The unfortunate man--for he was in the full meaning of the words an unfortunate man--stared down at the letter.
He felt moved and perplexed by the way it was worded. "Your affectionate old friend"--what a strange way to sign herself! Mrs. Tropenell had never signed herself so before. And what exactly did she mean by saying that it was her request, not Laura"s? In spite of those words, he felt convinced that Laura, too proud to ask this favour of him after the shameful way she had behaved yesterday, had persuaded Mrs. Tropenell to ask it for her.
He sat down and drew a piece of notepaper towards him. He was glad of the opportunity of showing them all how magnanimous he was--how much of a _man_. Laura should go to London with his full permission. Of course he knew quite well, at the back of his mind, that if he refused it she would probably go just the same. But in all the circ.u.mstances it would be just as well to heap coals of fire on her head. She should go--but not taking their child with her. His little Alice must not be contaminated.
When his daughter was old enough, he, G.o.dfrey, would tell her the truth about her mother"s brother. He did not hold with concealing this sort of thing from young people. In _his_ family, thank G.o.d, there had never been anything to hide. All had always been honest and above-board.
Besides, if anything happened to him, Alice would be a very wealthy woman, and Gillie would almost certainly try and get hold of her and of her money. He, G.o.dfrey, knew that well enough.
"MY DEAR MRS. TROPENELL:--Certainly it shall be as you ask----" He could not help adding, "though Laura knows that in doing this she is disregarding my formal wishes. Still, I admit that, Gillie being her brother, it is, I suppose, natural that she should wish to see him again before he leaves England."
Then he hesitated--indeed, he kept the messenger for whom he had already rung waiting for quite a long time. But at last he signed himself: "Your affectionate, and always grateful, G.o.dfrey Pavely."
When the banker reached home rather early that afternoon--for he felt too much upset to go in and spend his usual pleasant hour with Katty at Rosedean--little Alice met him with the news that "Mummy" had gone to London, and that she, Alice, was going to be allowed to sit up to dinner to bear him company.
It was characteristic of the man that, if relieved, he was also sharply annoyed. He had hoped to extract from his wife some word of reluctant thanks for his magnanimity. But no, she had not even left a note telling him what day she would return!
Things had not fallen out at The Chase that morning as G.o.dfrey Pavely had supposed. After breakfast Laura, still in a kind of stupor of pain and indignation, had gone into the garden. She had not been there a quarter of an hour when Mrs. Tropenell, who so seldom came to The Chase, had suddenly appeared, walking with stately, leisurely steps over the gra.s.s, to tell her of Oliver"s and Gillie"s coming departure for the Continent.
It was Mrs. Tropenell who had proposed sending that note to G.o.dfrey, but G.o.dfrey, who so little understood his wife, either for good or evil, was right in his belief that she would not have allowed her plans to be affected by his answer. At once Laura had determined to go to London, whether G.o.dfrey gave his consent or no. Yet she was relieved when there came to her from Freshley the news that her husband"s answer to Mrs.
Tropenell"s request was in the affirmative.
The message was given to her over the telephone by Oliver Tropenell, and in giving it he used the allusive form of words which come naturally when a man knows that what he says may be overheard: "Mother has just had a note saying that it is quite all right. So we propose to call for you in time to get the five minutes to one from Langford Junction. Does that give you enough time?" And she had exclaimed, "Oh, yes, yes! I"m quite ready now."
To that he had made no answer, and she had felt a little chill at the heart. Oliver"s voice had sounded curiously cold--but then the telephone does sometimes alter voices strangely.
Those eight days in London! Laura was often to live through each of those long days during the dull weeks which followed her return home.
Yet, when she did look back on that time, she had to admit that she had not been really happy, though the first hours had been filled with a sort of excited triumph and sense of victory. It was such a relief, too, to be away from G.o.dfrey, and spared, even if only for a few days, the constant, painful irritation of his presence.
But her brother, for whose sake, after all, she was in London, jarred on her perpetually. For one thing, Gillie was in extravagant, almost unnaturally high spirits, set on what he called "having a good time,"
and his idea of a good time was, as Oliver once grimly remarked, slightly monotonous.
Gillie"s good time consisted in an eager round of business interviews, culminating each evening in a rich dinner at one of the smart grill-rooms which were then the fashion, followed by three hours of a musical comedy, and finally supper at some restaurant, the more expensive the better.
To his sister, each evening so spent seemed a dreary waste of precious time. For in the daytime the two ladies, who had taken rooms in an old-fashioned hotel in a small street off Piccadilly, saw very little of Gillie and Oliver. Gillie had insisted that Oliver and he should go and stay at what he considered the smartest and most modern hotel in London, and though the strangely a.s.sorted quartette always lunched together, the two partners had a good deal to do each morning and most afternoons.
To Mrs. Tropenell"s surprise Oliver apparently had no wish to be with Laura alone. Was it because he was afraid of giving himself away to his coa.r.s.e-minded, jovial partner? Oliver looked stern, abstracted, and, when at the play, bored.
She admitted another possible reason for his almost scrupulous avoidance of Laura. With regard to the bitter feud between the brothers-in-law, Oliver had spoken to his mother with curious apathy. Perhaps he was honestly desirous of not taking sides. But on the whole Mrs. Tropenell swung more often to her first theory, and this view was curiously confirmed on the one Sunday spent by them in town.
Gillie, grumbling, a good deal at the dulness of the English Sunday, had motored off early to the country to spend the day with some people whom he had known in Mexico. And late that morning Oliver suddenly suggested that Laura and he should go out for a turn in the Green Park--only a stone"s-throw from the rooms the two ladies were sharing.
And that hour, which was perhaps fraught with bigger circ.u.mstance than any one, save Oliver himself, was ever to know, did remain in Laura Pavely"s memory as a strange and, in a sense, a delicious oasis, in her long, arid stay in London. For, as the two walked and talked intimately together in a solitude all the greater because peopled by the indifferent and unknown, they seemed to come nearer to one another--and to meet, for the first time, in an atmosphere of clarity and truth.
Laura, perhaps because she had felt, during these last few days, so desperately lonely in a spiritual sense, talked more freely, albeit in a more detached way, to her devoted, considerate, and selfless friend, than she had ever been able to bring herself to do to any other human being.
For a while, after they had turned and begun pacing together under the now yellowing plane trees, neither of them spoke. Then Oliver said abruptly, "So all our schemes have vanished into air--I"m sorry."
"I"m sorry too," she said. "I always knew that G.o.dfrey would never allow me to go away with Gillie, but I never, never thought that even he could behave as he did to my brother the other day----"
There was a sound of suppressed pa.s.sion and revolt in her voice that he had never heard there before. It touched a chord in his own heart, but all he said, slowly, was, "I suppose Gillie irritated him."
"No, I don"t think so. There wasn"t time for Gillie to do anything, for G.o.dfrey at once refused to shake hands with him. That"s how it began."
"Gillie ought to have written first. My mother begged him not to take G.o.dfrey by surprise----"
"Your mother is always right," she said in a low voice. "I"ve never known her wrong yet, though her advice isn"t always easy to follow, Oliver."
"I"m afraid she was right this time, anyhow."
"I know she was."
There fell between them a long, pregnant silence. And then Oliver said, in a low, moved voice, "I"m afraid that this last business has made you very unhappy, Laura?"
She answered, "Yes--foolishly so. I ought not to have been surprised, for by this time I know G.o.dfrey so well." And she believed herself to be speaking the truth.
"It"s not his fault," she went on painfully, "that he has nothing in common with me and with my brother, different as we, too, are the one from the other. Gillie and I might have been born on different planets from G.o.dfrey."
Laura had not meant to speak of G.o.dfrey to Oliver. Indeed, she had formed the resolution never to do so again. But somehow, to-day, she felt as if she might break that salutary rule.
His next words seemed to prove to her that she could trust him to understand, for, "Yes," he said quietly, "you"re right there, Laura. You and G.o.dfrey have nothing in common between you, and that being so, I suppose there"s nothing to be done?"
"No, there"s nothing to be done," she repeated hopelessly. And then once more she broke her wise resolution: "If it hadn"t been for Alice, I should, even now, be tempted to do what I so nearly did at the time that G.o.dfrey and Gillie"--she hesitated--"had their first misunderstanding."
"What you nearly did then, Laura?" There came an eager, questioning thrill in her companion"s strained voice.
"Yes--" Why shouldn"t she unburden her heart for once? "Yes, at the time of that first quarrel between my brother and my husband, I nearly left G.o.dfrey. But for your mother, I should have done so. Alice was a tiny baby then, and I didn"t realise, as I realise now, what an awful responsibility a woman takes on herself in breaking up a child"s happy home. Only your mother stopped my doing it, and the fact"--she looked at him with a soundless depth of sadness in her face--"the fact that Gillie didn"t really want me to go and live with him. Of course it was long before the question of his going to Mexico was raised."
"And have you never regretted that you did not carry out that purpose?"
Oliver Tropenell was looking straight before him as he asked the dangerous question. They were walking, slowly, slowly, along the broad path which runs just within the railings along the park side of Piccadilly. Between twelve and one on an autumn Sunday morning this path is generally deserted.
She did not answer at once, and he said quickly, "Forgive me! I ought not to have asked you that."
"Yes," she said again, "you can ask me anything you like, Oliver. But it"s very difficult to answer such a question truthfully."
And again there fell between them one of those long silences which played a curious part in a conversation neither ever forgot.
At last Laura did answer Oliver"s dangerous question. "I have always known in my heart that your mother was right in making me do what she did--I mean in persuading me that for my little girl"s sake I must go on. Alice loves her father, though I think, perhaps foolishly, that of the two she cares for me best----"
"Of course she does!" he exclaimed.
"But whether that be so or not, I know what a terrible thing it would have been for Alice if G.o.dfrey and I had lived apart. I"ve never doubted that--I don"t doubt it now. But for that I could not go on--after what happened the other day."
"Then if, as is of course possible, you and I don"t meet again for years and years, am I to think of you as always going on in exactly the same way?" he asked.
Some cruel devil outside himself had seemed to force him to utter the hopeless question which he had already made up his mind should be, must be, answered by Fate in the negative.
They had stopped their slow pacing side by side, and he was now looking down into her sad, desolate eyes. He saw the word--the one word "Yes,"