The Greatest Works of Marie Belloc Lowndes. Marie Belloc Lowndes
back to his own rooms, the rooms where he knew Mrs. Tropenell and Laura Pavely were now waiting for him, his mind was in a whirl of surprise and conjecture.
Katty Winslow acting the part of amateur detective? What an extraordinary notion! Somehow it was one which would never have crossed his mind. That, no doubt, was the real reason why she had been so determined to attend the inquest. But she had not sat with Mrs. Pavely, Mrs. Tropenell, and himself. She had chosen a place in a kind of little gallery behind the jurymen, and by her side, through the whole proceedings, had sat, with his arms folded, Oliver Tropenell.
Tropenell, since the discovery of Godfrey Pavely's body, had kept himself very much apart from the others. He had gone down to Pewsbury, and had broken the sad news to Mr. Privet—this by Laura's direct request and desire. But he had not shown even the discreet interest Lord St. Amant would have expected him to show in the newly-made widow and her affairs, and there was something enigmatic and reserved in his attitude.
One thing he had done. He had made a great effort to prevent Laura Pavely's being put into the witness-box. He had discovered that she shrank with a kind of agonised horror from the ordeal, and he had begged Lord St. Amant to join him in trying to spare her. But of course their efforts had been of no avail. Laura, in one sense, was the principal witness. But for her receipt of the letter, the body of her husband might not have been discovered for weeks, maybe for months. Fernando Apra would only have had to send a further instalment of rent, with the proviso that his room should not be entered till he returned, for the mystery to remain a mystery for at any rate a long time.
The funeral of Godfrey Pavely was to take place the next day in the old Parish Church of Pewsbury, where the Pavely family had a vault. The arrangements had all been left to Mr. Privet, and the only time Lord St. Amant had seen Oliver Tropenell smile since the awful discovery had been made, had been in this connection.
"I'm very glad we thought of it," he said, "I mean that Mrs. Pavely and myself thought of it. Poor old Privet! He was one of the very few people in the world who was ever really attached to Godfrey Pavely. And the fact that all the arrangements have been left to him is a great consolation, not to say pleasure, to the poor old fellow."
Chapter XX
It was the day of Godfrey Pavely's funeral, and more than one present at the great gathering observed, either to themselves or aloud to some trusted crony or acquaintance, that the banker would certainly have been much gratified had he seen the high esteem in which he was held by both the gentle and simple of the surrounding neighbourhood.
Even Lord St. Amant was a good deal impressed by the scene. Every blind in the High Street was down—a striking mark of respect indeed towards both the dead banker and his widow. Apart from that fact, the town looked as if it was in the enjoyment of a public holiday, but even that was in its way a tribute. The streets were full of people, and round the entrance to the churchyard was a huge crowd. As for the churchyard itself, it was overflowing, and presented a remarkable rather than a touching scene. Only a few of the town-folk were still allowed to be buried in the mediæval churchyard which lay just off the High Street, so a funeral actually taking place there was a very rare event.
The circumstances of Mr. Pavely's death had been so strange that the local paper had printed a verbatim report of the inquest, as well as a very flowery account of the departed, who had been, it was explained, so true and so loyal a townsman of Pewsbury. Yet, even so, there were those present at his funeral who muttered that Mr. Pavely had met his death just as might have been expected, through his love of money. It was also whispered that the job in which this queer foreigner had been associated with the banker had not been of the most reputable kind. This Fernando Apra—every one knew his queer name because of the big reward—had wanted to raise money for a kind of glorified gambling hell; that was the long and the short of it, after all, so much the shrewder folk of Pewsbury had already found out, reading between the lines of the evidence offered at the inquest.
In an official sense the chief mourners were two distant cousins of Godfrey Pavely—men with whom he had quarrelled years ago—but in a real, intimate sense, the principal mourners were old Mr. Privet, Lord St. Amant, who, though he was so fond of travel, never neglected the duties entailed by his position in the county, and last but by no means least Mr. Oliver Tropenell, who, as every one present was well aware, had during the last few months become the one intimate friend of the dead man. Among the women there were several who knew that at this very moment Mrs. Pavely was being comforted by Mr. Oliver Tropenell's mother, a lady who stood high in public esteem, and with whom Mrs. Pavely as a girl, had spent much of her youth, and from whose house, picturesque Freshley Manor, she had been married to the man whom they were now engaged in burying.
Another person present who aroused even more interest among the good folk of Pewsbury than either Lord St. Amant or Oliver Tropenell, was Mrs. Winslow.
The older townspeople looked at Katty with a good deal of rather excited sympathy, for they remembered the gossip and talk there had been about pretty Katty Fenton and the dead man, and of how unkind old Mrs. Pavely, now dead many a year, had shown herself to the lovely, motherless girl.
There were even some there who whispered that poor Godfrey Pavely had again become very fond of his first love—and that, too, when they were both old enough to know better! But these busybodies were not encouraged to say the little they knew. These are things—natural human failings—which should be forgotten at a man's funeral.
Mrs. Winslow did not look unreasonably upset. There were no tears in her bright brown eyes, and her black frock, sable plumed hat, and beautiful black furs, intensified the brilliant pink and white of her complexion. Indeed, many of the people who gazed at Katty that day thought they had never seen her looking so attractive. The world belongs to the living—not to the dead, and poor Godfrey Pavely, with his big, prosperous one-man business, and his almost uncanny cleverness in the matter of making money, belonged henceforth very decidedly to the past. So it was that among the men and women who stared with eager curiosity and respectful interest at the group of mourners, several noticed that Mr. Oliver Tropenell seemed to pay special attention to Mrs. Winslow.
Once he crossed over, and stood close to her for a minute or two by the still open grave, and his dark handsome face showed far more trace of emotion than did hers.
After the funeral, Lord St. Amant dropped Mrs. Winslow at the gate of Rosedean, and, on parting with Katty, he patted her hand kindly, telling himself that she was certainly a very pretty woman. Lord St. Amant, like most connoisseurs in feminine beauty, preferred seeing a pretty woman in black.
"You must try and forget poor Godfrey Pavely," he said feelingly.
He was startled and moved by the intensity with which she answered him:—"I wish I could—but I can't. I feel all the time as if he was there, close to me, trying to tell me something! I believe that he was murdered, Lord St. Amant."
"I'm sure you're mistaken. You must never think that!"
"Ah, but I do think so. I'm certain of it!"
Following the old custom, Godfrey Pavely's will was to be read after his burial, and Laura had written to Lord St. Amant asking him if he would be present.
In the great dining-room of The Chase, a dining-room still lined with the portraits of Mrs. Tropenell's ancestors, were two tables, one large long table which was never used, and a round table in the bow-window. To-day it was about the big table that there were gathered the five men and the one woman who were to be present at the reading of the will. Laura was the one woman. The men were Godfrey Pavely's lawyer, the dead man's two cousins—who had perhaps a faint hope of legacies, a hope destined to be disappointed, Oliver Tropenell, present as Laura Pavely's trustee, and Lord St. Amant, who had been a trustee to her marriage settlement.
Laura, in her deep black, looked wan, sad and tired, but perfectly calm. All the men there, with one exception, glanced towards her now and again with sympathy. The exception was Oliver Tropenell. He had shut her out, as far as was possible,