Love and hatred

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

She divined the quiver of half-shamed relief which went through her son. It made what she wished to say at once easier and more difficult.

"As I think you know, I first met St. Amant when I was very young, in fact before I was 'out,' and he was the first really clever, really attractive, and, in a sense, really noted man I had ever met. And then"—she hesitated painfully.

"And then, mother?" Oliver's voice was hard and matter-of-fact. He was not making it easy for her.

"Well, my dear, very very soon, he made of me his friend, and I was of course greatly flattered, but at that time, in the ordinary sense of the word, St. Amant never made love to me." She went on more firmly. "Of course I soon came to know that he cared for me in a way he did not care for the other women with whom his name was associated. I knew very soon too, deep in my heart, that if his wife—his frivolous, mean-natured, tiresome wife—died, he certainly would wish to marry me, and for years, Oliver, for something like six years, I daily committed murder in my heart."

And then something happened which troubled and greatly startled the woman who was making this painful confession. Her son gave a kind of cry—a stifled cry which was almost a groan. "God! How well I understand that!" he said.

"Do you, Oliver—do you? And yet I, looking back, cannot understand it! All that was best, indeed the only good that was in St. Amant to give I had then, and later, after I became a widow, I had it again."

"I suppose he was much the same then as later, or—or was he different then, mother?"

She knew what he meant. "He was the same then," she said quietly, "but somehow I didn't care! Girls were kept so ignorant in those days. But of course the whole world knew he was a man of pleasure, and in time I grew to know it too. But still it wasn't that which made me unhappy, for I did not realise what the phrase meant, still less what was implied by it. But even so, as time went on I was very unhappy. Mine was a false position—a position which hurt my pride, and, looking back, I suppose that there must have soon been a certain amount of muffled talk. If I was not jealous, other women were certainly jealous of me."

She waited for a few moments; the stirring of these long-dead embers was hurting her more than she would have thought possible.

At last she went on: "Sometimes months would pass by without our meeting, but he wrote to me constantly, and on his letters—such amusing, clever, and yes, tender letters—I lived. My aunt, my father, both singularly blind to the state of things, were surprised and annoyed that I didn't marry, and, as for me, I grew more and more unhappy."