Mrs. Maxon Protests Part 37

"So do I--even when I win, Sir Axel! I do so agree with you." The eyes took on a grateful look. Sir Axel was making a more favourable impression than the good man had any idea of. Cyril Maxon was responsible for Sir Axel's success this afternoon; it was a true instinct that had led Lady Rosaline to make a second appointment! Her nerves were soothed; her weariness pa.s.sed into a pleasant languor. She smiled at him indolently, in peaceful contentment.

"When did you say you were off?" she inquired. In asking when he might come to see her, he had founded his plea on the ground of an early departure from London.

"Next Tuesday. I'm looking forward to it. I've never seen Venice. I shall be at Danieli's."

"Now did I ask for your address, Sir Axel?"

He laughed. "Oh, I was playing my own hand. I thought perhaps, if I couldn't stand my own society all the time, you'd let me pay a call on you at the Lakes on my way back."

Lady Rosaline and Mrs. Ladd had planned an absolutely quiet time at the Italian Lakes. But, then, Sir Axel was absolutely quiet--after Cyril Maxon.

"Well, I might go so far as to send you an address. Don't consider it a command--or even an invitation!"

"You see, I don't know a soul out there, and can't speak a word of the language."

"Well, if absolute desperation drives you to our door, perhaps we'll let you stay a little."

"Oh, I say, I didn't quite mean that!"

"The fact is, you're not very good at pretty speeches, are you? But I don't mind that--and you know I should always be glad to see you."

Sir Axel departed well-pleased, not knowing to whom or to what the better part of his pleasure might justly be attributed. So may we profit by our neighbours' blunders, and find therein some consolation for our sufferings from their superior brilliancy.

CHAPTER XXII

JUDGMENT ACCORDINGLY

Certainly the quartette made a very agreeable party in Madeira. It proved to be as happily composed as the Major had antic.i.p.ated. The two elders enjoyed the sunshine, the fine nights, the casino, much gossip with one another and with casual coevals who had anything to add. The young couple made their excursions, had their bath and a little lawn-tennis (Winnie could not be roused to enthusiasm over this), gambled mildly and danced enthusiastically. Not all these things with one another exclusively. There were other young women there, and other young men. The Major was in request among the former; Winnie among the latter. There was no overdoing of the _tete-a-tete_. Among the colours, the flowers, and the fun, life ran very pleasantly.

But Mrs. Lenoir was a little impatient. Her pet scheme seemed to hang fire. She could not quite make out why. It was not, she thought, the other young men and women; there was no sign of any foreign attraction such as might induce either of her predestined lovers to wander from the appointed path. Yet the Major's advances were, in her judgment, painfully deliberate, and Winnie's good fellowship with him was almost demonstratively unsentimental. Mrs. Lenoir felt her experience at fault; she had expected that, in such a favourable climate, the affair would ripen more quickly. But there are ways of forcing plants, and she was a skilful gardener.

One day, a week after the party had arrived on the island, she came out into the hotel garden after lunch and settled herself, with the General's gallant a.s.sistance, in a long chair; the spot commanded a view over the harbour. The General, his offices performed, sat in a shorter chair and smoked his cigar. Far below them the ramshackle pretty town seemed to blink in the sunshine; a rather sleepy blinking is the att.i.tude it takes towards existence, except when a tourist ship comes in, or a squadron of men-of-war. Then it sits up, and eats, and anon sleeps again.

"I suppose, when they come down from the Mount, they'll go straight to the casino," said the General.

"Yes, I told them we'd meet them there. Hugh!"

She did not very often call him Hugh. In the use of his name he was in the habit of recognizing some rather special call on his services or his attention.

"Yes, my dear Clara? Now you're not going to worry about your share of the wine again?"

"No," said she, smiling, "I'm not. I've a little confession to make to you. I told you a fib about Winnie. I told you the fib I told everybody--that she was a distant cousin. She isn't. I met her at some friends'--very nice people. She was quite adrift. I asked her to come to me for a bit, and we got on so well that she's stayed. She's an orphan, I know--her father was a parson--and I think she's quite alone in the world, though she has a small income." She laughed. "You see what a long story it is. With most people it's so much easier to tell the little fib. But I've told you the truth about her now." Yet not all the truth.

Mrs. Lenoir's conscience certainly seemed sometimes to work on easy springs.

"Thank you for telling me, Clara. I suppose I know why you told me. But I think my boy knows already that, if he has any designs about Miss Winnie, he'll not find me an obstacle. Only she doesn't seem to me to be anything more than friendly towards him."

"Well, she'd naturally wait for a lead, wouldn't she?"

"You think it's that?" Mrs. Lenoir's slight wave of her fan was non-committal. "He's a very conscientious fellow. He looks at a thing all round. I'm sure he'd consider not only whether he liked her, but whether he could satisfy her--whether the life he could offer her would be to her liking. Being a soldier's wife isn't all beer and skittles.

And getting on with all the regiment!"

"Dear me, is there all that to consider?" Her tone was playful, yet rather contemptuous. "It doesn't look as if he was desperately in love."

"Men differ," mused the General. "Look at my three sons. Bertie's as I tell you--slow and solid--make an excellent husband to a woman of sense.

The Colonel never looks at a woman, so far as I know. George runs after every petticoat he meets, and hangs the consequences--confound him!"

"And which," asked Mrs. Lenoir, "is most like father, Hugh?"

"Ancient history, ancient history!" he murmured, half in pleasure, half in contrition, yet with a glance at his companion. "Shall I tell him what you've told me about Miss Winnie?"

"Just as you like." She laughed. "I don't think he's gone far enough to have any rights yet, you know."

"I don't think he has," agreed the General, laughing too--and not aware of the bearings of his admission.

Mrs. Lenoir, however, treasured it in her armoury: she might have need of it. Plainly the General might consider that, confession once begun, confession ought to have gone further. She had the same plausible answers she had given to Winnie herself. She had another; she acknowledged her own fib, but she would plead that she had no right to betray her friend. In the end she had not much doubt that she could manage the General. She had managed him before--in a much more difficult case; and he was very fond of Winnie. Something of partisanship influenced her mood; the free lance renewed memories of old raids in this little skirmish against convention; she was minded to fight at the best advantage she could--with the father 'contained' and the son as deeply committed to his position as she could get him before the blow was struck.

As a result of this conversation the General carried away an uneasy idea--born of the confidence so pointedly reposed in him, enforced by the slight touch of contempt in Mrs. Lenoir's voice--that one of the ladies, even possibly both, considered his son, if not a laggard, yet at least somewhat prosaically circ.u.mspect in his love-making. Such a view, if really entertained, did some injustice to Bertie Merriam. He was not impulsive; he was not pa.s.sionate. He took time to make up his mind. It would be almost true to say that, before falling in love, he made up his mind that he would--not the commonest order of events. But he had pretty well made up his mind by now. Only he received very little encouragement. Winnie was always 'jolly' to him; but she asked nothing of him, made no special claims on him--and took the same liberty as she accorded. In the pleasant round of their life he was one comrade among many; more intimate than the rest, no doubt, by reason of his habitual escort, the excursions, and the messing together at table, but not different in kind. Vaguely the Major felt that there was some barrier, real but imperceptible, which he could not pa.s.s--a thing made up out of a thousand un.o.btrusive trifles, yet composing in the ma.s.s a defence that he could not see how to penetrate.

There was a curious little man in the hotel--a man of about forty-five, short, bald, shabby, yet clean, though he did not bathe. In fact he did nothing--no excursions, no sports, no dancing, no flirtation. He did not even read; he sat about--meditating, it must be presumed. Something in him made the girls giggle and the men wink, as he pa.s.sed by; the men said 'Dotty!' and the girls sn.i.g.g.e.red at the witticism. His name, sought out in the hotel register, proved to be Adolphus Wigram. The wit who had made the search called him 'Dolly'--and the name became his at once, varied back to 'Dotty' sometimes by an ultra-witticism.

When Winnie came home from the casino this evening, having some minutes to spare before dressing for dinner, she went on to the hotel balcony, which overlooks the town from a loftier and, so to say, a more condescending alt.i.tude than the garden. She rested her elbows on the balcony and surveyed the beauty of the scene, so artfully composed of hill and slope and sea that one can hardly conceive it the outcome of nature's mere--and probably violent--caprice. She was lost in thought, and was startled to find elbows on a level with hers and a head in close neighbourhood, though rather lower. She recognized 'Dolly'--in the shabbiest of all suits, looking meditatively down on the lights of the town and harbour of Funchal.

"Quite a small place, Miss Wilson," said 'Dolly.' "Full of people!"

"I suppose it is," Winnie agreed politely. She had come out on the balcony occupied with another question than the population of Madeira.

"I tried to understand things once--to grasp them in the large, you know. Seems easy to some people, but I couldn't do it. I teach history.

I was a bit overworked; some of my friends subscribed to send me out here for just a fortnight. Doing me good."

Winnie turned her face towards the funny jerky little man. "Are you going to grasp things in the large when you get back?" she asked.

"No, no; I'm afraid not. Thirty thousand or so of them down there, I suppose! All thinking they're very important. All being born, or dying, or love-making, or starving, or filling their bellies, and so on. Quite a small place!"

Winnie smiled. "Yes, I dare say. It sounds true, but rather trite. I have problems of my own, Mr. Wigram."

"So have I--income, and taxation, and necessary expenditure. Still, these thirty thousand are interesting."

"They're awfully lucky to want very few clothes and hardly any fires, and to live in such a beautiful place. What do you mean by things in the large, Mr. Wigram?"

"Well, I mean truth," said the absurd little man, clutching the balcony railings, just as if he were going to vault over them and crack his skull on the nut-shaped stones which served for a path thirty or forty feet beneath. "Truth is things in the large, you know."

"I don't think I know that, but I know a friend in England who talks rather like you."

"Poor devil! How much money does he make?"