Stephen guessed the truth, and it explained what had puzzled him from the first—the sudden visit of his cousin, unaccompanied by her husband. He had suspected a tiff. But he had not divined a rupture. He was surprised at Winnie's pluck; it must be confessed that he was also rather staggered at being asked to consider Cyril Maxon as quite so impossible to live with. However, Winnie ought to know best about that.
"Oh, come, Dick, there are limits—there must be. You may be bound to take the high line, but the rest of us are free to judge cases on the merits. At this time of day you can't expect women to stand being sat upon and squashed all their lives."
Godfrey Ledstone had not talked much. Now he came forward on Winnie's side.
"A man must appreciate a woman, or how can he ask her to stay with him?"
"I don't see why she shouldn't do as she likes," said Tora. "Especially as you put a case where there are no children, Winnie."
Mrs. Lenoir was more reserved. "Let her either make up her mind to stand everything or not to stand it at all any more. Because she'll never change a man like that."
Only one to the contrary—and he a necessarily prejudiced witness! She claimed Mrs. Lenoir for her side, in spite of the reserve. The other three were obviously for her. Winnie was glad that she had put her case. Not only was she comforted; somehow she felt more important. No longer a mere listener, she had contributed to the debate. She would have felt still more important had she been free to declare that it was she herself who embodied the matter at issue.
For such added consequence she had not long to wait. After the guests had gone, Stephen Aikenhead came to her in the garden.
"I don't want to pry into what's not my business, but I think some of us had an idea that—well, that you were talking about yourself, really, at lunch. Don't say anything if you don't want to. Only, of course, Tora and I would like to help."
She looked up at him, blushing again. "I promised not to tell. But since you've guessed——"
"I'm awfully sorry about it."
"At least I promised not to tell till it was settled. Well—it is settled. So I've not broken the promise, really."
Stephen did not think it necessary—or perhaps easy—to pass judgment on this point.
"At any rate it's much better we should know, I think. I'm sure you'll find Tora able to help you now."
She was not thinking of Tora—nor of Dennehy's tirade, nor even of Mrs. Lenoir's reserve.
"Do you think Mr. Ledstone—guessed?"
Stephen smiled. "He took a very definite stand on the woman's side when you put your parable. I should say it's probable that he guessed."
Thus it befell that the secret leaked out, though the promise was kept; and Winnie found herself an object of sympathy and her destinies a matter of importance at Shaylor's Patch. It is perhaps enough to say that she would have been behaving distinctly well if, for the sake of a scrupulous interpretation of her promise, she had forgone these consolations. They were very real and precious. They negatived the doleful finality which she had set to her life as a woman. They transformed her case; instead of a failure, it became a problem. A little boldness of vision, a breath of the free air of Shaylor's Patch, a draught of the new wine of speculation—and behold the victim turned experimentalist!
Although the Reverend Francis Attlebury was vowed in his soul to celibacy and had never so much as flirted since he took his degree at Oxford twenty-three years ago, he had more knowledge of the mind of woman than most married men pleasurably or painfully achieve. Women came to him with their troubles, their grievances, even sometimes their sins; it was no more his business to pooh-pooh the grievances than to extenuate the sins; one does not carry a cross the more cheerfully or, as a rule, any further, because a bystander assures one that it is in reality very light.
He was a tall stout man—a grievance of his own was that he looked abominably well-fed in spite of constant self-denial—and possessed a face of native and invincible joviality. He was looking quite jovial now as he listened to Cyril Maxon, agreed that he had been shamefully used, and concluded in his own mind that if the negotiations were to be carried on in that spirit they might just as well not be initiated at all. The thing was not to prove how wrong she had been in going, but to get her back. She was more likely to come back, if it were conceded to her that she had at least a fair excuse for going. Would Cyril Maxon ever make such a concession—or let somebody make it for him?
The two men were old and intimate friends; moreover Maxon was even eager to acknowledge an authority in Attlebury's office, as well as a confidence in his personal judgment.
"You won't make her think she was always wrong by proving that you were always right, Cyril."
"Am I to say I was wrong where I know I was right?"
"You've probably said you were right already. Need you repeat it?"
"I'm ready to forgive her—absolutely and unreservedly."
"Would you go a little further—do something rather harder? Accept forgiveness?" The diplomatist smiled. "Conditional forgiveness we might call it, perhaps. Forgiveness in case there might be anything for her to forgive?"
Maxon broke out in natural impatience at the incomprehensible. "On my honour, I don't understand what she's got to complain of. I took her from a poor home, I've given her every luxury, she shares my career—I needn't use mock modesty with you, Frank—I've given her absolute fidelity——" He ended with a despairing wave of his hands.
Attlebury neither argued nor rebuked. "Is there anybody who has influence with her—whom she likes and relies on?"
"I should hate anybody else being dragged into it—except you, of course. I asked her to come to you."
"Oh, I know I'm suspect. I should be no good." He smiled contentedly. "Nobody you can think of?"
"Well, the man she consulted about it was Hobart Gaynor." His tone was full of grudging dislike of such a consultation.
"Hobart Gaynor? Yes, I know him. Not a bad choice of hers, Cyril, if she felt she had to go to some one. Not quite our way of thinking, but a very good fellow."
"Why is he to poke his nose into my affairs?"
"Come, come, she poked her pretty nose into his office, no doubt, and probably he'd much rather she hadn't. I've experience of ladies in distress, Cyril. I am, in fact, as the Great Duke said of authors—when he was Chancellor of Oxford, you know—much exposed to them."
"I didn't come here to discuss Hobart Gaynor."
"I hope we sometimes do wiser things than we come to do—or what's the good of a talk? Let's discuss Hobart Gaynor in the light of—say—an ambassador, or a go-between. You're looking very formidable, Cyril. Did you often look at Mrs. Maxon like that? If so, I hope she'd done something really wicked. Because, if she hadn't, you did."
For just that moment the note of rebuke and authority rang clear in his voice. The next, he was the friend, the counsellor, the diplomatist again.
"Let Gaynor go to her with a message of peace. Bygones to be bygones, faults on both sides, a fresh start, and so on."
Cyril Maxon had felt the rebuke; he bowed his head to it. But he fretted terribly.
"I can't bring myself to speak to him about it."
"Let me. She's your wife, you know. If she went wrong, mightn't you feel that some effort of yours would—well, have made the difference?"
"What am I to tell him to say?"
"Let me tell him what to say—you try to honour my draft when it's presented. Perhaps—God knows—we're fighting for her soul, Cyril, and we shall be asked how we've borne ourselves in the fight, shan't we?"
Cyril Maxon was always ready to own that he might have been wrong—to own it to God or to God's representative; he hated owning it to a fellow-creature uninvested with prerogatives. Attlebury had skilfully shifted the venue and changed the tribunal. A man may be sure he is right as against his wife—orvice versâ. Who dares enter an unqualified 'Not Guilty' before High Heaven's Court? There some count in the indictment is sure to be well laid and well proven.
"I think I know my faults," he said, in a complacent humility.
Attlebury's smile became more jovial still. "O learned gentleman!"
The disciple still held the natural man under control. Maxon smiled, if sourly.
"I may have been exacting."
"You may have been an ass," sprang to the clergyman's lips, but stayed unuttered. "Allowances, Cyril, allowances!" he murmured gently. "We all have to work through allowances."
"Do as you like, Frank. I want the thing put straight. You know I do. I think I ought to have from her an expression of—well, of regret."
"Won't coming back convey it?" Attlebury smiled. "In fact, rather forcibly?"
Left alone, the priest indulged himself in a bout of one of his diversions—the contemplation of the folly of his disciples. Not folly in believing in him and his authority—on that he was unimpeachably sincere. What moved his satiric vein was that they all had to be gulled—and were all gullible. Before they could be made better, they all had to be persuaded that they were better than they were already. Miserable offenders? Certainly. But with "potentialities"? Even more certainly—and to an unusual degree. No question of breaking the bruised reed—it must be put in splinters. And the smoking flax would be revived with a dash of kerosene. That Pope had been entirely wrong about Tannhäuser; he should have told him that his recent doings did not represent his true self. There is joy over a sinner that repenteth. To Attlebury there was excitement in one that might. He knew it, he chid himself for it; the glory was not in him or to him. But the sporting instinct was deep—a cause of sore penitence, and of unregenerate perpetual amusement at himself.
"I'd like to beat these free-thinking beggars!" A.M.D.G.? He prayed on his knees that it might be so—and so exclusively—that the Reverend Francis Attlebury might look for and gain no advancement, no praise, not even the praise of God, but might still say "I am an unprofitable servant," and still believe it.
Besides all this—right down in the depths of his being—came the primitive rivalry of man to man—obstinate in the heart of the celibate priest. "Dear old Cyril is a fool about women. He doesn't know a thing about them." This phase of thought was sternly repressed. It is not a branch of knowledge on which it behoves a man—not even a clergyman—to flatter himself. In the first place it is wrong; in the second—or same—place, dangerous.
Thus great forces began to deploy into line against little Winnie Maxon, holding her assertion of freedom to be grave scandal and offence. There was the Family, embodied in her lawfully wedded husband; there was nothing less than the Church Catholic, speaking inexorably in Mr. Attlebury's diplomatic phrases; the Wisdom of the World, its logic, its common sense, were to find expression—and where better expression?—in the sober friend, the shrewd lawyer, the moderate man Hobart Gaynor. Could she hurl defiance at these great allies? If she did, could she look for anything save utter and immediate defeat? Just one little woman, not very strong, not very wise, with really no case save a very nebulous hazy notion that, whatever they all said, it was too bad that she should be miserable all her life! The allies would tell her that many people were miserable all their lives, but (they would add) nobody need be. Between them they had a complete remedy. Hers was the blame, not theirs, if she would not swallow it.
At Shaylor's Patch, as the summer days passed by in sunshine and warm flower-scented breezes, where she was comforted, petted, made much of, where an infinite indulgence reigned, she was swallowing something quite different from the medicine that the allies proposed for her treatment. She was drinking a heady new wine. She was seeing with new eyes, travelling through new lands of thought and of feeling. Her spirit rejoiced as in a great emancipation—in being allowed, at last, to move, to live, to find itself, to meet its fellows, to give thanks to a world no longer its taskmaster, but the furnisher of its joys and the abetter in its pleasures. Of what should she be afraid in such a mood, of what ashamed? At Shaylor's Patch it seemed that rebellion might not only be admirable, as it often is, but that it would be easy—which it is very seldom.
For the real Great World—that amalgam of all the forces of the three allies, that mighty thing which so envelopes most people from the cradle to the grave that their speculations stray beyond it no more—and often much less—than their actions—this great thing had hardly a representative among all who came and went. These folks belonged to various little worlds, which had got as it were chipped off from the big one, and had acquired little atmospheres and little orbits of their own; from time to time they collided with one another, but nobody minded that—neither planet seemed a pin better or worse for the encounter. Each was inhabited by a few teachers and a body of disciples sometimes not much more numerous; teachers and disciples alike seemed very busy, very happy, and (to be frank) in many cases agreeably self-satisfied. Afraid of the big world—lest they should come into collision with that and be shattered to miserable atoms? Not a bit of it! For, you see, the big world was, for all its imposing and threatening appearance, really moribund, whereas they were young, vigorous, growing. Paralysis had set in in the Giant's legs. He could not catch them. Presently the disease would reach his heart. He would die, and they would parcel out all his possessions. Would they quarrel among themselves, these children of progress? Probably they would, as they cheerfully admitted. What matter? Such quarrels are stimulating, good for brain and heart, illuminating. Nay, in the end, not quarrels at all. The only real deadly quarrel was with the Giant. Would there be no danger of a new Giant coming into being, born of a union of all of them, just as despotic, just as lethargic, as the old? Into this distant speculation they did not enter, and their discreet forbearance may pardonably be imitated here.
On the whole they were probably too hard on the Giant; they did not allow enough for the difficulties involved in being so big, so lumbering, so complex. They girded at him for not trying every conceivable experiment; he grumbled back that he did not want to risk explosion on a large scale. They laughed at him for not running; a creature of his bulk was safer at a walk. They offered him all manner of new concoctions; he feared indigestion on a mighty scale. Some of them he dreaded and hated; at some he was much amused; for others he had a slow-moving admiration—they might be right, he would take a generation or two to think about it, and let them know in due course through his accredited channels.
Of some of Stephen Aikenhead's friends it was a little difficult to think as human beings; they seemed just embodied opinions. Doctor Johnson once observed—and few will differ from him—that it would be tiresome to be married to a woman who would be for ever talking of the Arian heresy. Mrs. Danford, a bright-eyed, brisk-moving woman, was for ever denouncing boys' schools. Dennis Carriston wanted the human race to come to an end and, consistently enough, bored existing members of it almost to their extinction or his murder. These were of the faddists; but the majority did not fairly deserve that description. They were workers, reformers, questioners, all of them earnest, many clever, some even humorous (not such a very common thing in reformers), one or two eminent in achievement. But questioners and speculators all of them—with two notable exceptions, Mrs. Lenoir and Godfrey Ledstone. These two had no quarrel with orthodox opinion, and a very great respect for it; they would never have thought of justifying their deviations from orthodox practice. They were prepared to pay their fines—if they were caught—and did not cavil at the jurisdiction of the magistrate.
Godfrey Ledstone would have made a fine "man about town," that unquestioning, untroubled, heathenish master of the arts and luxuries of life. Chill penury—narrow means and the necessity of working—limited his opportunities. Within them he was faithful to the type and obedient to the code, availing himself of its elasticities, careful to observe it where it was rigid; up to the present anyhow he could find no breach of it with which to reproach himself.
He was committing no breach of it now. Not to do what he was doing would in his own eyes have stamped him a booby, a fellow of ungracious manners and defective sensibilities, a prude and a dolt.
The breeze stirred the trees; in leisurely fashion, unelbowed by rude clouds, there sank the sun; a languorous tranquillity masked the fierce struggle of beasts and men—men were ceasing from their labour, the lion not yet seeking his meat from God.
"I shall go to my grave puzzled whether the profile or the full face is better."
She stirred lazily on her long chair, and gave him the profile to consider again.
"Beautiful, but cold, distant, really disheartening!"
"You talk just as much nonsense as Mrs. Danford or Mr. Carriston."
"Now let me make the comparison! Full face, please!"
"You might be going to paint my picture. Now are you content?"
"I'm more or less pacified—for the moment."
Stephen Aikenhead lounged across the lawn, pipe in mouth. He noticed the two and shook his shaggy head—marking, questioning, finding it all very natural, seeing the trouble it might bring, without a formula to try it by—unless, here too, things were in solution.
She laughed lightly. "You must be careful with me, Mr. Ledstone. Remember I'm not used to flattery!"
"The things you have been used to! Good heavens!"
"I dare say I exaggerate." Delicately she asked for more pity, more approval.
"I don't believe you do. I believe there are worse things—things you can't speak of." It will be seen that by now—ten days since Winnie's arrival—the famous promise had been pitched most completely overboard.
"Oh, I don't think so, really I don't. Isn't it a pretty sky, Mr. Ledstone?"
"Indeed it is, and a pretty world too, Mrs. Maxon. Haven't you found it so?"
"Why will you go on talking about me?"
"Mayn't I talk about the thing I'm thinking about? How can I help it?"
Her smile, indulgent to him, pleaded for herself also.
"It is horribly hard not to, isn't it? That's why I've told all about it, I suppose."
Stephen Aikenhead, after the shake of his head, had drifted into the house, seeking a fresh fill for his pipe. He found the evening post in and, having nothing in the world else to do, brought out a letter to Mrs. Maxon.
"For you," he said, making a sudden and somewhat disconcerting appearance at her elbow. He puffed steadily, holding the letter out to Winnie, while he looked at his friend Godfrey with a kindly if quizzical regard.
"Good gracious, Stephen!"
"Well, I always like letters worth a 'Good gracious,' Winnie."
"Hobart Gaynor's coming here to-morrow."
"Don't know the gentleman. Friend of yours? Very glad to see him."
"Coming from—from Cyril!"
"Oh!" The little word was significantly drawn out. "That's another pair of shoes!" it seemed to say.
She sat up straight, and let her feet down to the ground.
"To make me go back, I suppose!"
"You could hardly expect him not to have a shot at it—Cyril, I mean."
Her eyes had been turned up to Stephen. In lowering them to her letter again, she caught in transit Godfrey Ledstone's regard. For a second or two the encounter lasted. She swished her skirt round—over an ankle heedlessly exposed by her quick movement. Her glance fell to the letter. Godfrey's remained on her face—as well she knew.
"I must see Hobart, but I won't go back. I won't, Stephen."
"All right, my dear. Stay here—the longer, the better for us. Shall I wire Gaynor to come?"
"Will you?"
Stephen's last glance—considerably blurred by tobacco smoke—was rather recognisant of fact than charged with judgment. "I suppose all that will count," he reflected, as he went back once again to the house. It certainly counted. Godfrey Ledstone was doing nothing against the code. All the same he was introducing a complication into Winnie Maxon's problem. At the start freedom for her had a negative content—it was freedom from things—friction, wrangles, crushing. Was that all that freedom meant? Was not that making it an empty sterile thing?
"You'll be firm, Mrs. Maxon?"
Godfrey leant forward in his chair; the change of attitude brought him startlingly near to her. She sprang quickly to her feet, in instinctive retreat.
"I must hear what Hobart has to say." She met his eyes once more, and smiled pleadingly. He shrugged his shoulders, looking sulky. Her lips curved in a broader smile. "That's only fair to Cyril. You're not coming to dinner? Then—good night."
Hobart Gaynor undertook his embassy with reluctance. He was busily occupied over his own affairs—he was to be married in a fortnight—and he was only unwillingly convinced by Mr. Attlebury's suave demonstration of where his duty lay, and by the fine-sounding promises which that zealous diplomatist made in Cyril Maxon's name. Waiving the question whether things had been all wrong in the past, Attlebury gave a pledge that they should be all right in the future; all that a reasonable woman could ask, with an ample allowance for whims into the bargain. That was the offer, put briefly. Gaynor doubted, and, much as he wished well to Winnie Maxon, he did not desire to become in any sense responsible for her; he did not want to persuade or to dissuade. Indeed, at first, he would undertake no more than a fair presentment of Maxon's invitation. Attlebury persisted; the woman was young, pretty, not of a very stable character; her only safety was to be with her husband. Her old friend could not resist the appeal; he came into line. But when he asked Cicely Marshfield's applause for his action, he could not help feeling that she was, to use his own colloquial expression, rather "sniffy" about it; she did not appear fully to appreciate his obligation to save Winnie Maxon.
He arrived at Shaylor's Patch before lunch. Stephen Aikenhead received him with cordiality, faintly tinged, as it seemed to the visitor, with compassion. Tora's manner enforced the impression; she treated him as a good man foredoomed to failure. "Of course you must have your talk with her," Stephen said. "You shall have it after lunch." He spoke of the talk rather as a ceremony to be performed than as a conference likely to produce practical results.
"I hope you'll back me up—and Mrs. Aikenhead too?" said the ambassador.
The Aikenheads looked at one another. Tora smiled. Stephen rubbed his forehead. At the moment lunch was announced, and, the next, Winnie came into the room, closely followed by Godfrey Ledstone.
When Hobart saw her, a new doubt smote him—a doubt not of the success (he was doubtful enough about that already), but of the merits of his mission. She looked a different woman from the despairing rebel who had come to him in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Her eyes were bright, there was colour in her cheeks; her manner, without losing its attractive quietude and demureness, was gay and joyous. There might be something in what she had said about being "crushed" at her husband's house! It might not be merely a flourish of feminine rhetoric.
"The country has done wonders for you, Winnie," he said, as he shook hands.
"I'm having a lovely rest." To Hobart she seemed to add, "Why need you come and disturb it?"
Another omen unfavourable in the envoy's eyes was the obvious pleasure she took in Ledstone's presence and conversation; and yet another was the young man's unobtrusive but evident certainty that all he said and did would be well received. On Ledstone's fascinating attentions, no less than on the Aikenheads' affectionate and indulgent friendship, he had to ask her to turn her back. For what? A parcel of promises made by Attlebury in Maxon's name! Were they of much more practical value than what godfathers and godmothers promise and vow at a baby's christening? Could they change the natural man in Maxon and avail against his original sin? But, on the other hand, were not indulgent friendships, and, still more, charming attentions, exactly the dangers against which he had come to warn her? She was young, pretty, and not of a very stable character—Attlebury's words came back. The indulgent friendship would mine her defences; then the charming attentions would deliver their assault. No—Attlebury was right, his own mission was right; but it bore hard on poor Winnie Maxon. A reluctant messenger, a prophet too sensible of the other side of the argument (which prophets should never be), he found himself no match for the forces which now moved and dominated Winnie Maxon. She had been resolved when she was only crying for and dreaming of liberty. Would she be less resolved now that she had tasted it? And was now enjoying it, not amid frowns or reproofs, but with the countenance of her friends and the generally, though not universally, implied approval of all the people she met? Attlebury could make the disapproval of the great world outside sound a terrible thing; sheltered at Shaylor's Patch, Winnie did not hear its voice. Attlebury might hint at terrible dangers; such men thought it "dangerous" for a woman to have any pleasure in her life!
She listened to Hobart kindly and patiently enough, but always with reiterated shakes of her pretty head. At some of the promises she fairly laughed—they were so entirely different from the Cyril Maxon she knew.
"It's no use," she declared. "Whatever may be right, whatever may be wrong, I'm not going back. The law ought to set me free (this was an outcome of Shaylor's Patch!). Since it doesn't, I set myself free, that's all."
"But what are you going to do?"
"Either take a cottage down here or a tiny flat in London."
"I didn't ask where you were going to live, but what you were going to do." Hobart was a patient man, but few people's tempers are quite unaffected by blank failure, by a serene disregard of their arguments.
"Do? Oh, I dare say I shall take up some movement. I hear a lot about that sort of thing down here, and I'm rather interested."
"Oh, you're not the sort of woman who buries herself in a movement, as you call it."
"I can make friends, like other people, I suppose. I needn't bury myself."
"Yes, you can make friends fast enough! Winnie, you're avoiding the crux of the matter."
"Oh, you're back to your dangers! Well, I think I can trust myself to behave properly."
"You ought to be sure of it."
"Are you being polite?"
"Oh, hang politeness! This is a vital question for you."
The colour mounted in her cheeks; for the first time she showed some sign of embarrassment. But the embarrassment and the feelings from which it sprang—those new feelings of the last fortnight—could not make her waver. They reinforced her resolution with all the power of emotion. They made "going back" still more terrible, a renunciation now as well as a slavery. Her eyes, though not her words, had promised Godfrey Ledstone that she would not go back. What then, as Hobart Gaynor asked, was she going to do? The time for putting that question had not come. There was the pleasure now—not yet the perplexity.
She gave a vexed laugh. "Whether it's vital or not, at any rate it's a question for me, as you say yourself, and for me only. And I must risk it, Hobart. After all, there are different—well, ideas—on that sort of subject, aren't there?" Here Shaylor's Patch showed its influence again.
"I rather wish you hadn't come to this house," he said slowly.
"I've been happier here than anywhere in the world. What have you against it?"
"Well, I can't claim to know much about it, but don't some queer people come?"
"Plenty!" she laughed. "It's very amusing."
He smiled, frowned, looked, and indeed felt, a little foolish—as the average man does when he finds himself called upon to take the moral line.
"Rather—er—unsettling?" he hazarded lamely.
"Very stimulating."
"Well, I can say no more. I've done my job. Take care of yourself, Winnie."
"Oh yes, I will; you may be sure of that. Hobart, will you tell Cyril that I'm very, very sorry, and that I hope he'll be happy, and wish him splendid success and prosperity?"
"I'll tell him—if you won't write yourself."
"I couldn't. That would open it all again. I'll write to you, if there's any business to be settled."
Hobart Gaynor, thinking over the conversation on his way back to town, decided that Winnie had got on apace. Well, if she chose to take her life into her own hands, she herself must make the best of it. He did not pretend to feel quite easy—he could not get Godfrey Ledstone out of his head—but he said nothing about such apprehensions when he reported the failure of his mission. He also delivered Winnie's message to her husband. Cyril Maxon's lips set hard, almost savagely, over it. "We shall see," he said. He could not prevent her from doing what she had done, but he would not acknowledge it as setting up a permanent or recognized state of affairs. For the time disobedient, Winnie was still his wife. He would not accept her valediction. His house was still open to her and, after a decent period of penance, his heart.
A plain case of Stephen Aikenhead's "In solution"! What to Cyril was an indissoluble relationship (and more than that), not even temporarily suspended, but rather defied and violated, was to his wife a thing now at last—by her final decision—over and done with so far as it affected her position towards Cyril himself. He was out of her life—at last. She had her life—at last. Not quite entirely free, this life she had won by her bold defiance. She still acknowledged limitations, even while she nibbled at the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge that grew at Shaylor's Patch. Yet how incomparably more free than the old life! She was amazed to find with how little difficulty, with how slight a pang, and with how immense a satisfaction she had broken the bond—or had broken bounds, for she felt remarkably like a school-boy on a forbidden spree. What great things a little courage will effect! How the difficulties vanish when they are faced! Why, for five whole years, had she not seen that the door was open and walked out of it? Here she was—out! And nothing terrible seemed to happen.
"Well, I've done it now for good and all," she said to Stephen Aikenhead.
"Oh yes, you've done it. And what are you going to do next?"
"Just what Hobart asked me! Why should he—or why should you? If a woman doesn't marry, or becomes a widow, you don't ask her what she's going to do next! Consider me unmarried, or, if you like, a widow."
"That's all very well—excellently put. I am rebuked!" Stephen smiled comfortably and broadly. "You women do put things well. But may I observe that, if you were the sort of woman you're asking me to think about, you'd probably be living pretty contentedly with Cyril Maxon?"
The point was presented plainly enough for her. She smiled reflectively. "I think I see. Yes!"
"People differ as well as cases."
She sat down by him, much interested. They were, it seemed, to talk about herself.
"Hobart Gaynor's rather uneasy about me, I think."
"And you about yourself?"
"No, I'm just rather excited, Stephen."
"You're a small boat—and it's a big sea."
"That's the excitement of it. I've been—land-locked—for years. Oh, beached—whatever's your best metaphor for somebody wasting all this fine life!"
"Do you suppose you made your husband happy?"
The question was unexpected. But there was no side of a situation too forlorn for Stephen's notice.
"I really don't know," said Winnie. "I always seemed to be rather—well, rather a minor interest."
"I expect not—I really expect not, you know."
"Supposing I was, or supposing I wasn't—what does it amount to?"
"I was only just looking at it from his point of view for a minute."
"Did he make me happy?"
"Oh, certainly the thing wasn't successful all round," Stephen hastily conceded.
"He said marriage wasn't invented solely to make people happy."
"Well, I suppose he's got an argument there. But you probably thought that the institution might chuck in a little more of that ingredient incidentally?"
"Rather my feeling—yes. You put things well too, now and then, Stephen."
"You suffer under the disadvantage of being a very attractive woman."
"We must bear our infirmities with patience, mustn't we?"
She was this evening in a rare vein of excited pleasure, gay, challenging, admirably provoking, exulting in her freedom, dangling before her own dazzled eyes all its possibilities. Stephen gave a deep chuckle.
"I think I'll go in and tell Tora that I'm infernally in love with you," he remarked, rising from his chair.
"It would be awfully amusing to hear what she says. But—are you?"
A rolling laugh, full of applause, not empty of pity, rumbled over the lawn as Stephen walked back to the house.
No, Stephen was not in love with her; that was certain. He admitted every conceivable doubt as to his duty, but harboured none as to his inclination. That trait of his might, to Winnie's present mood, have been vexatious had he chanced to be the only man in the world, or even the only one in or near Shaylor's Patch. Winnie sat in the twilight, smiling roguishly. She had no fears for herself; far less had she formed any designs. She was simply in joyful rebound from long suppression. Her spirit demanded plenty of fun, with perhaps a spice of mischief—mischief really harmless. So much seemed to her a debt long overdue from life and the world. Yet peril was there, unseen by herself. For there is peril when longings for fun and mischief centre persistently round one figure, finding in it, and in it only, their imagined realization.
But was peril the right word—was it the word proper to use at Shaylor's Patch? Being no fool, Stephen Aikenhead saw clearly enough the chance that a certain thing would happen—or was happening. But how should this chance be regarded? The law—formed by this and that influence, historical, social, and religious—had laid upon this young woman a burden heavier than she was able to bear. So Stephen started his consideration of the case. Retort—she ought to have been stronger! It did not seem a very helpful retort; it might be true, but it led nowhere. The law then had failed with the young woman. Now it said, "Well, if you won't do that, at least you shan't do anything else with my sanction—and my sanction is highly necessary to your comfort, certainly here, and, as a great many people believe, hereafter." That might be right, because it was difficult to deny the general proposition that laws ought to be kept, under pain of penalties. Yet in this particular instance there seemed something rather vindictive about it. It was not as if the young woman wanted to rob churches or pick pockets—things obviously offensive and hurtful to her neighbours. All she would want (supposing the thing did happen) would be to behave in a perfectly natural and normal fashion. All she would be objecting to would be a law-enjoined sterilization of a great side of her nature. She would be wronging her husband? If wrong there were, surely the substantial wrong lay in deserting him, not in making the best of her own life afterwards? She might have children—would they suffer? Living in the social world he did, Stephen could not see that they need suffer appreciably; and they were, after all, hypothetical—inserted into the argument for the sake of logical completeness. She would wound other people's convictions and feelings? No doubt, but that argument went too far. Every innovator, every reformer, nay, every fighting politician, does as much. The day for putting ring-fences round opinions, and threatening trespassers with prosecution, was surely over.
Well, then, would she hurt herself? The argument descended abruptly from the general to the particular. It left principle, and came to prudence, asking no longer what she had a right to do, but what she would be wise to do in her own interests. A man may hold a thing not wrong, and yet be a fool if he does it in a place where the neighbours are so sure of its iniquity that they will duck him in the horse-pond. But suppose him to be a mighty man of valour, whom nobody cares to tackle! He can snap his fingers at the neighbours and follow his own conscience or inclination, free from fear and heedless of disapprobation.
"That's as far as I can get," Stephen concluded, rubbing his forehead, as his habit was in moments of meditation. The conclusion did not seem wholly moral, or wholly logical, but it might work out fairly well in practice; government by the law—that is, the opinion of the majority—for the weak (themselves the majority), government by their own consciences and inclinations for the strong. Probably it was a rough statement of what generally happened, if the terms weak and strong might be taken to sum up the complex whole of a man's circumstances and character; both must by all means be considered.
But who are the strong? How can they judge of their prowess until they are in the thick of the fray? If it fails them then, it's too late—and away to the horse-pond! You do poor service to a friend if you flatter him in this matter. When he finds himself in the pond, he will not be so grateful for your good opinion.
Winnie came in, bright-eyed, softly singing, making for upstairs at a hasty pace.
"I shall be late for dinner!" she cried. "I met Mr. Ledstone, and he made me go for a little walk."
"Did you enjoy it?" asked Stephen politely.
"Yes, thank you, Stephen, very much."
She was gone. Stephen sighed. She had only one life—that was the unspoken plea of her youth, her beauty, and her new-born zest in living. Say what you like, the plea was cogent.
To probe Godfrey Ledstone's mind would be to come up against the odd bundle of ideas which constitutes the average young man's workaday morality—the code before mentioned. This congeries of rules, exceptions, compromises, strictnesses, and elasticities may be condemned; it cannot be sneered at or lightly dismissed. It has, on the whole, satisfied centuries; only at rare intervals has it been seriously interfered with by the powers that be, by Church, or State, or Church-ruled State.
To interfere seriously with it is to rouse a hive of questions, large, difficult, so profoundly awkward as to appal statesmen, lay or ecclesiastical—questions not only moral and religious, but social and economic. Formal condemnation and practical tolerance leave these questions sleeping. The code goes on, exercising its semi-secret underground jurisdiction—a law never promulgated, but widely obeyed, a religion with millions of adherents and not a single preacher. Rather a queer way for the world to live? Rather a desperate attempt at striking a balance between nature and civilization? No doubt. But then, of course, it is only temporary. We are all going to be good some day. To make us all good, to make it possible for us all to be good, immediately—well, there is no telling but what that might involve a radical reconstitution of society. And would even that serve the turn?
The code never had a more unquestioning, a more contented adherent than Godfrey. Without theorizing—he disliked theories and had a good-natured distrust of them—he hit just that balance of conduct whereof the code approves; if he had talked about the matter at all (the code does not favour too much talking) he might have said that he was "not a saint" but that he "played the game." His fellow-adherents would understand perfectly what he meant. And the last thing in the world that he contemplated or desired was to attack, or openly to flout, accepted standards. The code never encourages a man to do that. Besides, he had a father, a mother, and a sister, orthodox-thinking people, very fond and proud of him; he would not willingly do or say anything to shock them. Even from a professional point of view—but when the higher motives are sufficient to decide the issue, why need they invoke the somewhat compromising alliance of others purely prudential?
By now he was very much in love with Winnie Maxon, but he was also desperately vexed with her, and with all the amiable theorizers at Shaylor's Patch. The opportunity had seemed perfect for what he wanted, and what he wanted seemed exactly one of the allowed compromises—an ideal elasticity! Whom would it wrong? Not Cyril Maxon, surely? He was out of court. Whom would it offend? There was nobody to offend, if the affair were managed quietly—as it could be here in the country. And she liked him; though he had made no declaration yet, he could not doubt that she liked him very much.
But the theorizers had been at her. When he delicately felt his way, discussing her position, or, professedly, the position of women in general whose marriages had proved a failure, she leant back, looking adorably pretty, and calmly came out with a remark of a profoundly disconcerting nature.
"If I ever decided to—to link my life with a man's again, I should do it quite openly. I should tell my husband and my friends. I should consider myself as doing just the same thing as if I were marrying again. I talked it all over with Tora the other night, and she quite agreed with me."
Agreed with her! Tora had put it into her head, of course, Godfrey thought angrily. The idea had Tora's hall-mark stamped large in its serene straightforward irrationality.
"But that'd mean an awful row, and the—a case, and all that!"
"I hope it would. But Cyril doesn't approve of divorce."
"Then you'd never be able to—to get regular, as long as he lived."
"I think I should be regular, without getting regular," she answered, smiling.
"What's the good of defying the world?"
"Isn't that the only way bad things get altered?"
"It needs a good deal of courage to do things like that—right or wrong."
"I should rely on the man I loved to give me the courage."
Godfrey did not wish to admit that the man whom (as he hoped) she loved lacked courage. The answer irritated him; he sat frowning sulkily, his usual gaiety sadly overcast. Winnie's eyes scanned his face for a moment; then, with a sigh, she looked over the lawn to the valley below. She was disappointed with the reception of her great idea. "Of course the two people would have to be very much in love with one another," she added, with a little falter in her voice.
He found a way out of his difficulty. "The more a man loved a woman, the less likely he'd be to consent to put her in such a position," he argued. His face cleared; he was pleased with his point; it was good, according to the code.
"It would be the only honourable position for her," Winnie retorted.
He rose to his feet in a temper; it was all so unreasonable. "I must go."
"Are you coming to anything to-morrow?"
"No, I shall be in town to-morrow. I dare say I shall stay a night or two." This was by way of revenge—or punishment. Let her see how she liked Shaylor's Patch without him!
She turned to him, holding out her hand; in her eyes was raillery, half-reproachful, half-merry. "Come back in a better temper!" she said.
"I'm a fool to come back at all." He kissed her hand and looked steadily into her eyes before he went away.
Himself at once a poor and a pleasure-loving man, Godfrey had the good luck to own a well-to-do and devoted friend, always delighted to "put him up" and to give him the best of hospitality. Bob Purnett and he were old schoolfellows and had never lost sight of one another. Bob had four thousand a year of his own (though not of his own making), and in the summer he had no work to do; in the winter he hunted. He was a jovial being and very popular, except with the House Committee and the cook of his club; to these unfortunate officials he was in the nature of a perpetual Assize Court presided over by a "Hanging Judge."
He gave Godfrey a beautiful dinner and a magnum of fine claret; let it be set down to his credit that he drank—and gave—fine claret at small dinners. He knew better than to be intemperate. Did he not want to go on hunting as long as possible? Nor was Godfrey given to excess in wine-drinking. Still the dinner, the claret, the old friendship, the liqueur, the good cigar, did their work. Godfrey found himself putting the case. It appeared to Bob Purnett a curious one.
"But it's rot," he observed. "You're married or you're not—eh?" He himself was not—quite distinctly. "Must be very pretty, or she wouldn't expect you to stand it?"
Godfrey laughed. There was a primitive truthfulness about Purnett's conversation. He was not sophisticated by thought or entangled in theory—quite different from the people at Shaylor's Patch.
"She is very pretty; and absolutely a lady—and straight, and all that."
"Then let it alone," counselled Bob Purnett.
"I can't help it, old chap." Again the primitive note—the cry that there are limits to human endurance! Godfrey had not meant to utter it. The saying of it was an illumination to himself. Up to now he had thought that he could help it—and would, if he were faced with theories and irrationality.
"Let's go to a Hall?" Bob suggested.
"I'd like a quiet evening and just a jaw."
Bob looked gravely sympathetic. "Oh, you've got it in the neck!" he said, with a touch of reverent wonder in his voice—something like the awe that madmen inspired in our forbears. Godfrey was possessed!
"Yes, I have—and I don't know what the deuce to do."
"Well, what the deuce are you to do?" asked Purnett. His healthy, ruddy, unwrinkled face expressed an honest perplexity. "Must be a rum little card—isn't she?"
"I can't help it, Bob."
"Dashed awkward!"
In fact these two adherents of the code—may it be written honest adherents, for they neither invented nor defended, but merely inherited it?—were frankly puzzled. There is a term in logic—dichotomy—a sharp division, a cutting in two, an opposing of contradictories. You are honest or not honest, sober or not sober. Rough reasoning, but the police courts have to work on it. So you are regular or irregular. But people who want to make the irregular regular—that is as great a shock to the adherents of the code as their tenets are to the upholders of a different law. The denial of one's presuppositions is always a shock—because one must start from somewhere. It is a "shock to credit"—credit of some kind—and how are any of us to get on without credit?
"Bring two more old brandies, Walter," Mr. Purnett commanded. It was the only immediate and practical step.
"Not for me, old chap."
Bob nodded accordingly to Walter. His face was inconceivably solemn.
"I sometimes feel like cutting the whole thing," said Godfrey fretfully.
"Well, there are other women in the world, aren't there?"
"No, no. I mean the whole thing. What's the good of it?" The young man's fresh face looked for the moment weary and old; he flung his good cigar, scarcely half-smoked, into the fireplace.
Bob Purnett knew better than to argue against a mood like that; one might just as well argue against a toothache.
"Let's go home and have an early bed," he suggested. He yawned, and tried to hide the action. He was devoted to his friend, but his friend had raised a puzzle, and puzzles soon fatigued him—except little ones made of wood, for which he had a partiality.
For three whole days Godfrey Ledstone fought; really trying to "cut the whole thing," to master again the feelings which had mastered him, not to go back to Shaylor's Patch. On one day he went to see his people, the father, mother, and sister, who were orthodox-thinking, and so fond and proud of him. They lived in Woburn Square. The old gentleman had been an accountant in a moderately good way of business, and had retired on a moderately good competence; at least, he was not old really, but, like some men, he took readily, even prematurely, to old age. Everything in the house seemed to Godfrey preternaturally settled; it even seemed settled somehow that Amy would not marry. And it was odd to think that Mr. and Mrs. Ledstone had once married, had (as it must be presumed) suffered from these terrible feelings, had perhaps doubted, feared, struggled, enjoyed. To-day all was so placid in Woburn Square; the only really acute question was the Income Tax—that certainly was a grievance to Mr. Ledstone. Godfrey appreciated the few hours of repose, the fondness, and the pride. It seemed then quite possible to "cut the whole thing"—yes, the whole of it.
Bob Purnett went off on a short visit, leaving his comfortable flat at his friend's disposal. Why not stay in London, do a good turn at work, and see some more of his people in Woburn Square? A good and wise programme. But on the fourth day came a gust that blew the good and wise programme clean out of the window—a gust of feeling like a draught of strong wine, heady and overpowering. He flung down his pencil, crying aloud, "It's no use!"
He was tried beyond that he was able. He laid an indictment, vague and formless, yet charged with poignant indignation, against the general order of things, against what forced a man into folly, and then branded him "Fool" with irons hissing-hot. The old protest, the creature's cry against the injustice of creation! An hour later he was on his way to the country—back to Shaylor's Patch. So far as he was concerned, the thing was settled. He might not realize it; he went, not led by purpose, but driven by craving. But "On my terms if I can, on hers if I must," interprets the confused and restless humming of his brain.
To a man in such case the people he meets as he fares along seem strangely restful, impossibly at peace. The old man with his pipe, the young clerk with his sporting paper, the labourer in the field, the toddler with its toy, all present an illusion of untroubled existence, at which the man with the gadfly looks in envy and in scorn. They possess their souls—he is possessed. Well might Bob Purnett wear that expression of awe! For some day the normal man must resume possession, and he may find that the strangest pranks have been played by the temporary tenant—furniture smashed, debts incurred, and what not, for all of which dilapidations and liabilities he, unfortunate soul, is held responsible! Happily it chances, after all not so seldom, that the temporary tenant has made beauty, not havoc, and left behind him generous gifts, to the enrichment of life till life itself shall pass away.
Stephen Aikenhead sat on the lawn with his little girl Alice, newly come home for the holidays. She was reading aloud to him; he smoked his pipe, and now and again his big hand would pass caressingly over the little bowed head with its soft brown hair. The story was about a certain Princess, to whom a Fairy had given the Gift of Eternal Youth on the condition that she never fainted either from fear or from joy. All went well for a very great many years. Generations were born and died, and the Princess was still sweet seventeen. She outlived seventy-seven Prime Ministers. But at last a very handsome groom, who had appeared at the Castle gates rather mysteriously and been taken into the Princess' service without (as it seemed) any "character," was thrown from his horse while he was in attendance on his Royal Mistress, and, lo and behold, the Princess fainted for fear that he might be dead, and fainted again for joy when she found he wasn't! So he revealed himself as the King of the neighbouring kingdom, and they married one another, and lived happily ever afterwards. Only, of course, the Princess lost the Gift of Eternal Youth.
"I love these stories about Princesses, Alice," said Stephen. "Read me another. I wish there were lots more Princesses. There aren't half enough of them nowadays. They're so picturesque, and such jolly things happen to them. Hallo, Godfrey, you back?"
Godfrey had sent the cab on with his luggage, and let himself in by the garden gate. He arrived just in time to hear the end of the story. Reader and listener were close to the parlour door. As his name was spoken, Godfrey heard a little movement from within—the sound of the movement of a woman's skirts. His impressionable nature responded to a new appeal, his readily receptive eyes beheld a new vision. As he looked at the big man and his little girl, so happy in one another, so at peace yet never in tedium, he wished that it—his affair—could be neither on his terms nor on hers—could be neither a deceit nor a defiance, but could be the straight regular thing, the good old-fashioned thing that, after all, served most people's turn well enough. There were failures, but it was in the broad way of nature and broadly successful. Who really objected to it, or questioned it? To whom was the Institution obnoxious? Rips and cranks, he answered in his concise vernacular; really it did well enough for everybody else—with, no doubt, allowances made here and there.
The soft rustle sounded again from within the parlour. Then Winnie Maxon stood in the doorway with shining, welcoming eyes.
"Well, would you like the story of the Princess with the Broken Heart?" asked Alice.
"Anything about a Princess!" said Stephen, with handsome liberality.
"It sounds sad, Alice. If it's sad, don't let's have it," Winnie pleaded.
"Oh, after all the old doctors had tried to mend it, one came, looking much older and much more wrinkled than all the rest——"
"I shall keep my eye on that practitioner, all the same," Stephen interposed. "I'm beginning to know the ropes!"
"And he mended it with an enormous gold ring that he'd cut off the little finger of a giant he had once killed on a walk he took."
"What a fellow!" said Stephen. "Prince in disguise, Alice?"
"Why, father, of course he was!"
Stephen shook his big head and turned his big spectacles up to heaven. "And that fellow Dennehy dares to call himself a republican! Now who—who, I ask you—would give a fig for a President in disguise? Read me some more Princesses, Alice."
They all enjoyed the Princesses. So sometimes, for an hour, a little child shall lead us into peace.
Embedded in his own conceptions as in a rock, Cyril Maxon refused to believe that his wife would not soon "have had enough of it." He refused to accept the failure of the envoy through whose mouth he had been induced to make such great concessions and such generous promises. Could they, in the end, fail to move her?
His duty towards her—that inexorable duty from which no act of hers could free him—called upon him for another effort. Attlebury was with him in this view, though now with less hope of a favourable issue; he detected the fact that his disciple's desire for self-vindication was no less strong than his hope of saving Mrs. Maxon, and feared for the result of this admixture of objects. He ventured on a reminder.
"Of course you want to be able to feel you've done all you could, but the great thing is to do it successfully. As we regard it, she has more at stake than you."
"I believe I can persuade her, if I go and see her."
Did he really mean persuade—or did he mean frighten? Attlebury doubted, and, because he doubted that, doubted yet more of the issue. The disciple did not give the cause fair play; a teacher has often to complain of that.
In whatever shape Cyril Maxon may have forecast in his own mind the interview that he proposed, there was no question as to how Winnie received the notice of his intention to seek her out in her asylum at Shaylor's Patch. It filled her with sheer panic; it drove her to what seemed now her only refuge. Her terror must surely make an appeal irresistible alike to the ardour and to the chivalry of her lover? Or he was no lover. Tora and she were at one on the point, though it was not put too bluntly between them.
"I can't see him; I won't," she declared to Stephen Aikenhead, running to the man of the house at last, rebel against male domination as she was.
"Rather difficult to refuse, if he comes here!"
"Then I won't be here when he comes, that's all." Her fright made her unjust. "If you won't protect me—or can't—I must act for myself." She flung out of the room, leaving Stephen no chance of protesting that the bolts and bars of Shaylor's Patch were at her service, and a siege by an angry lawyer all in the day's work.
She was afraid of herself; she distrusted her courage. She wanted to have a motive compulsory in its force; her instinct was to do something which should make a return home irrevocably impossible. Her husband's insistence hastened the crisis, though his patience could hardly have averted it.
Godfrey Ledstone had the news first from Tora Aikenhead. Her calm eyes asked him plainly enough what part it was his to play. Tora had taken her line and at once conceived hesitation to be impossible. His native idea would have been to comfort her before Maxon came, and again after he had gone, and to lie by in snug hiding when he was there. So ran the code, discreet and elastic. By now he knew—only too well—that this was not what these uncompromising people expected of him. In their odd view he had already gone too far for that convenient expedient. Social liberty might, it seemed, be more exacting than social bondage. For if you were always free to do as you liked, it was obviously necessary to be very careful about intimating too unreservedly what it was that you would like to do; since there could be no such thing as pleading impossibility in defence of a pledge unfulfilled.
"She's terribly unhappy. She declares that she must be gone before he comes. She daren't meet him."
"Why not?" he asked sharply. Another feeling was stirred in him.
"Well, he's always dominated her. He might break down her will again."
"You mean she might go back? Cave in, and go back?"
"That seems to be what she's afraid of, herself."
Tora entertained no more doubt of the soundness of her ideas than Cyril Maxon of his. Why should she, she would have asked, merely because hers were new, while his were old? To her mind newness was a presumption of merit in a view, since the old views had produced a world manifestly so imperfect all round. Holding her opinion strongly, she did not hesitate to use the weapons best suited to secure its triumph. If Godfrey's jealousy helped to that end, why was it illegitimate to let it play its part? Never was a woman less afraid of what men call responsibility.
"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 sex to sex. 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, Godfrey. 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 gratitude. "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, Godfrey."
"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 crushing—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, Godfrey 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 finishing 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 Dick 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 asserted 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!"