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.
[Pg 272] 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! [Pg 273] 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 [Pg 274] 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.
[Pg 275] 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.
[Pg 276] 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."
[Pg 277] 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 w............