Mrs. Maxon Protests Part 49

d.i.c.k nodded again, gave a tight grip, and marched out of the room.

Leaving the patient Synopsis and lighting a pipe, Stephen indemnified himself for the self-restraint he had exercised in not talking the case over with d.i.c.k by indulging in a survey of a wider order--one which embraced all Winnie's career from the time of her rebellion; there were few features with which confidential talks, interspersed between their labours, had not familiarized him. His mind was not now on Winnie's share in the matter--neither on how she had conducted herself nor on how she had been affected by her experiment and experience. It fastened, with its usual speculative zest, on the conflict and clash of theory and practice, opinion and conduct, which the story revealed throughout its course and exemplified in instance after instance. When put to a searching personal test, everybody, or almost everybody, had in some way or another broken down; if they were to be judged by the strict standards which they professed, or by the canons which habitually governed their lives, they had been failures. Here was d.i.c.k Dennehy ending the series with a striking example. But G.o.dfrey Ledstone had begun it. His was a twofold failure; he was false to his own theories--to that code of his--when he adopted Winnie's; he was false in turn to Winnie's when he was ashamed of her and fled back to respectability tempered by elasticities. Cyril Maxon followed suit, bartering his high doctrine, wriggling out of its exacting claims, for the chance of Rosaline Deering. Even that fellow Purnett, to whom regularity and domesticity were anathema, had offered to become regular and domestic. The only exception seemed to be the soldier Merriam; even here Stephen doubted the existence of a sure exception. Winnie had left the details of that talk in the garden at Madeira in obscurity, yet it was clear enough that she had not put out her power. Supposing she had?

Yet, granting the exception, he proved it to his own satisfaction to be more apparent than real. Merriam's case was not a conflict of opinion and conduct; it was more properly a clash between two allegiances, both in essence personal in their nature; between inclination and a conception of duty, no doubt, but of a duty so specialized and (if the word might be used) so incarnated as to lose its abstract quality and, by virtue of concreteness, to acquire a power of appeal really as emotional in character as the emotion with which it came into collision.

It seemed to him that here was a case of an apparent exception testing the rule, not disproving it. The rule emerged triumphant from the test--so declared Stephen Aikenhead, very anxious to find a clue to the labyrinth and fast colours in the shifting web of human nature. When it came to a pitched battle, the views and theories were worsted; the man himself won the day, calling to his aid reserves ordinarily hidden in the depths of his nature. By a pardonable instinct they all made the best case they could for their failures and deviations--explanations, excuses, bridges; they saved the show of consistency as far as they could. But however great or small the success of this special pleading, it did not alter the truth. The natural, essential--to use a new word, the subliminal--man himself in the end decided the issue.

Small wonder! thought Stephen; for these opinions were a motley host--enemies among themselves. If one of them were putting up a good fight, another was already ready to fall on its flank. If one were making a strong case, there was another to whisper its weak point in the adversary's ear, or to suggest insinuatingly--"Well, if he can't allow you what you want, try me! I'm much more accommodating. I recognize exceptions. I know the meaning of counsels of perfection. I understand the limits of human nature." Or conversely--"You'll get no real comfort from that shifty fellow. He'll betray you in this world, to say nothing of the next. Rest on me. I'm a rock. Rocks make hard beds, you say? A little, perhaps, now and then, but think how safe they are! And how they appeal to your imagination, rising foursquare to heaven, unshakable, eternal!" And then there was that plausible little rogue of an opinion which protests always that it is not an opinion at all--nothing so troublesome--"Don't bother your head with any of those fellows. Please yourself! What does it matter? Anyhow, what do any of them really know about it? You might just as well toss up as try to decide between them.

I'm an opinion myself, you say--just as bad as they are? Not at all! How dare you?" So they went on, betraying, competing, outbidding one another--like a row of men selling penny toys in the street, each trying to shout louder and to get more custom than the other. In such an irreverent image did Stephen Aikenhead envisage the Quest after Truth, whereof he was himself so ardent a devotee.

He had got back to his old formula. Things were 'in solution.' It was a very welter of opinions. Was that state of things to last for ever?

"Or"--he mused--"shall we to some future age seem, oh, ridiculously mixed? Will they have settled things? Will they have straightened out the moral and social world as the scientific fellows are straightening out the physical universe? If they have, they'll never understand how we doubted and squabbled. Only some great historian will be able to make that intelligible to them. Or will men go on for ever swirling round and round in a whirlpool, and never sail on a clear strong stream to the ocean of truth?"

So the muser mused in his quiet study, with the roar of the water in his ears. Had he chanced to think of it, he would have found that he was himself an example of the conclusion to which his survey of Winnie Maxon's experiences had led him. His speculations might ask, with 'jesting Pilate,' 'What is truth?' and stay not for an answer that could never come. The natural man, Stephen Aikenhead, was irresistibly bent on finding out. He returned briskly to the Synopsis--to his own little task of blasting away, if by chance he could, one fragment of the rocks that dammed the current.

He worked on, reading and making notes. The clock struck six, and seven, and half-past. He did not notice. Five minutes later the door opened, and Winnie came in.

"What's come over the house?" she asked. "You invited me to dinner at half-past seven! Here you are, not only not dressed, but with your hair obviously unbrushed! And Tora and d.i.c.k went off to the new house, Ellen tells me, at half-past five, with a lantern, and haven't come back yet!"

"Oh, did they? Then d.i.c.k's evidently made it all right with Tora too."

He rose and stretched himself. "I think you'll have to look out for something to-night or to-morrow, Winnie. d.i.c.k has made up his mind; he's decided that the house is otherwise delightful, but has just one fault.

He'd be lonely in it as a bachelor."

Winnie sat down and looked at him thoughtfully. "I wish it hadn't come so soon. I'm not ready. And I do have such bad luck!"

"He'll wait as long as you like. And how does the bad luck come in here?"

"I'm always forced into seeming to exact a sacrifice of some sort."

"Well, from some points of view that was likely to follow from the line you took. From your own side of the matter, is it altogether a bad thing that a man should have to search his heart--to ask what you're really worth to him?"

"Suppose he should bear me a grudge afterwards?"

"d.i.c.k's too square with his conscience to do that. He knows it's his own act and his own responsibility."

"At any rate I won't have any more vows, Stephen, no more on either side. I don't like them. I broke mine once. I thought I had a right to, but I didn't like doing it. Cyril had broken most of his, in my view, but people seem so often to forget that there's more than one." She gave an abrupt little laugh. "Cyril vowed to 'comfort' me! Imagine Cyril being obliged to vow to comfort anybody, poor man! He couldn't possibly do it."

"In the matter of vows they let you down easy at the registry office."

"In his heart d.i.c.k won't think that a marriage at all."

"You put that just wrong. In his opinions he mayn't, in his heart he will. I know d.i.c.k Dennehy pretty well, and you may be sure of that."

"I never wanted to be a lawless woman. But it was coming, or had come, to hatred; and it's such awful ruin to live with a person you hate--much worse, I think, than the things they do set you free for."

Stephen smiled. "I can find you some very respectable authority for that--a good pa.s.sage in Dollinger--but, I think, don't you, to-morrow?

After all, there's such a thing as dinner!"

"There is, and it'll be disgracefully overcooked." She rose and came across to him. "Give me your blessing and a kiss, Cousin Stephen. I think I see happiness glimmering a long way off."

"I don't think it's ever very far off, if you can see it," said Stephen, and kissed her.

Winnie shook her head doubtfully. She had suffered such a tossing and buffeting; the quiet of harbour seemed a distant goal, even if she could now steer a straight course towards it. Her feelings were still on edge; she shrank instinctively from any immediate call to strong emotion.

There was another trouble in her mind secret, hardly explicit, but real; if, because of what she had done, d.i.c.k Dennehy, still dominated by the convictions which he meant to disobey, should show that he thought she was to be had for the asking, she would resent it bitterly--even to a curt and final refusal. That would be almost as great a failure as G.o.dfrey Ledstone's, and such a rock might still lie in the way of her ship to its harbour. Much turned on d.i.c.k Dennehy's bearing towards her.

But the days that ensued at Shaylor's Patch were full of healing grace.

There was the cordiality of friendship again unclouded, Tora's serenity, Stephen's alert and understanding comradeship. d.i.c.k came when his work allowed--it may be surmised that he stretched its allowance to the full--and there were now infinite interest and unbounded fun over furnishing his house. In this work a formula was. .h.i.t upon, suitable to the state of suspense in which the master's affairs stood.

"Eventualities must be borne in view," said Stephen, with treacherous gravity. d.i.c.k bore them in view to the full limit of his purse--and how could Winnie refuse a friendly opinion on questions of taste? n.o.body mentioned Mrs. Lenoir's furniture, now at the cottage. It was not really very suitable for a country house, and in any case it would be pleasanter to make the fresh start in wholly fresh surroundings. Winnie mentally trans.m.u.ted it into new frocks, in which shape it would serve a purpose, temporary indeed, but less charged with a.s.sociations.

In no set confession, but in various intimate talks, the whole of her story, and the whole of her own att.i.tude towards it, came to d.i.c.k's knowledge. She attempted to conceal neither her pa.s.sion for G.o.dfrey Ledstone nor the attraction with which at the last Merriam had drawn her. The latter case she was especially anxious that he should understand.

"I was angry at first at being thought impossible, but he made me see his point of view, and then I almost fell in love with him," she said, smiling. "Only almost!"

It was not the old d.i.c.k Dennehy who listened; he would have had a ready explanation of how all the troubles had come about, and a vehement, though good-humoured, denunciation for the origin of them. Not only his feeling for Winnie, but his own struggle, with its revelation and its compromise, changed him. He listened with a grave attention or, sometimes, with a readily humorous sympathy. If he was rightly or wrongly--probably he himself would have used neither word, but would have said 'perforce'--disobeying his supreme authority, yet, as a man here in this world, he found some compensation in an increased humanity, a widened charity, an intensified sense of human brotherhood. He deliberately abandoned the effort to strike a balance between loss and gain, but the gain he accepted gladly, with a sense, as it were, of discovery, of opened eyes, of a vision more penetrating. He got rid of the idea that it was easy for everybody to believe what he believed, if only they would be at the pains, or that it was mere perverseness of spirit which prevented them from acting in exact accord with his standards--or even with their own. Thus, as the days pa.s.sed, his aim was no more to forgive and forget, but to appreciate and to understand. With Winnie this was an essential, if their harmony were to be complete. So much of the spirit--or the pride--of the theorist survived in her. She would not take even a great love if it came accompanied by utter condemnation; perhaps she could not have believed in it, or, believing in it for the time, would have seen no basis of permanence.

In the early days the ardour of love was all on his side; her heart was not so easily kindled again into flame. Only gradually did the woman's absolute faith and grateful affection for the man blossom into their natural fruit--even as by degrees Winnie's joy in life and delight in her own powers emerged from their eclipse. Again, now, her eyes sparkled and her laugh rang out exultantly.

"She sounds in a good humour," said Stephen Aikenhead. "If one did happen to want anything of her, it might be rather a good moment to ask it, I should think."

d.i.c.k looked up from the evening paper. "Is she ready, Stephen?"

"I think so, d.i.c.k."

With a buoyant step d.i.c.k Dennehy walked out into the garden, whence the laugh had come. Winnie was alone; her laugh had been only for a hen ludicrously scuttling back to her proper territory in fear of the menace of clapped hands. She wore a black lace scarf twisted about her head; from under its folds her eyes gleamed merrily.

"Would you be walking with me in the meadow a bit, by chance?" he asked.

Something in his gaze caught her attention. She blushed a little. "Yes, d.i.c.k."

But they walked in silence for a long while. Then she felt her eyes irresistibly drawn to him. As she turned her head, he held out his hands. Slowly hers came forward to meet them.

"You couldn't send me away now, could you, Winnie?"

"Oh, d.i.c.k, have you thought it all over, looked at every side of it--twenty times, a hundred times, five hundred times?"

"Not I! I looked at it all round once for all, and I've never doubted of it since. I've been waiting for you to do all that." His smile was happy and now confident.

"Well, in the end, I like it better like that. I like you to think so, anyhow, even if you're deceiving yourself. Because it shows----" She broke off mischievously. "What does it show, d.i.c.k?"

"Why, that you're the jewel of the world! What else would it be showing?"

"But what about the lady you were unhappy over, that evening at the station?"

"You knew it was yourself all the time!"

"Then how did you dare to say it wasn't serious? And to call yourself--or me--a fool?"

"You're teasing me to the end, Winnie."

She grew grave and slipped her arm through his. "I knew really why it wasn't and couldn't be serious to you--and why just in that way it became terribly serious. Time was when I should have thought you silly to think it so serious, and when you would have kept it 'not serious'