Mrs. Maxon Protests Part 47

She read with a mixture of affection and resentment. She had been arriving at her own verdict on her efforts and adventures. Here was d.i.c.k Dennehy's! He thanked G.o.d that efforts and adventures were at an end, and that she was going to settle down quietly--in fact, to take care of herself, as he had put it that evening when he walked with her to the railway station. A very unjust verdict, thought Winnie, but then--she added, smiling--"It's only old d.i.c.k Dennehy's!" What else was to be expected from him--from him who liked her so much and disapproved of her 'goings-on' so strenuously? What about his own? How was he settling that question of his? Or how had he settled it? That problem which was 'not serious'! "Perhaps I shall see you"! Only 'perhaps'? Yet she was going to settle down at Nether End, and he was building his house there. The probabilities of an encounter between them seemed to warrant more than 'perhaps.' The atmosphere of the railway waiting-room, the look on his face, that shout, m.u.f.fled by engine-snorts, about somebody being a fool--they all came back to her. "But I'm very busy"--meaning thereby--Winnie took leave to add the innuendo--"I shan't be able to see you often!" Irresistibly her lips curved into a smile. It looked as if the problem weren't quite settled yet! If it were finally settled either way, why should d.i.c.k be so busy, so entirely unable to give reasonable attention to his house, or--as Stephen had told her--to care a hang about it?

"Oh, nonsense!" Winnie contrived to say to herself, though not with absolute conviction. "If it ever was that, he must have got over it by now, and I shall bury myself in the Synopsis."

It was really rather soon to find herself pitted against another Inst.i.tution!

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE VIEW FROM A HOUSE

Winnie shut Dr. Westermarck on _The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_ with a bang. "I'm not going to do any more at the Synopsis to-day," she announced. "It's much too fine. And what are you chuckling at, Stephen?"

With the help of Liddell and Scott, and a crib, Stephen was digesting Aristophanes' skit on Socrates. "An awful old Tory, but it's dashed good stuff. On no account work if you don't want to, Winnie. This job's not to be done in a day, you know."

It certainly was not--and least of all in one of his working days, in which the labour of research was constantly checked by the incursion of distantly related argument. Winnie could not make out how far he was in earnest about the Synopsis. Sometimes he would talk about its completion--and the consequent amelioration of society--in sanguine words, yet with a twinkle in his eye; at other moments he would declare in an apparent despair that it was properly the work of fifty men, and forthwith abandon for the day a labour impossibly Herculean. Tora maintained towards the great undertaking an att.i.tude of serene scorn; she did not see the use of delving into dark ages in search of the light which only now, at last, was glimmering on the horizon of the future.

Alice, however, was all for the Synopsis; it was to make her father famous, and itself became famous among her school-mates these many years before there was the least chance of its coming to birth. "To find out all that anyone ever said since the world began, and tell us whether it's true or not," was Alice's handsome description of the proposed work; no wonder the school-mates were impressed.

Though the 'awful old Tory' might well have seen in Shaylor's Patch a lesser Phrontisterion, to Winnie Maxon the pa.s.sage of the summer months there proved a rest-cure. The tissues of brain and heart recovered. She was neither oppressed as in the days of her marriage, nor hurried from emotion to emotion as in the period of struggle which had followed her escape. Her memories--of exultation, of pain, of poignant feeling--softened in outline; becoming in some degree external to all that she had done and suffered, she was the better able to a.s.sess it and to estimate where it left her. A great gulf separated her from the woman who had fled from Cyril Maxon; yet the essential woman had pa.s.sed through the flood of the gulf undrowned--with all her potentialities of life, with her spirit schooled, but not broken. This is, perhaps, to say that she had fought a drawn battle with the world; if it really came to that, it was no mean achievement.

d.i.c.k Dennehy's new house was finished--at least it wanted only its last coat of paint and, if the weather held fine, would soon be dry enough to receive it profitably. By fits and starts consignments of its necessary gear--conceived on extremely Spartan lines--arrived from London. But the master of it had himself made no appearance. Every invitation from Shaylor's Patch--and now and then the invitation amounted to an entreaty, since Tora could not for the life of her make out what he wanted done at the house--was met by protestations of absorbing work.

The problem which Winnie's imagination had forecasted did not arise--or at least it exhibited no development. d.i.c.k's obstinate absence did not disprove its existence, but might be said to suspend its animation.

Winnie, dwelling in the cottage where G.o.dfrey Ledstone once abode, had a rest from the other s.e.x; here, too, a truce was called, after her brisk series of engagements. She welcomed it; it would have seemed shallow to pa.s.s too quickly from the thought of Bertie Merriam. She neither rejected nor winced at the idea that the truce might be perpetual. With Dennehy still away, the thought of the problem died down, leaving traces only in the compa.s.sionate amus.e.m.e.nt with which she again, from time to time, reflected that he had 'got over it.' She acquiesced very willingly in the conclusion. As matters stood, life was full, pleasant, peaceful, and fruitful in the growth of her mind.

"I don't know whether you'll ever transform the world, but at least you're educating one ignorant woman, Stephen," she said.

Dr. Westermarck being finished, Stephen had, with a sudden jump, transferred her to the study of Utopias, old and new; for these, of course, must figure in the Synopsis.

"Ah, you bring some knowledge of life with you now. That makes learning ever so much easier." He smiled at her. "I really ought to go and get into some sc.r.a.pes too. But there--I couldn't put my heart into the job, so it wouldn't be much use."

"Wouldn't Tora object?"

"I'm the one exception which mars the otherwise perfect harmony of Tora's conception of the male s.e.x. She would be bound to greet any lapse on my part with scientific exultation. But, I say, I'm not going to have you burying yourself in the Synopsis."

"That's just what I came here to do--exactly as I put it to myself!"

"You shan't do it. You're much too young and pretty. I shall get some young men down, to tempt you."

Two or three young men came, but they did not tempt Winnie. She found herself possessed by a great caution. Her old confidence in her own impulses was replaced by a deep distrust of any impulse. She stood on the defensive against the approach of even a liking; she const.i.tuted herself _advocatus diaboli_ whenever Stephen ventured to praise any of his young friends. She found one shallow and conceited, another learned but a bore, a third--well, there were limits to the allowable degree of ugliness, now weren't there? Stephen laughed; his poor friends were contributing to the payment of a score run up by other men.

At last in very decency d.i.c.k Dennehy had to come; Stephen sent him word that, as he had built the house, so he would pull it down, if its owner continued to show such a want of appreciation of his friendly labours.

He arrived early one afternoon in mid-September. He was perceptibly changed; being broken into London harness had set its mark on him in manner and in appearance. He was better groomed, his hair had been persuaded to lie down, he had cut off the upturned bristly ends of his moustache. His brogue had lost in richness; he said 'ye' much seldomer when he meant 'you.' His ways were quieter, his arguments less tempestuous, and his contradictions not so pa.s.sionate. Though thus a little outwardly and possibly inwardly conventionalized, he displayed all his old friendly heartiness in his greeting of Tora and Stephen--Alice had just gone back to school. Only when he turned to Winnie, who was in the garden with them, did a shade of constraint appear in his demeanour. She put it down to the memory of the note he had sent her; she had not replied, and probably he thought that she had resented it.

The constraint was due to a deeper cause. He had determined not to make love to Winnie Maxon, and now, at the sight of her, he found that he wanted to do it, and that the a.s.surances which he had managed to make to himself that he would not want to do it--at least would not be seriously tempted to do it--were all in vain. In loyalty to his convictions, and in accordance with a personal obstinacy which b.u.t.tressed the convictions, all these months he had fought his fight. Winnie was forbidden to him; he had taken no pains to conceal his views from his and her friends; he had taken great pains to conceal his feelings from her, and conceived that he had, in the main at least, succeeded. But for that house of his--but for wounding the Aikenheads' feelings--he would have given himself a little longer period of quarantine. Yet he had felt pretty safe until he saw Winnie. And he had brought his bag; he was booked for a three days' stay--there in the very zone of danger.

"I was a fool to come," he kept saying to himself, while he was being politely, and now and then urgently, requested to take note of and to admire this and that feature of his new house. In truth he could take very little interest in the house, for it had come over him, with sudden but irresistible certainty, that he would never be able to live in it.

He could not say so, of course--not just now, and not without a much better parade of reasons than he could manage to put into line impromptu. But there the certainty was--full-blown in his mind. Unless he could away with his convictions and his obstinacy, unless he could undertake and succeed in his quest, it would be impossible for him to live in the house here on the hill, with Winnie hardly a stone's throw away at the cottage on the road to Nether End. The idea was preposterous. Yet he had to go on looking at the house and admiring it.

The Aikenheads demanded nothing short of enthusiasm. About a house he could never live in! Poor d.i.c.k Dennehy did his best to pump it up, but the trials inherent in his position were terribly aggravated by this incidental addition of the house. Cyril Maxon and Bertie Merriam, in their kindred struggles with loyalties and convictions, had at least been spared this irritating feature. Why, there, actually visible from his study windows, were the chimneys of Winnie's cottage! Tora triumphantly pointed them out to him.

d.i.c.k Dennehy had the gift--the genius--of his race; he saw the fun of his own sufferings. As he surveyed the tops of Winnie's chimneys--with Winnie at his elbow, discreetly awaiting his opinion as to whether their presence enhanced the beauty of the landscape--his face wore a look of rueful amus.e.m.e.nt, instead of the simple admiration which the outlook from his study ought to have inspired in him. At the moment Tora and Stephen were having an animated wrangle in the pa.s.sage outside, relative to the merits of a dustbin, sent on approval.

"I hope I don't intrude?" said Winnie, waving her hand towards her chimney-pots.

"I'll be reminded of you, if I'm ever in danger of forgetting."

"We could almost start a system of communication--flag-wagging, or even wireless. Anything except thought-transference! I couldn't risk that with you--though you could with me quite safely."

"Ah, you're always teasing me, Winnie."

"You've not been nearly enthusiastic enough about the house, you know.

Make an effort."

"I'll be trying to say a few words on it after dinner. Will you be at dinner?"

"I shall. Tora has asked me, to entertain you."

"You can do that--and more when you've the mind to it."

"I must warn you at once that I take most of my meals, except breakfast, at the Patch--in brief intervals of relaxation from the Synopsis."

d.i.c.k had heard of the Synopsis. "You'll be learning a lot of nonsense,"

he remarked.

"Oh, I don't need the Synopsis to learn that. Just talking to people is quite enough."

"We won't have a telegraph; we'll have a telephone, Winnie. Then I'll hear your voice and admire your conversation." "And not see your face,"

he had very nearly added.

Winnie demurely surveyed the landscape again. "My chimneys are a pity, aren't they? They spoil the impression of solitude--of being alone with nature--don't they? But judging from Tora's voice--it sounds really aggrieved--I think it's time we went and umpired about the dustbin. When those two do quarrel, the contempt they express for one another's opinions is awful."

If the situation had its pathetic side for poor d.i.c.k Dennehy, there was more than one aspect on which a sense of humour could lay hold. Besides d.i.c.k, impelled by love yet racked by conscience, and, in consequence, by chimney-pots in the middle distance, there were the Aikenheads.

Engrossed in one another, in their studies and theories, they saw nothing of what was going on under--and seemed now to Winnie as plain to see as--their noses. They had bestowed immense pains on the house, and had counted on giving d.i.c.k a triumphant surprise. His behaviour--for even after dinner he achieved but a very halting enthusiasm--was a sore disappointment. They understood neither why he was not delighted nor why, failing that, in common decency and grat.i.tude he could not make a better show of being delighted. Good-tempered as they were, they could not help betraying their feelings--Tora by a sudden and stony silence touching the house of whose beauties she had been so full; Stephen by satirical remarks about the heights of splendour on which d.i.c.k now required to be seated in his daily life and surroundings. d.i.c.k marked their vexation and understood it, but could not so transform his demeanour as to remove it, and, being unable to do that, began by a natural movement of the mind to resent it. "They really might see that there's something else the matter," he argued within himself in plaintive vexation. Within twenty-four hours of his arrival, the three were manifestly at odds on this false issue, and the tension threatened to become greater and greater. It was all ridiculous, a comedy of mistakes, but it might end in a sad straining of an old and dear friendship.

To avert this catastrophe, Winnie determined to give the go-by to coy modesty. d.i.c.k Dennehy had not told her that he loved her, but she determined to acquaint the Aikenheads with the interesting fact. What would happen after that she did not know, but it seemed the only thing to do at the moment.

After lunch on the second day of the visit, d.i.c.k Dennehy, in a desperate effort to be more gracious, said that he would go across and have another look at the house. n.o.body offered to accompany him. Tora seemed not to hear his remark; Stephen observed sarcastically that d.i.c.k might consider the desirability of adding a ball-room and a theatre, and with that returned to his labours on the Synopsis. Winnie sat smiling while d.i.c.k departed and left her alone with Tora.

"You think he's not appreciative enough about the house, don't you, Tora?" she asked.

"I think he just hates it, but I really don't know why."

"It's not his own house that he hates; it's my chimneys."

"Your chimneys? What in the world do you mean?"

"He can see them from his study window--just where he wants to be undisturbed."