Mrs. Maxon Protests Part 22

"How you try to pin people down!" she complained. "You and your principles! I know what I should like to see happen, Mr. Dennehy."

"Ah, now--'d.i.c.k'--as a mere matter of fairness, Winnie!"

"Well, d.i.c.k, what I should just love to see is you in love with somebody who was married, or had been divorced, or something of that sort, and see how you'd like your principles yourself." She looked mischievous and very pretty.

Dennehy shook his head. "We're all miserable sinners. But I don't believe I'd do it."

"What, fall in love, or give way to it?"

"The latter. The former's out of any man's power, I think."

"What would you do?"

"Emigrate to America."

"Out of the frying-pan into the fire! It's full of divorced people, isn't it?"

"Not the best Irish society." He laughed. "Well, you're chaffing me."

"Oh no, I'm not. I'm serious. I should like to see the experiment.

d.i.c.k, if G.o.dfrey does run away, as you kindly suggest, give me a wide berth! Oh, is it quite impossible that, if I tried, I might--make you miserable?"

"If you'll flirt with me after this fas.h.i.+on every time we meet, I'll not be miserable--I'll be very happy."

"Ah, but that's only the beginning! The beginning's always happy."

The sadness in her voice struck him. "You poor dear! You've had bad luck, and you've fallen among evil counsellors, in which term, heaven forgive me, I include my dear friends here at Shaylor's Patch."

"I'll try your principles another way. If you were G.o.dfrey, would you leave me--now?"

He twisted his moustache and hesitated. "Well, there you have me," he admitted at last. "If a man does what he did, as a gentleman he must stand to be d.a.m.ned for it."

"G.o.dfrey's free to go, of course--that's our bargain. But you wouldn't have made a bargain like that?"

"I would not, Winnie. To do me justice, I believe I'd think it enough to be ruining one woman, without providing for my liberty to ruin another as soon as I wanted to."

Winnie laid her hand on his arm for a moment. "How pleasantly we quarrel!" she said.

"And why wouldn't we?" he asked, with native surprise that a quarrel should be considered a thing inherently unpleasant. "Ah, here come Stephen and Alice, back from church! I'll go and run races with her, and get an appet.i.te for lunch."

Stephen lounged up, his pipe in full blast.

"Stephen, how is it that this old world gets on at all, with everybody at loggerheads with everybody else?"

"I've often considered that. The solution is economic--purely economic, Winnie. You see, people must eat."

"So far the Court is with you, Stephen."

"And in anything except a rudimentary state of society they must feed one another. Because no man has the genius to make for himself all the things he wants to eat. Consequently--I put the argument summarily--you will find that, broadly speaking, all the burning and bludgeoning and fighting, all the killing in short, and equally all the refraining from killing, are in the end determined by the consideration whether your action one way or the other will seriously affect your supply of food--to which, in civilized society, you may add clothes, and so on."

"Does that apply to the persecution of opinions?"

"Certainly it does--usually by way of limitation of killing, though an exception must be made for human sacrifice. There have been temporary aberrations of judgment, but, generally speaking, they never killed more than a decent minimum of any useful heretics--not, anyhow, where secular statesmen had the last word. They had to make some kind of a show, of course, to satisfy, as they supposed, their superior officers.

Still--they left a good many Jews, Winnie!"

"Wasn't that the spread of toleration?"

"Certainly--toleration based on food, originally, and afterwards perhaps reinforced by doubt." He broke into a laugh. "But even to-day I'm hanged if I'd trust to the doubt without the food!" He beamed on her. "I'll tell you a secret--religion's all food, Winnie."

Winnie had asked for the exposition--but she had had enough of it. Even Stephen's last--and rather startling--thesis failed to draw further inquiries.

"It seems to follow that we oughtn't to keep lunch waiting," she said, laughing, as she put her arm through his. "I do love Shaylor's Patch,"

she went on, gently patting his arm. "You can always forget yourself and your troubles by talking nonsense--or sense--about something or other.

If I come to grief again"--her voice shook for an instant--"you'll give me a shed to lie in here, won't you, Stephen?"

"My poor house is thine, and all that is in it," he answered orientally.

"Yes, in a way I know it is--and so I needn't quite starve," said Winnie.

CHAPTER XIV

A COUNSEL OF PERFECTION

To Winnie's few but devoted adherents Cyril Maxon was not a man, but a monster, a type of tyranny, the embodied symbol of an intolerable servitude; even d.i.c.k Dennehy, staunch champion of the inst.i.tution, had no charity for the individual. Needless to say that this was not at all the view Mr. Maxon took of himself, and not entirely the judgment which an impartial observer would form of him. There were many women with whom he might have got on very well, women of a submissive temper, meek women, limited women, sly women who hoodwinked under a show of perfect obedience. He would not have been hard to hoodwink, had Winnie been content to attack her problem in that old-fas.h.i.+oned way. Or, again, an extremely clever and diplomatic woman--but she can make a good husband out of the rawest of raw material, mere flesh and bone with (as Stephen Aikenhead would certainly have added) the economic prerequisite.

From the moment that his wife had identified herself with the Ledstone family--his memory of Mr. Ledstone was vivid and horrible--he had set aside the idea that she would soon 'have had enough of it.' It was no longer in his power to hold to that conclusion. Now it was he himself who had had more than enough of it. She was done with. He took up his life alone. At first he sought to mitigate solitude by constant work. It was not a complete success. Then he installed an unmarried sister in his house. She was his senior, her temper was akin to his; the experiment lasted just a month, after which Miss Maxon returned to Broadstairs. Then gradually he began to seek society again, to show his face at his old resorts, to meet the women who admired him, who gushed over him as interesting, clever, and rising. They gushed still more now, hinting, each with what degree of delicacy nature had given her, their sympathy with him, and their unlimited astonishment at the folly and perverseness of Mrs. Maxon. He found this the most effective specific that he had tried.

It would be unpardonably rash to generalize, but it may be hazarded that in some cases the man who treats his wife worst misses her most. A comrade can perhaps be replaced, a new slave is hard to come by.

Besides, Cyril Maxon's principles forbade the search for one, and now he had to apply his principles to his own case. A year ago nothing in the whole world would have seemed so unlikely--Fate at its pranks again! It makes us pay for sins and principles alike--perhaps the best way (with deference to the _a priori_ philosophers) of learning to appraise either.

Cyril Maxon was very rising by now; people called him a certainty for a judges.h.i.+p in some ten years' time (he was only thirty-eight); and the ladies were very sympathetic. Several of them were members of Mr.

Attlebury's congregation, and the personal friends of that genial but exacting apostle. Some of the ladies wondered how Mr. Attlebury could be so responsive, and yet so definitely restricted in his responsiveness; they thought of his demeanour as of an occult art, and might have been right had they stopped at calling it esoteric. Attlebury himself felt no difficulty, not even a consciousness of effort. He met them in absolute intimacy of soul to soul. Happily in all creeds--and discreeds--there are men and women who can do it.

At first Cyril Maxon had refused to talk about his misfortune, which, of course, soon became public property, and the hints about it had to be almost impossibly delicate. But, as time went on, he found two or three friends to whom he could, more or less, open his heart. There was Mrs.

Ladd, an elderly woman with hearty kindly ways and a mind shrewdly matter of fact. There was Miss Fortescue, one of Attlebury's best 'workers,' a benevolent sensible spinster of five-and-forty. There was also Lady Rosaline Deering, daughter of a Scotch peer, widow of a Colonial Administrator. She was a woman of three-and-thirty, or thereabouts, tall and of graceful carriage; her nose was too long, and so was her chin, but she had pretty hair and fine eyes. She was a bit of a blue-stocking and dabbled in theology and philosophy. "Not afraid to think for myself," was the way in which she defined her att.i.tude, in contradistinction (as she implied) from the att.i.tude of most of the women who sat at Mr. Attlebury's feet. She admired Attlebury, but she thought for herself.

"One can't quite give up one's reason," she would say, with a winning smile. "Besides, I was brought up in the Church of Scotland, you know."

This ecclesiastical origin seemed to give her independence; she paid only so much voluntary allegiance as she chose to Attlebury and his Church; she could in case of need fall back on her Church of origin, as though on a domicile never finally forfeited. Also in her husband's lifetime she had seen the cities of men and known their minds. In fact she might be considered emanc.i.p.ated, and her adherence to Mr.

Attlebury's school was rather aesthetic than dogmatic; she thought that religion should be invested with beauty, but she was not afraid to talk of some of its doctrines as possibly 'symbolic.'

All the three ladies took a great interest in Maxon, but by common consent the first place was yielded to Lady Rosaline. Mrs. Ladd could fortify him, Miss Fortescue could cheer him up; they both recognized that Lady Rosaline could do something else, a subtle thing into which femininity entered more specifically; one of the things which Mrs. Maxon ought to have given him, but obviously had not; perhaps something like what Lady Rosaline herself derived from Attlebury's church services, a blend of intellectual and aesthetic satisfaction. Mrs. Ladd and Miss Fortescue were weak in the aesthetic element. Moreover there was a special bond of sympathy between Lady Rosaline and Maxon. The late Colonial Administrator had been by no means all that he should have been as a husband, and when death severed the union, it was but a very slender string that its shears cut.

Mrs. Ladd and Miss Fortescue had hinted at this sad story; Lady Rosaline herself told it, though in reticent outline only, to Cyril one evening in November when he happened to have leisure to go to tea with her at her flat in Hans Place.