Another kind of woman would have gone away to the Continent, alone or with her child, taking what in common parlance6 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 Commissioner7 of Police had foretold8, the large reward offered by Mrs. Pavely had brought in its train a host of tiresome9 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 recess10 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 detailed12 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 determined13 obstinacy14, 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 gainsaying15 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, unnatural16 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 inscribed17 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 melancholy18 memories these rather formal, commonplace love-letters evoked19 in the woman who as a girl had been their recipient20.
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 fraught21 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. Vividly22 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, kindly23 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 bent24 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 cleansing25, 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, passionate26 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 draught27 of pure cold water to a man dying of thirst is like the last glass of drugged beer imbibed28 by some poor sot already drunk."
[Pg 277] It was a horrible simile29, and yet—yes, she felt that it was a true smile. For the first time Laura Pavely dimly apprehended30 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 postscript31 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 crave32."
After giving a shamed, furtive33 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 was asleep, but even so, she locked the door before coming back to her station by the fire.
She put more coal on the now glowing embers, and then she took up another letter Oliver had written to her, a letter written from Paris just after he and her brother had left London together for that long holiday on the Continent. Outwardly it was a commonplace letter enough concerning a change in certain of her investments; but when she held it to the fire, between the black lines there again started into pulsing life another message, winged from his soul to hers.... [Pg 278]
"Laura, I have sworn not to speak to you of love, and even in this letter which you will never see, I will not break my oath. But as I go in and out of the old Paris churches (where alone I find a certain measure of solace34 and peace), in the women whom I see there praying I often seem to discover something akin5 to your spiritual and physical perfection.
"It is strange, considering the business on which I am engaged, that I should feel thus drawn35 to haunt these old, dim Paris churches, but there at least I can escape from Gillie, of Gillie who talks perpetually of Godfrey, your owner and your tyrant36."
And as she read these last words, there came a cold feeling over Laura's heart. She realised, for the first time, how Oliver had hated Godfrey.
She read on:
"Gillie does not understand the reverence37 in which I hold you. Sometimes when he speaks of you—of you and Godfrey—I feel as if some day I shall strike him on the mouth.
"But he is your brother, Laura. According to the measure which is in the man he loves you, aye, and even reverences38 you too, in his fashion; but with this reverence is mingled39 a touch of pity, of contempt, that you should be what he calls 'good.'"
Good? Laura looked up and stared into the now glowing fire. Good in a narrow, effortless sense she had always been, but to the man who was so little her owner, though so much at times her tyrant, she had been, almost from the very first, hard, and utterly40 lacking in sympathy.
[Pg 279] It was with relief that Laura burnt that letter.
The notes Oliver Tropenell had written to her in London while he was conducting the investigation41 into Godfrey Pavely's disappearance42, held, to her disappointment, no secret writing in between. But the letters she had received from him since her widowhood all had an invisible counterpart.
The first was written on ship-board:
"Laura, I am now free to speak to you of love. The world would say that I must wait in spirit as I have waited in body, but I know at what a cost has been bought the relief from the vow43 which I faithfully kept.
"The past is dead, the future is my own. I look back, dear love, to the few moments we had by the great window in your drawing-room, when my mother was talking to Alice over by the fire. You were so gentle, so sweet, to me then. It was as if—God forgive me for my presumption—you were regretting my departure. Till that moment I had felt as if the man who had once called you wife stood between us, an angry, menacing shape. But he vanished then, in that house of which he had never been the real master. And since that day he has not haunted me as he haunted me during those long long days of waiting for the news I at once longed for and dreaded44.
"When I come back I shall not ask you to love me, I shall only humbly46 ask you to let me love you."
Laura went to her writing-table and turned on the light. She moved as one walking in her sleep, for she was in an extraordinary state of spiritual and [Pg 280] 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 anguished47 longing48 for her presence they expressed, and in their abhorrence49, hatred50, 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 jealousy51. It seemed to prove to her as nothing else could have done how passionately52, 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 plunged53 in darkness and slumber54, 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 [Pg 281] 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 dread45 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 Manor55, 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 spoke11 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."
[Pg 282] 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 solitude56, 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 chateau57, 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 dense58 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 [Pg 283] 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 luminous59 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 wraith60. 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 rapture61, 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 [Pg 284] 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 wireless62 message saying that Oliver would be at Freshley the next day.
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1
tragic
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| adj.悲剧的，悲剧性的，悲惨的 | |
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captivity
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| n.囚禁；被俘；束缚 | |
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instinctively
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defensive
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| adj.防御的；防卫的；防守的 | |
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akin
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| adj.同族的，类似的 | |
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parlance
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| n.说法；语调 | |
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commissioner
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| n.（政府厅、局、处等部门）专员，长官，委员 | |
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foretold
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| v.预言，预示( foretell的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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tiresome
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| adj.令人疲劳的，令人厌倦的 | |
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recess
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| n.短期休息，壁凹（墙上装架子，柜子等凹处） | |
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spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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detailed
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| adj.详细的，详尽的，极注意细节的，完全的 | |
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determined
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| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
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obstinacy
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| n.顽固；（病痛等）难治 | |
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gainsaying
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| v.否认，反驳( gainsay的现在分词 ) | |
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unnatural
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| adj.不自然的；反常的 | |
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inscribed
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| v.写，刻( inscribe的过去式和过去分词 )；内接 | |
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melancholy
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evoked
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recipient
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fraught
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| adj.充满…的，伴有(危险等)的；忧虑的 | |
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vividly
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kindly
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bent
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cleansing
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passionate
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| adj.热情的，热烈的，激昂的，易动情的，易怒的，性情暴躁的 | |
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draught
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| n.拉，牵引，拖；一网（饮，吸，阵)；顿服药量，通风；v.起草，设计 | |
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imbibed
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simile
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apprehended
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| 逮捕，拘押( apprehend的过去式和过去分词 )； 理解 | |
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postscript
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crave
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| vt.渴望得到，迫切需要，恳求，请求 | |
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furtive
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| adj.鬼鬼崇崇的，偷偷摸摸的 | |
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solace
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drawn
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tyrant
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| n.暴君，专制的君主，残暴的人 | |
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reverence
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| n.敬畏，尊敬，尊严；Reverence:对某些基督教神职人员的尊称；v.尊敬，敬畏，崇敬 | |
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reverences
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| n.尊敬，崇敬( reverence的名词复数 )；敬礼 | |
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mingled
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| 混合，混入( mingle的过去式和过去分词 )； 混进，与…交往[联系] | |
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utterly
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| adv.完全地，绝对地 | |
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investigation
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| n.调查，调查研究 | |
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disappearance
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| n.消失，消散，失踪 | |
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vow
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| n.誓(言)，誓约；v.起誓，立誓 | |
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dreaded
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| adj.令人畏惧的；害怕的v.害怕，恐惧，担心( dread的过去式和过去分词) | |
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dread
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humbly
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| adv. 恭顺地，谦卑地 | |
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anguished
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| adj.极其痛苦的v.使极度痛苦(anguish的过去式) | |
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longing
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| n.（for）渴望 | |
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abhorrence
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| n.憎恶；可憎恶的事 | |
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hatred
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| n.憎恶，憎恨，仇恨 | |
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jealousy
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| n.妒忌，嫉妒，猜忌 | |
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passionately
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| ad.热烈地，激烈地 | |
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plunged
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| v.颠簸( plunge的过去式和过去分词 )；暴跌；骤降；突降 | |
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slumber
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| n.睡眠，沉睡状态 | |
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manor
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| n.庄园，领地 | |
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solitude
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| n. 孤独; 独居,荒僻之地,幽静的地方 | |
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57
chateau
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| n.城堡，别墅 | |
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58
dense
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| a.密集的，稠密的，浓密的；密度大的 | |
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59
luminous
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| adj.发光的，发亮的；光明的；明白易懂的；有启发的 | |
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60
wraith
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| n.幽灵；骨瘦如柴的人 | |
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61
rapture
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| n.狂喜；全神贯注；着迷；v.使狂喜 | |
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62
wireless
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| adj.无线的；n.无线电 | |
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