Love and hatred Part 3

"Well, my dear, very very soon, he made of me his friend, and I was of course greatly flattered, but at that time, in the ordinary sense of the word, St. Amant never made love to me." She went on more firmly. "Of course I soon came to know that he cared for me in a way he did not care for the other women with whom his name was a.s.sociated. I knew very soon too, deep in my heart, that if his wife--his frivolous, mean-natured, tiresome wife--died, he certainly would wish to marry me, and for years, Oliver, for something like six years, I daily committed murder in my heart."

And then something happened which troubled and greatly startled the woman who was making this painful confession. Her son gave a kind of cry--a stifled cry which was almost a groan. "G.o.d! How well I understand that!" he said.

"Do you, Oliver--do you? And yet I, looking back, cannot understand it!

All that was best, indeed the only good that was in St. Amant to give I had then, and later, after I became a widow, I had it again."

"I suppose he was much the same then as later, or--or was he different then, mother?"

She knew what he meant. "He was the same then," she said quietly, "but somehow I didn't care! Girls were kept so ignorant in those days. But of course the whole world knew he was a man of pleasure, and in time I grew to know it too. But still it wasn't that which made me unhappy, for I did not realise what the phrase meant, still less what was implied by it. But even so, as time went on I was very unhappy. Mine was a false position--a position which hurt my pride, and, looking back, I suppose that there must have soon been a certain amount of m.u.f.fled talk. If I was not jealous, other women were certainly jealous of me."

She waited for a few moments; the stirring of these long-dead embers was hurting her more than she would have thought possible.

At last she went on: "Sometimes months would pa.s.s by without our meeting, but he wrote to me constantly, and on his letters--such amusing, clever, and yes, tender letters--I lived. My aunt, my father, both singularly blind to the state of things, were surprised and annoyed that I didn't marry, and, as for me, I grew more and more unhappy."

"Poor mother!" muttered Oliver. And she sighed a sigh of rather piteous relief. She had not thought he would understand.

"I don't know what I should have done but for two people, your father, who of course was living here then, our nearest neighbour, and, what meant very much more to me just then, Laura's mother, Alice Tropenell.

Though she was only a very distant relation, she was like a daughter in this house. Alice was my one friend. She knew everything about me. She was--well, Oliver, I could never tell you what she was to me then!"

"I suppose," he said slowly, "that Laura is like her?"

"Laura?" Mrs. Tropenell could not keep the surprise out of her low voice. "Oh no, my dear, Laura is not in the least like her mother. But Laura's child is very like Alice--even now."

"Laura's child?" Oliver Tropenell visioned the bright, high-spirited, merry little girl, who somehow, he could not have told her why, seemed often to be a barrier between himself and Laura.

"Alice--my friend Alice--was full of buoyancy, of sympathy for every living thing. She possessed what I so much lacked in those days, and still alas! lack--sound common-sense. And yet she, too, had her ideals, ideals which did not lead her into a very happy path, for Robert Baynton, high-minded though he may have been, was absorbed in himself--there was no room for any one else." Had she been telling her story to any one but her son, Mrs. Tropenell would have added, "Laura is very like him."

Instead, she continued, "No one but Alice would have made Robert Baynton happy, or have made as good a thing of the marriage as she did--for happy they were. I think it was the sight of their happiness that made me at last long for something different, for something more normal in my life than that strange, unreal tie with St. Amant. So at last, when I was four-and-twenty, I married your father." Oliver remained silent, and she said a little tremulously, "He was very, very good to me. He made me a happy woman. He gave me _you_."

There was a long, long pause. Mrs. Tropenell had now come to what was the really difficult part of the task she had set herself.

"You are thinking, my boy, of _afterwards_." And as she felt him move restlessly, she went on pleadingly, "As to that, I ask you to remember that I was very lonely after your father died. Still, if you wish to know the real truth"--she would be very honest now--"that friends.h.i.+p which you so much disliked stood more in the way of your having a stepfather than anything else could have done."

"I see that now," he said sombrely, "but I did not see it then, mother."

"Even if Lady St. Amant had not lived on, as she did, all those years, I should not have married St. Amant--I think I can say that in all sincerity. So you see, Oliver, you need not have been afraid, when at last he became free."

She sighed a long, unconscious sigh of relief.

"I gather you still see him very often when he's at Knowlton Abbey?"

"Yes, it's become a very comfortable friends.h.i.+p, Oliver. But for St.

Amant I should often feel very lonely, my dear."

She longed to go on--to tell Oliver how hard it had been for her to build up her life afresh--after he had finally decided to stay on in Mexico. But she doubted if he would understand....

Suddenly he turned and kissed her.

"Good-night," he said. "I'm grateful to you for having told me all--all that you have told me, mother."

Oliver Tropenell hurried up the silent house. By his own wish the large garret to which he had removed all his own treasures and boyish belongings after a delicate childhood spent in a room close to his mother's, was still in his room, and it had been very little altered.

It was reached by a queer, narrow, turning staircase across which at a certain point a beam jutted out too low. Tropenell never forgot to duck his head at that point--indeed he generally remembered as he did so how proud he had been the first time he had found himself to be too tall to pa.s.s under it straightly! But, strange to say, to-night he did forget--and for a moment he saw stars.... Fool! Fool that he was to allow his wits to go wool-gathering in this fas.h.i.+on!

With eyes still smarting, he leapt up the last few steps to the little landing which he shared with no one else. Opening the door he turned the switch of the lamp on the writing-table which stood at a right angle to the deep-eaved window.

Then he shut the door and locked it, and, after a moment of indecision, walked across to the book-case which filled up the s.p.a.ce between the fireplace and the inner wall of the long, rafted room.

He did not feel in the mood to go to bed, and idly he let his eyes run over the long rows of books which he had read, in the long ago, again and again, for like most lonely boys he had been a great reader. They were a good selection, partly his mother's, partly his own, partly Lord St. Amant's. He knew well enough--he had always known, albeit the knowledge gave him no pleasure, that he had owed a great deal, as boy and man, to his mother's old friend. Lord St. Amant had really fine taste. It was he who had made Oliver read Keats, Blake, Byron, Poe, among poets; he who had actually given him _Wuthering Heights_, _Vanity Fair_, _The Three Musketeers_, _Ali Baba of Ispahan_. There they were all together.

He had not taken his books with him when he had first gone to Mexico, for he had not meant to stay there. But at last he had written home to a great London bookseller and ordered fresh copies of all his old books at home. The bookseller had naturally chosen good editions, in some cases rare first editions. But those volumes had never been read, as some of these had been read, over and over and over again.

But now, to-night, he did not feel as if he could commune with any comfort even with one of these comfortable, unexacting friends. He felt too restless, too vividly alive. So suddenly he turned away from the bookcase, and looked about him. A large French box-bed had taken the place of the narrow, old-fas.h.i.+oned bedstead of his youth; and his mother had had moved up to this room a narrow writing-table from the study on the ground floor which no one ever used.

He walked over to that writing-table now, and sat down. On it, close to his left hand, stood a large despatch-box. He opened and took out of it a square sheet of paper on which was embossed his Mexican address.

Drawing two lines across that address, and putting in the present date, September 19th, he waited, his pen poised in his hand for a full minute.

Then he began writing rather quickly, and this is what he wrote:--

"MY DEAR LAURA,--G.o.dfrey suggests that I should act as your trustee, in succession to Mr. Blackmore. Am I to understand that this suggestion has your approval? If yes, I will of course consent to act. But please do not think I shall be offended if you decide otherwise. You may prefer some woman of your acquaintance. Women, whatever G.o.dfrey may tell you, make excellent men of business. They are, if anything, over-prudent, over-cautious where money is concerned; but that is a very good fault in a trustee."

His handwriting was small and clear, but he had left large s.p.a.ces between the lines, and now he was at the end of the sheet of paper.

There was just room for another sentence and his signature. He waited, hesitating and of two minds, till the ink was dry, and then he began again, close to the bottom of the sheet:--

"Before we meet again I wish to say one further thing."

He put this first sheet aside, and took another of the same size from the box by his side:--

"You said something to-day which affected me painfully. You spoke as if what I have done for your brother caused you to carry a weight of almost intolerable grat.i.tude. So far as any such feeling should exist between us, the grat.i.tude should be on my side. In sober truth Gillie has been invaluable to me.

"I remain, "Yours sincerely,"

Then very rapidly Oliver Tropenell made an "O" and a "T," putting the T across the O so that any one not familiar with his signature would be hard put to it to know what the two initials were.

He read over the words he had just written. They seemed poor, inadequate, and he felt strongly tempted to write the letter again, and word it differently. Then he shook his head--no, let it stand!

Slowly he put the second sheet of the letter aside, and placed the first one, on which the ink was dry, before him. Then he looked round, with a queer, furtive look, and, getting up, made sure the door was locked.

Coming back to the writing-table, he took out of the despatch-box lying there a small, square, crystal-topped flagon of the kind that fits into an old-fas.h.i.+oned dressing-case. The liquid in it was slightly, very slightly, coloured, and looked like some delicate scent.

From the despatch-box also he now brought out a crystal penholder with a gold nib. He dipped it in the flagon, and began to write in between the lines of the letter he had just written. As the liquid dried, the slight marks made by the pen on the paper vanished, for Oliver Tropenell was writing in invisible ink.

"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 n.o.ble, it is terrible also. Why is it that you so misunderstand, misjudge, the one priceless gift, the only bit of Heaven which G.o.d or Nature--I care not which--has given to man and woman? What you, judging by your words to-day, take to be love is as little like that pa.s.sion as a deep draught of pure cold water to a man dying of thirst, is like the last gla.s.s of drugged beer imbibed by some poor sot already drunk."

Oliver Tropenell waited awhile. There were still two s.p.a.ces, before the bottom of the page of notepaper was reached, and again he dipped the pen into the strange volatile liquid.

"G.o.d bless you, my dear love," he wrote, "and grant you the peace which seems the only thing for which you crave."