Mrs. Tropenell was startled and, what she seldom was, frightened. She felt she was face to face with an elemental force—the force of hate.
She repeated his last words, but in how different a spirit, in how different a tone! "Poor devil? Yes, Oliver, Godfrey is really to be pitied, and I ask you to believe me, my son, when I say that he does do his duty by Laura according to his lights."
"Mother?" He put out his hand in the darkness and just touched hers. "Why is it that Laura is so much fonder of you than you are of Laura? You don't respect—or even like—Godfrey?"
She protested eagerly. "But I am fond of Laura—very, very fond, Oliver! But though, as you say, I neither really like nor respect Godfrey, I can't help being sorry for him. He once said to me—it's a long time ago—'I thought I was marrying a woman, but I've married a marble statue. I'm married to something like that'—and he pointed to 'The Wingless Victory' your father brought me, years ago, from Italy. Godfrey is an unhappy man, Oliver—come, admit that you know that?"
"I think she's far, far more unhappy than he is! No man with so thoroughly good an opinion of himself is ever really unhappy. Still, it's a frightful tangle."
He stopped short for a moment, then in a very low voice, he asked her, "Is there no way of cutting it through, mother?" Suddenly he answered his own question in a curiously musing, detached tone. "I suppose the only way in which such a situation is ever terminated is by death."
"Yes," she said slowly, "but it's not a usual termination. Still, I have known it happen." More lightly she went on: "If Laura died, Godfrey wouldn't escape Katty a second time. And one must admit that she would make him an almost perfect wife."
"And if Godfrey died, mother?"
Mrs. Tropenell felt a little tremor of fear shoot through her burdened heart. This secret, intimate conversation held in the starry night was drifting into strange, sinister, uncharted channels. But her son was waiting for an answer.
"I don't know how far Laura's life would alter for the better if Godfrey died. I suppose she would go on much as she does now. And, Oliver——"