Mrs. Maxon Protests Part 12

"It's just awful to think of the poor little lady going back to that brute of a fellow," he said.

"Oh, don't abuse him. I dare say he's as unhappy as she is. And he thinks he's right. I'm not sure you don't think he's right, really."

Tora smiled over her shrewd thrust. "So you're the last person who ought to abuse him."

"Oh, what does it matter what I think?" he cried impatiently.

There was still enough of his old mood and his old ideas in him to stir a resentment against Tora, to make him feel that she was forcing his hand and constraining him to accept a bigger liability than he had bargained for. Theorists must always be up to that! They seem to take a positive pleasure in proving that you are bound to go to lengths--to all lengths! That the comfortable half-way will never serve! Perhaps they do not enough reflect that the average man is not thereby encouraged to start at all.

But Winnie herself had genuine power to stir his heart--and now, indeed, as never before, since she seemed helpless save for him, and hopeless save in him, yet in and through him both brave and confident--the most profound, the most powerful, flattery from s.e.x to s.e.x. Mere friends could not help now; mere convictions, a naked sense of being in the right, would not avail. These she had, but she must have love too. To this mood all the man in him responded.

"It only needed this final trouble to--to make me speak."

"I don't think I need speak," she whispered, with her delicately quavering smile. "You know it all--all the great thing it is. I'm not ashamed of it, G.o.dfrey. And you won't be ashamed of me, will you?"

The question did not disconcert him now. For the time he had lost that vision of the future which had once disquieted and alarmed him. His phrases might be well-worn, but they were heartily sincere when he told her he would face the world, if only she were by his side.

"It shall all be just as you said you wished it to be, if ever you joined your life to a man's again." He quoted almost verbally, just missing her poetic "link."

Winnie kissed him in warm and pretty grat.i.tude. "That takes away my last doubt," she told him. "I shall be proud now, as proud as any woman! And to-day--just for a few hours--let's forget everything, except that we're plighted lovers." She put her arm through his. "You'll kill the giant, take his ring, and mend the Princess' Broken Heart!"

"I say, are you making me a Prince in disguise, Winnie?"

"Well, don't you feel like a Prince now?" she asked, with the sweet audacity of a woman who knows that she is loved, and for her lover boldly takes herself at her lover's valuation.

Obedient to her wish, the outside world effected one of its disappearances--very obliging, if not of long duration. Even Woburn Square made tactful exit, without posing the question as to what its opinion of the proceedings might likely be. Of course, that point could be held immaterial for the present at least.

For the second time then, in Winnie Maxon's recent experience, with a little courage things proved easy; difficulties vanished when faced; you did what you held you had a right to do, and nothing terrible happened.

Certainly nothing terrible happened that evening at Shaylor's Patch.

There was a romantic, an idyllic, bit of courting, with the man ardent and gallant, the woman gay but shy; it was all along orthodox lines, really conventional. He had undertaken that the affair should be carried through on Winnie's lines; this was his great and fine concession--or conversion. He observed it most honourably; she grew more and more gratefully tender.

"Another man than you--yes, even another man I loved--might have wounded me to-night," she murmured, as they parted at the door after dinner.

"I could never wound you--even with my love."

She took his hand and kissed it. "I'm trusting you against all the world, G.o.dfrey."

"You may trust me."

Her heart sang, even while her lover left her.

For what followed in the two or three days during which she still abode at Shaylor's Patch people shall find what names they please, since her history is, of necessity, somewhat concerned with contentious matters.

Some may speak of unseemly travesty, some of idle farce; others may find a protest not without its pathos--a protest that she broke with the old order only because she must, that she would fain carry over into her new venture what was good in the old spirit, that her enterprise was to her a solemn and high thing. They were to be man and wife together; he must buy her the ring that symbolised union; they must have good and true witnesses--nothing was to be secret, all above-board and unashamed.

There must even be a little ceremonial, a giving and taking before sympathetic friends, a declaration that she held herself his, and him hers, in all love and trust, and to the exclusion of all other people in the world. For ever? Till death did them part? No--the premises peremptorily forbade that time-honoured conclusion. But so long as the love that now bound them together still sanctified the bond which it had fastened. Satisfied in her heart that the love could never die, she defined without dismay the consequences of its death. At all events, she would have answered to an objector, could they be worse than what had befallen her when her love for Cyril Maxon died a violent death by crus.h.i.+ng--died and yet was, in the name of all that is holy, denied decent burial?

And yet there were qualms. "Will people understand?" was her great question.

Tora--uncompromising, level-headed--answered that most of them would not even try to, and added, "What matter?" Stephen asked, "Well, so long as your friends do?" Her lover vowed that, whether her action were approved or not, no tongue could wag against her honour or her motives.

The last day came--the day when the pair were to set out together, G.o.dfrey from his summer cottage in the village of Nether End, near Shaylor's Patch, Winnie from her haven under the Aikenheads' friendly roof. A home has been taken in London, but they were to have a week's jaunt--a honeymoon--in North Wales first. Winnie was now putting the finis.h.i.+ng touch to her preparations by writing her luggage labels. The name she wrote seemed happily to harmonize personal independence with a union of hearts and destinies--Mrs. Winifred Ledstone.

The sound of a man's footstep made her look up. She saw d.i.c.k Dennehy before her. He had come in from the garden, and was just clutching off his hat at the sight of her.

"Mr. Dennehy! I didn't know you were coming here to-day."

"No more did I, Mrs. Maxon, till a couple of hours ago. I found I had nothing to do, so I ran down to see how you were all getting on."

"Some of us are just getting off," smiled Winnie. "You're in time to say good-bye."

"Why, where are you off to? I'm sorry you're going."

With a saucy glance Winnie pushed a luggage label across the table towards him. He took it up, studied it, and laid it down again without a word.

"Well?" said Winnie.

He spread out a pair of pudgy splay-fingered hands and shook his shock-haired head in sincere if humorous despair.

"You're all heathens here, and it's no good talking to you as if you were anything else."

"I'm not a heathen, but if the Church backs up the State in unjust laws----"

He wagged a broad forefinger. "Even a heathen tribe has its customs. Any customs better than none! Ye can't go against the custom of the tribe for nothing. I speak as heathen to heathen."

"Can't customs ever be changed?" Winnie was back at her old point.

"You're not strong enough for the job, Mrs. Maxon." His voice was full of pity.

But Winnie was in no mood to accept pity. "You call me a heathen.

Suppose it was A.D. 50 or 100, and not A.D. 1909. I think you'd be a heathen, and I--well, at any rate I should be trying to screw up my courage to be a Christian martyr."

He acknowledged a hit. "Oh, you're all very clever!" he grumbled. "I'll bet Stephen taught you that. That's from his mint, if I know the stamp!

Take it as you say then--are you looking forward to your martyrdom?"

Perhaps she was, and in what must be admitted to be the proper spirit--thinking more of the crown than of the stake. "I don't look very unhappy, do I?" she asked radiantly.

"Going off with him to-day, are you?" She nodded gaily. The natural man suddenly a.s.serted itself in Dennehy. He smiled. "It's more than the young dog deserves, sure it is!"

"Oh, well, you're being a heathen now!" laughed Winnie, distinctly well-pleased.

"I'm wondering what Mrs. Lenoir will say about it."

Winnie's pleasure suffered a slight jar.

"Why should Mrs. Lenoir be any judge of a case like mine?" she asked rather coldly.

"Oh, I'm not making comparisons," he murmured vaguely. Still there was a point of comparison in his mind. Mrs. Lenoir, too, had been a rebel against the custom of the tribe, and, though the motives of rebellion differ, the results may be the same. "Well, I'll wish you luck anyhow,"

he continued, holding out his hand. "I hope he'll make you happy, for you're giving him a lot, by the powers, you are!"

"I hope I'm giving anything like as much as I'm getting."