The Essential Writings of Marie Belloc Lowndes. Marie Belloc Lowndes

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ a feeling of rushing, unreasoning joy she heard him coming across the hall. A moment later he walked through into the room and came and stood before her.

      "Mother," he said, "it's a beautiful night. Would you care to come into the garden for a few minutes?"

      As soon as they had stepped out of the French window into the darkness, she took his arm.

      "You don't feel it cold?" he asked solicitously.

      "Oh no," she said, surprised. "I'm so little cold, Oliver, that I shouldn't at all mind going over to the blue bench, and sitting down."

      They went across the grass, to a curious painted Italian bench which had been a gift of the woman who was so much in both their thoughts.

      And there, "I want to ask you a question," he said slowly. "What led to the marriage of Laura Baynton and Godfrey Pavely? From something she once said to me, I gather she thinks that you approved of it."

      She felt as if his eyes were burning her in the darkness, and as she hesitated, hardly knowing what to say, he went on, and in his voice there was something terribly accusing.

      "Did you make the marriage, mother? Did you really advise her to take that fellow?"

      The questions stung her. "No," she answered coldly. "I did nothing of the kind, Oliver. If you wish to know the truth, the person who was most to blame was your friend Gillie, Laura's brother. Laura adored her brother. There was nothing in the world she wouldn't have done for him, and she married Godfrey—it seems a strange thing to look back on now—to please Gillie."

      "But she met Pavely here?"

      "Yes, of course she did. As you know, she very often stayed with me after her father died, and when Gillie Baynton, instead of making a home for her, was getting into scrape after scrape, spending her money as well as his own."

      He muttered, "Gillie knew she was to have money later."

      She went on: "And then Godfrey Pavely in love is a very different person from Godfrey Pavely—well, out of love. He was set on marrying Laura, and that over years. He first asked her when she was seventeen, and they married when she was twenty-one. In the interval he had done Gillie many good turns. In fact Godfrey bought Laura from Gillie. That, Oliver, is the simple truth."

      She waited for him to make some kind of comment, but he said nothing, and she went on, a tinge of deep, yearning sadness in her voice, "Don't let your friends, or rather their incompatibility of temper—" she hesitated, and then rather solemnly ended her sentence with the words, "affect our relations, my son."

      "I'm sorry, mother." Tropenell's voice altered, softened. "Forgive me for the way I spoke just now! I had got it into my head—I didn't know quite exactly why—that you had promoted the marriage. I see now that you really had nothing to do with it."

      "I won't say that! It's difficult to remember exactly what did happen. Godfrey never wearied in his slow, inexorable pursuit of Laura. I think that at last she was touched by his constancy. She knew nothing then of human nature—she knows nothing of it now."

      He muttered, "Poor girl! Poor unfortunate girl!" and his way of uttering the commonplace words hurt his mother shrewdly.

      Suddenly she made up her mind to say at least one true thing to him. It was a thing she knew well no one but herself would ever say to Oliver.

      "I am in a position to know," she said, "and I want you to believe it when I tell you, that if Laura is to be as much pitied as you believe her to be—so too, I tell you, Oliver, is Godfrey! If I had known before the marriage, even an hour before the actual wedding, what I learnt afterwards—I mean as to their amazingly different ideals of life—I would have done anything to stop it!"

      "What d'you mean exactly, mother, by different ideals of life?"

      As he asked the question he moved away from her a little, but he turned round and bent his eyes on to her face—dimly, whitely, apparent in the starlit, moonlit night.

      She did not speak at once. It seemed to her that the question answered itself, and yet she felt that he was quivering with impatience for her answer.

      "The French," she said in a low voice, "have a very good phrase to describe the kind of man Godfrey is. Godfrey Pavely is a le moyen homme sensuel—the typical man of his kind and class, Oliver—the self-satisfied, stolid, unimaginative upper middle-class. Such men feel that the world, their English world at any rate, has been made for them, built up by the all-powerful entity they call God in their personal interest. They know scarcely anything of what is going on, either above or below them, and what is more, they do not really care, as long as they and their like prosper."

      Oliver nodded impatiently. He knew all that well enough!

      His mother went on: "Godfrey Pavely ought to have married some rather clever, rather vulgar-natured, rather pretty girl, belonging to his own little world of Pewsbury. Then, instead of being what he now is, an uncomfortable, not over contented man, he would have been, well—what his worthy father was before him. That odd interest in queer, speculative money dealings, is the unfortunate fellow's only outlet, Oliver, for what romance is in him."

      "I wonder if you're right, mother?"

      "I'm sure I am."

      There came a long silence between them.

      Mrs. Tropenell could see her son in outline, as it were, his well-shaped head, and long, lean, finely proportioned body. He was sitting at the further end of the bench, and he was now staring right before him. She found it easier—far easier—to speak of Godfrey than of Laura. And so, musingly, she went on:

      "Looking back a dozen years, I can think of several young women whom Godfrey would have done well to consider——"

      "I can certainly think of one, mother," he said, and in the darkness there came a bitter little smile over his face.

      "You mean Katty Winslow? Yes—I think you're right, my dear. When Godfrey turned from Katty to Laura, he made a terrible mistake. Katty, in the old days, had very much the same ambitions, and the same social aspirations, as himself. She was really fond of him too! She would have become—what's the odious word?—'smart.' And Godfrey would have been proud of her. By now he would have stood for Parliament, and then, in due course, would have come a baronetcy. Yes, if the gods had been kind, Godfrey Pavely would have married poor little Katty—he didn't behave over well to her, you know!"

      "It seems to me that Mrs. Winslow has made quite a good thing of her life, mother."

      "Do you really think that, Oliver?"

      "Yes, I do. She managed very cleverly, so I'm told, to get rid of that worthless husband of hers, and now she's got that pretty little house, and that charming little garden, and as much of Godfrey as she seems to want." He spoke with a kind of hard indifference.

      "Katty's not the sort of woman to be really satisfied with a pretty little house, a charming little garden, and a platonic share in another woman's husband."

      "Then she'll marry again. People seem to think her very attractive."

      There was a long pause.

      "Mother?"

      "Yes, my dearest."

      "To СКАЧАТЬ