Love and hatred

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

CHAPTER XXVII

IT was now early, very early in the morning after the return of Lord St. Amant to the Abbey. Dead dark, and dead quiet too, in the great sleeping house. Not dead cold, however, in his lordship's comfortable bedroom, for he had built up the fire, as he sat on and on, still fully dressed, reading, or trying to read—his bed exactly in the same state as when he had gone upstairs from the drawing-room about eleven.

It was years and years since Lord St. Amant had last stayed up all night, but though he had made a great effort to forget himself in those ever fresh, even if familiar, memoirs of Saint Simon, he had found it impossible to banish from his mind—even for a few moments—the awful thing which he knew would, in a sense, never leave his mind again.

For the tenth time he put his book down, marking the page with a tiny strip of green watered ribbon, on a low table by his side, and then, staring into the fire, his memory lingered—not over his talk with Sir Angus Kinross, he was sick of thinking that over—but over the incidents which had marked the evening before.

He had returned from London only just in time to dress for dinner, and so he had not seen his guests till just before a quarter-past eight. Then had followed an hour passed, outwardly at least, peacefully and pleasantly.

But while he had been eating mechanically the food put before him, in very truth not knowing what it was, terrible thoughts had gone through his mind in a terrible sequence.

Once or twice he had caught, or thought he had caught, Oliver Tropenell's penetrating eyes fixed searchingly on his face, but he, the host, had avoided looking at his guest. Somehow he could neither look at Oliver, nor even think of Oliver—with Oliver and Laura there, the one sitting opposite to him, the other next him.

Laura? Laura, on Lord St. Amant's left, had looked lovely last night. She was wearing a white dress, almost bridal in its dead whiteness—a rather singular fact considering that she had till to-day worn unrelieved black. Looking back, her host could not get her out of his mind. To think that she, proud, reserved, Laura Pavely was to be the heroine of a frightful tragedy which would bring not only shame and disgrace on herself and on the man whom Lord St. Amant had every reason to suppose she now loved, but—what was of so very much more concern to him—on that man's mother.

Looking at Laura, seeing that strange, haunting Mona Lisa smile on her lovely face, it had seemed incredible that she should be the central figure of such a story. But how could she escape being the central figure, the heroine of the story, at any rate in the imagination of all those, one might almost count them by millions, rather than thousands, who in a few days or a few weeks would be as familiar with the name "Mrs. Pavely" as they once had been with the names of—of Mrs. Bravo and Mrs. Maybrick?

Yes, Lord St. Amant, staring into the fire, told himself, that that three-quarters of an hour spent in his own dining-room had been the most painful time he had ever lived through in his long life. He felt as if every moment of it was indelibly stamped on his brain. And yet he had completely forgotten what the talk had been about! He supposed they had talked. Silence would have seemed so strange, so unnatural. Yet he could not remember a single thing which had been said.