The Greatest Works of Marie Belloc Lowndes. Marie Belloc Lowndes
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 château, 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 régime 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.
Chapter XXII
A year ago, almost to a day, Mrs. Tropenell had been sitting where she was sitting now, awaiting Laura Pavely. Everything looked exactly as it had looked then in the pretty, low drawing-room of Freshley Manor. Nothing had been added to, nothing withdrawn from, the room. The same shaded reading-lamp stood on the little table close to her elbow; the very chrysanthemums might have been the same.
And yet with the woman sitting there everything was different! Of all the sensations—unease, anxiety, foreboding, jealousy—with which her heart had been filled this time last year, only one survived, and of that one she was secretly very much ashamed, for it was jealousy.
And now she was trying with all the force of her nature to banish the ugly thing from her heart.
What must be—must be! If Oliver's heart and soul, as well as the whole of his ardent, virile physical entity, desired Laura, then she, his mother, must help him, as much as lay within her power, to compass that desire.
Since Godfrey Pavely's death, it had been as if Mrs. Tropenell's life had slipped back two or three years. All these last few months she had written to Oliver long diary letters, and Oliver on his side had written to her vivid chronicles of his Mexican life. Perhaps she saw less, rather than more of Laura than she had done in the old days, for Laura, since her widowhood, had had more to do. She took her duties as the present owner of The Chase very seriously. Still, nothing was changed—while yet in a sense everything had been changed—by the strange, untoward death of Godfrey Pavely.
Oliver's letters were no longer what they had been, they were curiously different, and yet only she, his mother, perchance would have seen the difference, had one of his letters of two years ago and one of his letters of to-day been put side by side.
The love he had borne for the Spanish woman, of whom he had once spoken with such deep feeling, had not affected his relations with his mother. But the love he now bore Laura Pavely had.