Mrs. Maxon Protests Part 45

"Do you think that we influenced her--that we stopped her?" she asked.

"Because I wouldn't have done that on purpose."

"I certainly wouldn't have encouraged her on purpose. And, if you ask me, I think that our att.i.tude of--well, of reserve (Mrs. Lenoir was smiling) will have its weight--combined, perhaps, with Sir Axel's attractions."

"I'm sorry. If Cyril does want her, and it doesn't come off, he'll hate me worse than ever."

"He won't guess you've had anything to do with it--supposing you have."

"No, but he'll trace the whole thing back to me, of course. He'll blame me for having forced him into acting against his conscience."

"Tut, tut, he shouldn't have such a silly conscience," said Mrs. Lenoir easily. To her, consciences were not things to be treated with an exaggerated punctilio. "After all, if she'd asked you right out, what would you have said?"

"I should have refused to say anything, of course."

"She probably thought as much, so she tried to pump you indirectly. I think you seem to have been very moderate--and I'm sure I was. And, as one woman towards another, you ought to be glad if Lady Rosaline does prove quick at taking a hint. I shall be glad too, incidentally, because I like her, and hope to see something of her in town--which I certainly shouldn't do, if she became Lady Rosaline Maxon."

"Well, I had no idea how matters stood, and I said as little as I could," Winnie ended, protesting against any new entry on the debit side of her account with Cyril--a column about which she had not been wont greatly to concern herself.

Winnie soon found distraction from curious probings of her conscience in the care and tendance of her friend, in which she a.s.sisted the invaluable Emily. As they travelled gradually homewards, Mrs. Lenoir developed a severe and distressing cough, which made sleep very difficult and reduced her none too great strength to dangerous weakness.

Yet home she would go, rejecting almost curtly any suggestion of a return to a milder climate. She faced her position with a fatalistic courage, and her att.i.tude towards it was marked by her habitual clearness of vision.

"If I'm going to die--and I rather think I am--I'd sooner die at home than in a hotel."

"Oh, don't talk about dying!" Winnie implored. "What am I to do?" Indeed she was now bound to her friend by a strong affection.

"Well, there's just you--and the General. But the General will die too quite soon, and you'll go away anyhow. Oh yes, you'll have to, somehow; it'll happen like that. There's n.o.body else who cares. And I don't know that women like me do themselves any good by living to be old. I'm not complaining; I chose my life and I've enjoyed it. Let me go home, Winnie!"

The appeal could not be resisted, and the beginning of May found them at home. A late cold spring filled Winnie with fears for her friend. Yet Mrs. Lenoir neither would nor, as it now seemed, could make another move. She lay on her sofa, her beautiful eyes steadily in front of her.

She moved and spoke little. She seemed just to be waiting. Often Winnie wondered through what scenes of recollection, through what strains of meditation, her mind was pa.s.sing. But she preserved all that defensiveness which her life had taught her--the power of saying nothing about herself, of giving no opening either to praise or to blame, of asking no outside support. Perhaps she talked to the General. He came every day, and Winnie was at pains to leave them alone together. Towards the rest of the world, including even Winnie, she was evidently minded to maintain to the end her consistent reticence. Sickness puts a house out of the traffic of the world; day followed day in a quiet isolation and a sad tranquillity.

What had pa.s.sed left its mark on Winnie's relations with the General. He was, of course, courteous and more than that. He was uniformly kind, even affectionate, and const.i.tuted himself her partner in all that could be done or attempted for the patient whom they both loved. That link between them held, and would hold till another power than theirs severed it. But it was all that now kept them together; when it was gone, he would be in effect a stranger to her. If she said to herself, with a touch of bitterness, "He has lost all his interest in me," there was a sense in which she spoke the truth. He had pictured her as coming into the inner circle of his life, and had urgently desired the realization of the picture. Now she was definitely relegated to the outskirts; she was again just Mrs. Lenoir's young friend--with this change--that he cherished a pathetically amiable grudge against her for the loss of the picture. How much he knew of what had pa.s.sed between herself and his son on that last evening, she was not aware; but he knew the essence of it.

Though in charity he might refrain from censure, she had been an occasion of sore distress to his best-beloved son. To her sensitive mind, in spite of his kindness, there was a reserve in his bearing; he now held their friendship to its limits. The love he had borne her was wounded to death by the pain she had given him. She could imagine his thoughts made articulate in the words, "You shan't have it in your power to hurt mine and me again." She opened her eyes to the fact that she had lost a good friend, in these days which menaced her, only too surely, with the loss of a dear one. This chapter of her life seemed like to come to its end--as other chapters had before.

One visitant from the outside world--the General seemed a part of the household--made an appearance in the person of Mrs. Ladd. She came to call on Mrs. Lenoir, unaware of her illness; it was one of the patient's days of exhaustion, and Winnie had to entertain the good lady and, after listening to her appropriate sympathy, to hear her news. She had come back to England alone. Rosaline had gone to stay with friends at Biarritz.

"I think she didn't want to come home just now," said Mrs. Ladd, with a glance at Winnie which plainly fished for information.

"Mrs. Lenoir has told me a certain impression of hers, which I didn't form for myself at Bellaggio," Winnie remarked. "Are you referring to that, Mrs. Ladd?"

"Yes. Rosaline told me that you suspected nothing. But since it's all settled, there's no harm in speaking of it now. Sir Axel is at Biarritz too. I think they'll probably be married as they pa.s.s through Paris on their way home."

"Oh, it's as settled as that, is it?" Winnie's speculations revived. How much had she and Mrs. Lenoir between them contributed to the settlement?

"I think she's right to bring it to a point. It avoids all question."

Mrs. Ladd put her head on one side. "I've seen Mr. Maxon. Of course he doesn't know that you've ever seen Rosaline since--since the old days--much less that you had anything to do with it?"

"Had I? I never meant to have."

"Oh, I think so. Rosaline spoke vaguely, but I think something in your manner--of course you couldn't help it, and you didn't know. And, as I say, he has no notion of it."

"I'm glad. He'd be so angry with me, and I don't want him to be more angry than he must."

"I don't think he's got any anger to spare for you. He never referred to you. But her! Oh, my dear!" Mrs. Ladd's kindly old face a.s.sumed an almost frightened expression. "Well, I just had to stop him. I told him Rosaline was my friend, and that I wouldn't listen to it. He declared that he had a promise from her, and that on the faith of it, and of it alone, he--well, you know, don't you? Of course I said that there must have been a complete misunderstanding, but he wouldn't have it. Really, we all but quarrelled, if not quite."

How well Winnie knew! The domineering man, so sure both of his desires and of his claims, so confident in his version of the facts, so impervious to any other impression of them--from out the past the picture of him rose complete.

"I knew, of course, that he liked his own way," said Mrs. Ladd. "But, really, I was rather startled." She suddenly leant forward and patted Winnie's hand. No words pa.s.sed, but Winnie understood that Mrs. Ladd had been, to some extent at least, revising a judgment, and wished her to know it.

"He'll marry, though--mark my words! I know him, and I know something about that sort of man. He'll marry in a twelvemonth, if it's only to show Rosaline he can, and to hold up his end against Mr. Attlebury. I told Mr. Attlebury so. 'He's taken his line, and he'll go through with it,' I said, 'as soon as he finds a woman to help him.'"

"What did Mr. Attlebury say?"

"Nothing! He wouldn't talk about it. He just waved his hands in that way he has. But you may take it from me that that's what will happen."

The prophecy, born of the old woman's amiable worldly wisdom, seemed likely of fulfilment. There was nothing Cyril Maxon hated so much as failure or the imputation of it, nothing he prized so dearly as proving himself right, to which end it was ever necessary to refuse to admit that he had been wrong. Winnie seemed to hear him grimly declaring that, since he had taken his course, not Lady Rosaline, not a dozen Attleburys, should turn him from it. He would follow it to the end, even though he had little desire for it; antagonism was often to him stimulus enough. Thus it was that he became an implacable enemy to the liberty of those about him, warring with them if they a.s.serted any independence, tyrannizing if they submitted. Such people create resistance, as it were out of a vacuum--even a wild and desperate resistance, which takes little heed of what it may hurt or overthrow in its struggle against domination. Venerable inst.i.tutions, high ideals, personal loyalty may have to pay the price. All go by the board when the limits of human endurance are reached.

Had Winnie Maxon received a cla.s.sical education--the absence of which had not in her case proved a panacea against all forms of failure--she might have found in wise old Mrs. Ladd a good embodiment of the Greek Chorus--usually people with little business of their own (as would appear for all that appears to the contrary) and bent on settling other people's on lines safely traditional; yet with a salt of shrewdness, not revolutionaries, but brave enough to be critics, admitting that acceptance and submission present their difficulties--but you may go further, and far worse by a great deal! Those limits of endurance must be stretched as far as possible.

On the next day but one, the expected blow fell. Pneumonia declared itself; the patient took the doctor's diagnosis as a death-sentence--final, hardly unwelcome. Her nights were pain; day brought relief, yet increasing weakness. Now the General could not endure much of the sick-room; he came, but his visits were briefer.

Besides his grief for his friend, some distress was upon him--distress still for her sake, perhaps also for the sake of others who had gone before, even for himself, it may be. He knew so much more than Winnie did. Infinitely tender to his dying friend, he said but one word to Winnie. "When I suggest that she might see somebody, she only smiles."

Winnie understood the suggestion. "We must all of us settle that for ourselves in the end, mustn't we? I think she seems happy--at least, quite at peace."

He made a fretful gesture of protest. She had no right to be quite at peace. He lived in the ideas in which he had been bred. If he had offended a gentleman, let him apologize before it was too late.

Insensibly he applied the parallel from the seen world to the unseen--as, indeed, he had been taught. His mind stuck in particular categories of conduct; for some credit was to be given, for some penalties had to be paid; it was a system of marks good and bad. Even in the education of the young this is now held to be a disputable theory.

He thought that he had known very intimately his dear old friend who now lay dying. He found that he knew her very little; he could not get close to her mind at the end. For Winnie Maxon she had one more revelation.

Mrs. Lenoir would not 'see anybody'--she also detected the special meaning, and, with a tired smile, repelled the suggestion--but in hints and fragments she displayed to Winnie in what mood she was facing death.

Courageously--almost indifferently; the sun was set, and at night people go to bed--tired people they are generally. She had not thought much of responsibility, of a reckoning; she suffered or achieved none of the resulting impulse to penitence; she even smiled again at the virtue of a repentance become compulsory, because it was possible to sin no more.

"Some women I've known became terribly penitent at forty," she said to Winnie. "I never knew one do it at twenty-five." Her att.i.tude seemed to say that she had been born such and such a creature, and, accordingly, had done such and such things--and thus had lived till it became time for the conditioned, hardly voluntary, life of the creature to end. On the religious side it was pure negation, but on the worldly there was something positive. As verily as the General, as Bertie Merriam himself, she had 'played the game.' Her code was intact; her honour, as judged by it, unsmirched. "I've been straight, Winnie," she said, in almost the last conscious minute.

Then came oblivion; the soul was rid of its burden many hours before the body was. She pa.s.sed from the life in which she had been so great an offender against the rules, had played so interesting a part, had done so many kind things, had been such a good friend, even on occasion so resolute a resister of temptation--and a woman not to be mentioned. As Winnie wept over her and paid her the last offices of love--for she, at least, had received the purest gold of unseeking love--her heart suffered a mighty searching pang of tenderness. Old words, of old time familiar, came back. "I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in."

Such things had her dead friend done for her.

An exaltation and a confidence took hold on her after she had kissed the cold brow. But outside the room stood the old General, sad, grey, heavy of face. His voice was broken, his hands tremulous.

"I wish--I wish she'd have seen somebody, Winnie!"

Winnie threw herself into his arms, and looked up at him, her eyes streaming with tears. "Dear General, she sees nothing or she sees G.o.d.

Why are we to be afraid?"

CHAPTER XXVII

A PHILOSOPHICAL PROJECT