Mrs. Tropenell, waiting for Oliver to come back, lost count of time, and
yet not much more than half an hour had gone by before she heard the
sound of a glazed door, which opened on to the garden from a distant
part of the house, burst open.
In that sound she seemed to hear all the impatience, all the pain, all
the frustrated longing she divined in her son.
She got up from her chair and stood listening. Would he go straight
upstairs--as she, in her stormy, passionate youth, would have done in
his place?
But no--with a feeling of rushing, unreasoning joy she heard him coming
across the hall. A moment later he walked through into the room and came
and stood before her.
"Mother," he said, "it's a beautiful night. Would you care to come into
the garden for a few minutes?"
As soon as they had stepped out of the French window into the darkness,
she took his arm.
"You don't feel it cold?" he asked solicitously.
"Oh no," she said, surprised. "I'm so little cold, Oliver, that I
shouldn't at all mind going over to the blue bench, and sitting down."
They went across the grass, to a curious painted Italian bench which had
been a gift of the woman who was so much in both their thoughts.
And there, "I want to ask you a question," he said slowly. "What led to
the marriage of Laura Baynton and Godfrey Pavely? From something she
once said to me, I gather she thinks that you approved of it."
She felt as if his eyes were burning her in the darkness, and as she
hesitated, hardly knowing what to say, he went on, and in his voice
there was something terribly accusing.
"Did _you_ make the marriage, mother? Did you really advise her to take
that fellow?"
The questions stung her. "No," she answered coldly. "I did nothing of
the kind, Oliver. If you wish to know the truth, the person who was most
to blame was your friend Gillie, Laura's brother. Laura adored her
brother. There was nothing in the world she wouldn't have done for him,
and she married Godfrey--it seems a strange thing to look back on
now--to please Gillie."
"But she met Pavely here?"
"Yes, of course she did. As you know, she very often stayed with me
after her father died, and when Gillie Baynton, instead of making a home
for her, was getting into scrape after scrape, spending her money as
well as his own."
He muttered, "Gillie knew she was to have money later."
She went on: "And then Godfrey Pavely in love is a very different person
from Godfrey Pavely--well, out of love. He was set on marrying Laura,
and that over years. He first asked her when she was seventeen, and they
married when she was twenty-one. In the interval he had done Gillie many
good turns. In fact Godfrey bought Laura from Gillie. That, Oliver, is
the simple truth."
She waited for him to make some kind of comment, but he said nothing,
and she went on, a tinge of deep, yearning sadness in her voice, "Don't
let your friends, or rather their incompatibility of temper--" she
hesitated, and then rather solemnly ended her sentence with the words,
"affect _our_ relations, my son."
"I'm sorry, mother." Tropenell's voice altered, softened. "Forgive me
for the way I spoke just now! I had got it into my head--I didn't know
quite exactly why--that you had promoted the marriage. I see now that
you really had nothing to do with it."
"I won't say that! It's difficult to remember exactly what did happen.
Godfrey never wearied in his slow, inexorable pursuit of Laura. I think
that at last she was touched by his constancy. She knew nothing then of
human nature--she knows nothing of it now."
He muttered, "Poor girl! Poor unfortunate girl!" and his way of uttering
the commonplace words hurt his mother shrewdly.
Suddenly she made up her mind to say at least one true thing to him. It
was a thing she knew well no one but herself would ever say to Oliver.
"I am in a position to know," she said, "and I want you to believe it
when I tell you, that if Laura is to be as much pitied as you believe
her to be--so too, I tell you, Oliver, is Godfrey! If I had known before
the marriage, even an hour before the actual wedding, what I learnt
afterwards--I mean as to their amazingly different ideals of life--I
would have done _anything_ to stop it!"
"What d'you mean exactly, mother, by different ideals of life?"
As he asked the question he moved away from her a little, but he turned
round and bent his eyes on to her face--dimly, whitely, apparent in the
starlit, moonlit night.
She did not speak at once. It seemed to her that the question answered
itself, and yet she felt that he was quivering with impatience for her
answer.
"The French," she said in a low voice, "have a very good phrase to
describe the kind of man Godfrey is. Godfrey Pavely is a _le moyen homme
sensuel_--the typical man of his kind and class, Oliver--the
self-satisfied, stolid, unimaginative upper middle-class. Such men feel
that the world, their English world at any rate, has been made for them,
built up by the all-powerful entity they call God in their personal
interest. They know scarcely anything of what is going on, either above
or below them, and what is more, they do not really care, as long as
they and their like prosper."
Oliver nodded impatiently. He knew all that well enough!
His mother went on: "Godfrey Pavely ought to have married some rather
clever, rather vulgar-natured, rather pretty girl, belonging to his own
little world of Pewsbury. Then, instead of being what he now is, an
uncomfortable, not over contented man, he would have been, well--what
his worthy father was before him. That odd interest in queer,
speculative money dealings, is the unfortunate fellow's only outlet,
Oliver, for what romance is in him."
"I wonder if you're right, mother?"
"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 Godfrey than of
Laura. And so, musingly, she went on:
"Looking back a dozen years, I can think of several young women whom
Godfrey 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
Godfrey 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 Godfrey 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 gods had been kind,
Godfrey 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 Godfrey 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 gods 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
attitude 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 hoarsely, "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 Godfrey 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, Godfrey 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--Godfrey?"
She protested eagerly. "But I _am_ fond of Laura--very, very fond,
Oliver! But though, as you say, I neither really like nor respect
Godfrey, 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.
Godfrey 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, Godfrey
wouldn't escape Katty a second time. And one must admit that she would
make him an almost perfect wife."
"_And if Godfrey 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 Godfrey
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 scrape 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 scrapes 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 passed through into her
own bedroom without turning up the light.
Walking over to her window, she gazed down into the moonlit space
beneath. But she could see no moving shadow, hear no sound. Oliver had
padded away across the grass, 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 passionate, wayward, in a measure nobly
selfless and generous human being whom she had created.
How strange, how amazing that Laura made no response to that ardent,
exalted passion! 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 Godfrey which seemed sometimes to
amount to horror, were this beautiful woman's nearest approach to
passion.