Mrs. Maxon Protests Part 28

"Please do. We neither of us mind, do we, Winnie?" said Mrs. Lenoir.

There was really more reason to ask the General if he minded Winnie's cigarette, which had come from the studio and was not of a very fine aroma.

Winnie stuck to her stool and listened, with her eyes set on the fire.

At first the talk ran still on the three sons--evidently the old soldier's life was wrapped up in them--but presently the friends drifted back to old days, to the people they had both known. Winnie's ears caught names that were familiar to her, references to men and stories about men whom she had often heard Cyril Maxon and his legal guests mention. But to-night she obtained a new view of them. It was not their public achievements which occupied and amused the General and Mrs.

Lenoir. They had known them as intimates, and delighted now to recall their ways, their foibles, how they had got into sc.r.a.pes and got out of them in the merry thoughtless days of youth. Between them they seemed to have known almost everybody who was 'in the swim' from thirty years to a quarter of a century before; if the General happened to say, 'So they told me, I never met him myself,' Mrs. Lenoir always said, 'Oh, I did'--and _vice versa_.

"It was just before my dear wife died," the General said once, in dating a reminiscence.

There was a moment's silence. Winnie did not look up. Then the General resumed his story. But he cut it rather short, and ended with, "I'm afraid our yarns must be boring this young lady, Clara."

Evidently he accepted Winnie entirely at her face value--as Miss Winnie Wilson. The anecdotes and reminiscences, though intimate, had been rigidly decorous, even improbably so in one or two cases; and now he was afraid that she was bored with what would certainly interest any intelligent woman of the world. Winnie was amused, yet vexed, and inclined to wish she had not become Miss Wilson. But she had made a good impression; that was clear from the General's words when he took his leave.

"Bertie will come and see you directly he gets home, Clara. It'll be in about six weeks, I expect." He turned to Winnie. "I hope you'll be kind to my boy. He doesn't know many ladies in London, and I want him to have a pleasant holiday."

"I will. And I wish they were all three coming, Sir Hugh."

"That might end in a family quarrel," he said, with a courtly little bow and a glance from his eyes, which had not lost their power of seconding a compliment.

"Well, I think you've made a favourable impression, though you didn't say much," Mrs. Lenoir remarked when he was gone.

Winnie was standing, with one foot on her stool now. She frowned a little.

"I wish you'd tell him about me," she said.

There was a pause; Mrs. Lenoir was dispa.s.sionately considering the suggestion.

"I don't see much use in taking an a.s.sumed name, if you're going to tell everybody you meet."

"He's such a friend of yours."

"That's got nothing to do with it. Now if it were a man who wanted to marry you--well, he'd have to be told, I suppose, because you can't marry. But the General won't want to do that."

"It seems somehow squarer."

"Then am I to say Mrs. Maxon or Mrs. Ledstone?"

There it was! Winnie broke into a vexed laugh. "Oh, I suppose we'd better leave it."

Thus began Winnie's cure, from love and anger, and from G.o.dfrey Ledstone. Change of surroundings, new interests, kindness, and, above all perhaps, appreciation--it was a good treatment. Something must also be credited to Mrs. Lenoir's att.i.tude towards life. She had none of the snarl of the cynic; she thought great things of life. But she recognized frankly certain of its limitations--as that, if you do some things, there are other things that you must give up; that the majority must be expected to demand obedience to its views on pain of penalties; if you do not mind the penalties, you need not mind the views either; above all, perhaps, that, if you have taken a certain line, it is useless folly to repine at its ordained consequences. She was nothing of a reformer--Winnie blamed that--but she was decidedly good at making the best of her world as she found it, or had made it for herself; and this was the gospel she offered for Winnie's acceptance. Devoid of any kind of penitential emotion, it might yet almost be described as a practical form of penitence.

Winnie heard nothing of or from Woburn Square; there was n.o.body likely to give her news from that quarter except, perhaps, Bob Purnett, and he was away, having accepted an invitation to a fortnight's hunting in Ireland. But an echo of the past came from elsewhere--in a letter addressed to her at Shaylor's Patch, forwarded thence to the studio (she had not yet told the Aikenheads of her move), and, after two or three days' delay, delivered at Knightsbridge by Mrs. O'Leary in person.

It was from her husband's solicitors; they informed her of his intention to take proceedings, and suggested that they should be favoured with the name of a firm who would act for her.

Winnie received the intimation with great relief, great surprise, some curiosity, and, it must be added, a touch of malicious amus.e.m.e.nt. The relief was not only for herself. It was honestly for Cyril Maxon also.

Why must he with his own hands adjust a lifelong millstone round his own neck? Now, like a sensible man, he was going to take it off. But it was so unlike him to take off his millstones; he felt such a pride in the c.u.mbrous ornaments. 'What had made him do it?' asked the curiosity; and the malicious amus.e.m.e.nt suggested that, contrary to all preconceptions of hers, contrary to anything he had displayed to her, he too must have his weaknesses--in what direction it was still uncertain. The step he now took might be merely the result of acc.u.mulated rancour against her, or it might be essential to some design or desire of his own. Winnie may be excused for not harbouring the idea that her husband was acting out of consideration for her; she had the best of excuses--that of being quite right.

For the rest--well, it was not exactly pleasant. But she seemed so completely to have ceased to be Mrs. Maxon that at heart it concerned her little what people said of Mrs. Maxon. They--her Maxon circle, the legal profession, the public--would not understand her provocation, her principles, or her motives; they would say hard and scornful things. She was in safe hiding; she would not hear the things. It would be like what they say of a man after he has gone out of the room and (as Sir Peter Teazle so kindly did in the play) left his character behind him. Of that wise people take no notice.

But G.o.dfrey? It must be owned that the thought of him came second; indeed third--after the aspect which concerned her husband and that which touched herself. But when it came, it moved her to vexation, to regret, to a pity which had even an element of the old tenderness in it.

Because this development was just what poor G.o.dfrey had always been so afraid of, just what he hated, a thing a.n.a.logous to the position which in the end he had not been able to bear. And poor Woburn Square! Oh, and poor Mabel Thurseley too, perhaps! What a lot of people were caught in the net! The news of her husband's action did much to soften her heart towards G.o.dfrey and towards Woburn Square. "I really didn't want to make them unhappy or ashamed any more," she sighed; for had not her action in the end produced Cyril's? But, as Mrs. Lenoir would, no doubt, point out, there was no help for it--short of Winnie's suicide, which seemed an extreme remedy, or would have, if it had ever occurred to her: it did not.

Her solicitude was not misplaced. The high moralists say _Esse quam videri_--what you are and do matters, not what people think you are or what they may discover you doing. A hard high doctrine! "He that is able to receive it, let him receive it." Mr. Cyril Maxon also had found occasion to consider these words.

For Winnie had been right. Jubilation had reigned in Woburn Square, provisionally when G.o.dfrey fetched his portmanteau away from the studio, finally and securely (as it seemed) when Amy made known the result of her mission. Father read his paper again in peace; mother's spasms abated. There was joy over the sinner; and the sinner himself was not half as unhappy as he had expected--may it be said, hoped?--to be.

Mercilessness of comment is out of place. He had been tried above that which he was able. Yet, if sin it had been, it was not of the sin that he repented. It had been, he thought, from the beginning really impossible on the basis she had defined--and extorted. In time he had been bound to recognize that. But he wore a chastened air, and had the grace to seek little of Miss Thurseley's society. He took another studio, in a street off Fitzroy Square, and ate his dinner and slept at his father's house.

Things, then, were settling down in Woburn Square. By dint of being ignored, Winnie and her raid on the family reputation might soon be forgotten. The affair had been kept very quiet; that was the great thing. (Here Woburn Square and the high moralists seem lamentably at odds, but the high moralists also enjoin the speaking and writing of the truth.) It was over. It ranked no more as a defiance; it became merely an indiscretion--a thing young men will do now and then, under the influence of designing women. There was really jubilation--if only Amy would have looked a little less gloomy, and been rather more cordial towards her brother.

"I don't understand the girl," Mr. Ledstone complained. "Our line is to make things pleasant for him."

"It's that woman. She must have some extraordinary power," his wife pleaded. Winnie's extraordinary power made it all the easier to forgive her son G.o.dfrey. Probably few young men would have resisted, and (this deep down in the mother's heart) not so very many had occasion to resist.

Then came the thunderbolt--from which jubilation fled shrieking. Who hurled it? Human nature, Winnie, Lady Rosaline Deering--little as she either had meant to do anything unkind to the household in Woburn Square? Surely even the high moralists--or shall we say the high G.o.ds, who certainly cannot make less, and may perhaps make more, allowances?--would have pitied Mr. Ledstone. Beyond all the disappointment and dismay, he felt himself the victim of a gross breach of trust. He fumed up and down the back room on the ground floor which was called his study--the place he read the papers in and where he slept after lunch.

"But he said there were to be no proceedings. He said he didn't believe in it. He said it distinctly more than once."

Mrs. Ledstone had gone to her room. The sinner had fled to his studio, leaving Amy to break the news to Mr. Ledstone; Amy was growing accustomed to this office.

"I suppose he's changed his mind," said Amy, with a weary listlessness.

"But he said it. I remember quite well. 'I am not a believer in divorce.' And you remember I came home and told you there were to be no proceedings? Monstrous! In a man of his position! Well, one ought to be able to depend on his word! Monstrous!" Exclamation followed exclamation like shots from a revolver--but a revolver not working very smoothly.

"It'll have to go through, I suppose, daddy."

"How can you take it like that? What'll your Uncle Martin say? And Aunt Lena--and the Winfreys? It'll be a job to live this down! And my son--a man with my record! He distinctly said there were to be no proceedings.

I left him on that understanding. What'll Mrs. Thurseley think? I shall go and see this man Maxon myself." Of all sinners Mr. Maxon was ranking top in Woburn Square to-day--easily above his wife even.

"I don't expect that'll do any good."

"Amy, you really are----Oh, well, child, I'm half off my head. A man has no right to say a thing like that unless he means it. No proceedings, he said!"

"I expect he did mean it. Something's changed him, I suppose."

Something had--and it never occurred to Cyril Maxon that the Ledstone family had any right to a say in the matter. He would have been astonished to hear the interpretation that Mr. Ledstone put on the interview which he remembered only with vivid disgust, with the resentment due to an intrusion entirely unwarrantable. So the poor old gentleman must be left fuming up and down, quite vainly and uselessly clamouring against the unavoidable, an object for compa.s.sion, even though he was thinking more of the Thurseleys, of Uncle Martin, Aunt Lena, and the Winfreys than of how his son stood towards divine or social law on the one side, and towards a deserted woman on the other?

Respectability is, on the whole, a good servant to morality, but sometimes the servant sits in the master's seat.

The culprit's state was no more enviable than his father's; indeed it appeared to himself so much worse that he was disposed to grudge his family the consternation which they displayed so prodigally and to find in it an unfair aggravation of a burden already far too heavy. Nothing, perhaps, makes a man feel so ill-used as to do a mean thing and then be baulked of the object for whose sake he did it. A mean thing it undoubtedly was, even if it had been the right thing also in the eyes of many people--for to such unfortunate plights can we sometimes be reduced by our own actions that there really is not a thing both right and straight left to do; and it had been done in a mean and cowardly way.

Yet it was now no good. Things had just seemed to be settling down quietly; he was being soothed by the consolatory petting of his mother and father. Now this happened--and all was lost. His decent veil of obscurity was rent in twain; he was exposed to the rude stare of the world, to the shocked eyes of Aunt Lena and the rest. He had probably lost the girl towards whom his thoughts had turned as a comfortable and satisfactory solution of all his difficulties; and he had the perception to know that, whether he had lost Mabel or not, he had finally and irretrievably lost Winnie. Everybody would be against him now, both the men of the law and the men of the code; he had been faithful to the standards of neither.

He had not the grace to hate himself; that would have been a promising state of mind. But fuming up and down in his studio off Fitzroy Square (just like his father in the back room in Woburn Square) and las.h.i.+ng himself into impotent fury, he began to feel that he hated everybody else. They had all had a hand in his undoing--Bob Purnett and his lot with their easy-going moralities, Shaylor's Patch and its lot with their silly speculations and vapourings over things they knew nothing about, Cyril Maxon who did not stand by what he said nor by what he believed, Winnie with ridiculous exacting theories, Mabel Thurseley (poor blameless Mabel!) by attracting his errant eyes and leading him on to flirtation, his parents by behaving as if the end of the world had come, his sister because she despised him and had sympathy with the deserted woman. He was in a sad case. n.o.body had behaved or was behaving decently towards him, n.o.body considered the enormous--the impossible--difficulties of his situation from beginning to end. Was there no justice in the world--nor even any charity? What an ending--what an ending--to those pleasant days of dalliance at Shaylor's Patch! What was deep down in his heart was--"And I could have managed it all right my way, if she'd only have let me!"

He did not go home to dinner that evening. He slunk back late at night, hoping that all his family would be in bed. Yet when he found that accusing sister sitting alone in the drawing-room, he grounded a grievance on her solitude. She was sewing--and she went on sewing in a determined manner and in unbroken silence.

"Well, where's everybody? Have you nothing to say? I'm sent to Coventry, I suppose?"

"Mother's in bed. Oh, she's pretty easy now; you needn't worry. Daddy's in his study; he was tired out, and I expect he's gone to sleep. I'm quite ready to talk to you, G.o.dfrey."

Perhaps--but her tone did not forebode a cheerful conversation.