Those winter and spring months which followed the tragic death of
Godfrey Pavely were full of difficult, weary, and oppressive days to his
widow Laura. Her soul had become so used to captivity, and to being
instinctively on the defensive, that she did not know how to use her
freedom--indeed, she was afraid of freedom.
Another kind of woman would have gone away to the Continent, alone or
with her child, taking what in common parlance is described as a
thorough change. But Laura went on living quietly at The Chase, feeling
in a queer kind of way as if Godfrey still governed her life, as if she
ought to do exactly what Godfrey would wish her to do, all the more so
because in his lifetime she had not been an obedient or submissive wife.
As the Commissioner of Police had foretold, the large reward offered by
Mrs. Pavely had brought in its train a host of tiresome and even
degrading incidents. A man of the name of Apra actually came from the
Continent and tried to make out that _he_ had been the banker's
unwitting murderer! But his story broke down under a very few minutes'
cross-examination at Scotland Yard. Even so, Laura kept the offer of the
thousand pounds in being. It seemed to be the only thing that she could
still do for Godfrey.
Though she was outwardly leading the quiet, decorously peaceful life of
a newly-made widow, Laura's soul was storm-tossed and had lost its
bearings. Her little girl's company, dearly as she loved the child, no
longer seemed to content her. For the first time in her life, she longed
consciously for a friend of her own age, but with the woman living at
her gate, with Katty Winslow, she became less, rather than more,
intimate.
Also, hidden away in the deepest recess of her heart, was an
unacknowledged pain. She had felt so sure that Oliver Tropenell would
stay on with his mother through the winter and early spring! But, to her
bewildered surprise, he had left for Mexico almost at once. He had not
even sought a farewell interview to say good-bye to her alone, and their
final good-bye had taken place in the presence of his mother.
Together he and Mrs. Tropenell had walked over to The Chase one late
afternoon, within less than a week of Godfrey's funeral, and he had
explained that urgent business was recalling him to Mexico at once. He
and Laura had had, however, three or four minutes together practically
alone; and at once he had exclaimed, in a voice so charged with emotion
that it recalled those moments Laura now shrank from remembering--those
moments when he had told her of his then lawless love--"You'll let me
know if ever you want me? A cable would bring me as quickly as I can
travel. You must not forget that I am your trustee."
And she had replied, making a great effort to speak naturally: "I will
write to you, Oliver, often--and I hope you will write to me."
And he had said: "Yes--yes, of course I will! Not that there's much to
say that will interest you. But I can always give you news of Gillie."
He had said nothing as to when they were to meet again. But after he was
gone Mrs. Tropenell had spoken as if he intended to come back the
following Christmas.
Oliver had so far kept his promise that he had written to Laura about
once a fortnight. They were very ordinary, commonplace letters--not
long, intimate, and detailed as she knew his letters to his mother to
be. Mostly he wrote of Gillie, and of whatever work Gillie at the moment
was engaged upon.
On her side, she would write to him of little Alice, of the child's
progress with her lessons, of the funny little things that Alice said.
Occasionally she would also force herself to put in something about
Godfrey, generally on some matter connected with the estate, and she
would tell him of what she was doing in the garden, or in the house
which had been built by his, Oliver's, forbears.
She could not tell him, what was yet oddly true, that the spirit of
Godfrey still ruled The Chase. He had inherited from his parents certain
old-fashioned ways and usages, to which he had clung with a sort of
determined obstinacy, and as to such matters, his wife, in the days
which were now beginning to seem so far away and so unreal, had never
even dreamt of gainsaying him.
One of these usages was the leaving off of fires, however cold the
weather might be, on the first of May, and this year, on the eve of May
Day, Laura remembered, and made up her mind that in this, as in so much
else, she would now be more submissive to the dead than she had ever
been to the living Godfrey.
* * * * *
Laura sat up late that night destroying and burning certain papers
connected with her past life. She had come to realise how transitory a
thing is human existence, and she desired to leave nothing behind her
which might later give her child a clue to what sort of unhappy,
unnatural married life she and Godfrey had led.
But it is always a painful task--that of turning over long-dead embers.
Sitting there in the boudoir, close to the glowing fire, and with a big
old-fashioned despatch-box at her side, she glanced at the letters which
her husband had written to her during their brief engagement, and then
she tied them up again and inscribed them with names and dates. They
might give Alice pleasure some day, the more so that there was
singularly little else remaining to tell Godfrey's child what he had
been like at his best. She, Laura, only knew--Alice, thank God, would
never know, would never understand--what melancholy memories these
rather formal, commonplace love-letters evoked in the woman who as a
girl had been their recipient.
The very few letters which her husband had written to her during their
married life, when he happened to be in London or away on business, she
had always destroyed as they came. They had been brief, business-life
communications, generally concerning something he desired to be done on
the estate, or giving her the instructions he wished to have telephoned
to the Bank.
After glancing absently through them, she burnt many letters which she
now wondered why she had kept--letters for the most part from friends of
her girlhood who had gradually drifted away from her, and the memory of
whom was fraught with pain. She put aside the meagre packet of her
brother's letters, and then, at last she gathered up in her hands the
score or more large envelopes addressed in Oliver Tropenell's clear,
small, masculine handwriting.
Should she burn these too--or keep them?
Slowly she took out of its envelope the first of Oliver's letters which
she had kept--that in which he expressed his willingness to become her
trustee. For the first time she forgot little Alice, forgot the day when
her daughter would read all that she found here, in her mother's
despatch-box, with the same eager interest and perchance the same moved
pleasure, which she, Laura, had felt when reading the letters her own
beloved mother had left behind her.
Consideringly she glanced over the first real letter Oliver Tropenell
had ever written to her. Vividly she remembered the whole circumstances
surrounding the sending and receiving of that letter, for it had
followed close on the scene which, try as she might, she could not, even
now, forget. It was in this letter that she now held open in her hand,
that Oliver had heaped coals of fire on her head, by his quiet, kindly
acceptance of the trusteeship. There was unluckily one passage she felt
Alice should never have a chance of reading--for it concerned Gillie.
So, though she was sorry to destroy the letter, she felt that on the
whole it would be better to burn it, here and now.
Hesitatingly she held out the large sheet to the bright fire--and as she
was in the act of doing so, quite suddenly there flashed between the
lines of firm, black handwriting other lines--clear, brownish lines--of
the same handwriting. What an extraordinary, amazing, incredible thing!
Laura slipped down on to the hearthrug from the low arm-chair on which
she had been sitting with her despatch-box beside her, and bent forward,
full of tremulous excitement--her heart beating as it had never beat
before.
"The decks are cleared between us, Laura, for you know now
that I love you. You said, 'Oh, but this is terrible!' Yes,
Laura, love is terrible. It is not only cleansing,
inspiring, and noble, it is terrible too. Why is it that
you so misunderstand, misjudge, the one priceless gift, the
only bit of Heaven, which God or Nature--I care not
which--has given to man and woman?"
She stopped reading for a moment, then forced herself to go on, and the
next few lines of that strange, passionate secret letter, burnt
themselves into her brain.
She let the paper flutter down, and covered her face with her hands.
Could she--should she believe what this man said?
"What you, judging by your words to-day, take to be love is
as little like that passion as a deep draught of pure cold
water to a man dying of thirst is like the last glass of
drugged beer imbibed by some poor sot already drunk."
It was a horrible simile, and yet--yes, she felt that it was a true
smile. For the first time Laura Pavely dimly apprehended the meaning of
love in the same sense that Oliver Tropenell understood it.
She took up the sheet of paper again, and with the tears falling down
her cheeks, she read the postscript which was superposed, as it were, on
to the first.
"God bless you, my dear love, and grant you the peace which
seems the only thing for which you crave."
After giving a shamed, furtive look round the empty room, Laura Pavely
pressed the letter to her lips, and then she threw it into the fire, and
watched it vanish into brilliant flame, feeling as if a bit of her heart
were being burnt with it.
Slowly she got up and went to the door; opening it, she listened for a
while.
The whole household was asleep, but even so, she locked the door before
coming back to her station by the fire.
She put more coal on the now glowing embers, and then she took up
another letter Oliver had written to her, a letter written from Paris
just after he and her brother had left London together for that long
holiday on the Continent. Outwardly it was a commonplace letter enough
concerning a change in certain of her investments; but when she held it
to the fire, between the black lines there again started into pulsing
life another message, winged from his soul to hers....
"Laura, I have sworn not to speak to you of love, and even
in this letter which you will never see, I will not break
my oath. But as I go in and out of the old Paris churches
(where alone I find a certain measure of solace and peace),
in the women whom I see there praying I often seem to
discover something akin to your spiritual and physical
perfection.
"It is strange, considering the business on which I am
engaged, that I should feel thus drawn to haunt these old,
dim Paris churches, but there at least I can escape from
Gillie, of Gillie who talks perpetually of Godfrey, your
owner and your tyrant."
And as she read these last words, there came a cold feeling over Laura's
heart. She realised, for the first time, how Oliver had hated Godfrey.
She read on:
"Gillie does not understand the reverence in which I hold
you. Sometimes when he speaks of you--of you and Godfrey--I
feel as if some day I shall strike him on the mouth.
"But he is your brother, Laura. According to the measure
which is in the man he loves you, aye, and even reverences
you too, in his fashion; but with this reverence is mingled
a touch of pity, of contempt, that you should be what he
calls 'good.'"
Good? Laura looked up and stared into the now glowing fire. Good in a
narrow, effortless sense she had always been, but to the man who was so
little her owner, though so much at times her tyrant, she had been,
almost from the very first, hard, and utterly lacking in sympathy.
It was with relief that Laura burnt that letter.
The notes Oliver Tropenell had written to her in London while he was
conducting the investigation into Godfrey Pavely's disappearance, held,
to her disappointment, no secret writing in between. But the letters she
had received from him since her widowhood all had an invisible
counterpart.
The first was written on ship-board:
"Laura, I am now free to speak to you of love. The world
would say that I must wait in spirit as I have waited in
body, but I know at what a cost has been bought the relief
from the vow which I faithfully kept.
"The past is dead, the future is my own. I look back, dear
love, to the few moments we had by the great window in your
drawing-room, when my mother was talking to Alice over by
the fire. You were so gentle, so sweet, to me then. It was
as if--God forgive me for my presumption--you were
regretting my departure. Till that moment I had felt as if
the man who had once called you wife stood between us, an
angry, menacing shape. But he vanished then, in that house
of which he had never been the real master. And since that
day he has not haunted me as he haunted me during those long
long days of waiting for the news I at once longed for and
dreaded.
"When I come back I shall not ask you to love me, I shall
only humbly ask you to let me love you."
Laura went to her writing-table and turned on the light. She moved as
one walking in her sleep, for she was in an extraordinary state of
spiritual and mental exaltation. She drew a sheet of paper towards her,
and before burning the letter she still held in her hand, she copied
out, not all, but a certain part of what had been written there in that
invisible ink which only flashed into being when held up against a
flame.
Then she went back to the fire, and read the next letter--and the next.
In a sense they were alike--alike in the measureless love, the almost
anguished longing for her presence they expressed, and in their
abhorrence, hatred, contempt for the man who had been her husband. It
was as if Oliver, in spite of his confident words in the letter which
had been written on shipboard, could not forget Godfrey--as if
perpetually he felt the dead man's menacing presence to be there,
between them.
Laura was amazed, troubled, and yet at the same time profoundly stirred
and excited by Oliver's retrospective jealousy. It seemed to prove to
her as nothing else could have done how passionately, exclusively he
loved her, and had always loved her.
Though none of those about her were aware of it, the mistress of The
Chase became henceforth a different woman. It was as though she had
suddenly become alive where she had been dead, articulate instead of
dumb.
Each night, when the house was plunged in darkness and slumber, Laura
would light three candles, and read the words of longing and of love
which Oliver had written in between the formal lines of the last letter
she had received from him. And then, when a new letter came, she would
burn the one that had come before--the one whose contents she had
already long known by heart.
And as the spring wore into summer the thing that became, apart from her
child, the only real thing in Laura Pavely's life, was her strong,
secret link with this man who she knew was coming back to claim her, on
whatever terms she chose to exact, as his own. And she fell into a deep,
brooding peace--the peace of waiting. She was in no hurry to see Oliver
again--indeed, she sometimes had a disturbing dread that his actual
presence might destroy that amazing sense of nearness she now felt to
him. Unconsciously her own letters to him became more intimate, more
self-revealing; she wrote less of Alice, more of herself.
The only uneaseful element in Laura Pavely's life now was Katty Winslow.
The two women never met without Katty's making some mention of Godfrey.
And once Laura, when walking away with Katty from Freshley Manor, where
the two had met unexpectedly, was sharply disturbed by something Katty
said.
"I'm told Oliver Tropenell is coming back at or after Christmas. Somehow
I always associate him with that awful time we had last January. I think
I shall try and be away when he is here--I don't suppose he'll stay
long."
Katty spoke with a kind of rather terrible hardness in her voice, fixing
her bright eyes on Laura's quivering face.
"Instead of going away as he did, he ought to have stayed and tried to
clear up the mystery."
"But the mystery," said Laura in a low voice, "_was_ cleared up,
Katty."
But Katty shook her head. "To me the mystery is a greater one than
ever," she said decisively.
* * * * *
Early in September Laura received a letter written, as were all Oliver's
letters, in sober, measured terms, and yet, even as she opened it, she
felt with a strange, strong instinct that something new was here. And as
she lived through the few hours which separated her from night and
solitude, she grew not only more restless, but more certain, also, of
some coming change in her own life.
His open letter ran:--
"I am writing in my new country house. Years ago, after I
first came out to Mexico, I stumbled across the place by
accident, and at once I made up my mind that some day I
would become its possessor. Over a hundred years old, this
little chateau, set on a steep hillside, is said to have
been built by a Frenchman of genius who, having got into
some bad scrape in Paris, had to flee the country, while
the old _regime_ was in full fling.
"When I first came here, the house had stood empty for over
forty years. The garden, beautiful as it was, had fallen
into ruin. The fountains were broken, the water no longer
played, the formal arbours looked like forest trees. White
roses and jasmine mingled with the dense southern
vegetation, fighting a losing fight.
"For a few brief weeks in '67 it was inhabited by Maximilian
and his young Empress--indeed, it is said that the Emperor
still haunts the cool large rooms on the upper floor--there
are but two storeys. So far I have never met his noble
ghost. I should not be afraid if I did.
"I am beginning to think that it is time I came back to
Freshley for a while. But my plans are still uncertain."
At last came solitude, and the luminous darkness of an early autumn
night. Laura locked herself into her room.
Yes, instinct had not played her false, for the first words of the
secret letter ran:--
"Laura, I am coming home. I had meant to linger on here yet
another month or six weeks, but now I ask myself each hour
of the day and night--why wait?
"The room in which I am sitting writing to you, thinking of
you, longing for you, was the room of those two great
lovers, Maximilian and his Carlotta. The ghost of their love
reminds me of the transience of life. I have just walked
across to the window, thinking, thinking, thinking, my
beloved, of you. For I am haunted ever, Laura, by your
wraith. I walk up and down the terrace wondering if you will
ever be here in the body--as you already seem to be in the
spirit.
"I am leaving at sunrise, and in three days I shall be upon
the sea. You will receive a cable, and so will my mother.
The thought of seeing you again--ah, Laura, you will never
know what rapture, so intense as to be almost akin to pain,
that thought gives me. Lately your letters have seemed a
thought more intimate, more confiding--I dare not say less
cold. But I have sworn to myself, and I shall keep my oath,
to ask for nothing that cannot be freely given."
Two days later Laura received a wireless message saying that Oliver
would be at Freshley the next day.