Mrs. Maxon Protests Part 27

Oh, the comfort of a good Emily--a maid not too young and not too old, not too flighty and not too crabbed, light of hand, sympathetic, entirely understanding that her lady has a right to be much more comfortable than she has ever thought of being herself! In Maxon days Winnie had possessed a maid. They seemed far off, and never had there been one as good as Mrs. Lenoir's Emily. She had come into Mrs. Lenoir's life about the same time as Mr. Lenoir had, but with an effect that an impartial observer could not but recognize as not only more durable, but also more essentially important--save that Lenoir had left the money which made Emily possible. Mrs. Lenoir had paid for the money--in five years' loyalty and service.

Winnie reposed between deliciously fine sheets--why, it was like Devons.h.i.+re Street, without Cyril Maxon!--and watched Emily dexterously disposing her wardrobe. It was not ample. Some of the effects of the Maxon days she had left behind in her hurried flight; most of the rest had worn out. But there were relics of her gilded slavery. These Emily tactfully admired; the humbler purchases of 'Mrs. Ledstone' she stowed away without comment. Also without comment, but with extraordinary tact, she laid out the inferior of Winnie's two evening dresses.

"There's n.o.body coming but the General, miss," said she.

"Now why does she call me 'miss'--and who's the General?" These two problems rose in Winnie's mind, but did not demand instant solution.

They were not like the questions of the last few days; they were more like Shaylor's Patch conundrums--interesting, but not urgent, willing to wait for an idle hour or a rainy day, yielding place to a s.h.i.+ning sun or a romp with Alice. They yielded place now to Winnie's great physical comfort, to her sense of rescue from the desolate studio, to her respite from the feeling of finality and of failure. With immense surprise she realized, as she lay there--in a quiet hour between Emily's deft and charitable unpacking and Emily's return to get her into the inferior frock (good enough for that unexplained General)--that she was what any reasonably minded being would call happy. Though the great experiment had failed, though G.o.dfrey was at this moment in Woburn Square, though Mabel Thurseley existed! "Oh, well, I was so tired," she apologized to herself shamefacedly.

She got down into the small but pretty drawing-room in good time. Yet Mrs. Lenoir was there before her, clad in a tea-gown, looking, as it occurred to Winnie, rather like Mrs. Siddons--a cheerful Mrs. Siddons, as, indeed, the great woman appears to have been in private life.

"I got my things off early, so as to leave you Emily," said the hostess.

She obviously did not consider that she had been getting anything on.

"What a dear she is!" Winnie came to the fire and stood there, a slim-limbed creature, warming herself through garments easily penetrable by the welcome blaze.

"Quite a find! The General sent her to me. Her husband was a sergeant-major in his regiment--killed in South Africa."

The General again! But Winnie postponed that question. Her lips curved in amus.e.m.e.nt. "She calls me 'miss.'"

"Better than that silly 'Mrs. Smith' you said to Bob Purnett. Only unhappy women try to make epigrams. And for a woman to be unhappy is to be a failure."

"Isn't that one--almost--Mrs. Lenoir?"

"Quite quick, my dear!" her hostess commented. "But if it is, it's old.

I told Emily you were a second cousin. I never know exactly what it means, but in my experience it's quite useful. But please yourself, Winnie. Who will you be?"

"Did Emily believe what you told her?"

The twinkle came again. "She's much too good a servant ever to raise that question. What was your name?"

"My maiden name? Wilkins."

"I think names ending in 'kins' are very ugly," said Mrs. Lenoir. "But a modification? What about Wilson? 'Winnie Wilson' is quite pretty."

"'Miss Winnie Wilson'? Isn't it rather--well, rather late in the day for that? But, I don't want to be Ledstone--and it's rather unfair to call myself Maxon still."

"Names," observed Mrs. Lenoir, "are really not worth troubling about, so long as you don't hurt people's pride. I used to have a fetish-like feeling about them--as if, I mean, you couldn't get rid of the one you were born with, or, my dear, take one you had no particular right to.

But one night, long ago, somebody--I really forget who--brought an Oxford don to supper. We got on the subject, and he told me that a great philosopher--named Dobbs, if I remember rightly--defined a name as 'a word taken at pleasure to serve for a mark.'" She looked across the hearthrug, confidently expecting Winnie's approval. "I liked it, and it stuck in my memory."

"It does make things simpler, Mrs. Lenoir."

"Mind you, I wouldn't take a great name I hadn't a right to. Courtenays and Devereauxes in the chorus are very bad form. But I don't see why you shouldn't be Wilson. And the 'Miss' avoids a lot of questions."

"All right. Miss Winnie Wilson be it! It sounds like a new toy. And now, Mrs. Lenoir, for the other problem that Emily has raised. Who's the General?"

Mrs. Lenoir liked her young friend, but possibly thought that she was becoming a trifle impertinent. Not that she minded that; in her heart she greeted it as a rebound from misery; in the young it often is.

"If you've any taste in men--which, up to now, you've given your friends no reason to think--you'll like the General very much."

"Will he like me?"

"The only advantage of age is that I shan't mind if he does, Winnie."

Winnie darted towards her. "What a dear you've been to me to-day!"

"Hush, I think I hear the General's step."

The parlour-maid--not Emily, but a young woman, smart and a trifle scornful--announced, "Sir Hugh Merriam, ma'am--and dinner's served."

CHAPTER XVII

THE TRACK OF THE RAIDER

The General was old-fas.h.i.+oned; he liked to be left alone with the port--or let us say port-wine, as he always did--after dinner for a quarter of an hour; then he would rejoin the ladies for coffee and, by their never a.s.sumed but always solicited permission, a cigar in the drawing-room. Thus Winnie had a chance of gratifying her lively curiosity about the handsome old man with gentle manners, who had seen and done so much, who talked so much about his sons, and came to dine with Mrs. Lenoir twice a week.

"I've fallen in love with your General. Do tell me about him," she implored her hostess.

"Oh, he's very distinguished. He's done a lot of fighting--India, Egypt, South Africa. He first made his name in the Kala Kin Expedition, in command of the Flying Column. And he invented a great improvement in gun-carriages--he's a gunner, you know--and----"

"I think," interrupted Winnie, with a saucy air of doubt, "that I meant something about him--and you, Mrs. Lenoir."

"There's nothing to tell. We're just friends, and we've never been anything else."

Winnie was sitting on a stool in front of the fire, smoking her Ledstone-learnt cigarette (destined, apparently, to be the only visible legacy of that episode). She looked up at Mrs. Lenoir, still with that air of doubt.

"Well, why shouldn't I tell you?" said the lady. "He wanted something else, and I wouldn't."

"Were you in love with somebody else?"

"No, but he'd brought those boys--they were just schoolboys then--to see me, and it--it seemed a shame. He knew it was a shame too, but--well, you know what happens sometimes. But, quite soon after, his wife fell ill, and died in four or five days--pneumonia. Then he was glad. But he went abroad directly--without seeing me--and was abroad many years. When he came home and retired, I met him by accident, and he asked leave to call. He's very lonely--so am I rather--and he likes a change from the club. I don't wonder! And, as you'll have gathered, we've known all the same people in the old days, and always have lots to talk about. That's the story, Winnie."

"I like it. Do you ever see the sons?"

"They all come to see me when they're home on leave; but that's not often."

"The Major's coming next week, though. The General said so. Let's see if I've got them right. There's the Major--he's the eldest--in Egypt. But the second one is cleverer, and has become a colonel first; he's in Malta now. And then the one in India has only just got his troop; he ought to have had it before, but they thought he gave too much time to polo, and horse-racing, and private theatricals."

"That's Georgie--my favourite," said Mrs. Lenoir.

"I'm for the Major--because I think it's a shame that his younger brother should be made a colonel before him. I'm glad it's the Major that's coming home on leave next month."

Mrs. Lenoir looked at Winnie, and patted herself on the back. All this was much better for Winnie than the empty studio. She knew that the animation was in part an effort, the gaiety in some measure a.s.sumed--and bravely a.s.sumed. But every moment rescued from brooding was, to Mrs.

Lenoir's mind, so much to the good. According to some other ways of thinking, of course, a little brooding might have done Winnie good, and would certainly have been no more than she deserved.

Coffee came in, and, quick on its heels, the General. He produced his cigar, and advanced his invariable and invariably apologetic request.