Mrs. Maxon Protests Part 39

Major Merriam sauntered towards her with his cigar. He was really rather eager, but he did not look it. The invitation might be merely a tardy apology for the snubs of yesterday.

"May I sit down by you?"

"Please do. Have you seen the _Times_?"

"I looked through the lot of them."

"Have you seen this one--the 26th?" She held up her copy.

"I suppose I have. I had a run through them all."

"Read that." Her finger indicated the report.

He read it; the process did not take long. He took his cigar out of his mouth. "Well, Miss Wilson?"

"I was Mrs. Maxon; that's all," said Winnie.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE REGIMENT

Had Bertie Merriam displayed righteous indignation or uncontrollable grief, Winnie would have left him to digest his emotion in solitary leisure. Since, however, he merely looked extremely thoughtful, as he let the _Times_ flutter to the ground and took a long pull at his cigar, it seemed natural to tell him the story. This she proceeded to do, neither boastfully nor apologetically, but with sober veracity, tempered by a humorous appreciation of how the various parties to it, herself included, came out of their various ordeals. Now and then her auditor nodded his understanding of the points--of the impossibility of life with Cyril Maxon; of how Shaylor's Patch enlarged the horizon; of the experiment with G.o.dfrey Ledstone and its comico-tragic failure; of how Maxon, for reasons unascertained, had found open to him a course which he had always declared to be lawfully open to no man; finally, of the considerations, sufficient or insufficient, which had led to the incarnation of Miss Winnie Wilson. In fact, so far as it lies within a human being's power to tell the truth about himself or herself, Winnie told it; she had no dependents and she had a hundred and fifty pounds a year.

As has been said, the Major was not an especially religious man. He had himself lived an unusually steady and regular life, keeping himself in strict training for the work to which his whole heart was devoted, but his moral ideas were those of his cla.s.s and generation. He was not strait-laced. Moreover he was heavily bia.s.sed in favour of the lady who now took him into her confidence, and not only had the advantage of telling her side of the story without anybody to criticize or contradict, but succeeded in telling it so as to carry conviction of her sincerity, if not of her wisdom. He was ready to see with her eyes, at least to the point of admitting excuse where she pleaded justification.

Though he imputed to her a great want of worldly wisdom in her dealings with G.o.dfrey Ledstone, her moral character did not suffer in his estimation, nor (what was perhaps more remarkable) were his feelings towards her perceptibly chilled. Neither did he cherish any personal grievance. She was ent.i.tled to protect herself from the idle curiosity of casual acquaintances. So soon as she had definite ground for according to him a special treatment, she had dealt openly with him and made a clean breast of it.

"Thank you," he said at the end. "I shall respect your confidence."

"What I've told you is meant for the General too, please."

"Thank you again. It's very straight of you. You must be glad to have it all over at last?"

Winnie made the slightest grimace. "Isn't that rather a sanguine view?"

Her own views about things being 'all over' had become less sanguine than of yore.

"Well, yes, I suppose it is." Even while he had been speaking, the same idea was at the back of his own mind. Things have a way of never getting 'all over,' of possessing no absolute ends, of continuing, for good and evil, to affect life till life itself ends--and even, after that, of affecting other lives sometimes. Bertie Merriam himself, thoughtfully considering, saw that the thing was by no means 'all over' with the coming of the news contained in the _Times_ of the 26th.

"And now," said Winnie, rising from her chair, "I'm going to talk nonsense with the Layton girl and the Anstruther boys, and forget all about it for a bit." She stood looking at him for a moment in a very friendly, rather puzzled, way. She wanted to convey to him that she would consider it very natural for her disclosure to make all the difference, but the a.s.surance was not easy to frame without a.s.suming more than she was, by the forms of the game, ent.i.tled to a.s.sume. She got as near to it as she could. "I've been prepared to accept the consequences all through. If I claim liberty of opinion myself, I allow it to others, Major Merriam."

"Yes, yes, I quite understand. You surely don't fear a harsh judgment from me?" He added, after the briefest pause, "Or from my father?"

"I don't think I need. You've both been such kind good friends to me."

She broke into a smile. "And, of course, on my theory I don't admit that I'm properly a subject of judgment at all."

"But you admit that I may think differently if I like?"

"Yes, I admit that. We may all think what we like, and do as we like, so long as we do it sincerely."

"Wouldn't things get rather--well, chaotic--under that system?" he asked, smiling in his turn.

"I knew I shouldn't convert you--you stickler for discipline!"

He heard the description with a laugh, but without protest or disclaimer. To his ears it was a compliment. Nor did he think Winnie, so far as he claimed to understand her, quite so scornful of all discipline as her playful taunt implied, nor in practice so thoroughgoing an anarchist as her theory of the unbridled liberty of private judgment required in logic that she should be. She did not appear to him a naturally lawless woman, nor even unusually volatile. She had had 'hard luck' and had fought against it blindly and recklessly. But, given good conditions, she would readily conform to the standards, since she would not want to do anything else. Taking this view, he saw little reason to revise his judgment or to alter his intentions, so far as the judgment and intentions depended on his estimate of the woman herself. Her candour was even a new point in her favour.

So far then neither Winnie nor even Mrs. Lenoir need regret the disclosure. The case, when fully explained, seemed to the Major eminently pardonable--at worst, a piece of visionary folly in which an ignorant young woman had rashly matched herself against the world. But there was another aspect of the case. _Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner._ Perhaps. But some people shrink from understanding things for that very reason; the consequences seem too alarming and even revolutionary. And the great bulk of people, even if they were willing to understand every case, have really no time to do it; it cannot be expected of them in this busy life. They find themselves obliged to work by generalizations and categories, to bind by rules and prohibitions admitting of no exception. It is the only way by which people in a society can tackle the job of estimating the conduct of other people, or indeed of regulating their own. The world labels in rows and p.r.o.nounces judgment on squads, an inevitably rough-and-ready method, but--the world pleads--the only practical alternative to a moral anarchy against which it must protect itself, even though at the cost of constantly pa.s.sing the same sentence on offenders of widely different degrees of criminality.

Now the world, or society, or public opinion, or whatever collective term may be used for that force to which all gregarious animals, whether they like it or not, are of necessity amenable--possessed for Major Merriam a meaning which was to him all-important, but to which Winnie and Mrs. Lenoir had accorded only the faintest, if indeed any, consideration; it meant something not vague and distant, but near, potent, with close and imperative claims on him. This thing it was which occupied his mind as he walked through the garden to the annex in which his father and he were lodged, and where he would find the General reading on the verandah until it should be time to go to the casino. For society at large, for the moralists or gossips of London, he had not much regard. He was not a prominent man; few people would know, of those few half would not care, and the thing would soon blow over. But neither his life nor his heart was in London, and it was not about the feelings or views of the great city that he went, with Winnie's copy of the _Times_ in his hand, to consult his father.

The General had been reading, and was now dozing, on the verandah. He woke up at the sound of his son's step. "Ready for the casino, my boy?"

he asked briskly.

"Well, I've something I want to talk about first, if you don't mind." He laid the _Times_ on the table.

When the General heard the story, told more briefly than Winnie had related it, but with no loss to its essential features, he conceived a grudge against Mrs. Lenoir--Clara's silence, rendered more deceitful by that delusive half-confidence of hers, seemed to him unkind--but, as regards the prisoner at the bar herself, his judgment was even more lenient than his son's, as perhaps might be expected from his more various experience. The thing was annoying, distinctly annoying, but he liked Winnie none the less. The poor girl had been in a fix!

"However it's really not our business to judge her," he concluded, looking across at his son. "We've got nothing to do with that. That's for her and her own conscience."

"She's had devilish hard luck," said Bertie.

"Yes, she has. Heavens, my boy, who am I to be hard on her?"

The Major gazed out over the garden. "As far as I'm concerned myself, I'd take the chances and go on with it." He knew that his father would understand what he meant by 'it.'

"Well, well, there are things to consider----"

Bertie turned sharply round again. Conviction rang in his voice as he interrupted: "By Jove, there are! There's the regiment!"

The General pursed up his lips and gave two quick little nods of his head. "Yes. In a few months you'll be in command."

"It might not get out, of course. There's always that chance."

"Next year you go to India. Everything gets out in India."

"Of course, if people could be got to understand the case as we do----"

"Don't you build on that, Bertie. The mere fact of this"--he tapped the _Times_--"will be all they want; take my word for it. They wouldn't make things comfortable for her."

For the moment at least Bertie's mind was not on that point; it was directed towards the subject on which he had once discoursed to Winnie herself--the influence which the wife of a commanding officer does and ought to exercise on the tone of the small society over which she is naturally called upon to exercise a sort of presidency. "Would it be good for the regiment?"

The General wore a mournful air as he took out and lit a long lean cheroot. He did not look at Bertie, as he murmured, "Must consider that, in your position."

Certainly that had to be considered; for here the two men touched what was their real effective religion--the thing which in truth shaped their lives, to which they were both loyal and uncompromising adherents, in regard to which the son was almost a fanatic. What was important to the regiment was of vital importance to Bertie Merriam and to his life's work. One of the things important to the regiment was the wives of its officers; most important was their influence on the 'young chaps'--as he had said to Winnie. It ought to be, if not motherly, at least 'elder-sisterly.' Viewed in this connection, there was evidently matter for consideration, a.s.suming that everything got out in India, as according to the General it did. To present to the 'young chaps' such an 'elder sister' as Winnie--certainly consideration was needed.

Later in the afternoon Mrs. Lenoir sat in a wicker chair on the casino terrace which overlooks, from a respectable and precipitous height, the roadstead and the sea. She had spent a lonely afternoon, she had seen none of her three friends, and by herself had drifted down to a solitary cup of tea at this resort, which she was at the moment feeling to be insecurely ent.i.tled to be called one of pleasure. She had an instinct that something was happening, that things were being settled behind her back. The feeling made her fretful; when she was fretful, the lines on her face showed a deeper chiselling. And by a very human instinct, because she thought that her friend the General was going to be angry with her, she began to get angry with him--so as not to start the quarrel at a disadvantage. They were making a fuss; now what in heaven's name was there to make a fuss about? Hugh to make a fuss! A smile more acrid, less kind, than usual, bent Mrs. Lenoir's lips; it made her look older.