Love and hatred

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

Even now Godfrey Pavely did not seem eager to go home. The two men were close to the furthest edge of the wide lawn, but they were still talking earnestly.

Mrs. Tropenell gazed across, with a painful scrutiny, at her son's visitor.

Godfrey Pavely was a neatly made, neatly dressed, neatly mannered man—in a way not ill-looking. His reddish-brown hair toned in oddly with his light, ginger-coloured eyes. He had become rather particular about his health of late, and went to some trouble to keep himself fit, and in good condition. Yet he looked more like a townsman than like the countryman he certainly was. For if the fortunate inheritor of a successful county banking business, which so far he had managed with such skill as to save it from any thought of amalgamation, he was also the owner of a fine old property.

Lawford Chase had belonged to Mrs. Tropenell's ancestors for centuries—for almost as many centuries as the years in which he, Godfrey, had owned it. But her father had been careless and extravagant during his long, happy life, so the owner of Pavely's Bank had bought up the mortgages on Lawford Chase, and finally foreclosed.

All this was ancient history now, and Mrs. Tropenell felt no bitterness on that account. Indeed, she had rejoiced, with a sense of real joy, when her friend's daughter had become mistress of her own old home.

The two men whom she was watching went on talking for what seemed to the onlooker a very long time; but, at last, Godfrey Pavely, turning on his heel, walked on, to be at once engulfed by the dark green arch formed by the high beech trees. Then Mrs. Tropenell saw her son, all her heart welcoming him, come striding towards her across the long stretch of short, green turf.

Once more she asked herself what possible link there could be between men so utterly unlike. Her Oliver—more hers now, she felt, than ever before, and that though for the first time he was making her secretly, miserably jealous—was a creature of light and air, of open spaces, if need be of great waters. He was built, like herself, on a big and powerful plan; and yet so tall, so spare, so sinewy, that though he was broad he looked slim, and though four-and-thirty years of age he might have been taken, even at this small distance from where she sat, for a long-limbed youth. His life for the last twelve years had been one that often ages a man—but it had not aged him. His vigour was unbroken, his vitality—the vitality which had made him so successful, and which attracted men and women of such very different types—unimpaired.

Mrs. Tropenell had been touched, perhaps in her secret heart little surprised, at the pleasure—one might almost have said the enthusiasm—with which her neighbours for miles round had welcomed Oliver home again, after what had been so long an absence from England. The fact that he had come back a very wealthy man, and that during those years of eclipse he had managed to do some of them good turns, of course counted in his popularity, and she was too open-eyed a woman not to be well aware of that.

The mother knew that her son was not the downright, rather transparent, good-natured fellow that he was now taken to be. No man she had ever known—and she had ever been one of those women of whom men make a confidant—could keep his own or another's secrets more closely than could Oliver. He had once written to her the words: "You are the only human being, mother, to whom I ever tell anything," and she had instinctively known this to be true.

Yet their relationship was more like that of two friends than of mother and son. She knew all there was to know of his thoughts, and of his doubts, concerning many of the great things which trouble and disturb most thinking modern men. Of the outward life he led in the Mexican stretch of country of which he had become the administrator and practical ruler, she also knew a great deal, indeed surprisingly much, for he wrote by each mail long, full letters; and the romance of his great business had become an ever continuous source of interest, of amusement, and of pride to the mother who now only lived for him.