ought to have guessed, ought to have seen--by now! Instead, he remained absorbed in himself, in the tiresome little business interests of his prosperous life, in his new friendship for Oliver Tropenell, and--in that ambiguous, tantalising friendship with herself.
Again she told herself that she was wasting what remained to her of youth and of vitality over a thoroughly unsatisfactory state of things, and painfully she determined that, if what she had gradually come to plan since her return home did not come to pa.s.s, she would leave Rosedean, and make another life for herself elsewhere.
The things Katty toiled and schemed for had a way of coming to pa.s.s. She had planned her divorce long before it had actually taken place, at a time indeed when it seemed impossible to believe that it ever could take place. Bob Winslow had been adoringly, slavishly devoted to her for more than two-thirds of their married life, and it had taken her trouble and time to drive him into the courses it was necessary he should pursue to procure her freedom.
She had no doubt--there could be no doubt--that were G.o.dfrey free he would turn to her instinctively at once. She was well aware of her power over him, and till lately she had been virtuously proud of what she imagined to be her loyalty to Laura. Also she had had no wish to make her own position at Rosedean untenable.
Even as it was, G.o.dfrey came far too often to see her. Had she lived nearer to Pewsbury, even a mile nearer, his frequent calls on her would have meant a flood of ill-natured gossip in the little town.
Yes, the situation, from Katty"s point of view, was thoroughly unsatisfactory, and, as far as she was concerned, it was time it was ended or mended. And then, once more, for the hundredth time, her restless, excited mind swung back to what was to her just now the real mystery, the all-important problem--the relations between Oliver Tropenell and Laura Pavely.
Of course it was possible--though Katty thought not likely--that Tropenell was still unaware of his pa.s.sion for Laura. Perhaps he still disguised it under the name of "friendship." But even if that were so, such a state of things could not endure for very long. Any day some trifling happening might open his eyes, and, yes--why not?--G.o.dfrey"s.
CHAPTER VIII
G.o.dfrey Pavely was standing in his private room at Pavely"s Bank. It was only a little after ten, and he had not been in the room many minutes, yet already he had got up from his writing-table and moved over to the middle one of the three windows overlooking the prim, exquisitely kept walled garden, which even nowadays reminded him of his early childhood.
He had gazed out of the window for a few moments, but now he stood with his back to the window, staring unseeingly before him, a piece of note paper crushed up in his hand.
For close on a hundred years his well-to-do careful-living forbears had pa.s.sed their pleasant, uneventful lives in this s.p.a.cious Georgian house, set in the centre of the wide High Street of the prosperous market town of Pewsbury.
What was now known as "Mr. Pavely"s own room" had been the dining-room of his grandparents. He himself had always known it as part of the Bank, but it still had some of the characteristics of a private living-room.
Thus, on the dark green walls hung a number of quaint family portraits, his great-grandfather, his grandfather and grandmother, two uncles who had died in youth, and a presentation portrait of his own father. These were arranged about and above the mantelpiece, opposite the place where stood his wide, leather-topped writing-table.
Taking up most of the wall opposite the windows was a bookcase of really distinguished beauty. G.o.dfrey Pavely had been gratified to learn, some five or six years ago, that this piece of furniture was of very considerable value, owing to the fact that it was supposed to have been, in a special sense, the work and design of Chippendale himself. But just now, at this moment, he felt as if he hated the substantial old house and everything in it.
He had come into this room, twenty minutes ago, to find the usual pile of open letters on the table. On the top of the pile was an unopened envelope marked _Private_, and it was the contents of that envelope that he now held crushed up--not torn up--in his hand.
And as he stood there, staring before him unseeingly at the bookcase, there suddenly flashed into his mind a vision of the first time he had brought Laura here, to his own room at the Bank. They had only just became engaged, and he was still feeling an almost oppressive joy of having compa.s.sed that which he had so steadfastly desired.
He could see her graceful figure walking through the mahogany door, he could almost hear her exclaim, "What a charming room, G.o.dfrey! I can"t help wishing that we were going to live here, in Pewsbury!"
She had gone over and stood exactly where he was standing now, and then she had turned and gazed into the walled garden, at that time brilliant with tulips and wallflowers. Coming round behind her, he had put his arm, a little awkwardly, round her shoulders. At once she had slipped from beneath his grasp, but not unkindly--only with a gentle word that at any moment some one might come in, and he, poor fool that he had been, had admired her maidenly delicacy....
He glanced down at the piece of notepaper he held in his hand, and, smoothing it out, he read it through for the tenth or twelfth time.
Then, as there came a knock at the door, he hastily thrust it into his pocket.
"Come in!" he cried impatiently; and his head clerk came into the room.
Mr. Privet had a delicate, refined, thoughtful face. He was very much respected in the town, and regarded as an important, integral part of Pavely"s Bank. He was one of the very few people in the world who were really attached to G.o.dfrey Pavely, and he perceived at once that there was something wrong.