Mrs. Maxon Protests
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Just before she had fairly settled down to this task, she had a visitor. At half-past eleven – early hours for her to be out and about – Mrs. Lenoir appeared.
"I was supping at the Carlton grill-room last night," she explained, "with a couple of girls whom I'd taken to the play, and Bob Purnett came in. He drove me back home, and – I don't know if he ought to have – but he told me about some trouble here. So, as I'm an interfering old woman, I came round to see if I could be of any use." Her manner to-day was less stately and more cordial. Also she spoke with a certain frankness. "You see, I know something about this sort of thing, my dear."
Winnie, of course, distinguished her 'sort of thing' very broadly from 'the sort of thing' to which Mrs. Lenoir must be assumed to refer, but she made no secret of the state of the case or of her own attitude towards it. "I accept it absolutely, but I'm bitterly hurt by the way it was done."
"Oh, you can put it that way, my dear; but you're human like the rest of us, and, of course, you hate having him taken away from you. Now shall I try what I can do?"
"Not for the world! Not a word, nor a sign! It's my mistake, and I stand by it. If he came back, it would never be the same thing. It was beautiful; it would be shameful now."
Mrs. Lenoir smiled doubtfully; she had an imperfect understanding of the mode of thought.
"Very well, that's settled. And, for my part, I think you're well rid of him. A weak creature! Let him marry a Bloomsbury girl, and I hope she'll keep him in fine order. But what are you going to do?"
"I don't quite know. Stephen and Tora would let me go back to Shaylor's Patch for as long as I liked."
"Oh, Shaylor's Patch! To talk about it all, over and over again!"
A note of impatience in her friend's voice was amusingly evident to Winnie. "You mean the less I talk about it, the better?" she asked, smiling.
"Well, you haven't made exactly a success of it, have you?" The manner was kinder than the words.
"And I didn't make exactly a success of my marriage either," Winnie reflected, in a puzzled dolefulness. Because, if both orthodoxy and unorthodoxy go wrong, what is a poor human woman to do? "Well, if I mayn't go to Shaylor's Patch – at present, anyhow – I must stay here, Mrs. Lenoir; that's all. The studio's in my name, because I could give better security than Godfrey, and I can stay if I want to."
"Not very cheerful – and only that dirty old Irishwoman to do for you!"
"Oh, please don't abuse Mrs. O'Leary. She's my one consolation."
Mrs. Lenoir looked at her with something less than her usual self-confidence. It was in a decidedly doubtful and tentative tone that she put her question: "I couldn't persuade you to come and put up with me – in both senses – for a bit?"
Winnie was surprised and touched; to her despairing mood any kindness was a great kindness.
"That's really good of you," she said, pressing Mrs. Lenoir's hand for a moment. "It's – merciful."
"I'm an old woman now, my dear, and most of my cronies are getting old too. Still, some young folks look in now and then. We aren't at all gay; but you'll be comfortable, and you can have a rest while you look about you." There was a trace of the explanatory, of the reassuring, about Mrs. Lenoir's sketch of her home life.
"What's good enough for you is good enough for me, you know," Winnie remarked, with a smile.
"Oh, I'm not so sure! Oh, I'm not speaking of creature comforts and so on. But you seem to me to expect so much of – of everybody."
Winnie took the hand she had pressed and held it. "And you?" she asked.
"Never mind me. You're young and attractive. Don't go on expecting too much. They take what they can."
"They? Who?"
"Men," said Mrs. Lenoir. Then out of those distant, thoughtful, no longer very bright eyes flashed for an instant the roguish twinkle for which she had once been famous. "I've given them as good as I got, though," said she. "And now – will you come?"
Winnie laughed. "Well, do you think I should prefer this empty tomb?" she asked. Yes – empty and a tomb – apt words for what the studio now was. "You weren't as nice as this at Shaylor's Patch – though you always said things that made me think."
"They've all got their heads in the air at Shaylor's Patch – dear creatures!"
"I shall enjoy staying with you. Is it really convenient?" Mrs. Lenoir smiled. "Oh, but that's a silly question, because I know you meant it. When may I come?"
"Not a moment later than this afternoon."
"Well, the truth is I didn't fancy sleeping here again. I expect I should have gone to Shaylor's Patch."
Again Mrs. Lenoir smiled. "You're full of pluck, but you're scarcely hard enough, my dear. If I'm a failure, Shaylor's Patch will do later, won't it?"
"I shall disgrace you. I've nothing to wear. We were – I'm very poor, you know."
"I'd give every pound at my bank and every rag off my back for one line of your figure," said Mrs. Lenoir. "I was beautiful once, you know, my dear." Her voice took on a note of generous recognition. "You're very well – in the petite style, Winnie." But by this she evidently meant something different from her 'beautiful.' Well, it was matter of history.
That afternoon, then, witnessed a remarkable change in Winnie's external conditions. Instead of the desolate uncomfortable studio, charged with memories too happy or too unhappy – there seemed nothing between the two, and the extremes met – peopled, also, with 'spooks' potential if not visualized, there was Mrs. Lenoir's luxurious flat in Knightsbridge, replete, as the auctioneers say, with every modern convenience. The difference was more than external. She was no longer a derelict – left stranded at the studio or to drift back to Shaylor's Patch. No doubt it might be said that she was received out of charity. Amply acknowledging the boon, Winnie had yet the wit to perceive that the charity was discriminating. Not for her had she been plain, not for her had she been uninteresting! In a sense she had earned it. And in a sense, too, she felt that she was in process of being avenged on Godfrey Ledstone and on Woburn Square. A parallel might be traced here between her feelings and Cyril Maxon's. They had made her count for nothing; she felt that at Mrs. Lenoir's she might still count. The sorrow and the hurt remained, but at least this was not finality. She had suffered under a dread suspicion that in their different ways both Shaylor's Patch and the solitary studio were. Here she had a renewed sense of life, of a future possible. Yet here too, for the first time since Godfrey left her, she lost her composure, and the tears came – quite soon, within ten minutes after Mrs. Lenoir's greeting.
Mrs. Lenoir understood. "There, you're not so angry any more," she said. "You're beginning to see that it must have happened – with that fellow! Now Emily will make you comfortable, and put you to bed till dinner-time. You needn't get up for that unless you like. There's only the General coming; it's one of his nights."
Oh, the comfort of a good Emily – a maid not too young and not too old, not too flighty and not too crabbed, light of hand, sympathetic, entirely understanding that her lady has a right to be much more comfortable than she has ever thought of being herself! In Maxon days Winnie had possessed a maid. They seemed far off, and never had there been one as good as Mrs. Lenoir's Emily. She had come into Mrs. Lenoir's life about the same time as Mr. Lenoir had, but with an effect that an impartial observer could not but recognize as not only more durable, but also more essentially important – save that Lenoir had left the money which made Emily possible. Mrs. Lenoir had paid for the money – in five years' loyalty and service.
Winnie reposed between deliciously fine sheets – why, it was like Devonshire Street, without Cyril Maxon! – and watched Emily dexterously disposing her wardrobe. It was not ample. Some of the effects of the Maxon days she had left behind in her hurried flight; most of the rest had worn out. But there were relics of her gilded slavery. These Emily tactfully admired; the humbler purchases of 'Mrs. Ledstone' she stowed away without comment. Also without comment, but with extraordinary tact, she laid out the inferior of Winnie's two evening dresses.
"There's nobody coming but the General, miss," said she.
"Now why does she call me 'miss' – and who's the General?" These two problems rose in Winnie's mind, but did not demand instant solution. They were not like the questions of the last few days; they were more like Shaylor's Patch conundrums – interesting, but not urgent, willing to wait for an idle hour or a rainy day, yielding place to a shining sun or a romp with Alice. They yielded place now to Winnie's great physical comfort, to her sense of rescue from the desolate studio, to her respite from the feeling of finality and of failure. With immense surprise she realized, as she lay there – in a quiet hour between Emily's deft and charitable unpacking and Emily's return to get her into the inferior frock (good enough for that unexplained General) – that she was what any reasonably minded being would call happy. Though the great experiment had failed, though Godfrey was at this moment in Woburn Square, though Mabel Thurseley existed! "Oh, well, I was so tired," she apologized to herself shamefacedly.
She got down into the small but pretty drawing-room in good time. Yet Mrs. Lenoir was there before her, clad in a tea-gown, looking, as it occurred to Winnie, rather like Mrs. Siddons – a cheerful Mrs. Siddons, as, indeed, the great woman appears to have been in private life.
"I got my things off early, so as to leave you Emily," said the hostess. She obviously did not consider that she had been getting anything on.
"What a dear she is!" Winnie came to the fire and stood there, a slim-limbed creature, warming herself through garments easily penetrable by the welcome blaze.
"Quite a find! The General sent her to me. Her husband was a sergeant-major in his regiment – killed in South Africa."
The General again! But Winnie postponed that question. Her lips curved in amusement. "She calls me 'miss.'"
"Better than that silly 'Mrs. Smith' you said to Bob Purnett. Only unhappy women try to make epigrams. And for a woman to be unhappy is to be a failure."
"Isn't that one – almost – Mrs. Lenoir?"
"Quite quick, my dear!" her hostess commented. "But if it is, it's old. I told Emily you were a second cousin. I never know exactly what it means, but in my experience it's quite useful. But please yourself, Winnie. Who will you be?"
"Did Emily believe what you told her?"
The twinkle came again. "She's much too good a servant ever to raise that question. What was your name?"
"My maiden name? Wilkins."
"I think names ending in 'kins' are very ugly," said Mrs. Lenoir. "But a modification? What about Wilson? 'Winnie Wilson' is quite pretty."
"'Miss Winnie Wilson'? Isn't it rather – well, rather late in the day for that? But, I don't want to be Ledstone – and it's rather unfair to call myself Maxon still."
"Names," observed Mrs. Lenoir, "are really not worth troubling about, so long as you don't hurt people's pride. I used to have a fetish-like feeling about them – as if, I mean, you couldn't get rid of the one you were born with, or, my dear, take one you had no particular right to. But one night, long ago, somebody – I really forget who – brought an Oxford don to supper. We got on the subject, and he told me that a great philosopher – named Dobbs, if I remember rightly – defined a name as 'a word taken at pleasure to serve for a mark.'" She looked across the hearthrug, confidently expecting Winnie's approval. "I liked it, and it stuck in my memory."
"It does make things simpler, Mrs. Lenoir."
"Mind you, I wouldn't take a great name I hadn't a right to. Courtenays and Devereauxes in the chorus are very bad form. But I don't see why you shouldn't be Wilson. And the 'Miss' avoids a lot of questions."
"All right. Miss Winnie Wilson be it! It sounds like a new toy. And now, Mrs. Lenoir, for the other problem that Emily has raised. Who's the General?"
Mrs. Lenoir liked her young friend, but possibly thought that she was becoming a trifle impertinent. Not that she minded that; in her heart she greeted it as a rebound from misery; in the young it often is.
"If you've any taste in men – which, up to now, you've given your friends no reason to think – you'll like the General very much."
"Will he like me?"
"The only advantage of age is that I shan't mind if he does, Winnie."
Winnie darted towards her. "What a dear you've been to me to-day!"
"Hush, I think I hear the General's step."
The parlour-maid – not Emily, but a young woman, smart and a trifle scornful – announced, "Sir Hugh Merriam, ma'am – and dinner's served."
CHAPTER XVII
THE TRACK OF THE RAIDER
The General was old-fashioned; he liked to be left alone with the port – or let us say port-wine, as he always did – after dinner for a quarter of an hour; then he would rejoin the ladies for coffee and, by their never assumed but always solicited permission, a cigar in the drawing-room. Thus Winnie had a chance of gratifying her lively curiosity about the handsome old man with gentle manners, who had seen and done so much, who talked so much about his sons, and came to dine with Mrs. Lenoir twice a week.
"I've fallen in love with your General. Do tell me about him," she implored her hostess.
"Oh, he's very distinguished. He's done a lot of fighting – India, Egypt, South Africa. He first made his name in the Kala Kin Expedition, in command of the Flying Column. And he invented a great improvement in gun-carriages – he's a gunner, you know – and – "
"I think," interrupted Winnie, with a saucy air of doubt, "that I meant something about him – and you, Mrs. Lenoir."
"There's nothing to tell. We're just friends, and we've never been anything else."
Winnie was sitting on a stool in front of the fire, smoking her Ledstone-learnt cigarette (destined, apparently, to be the only visible legacy of that episode). She looked up at Mrs. Lenoir, still with that air of doubt.
"Well, why shouldn't I tell you?" said the lady. "He wanted something else, and I wouldn't."
"Were you in love with somebody else?"
"No, but he'd brought those boys – they were just schoolboys then – to see me, and it – it seemed a shame. He knew it was a shame too, but – well, you know what happens sometimes. But, quite soon after, his wife fell ill, and died in four or five days – pneumonia. Then he was glad. But he went abroad directly – without seeing me – and was abroad many years. When he came home and retired, I met him by accident, and he asked leave to call. He's very lonely – so am I rather – and he likes a change from the club. I don't wonder! And, as you'll have gathered, we've known all the same people in the old days, and always have lots to talk about. That's the story, Winnie."
"I like it. Do you ever see the sons?"
"They all come to see me when they're home on leave; but that's not often."
"The Major's coming next week, though. The General said so. Let's see if I've got them right. There's the Major – he's the eldest – in Egypt. But the second one is cleverer, and has become a colonel first; he's in Malta now. And then the one in India has only just got his troop; he ought to have had it before, but they thought he gave too much time to polo, and horse-racing, and private theatricals."
"That's Georgie – my favourite," said Mrs. Lenoir.
"I'm for the Major – because I think it's a shame that his younger brother should be made a colonel before him. I'm glad it's the Major that's coming home on leave next month."
Mrs. Lenoir looked at Winnie, and patted herself on the back. All this was much better for Winnie than the empty studio. She knew that the animation was in part an effort, the gaiety in some measure assumed – and bravely assumed. But every moment rescued from brooding was, to Mrs. Lenoir's mind, so much to the good. According to some other ways of thinking, of course, a little brooding might have done Winnie good, and would certainly have been no more than she deserved.
Coffee came in, and, quick on its heels, the General. He produced his cigar, and advanced his invariable and invariably apologetic request.
"Please do. We neither of us mind, do we, Winnie?" said Mrs. Lenoir. There was really more reason to ask the General if he minded Winnie's cigarette, which had come from the studio and was not of a very fine aroma.
Winnie stuck to her stool and listened, with her eyes set on the fire. At first the talk ran still on the three sons – evidently the old soldier's life was wrapped up in them – but presently the friends drifted back to old days, to the people they had both known. Winnie's ears caught names that were familiar to her, references to men and stories about men whom she had often heard Cyril Maxon and his legal guests mention. But to-night she obtained a new view of them. It was not their public achievements which occupied and amused the General and Mrs. Lenoir. They had known them as intimates, and delighted now to recall their ways, their foibles, how they had got into scrapes and got out of them in the merry thoughtless days of youth. Between them they seemed to have known almost everybody who was 'in the swim' from thirty years to a quarter of a century before; if the General happened to say, 'So they told me, I never met him myself,' Mrs. Lenoir always said, 'Oh, I did' – and vice versâ.
"It was just before my dear wife died," the General said once, in dating a reminiscence.
There was a moment's silence. Winnie did not look up. Then the General resumed his story. But he cut it rather short, and ended with, "I'm afraid our yarns must be boring this young lady, Clara."
Evidently he accepted Winnie entirely at her face value – as Miss Winnie Wilson. The anecdotes and reminiscences, though intimate, had been rigidly decorous, even improbably so in one or two cases; and now he was afraid that she was bored with what would certainly interest any intelligent woman of the world. Winnie was amused, yet vexed, and inclined to wish she had not become Miss Wilson. But she had made a good impression; that was clear from the General's words when he took his leave.
"Bertie will come and see you directly he gets home, Clara. It'll be in about six weeks, I expect." He turned to Winnie. "I hope you'll be kind to my boy. He doesn't know many ladies in London, and I want him to have a pleasant holiday."
"I will. And I wish they were all three coming, Sir Hugh."
"That might end in a family quarrel," he said, with a courtly little bow and a glance from his eyes, which had not lost their power of seconding a compliment.
"Well, I think you've made a favourable impression, though you didn't say much," Mrs. Lenoir remarked when he was gone.
Winnie was standing, with one foot on her stool now. She frowned a little.
"I wish you'd tell him about me," she said.
There was a pause; Mrs. Lenoir was dispassionately considering the suggestion.
"I don't see much use in taking an assumed name, if you're going to tell everybody you meet."
"He's such a friend of yours."
"That's got nothing to do with it. Now if it were a man who wanted to marry you – well, he'd have to be told, I suppose, because you can't marry. But the General won't want to do that."
"It seems somehow squarer."
"Then am I to say Mrs. Maxon or Mrs. Ledstone?"
There it was! Winnie broke into a vexed laugh. "Oh, I suppose we'd better leave it."
Thus began Winnie's cure, from love and anger, and from Godfrey Ledstone. Change of surroundings, new interests, kindness, and, above all perhaps, appreciation – it was a good treatment. Something must also be credited to Mrs. Lenoir's attitude towards life. She had none of the snarl of the cynic; she thought great things of life. But she recognized frankly certain of its limitations – as that, if you do some things, there are other things that you must give up; that the majority must be expected to demand obedience to its views on pain of penalties; if you do not mind the penalties, you need not mind the views either; above all, perhaps, that, if you have taken a certain line, it is useless folly to repine at its ordained consequences. She was nothing of a reformer – Winnie blamed that – but she was decidedly good at making the best of her world as she found it, or had made it for herself; and this was the gospel she offered for Winnie's acceptance. Devoid of any kind of penitential emotion, it might yet almost be described as a practical form of penitence.
Winnie heard nothing of or from Woburn Square; there was nobody likely to give her news from that quarter except, perhaps, Bob Purnett, and he was away, having accepted an invitation to a fortnight's hunting in Ireland. But an echo of the past came from elsewhere – in a letter addressed to her at Shaylor's Patch, forwarded thence to the studio (she had not yet told the Aikenheads of her move), and, after two or three days' delay, delivered at Knightsbridge by Mrs. O'Leary in person. It was from her husband's solicitors; they informed her of his intention to take proceedings, and suggested that they should be favoured with the name of a firm who would act for her.
Winnie received the intimation with great relief, great surprise, some curiosity, and, it must be added, a touch of malicious amusement. The relief was not only for herself. It was honestly for Cyril Maxon also. Why must he with his own hands adjust a lifelong millstone round his own neck? Now, like a sensible man, he was going to take it off. But it was so unlike him to take off his millstones; he felt such a pride in the cumbrous ornaments. 'What had made him do it?' asked the curiosity; and the malicious amusement suggested that, contrary to all preconceptions of hers, contrary to anything he had displayed to her, he too must have his weaknesses – in what direction it was still uncertain. The step he now took might be merely the result of accumulated rancour against her, or it might be essential to some design or desire of his own. Winnie may be excused for not harbouring the idea that her husband was acting out of consideration for her; she had the best of excuses – that of being quite right.
For the rest – well, it was not exactly pleasant. But she seemed so completely to have ceased to be Mrs. Maxon that at heart it concerned her little what people said of Mrs. Maxon. They – her Maxon circle, the legal profession, the public – would not understand her provocation, her principles, or her motives; they would say hard and scornful things. She was in safe hiding; she would not hear the things. It would be like what they say of a man after he has gone out of the room and (as Sir Peter Teazle so kindly did in the play) left his character behind him. Of that wise people take no notice.
But Godfrey? It must be owned that the thought of him came second; indeed third – after the aspect which concerned her husband and that which touched herself. But when it came, it moved her to vexation, to regret, to a pity which had even an element of the old tenderness in it. Because this development was just what poor Godfrey had always been so afraid of, just what he hated, a thing analogous to the position which in the end he had not been able to bear. And poor Woburn Square! Oh, and poor Mabel Thurseley too, perhaps! What a lot of people were caught in the net! The news of her husband's action did much to soften her heart towards Godfrey and towards Woburn Square. "I really didn't want to make them unhappy or ashamed any more," she sighed; for had not her action in the end produced Cyril's? But, as Mrs. Lenoir would, no doubt, point out, there was no help for it – short of Winnie's suicide, which seemed an extreme remedy, or would have, if it had ever occurred to her: it did not.
Her solicitude was not misplaced. The high moralists say Esse quam videri– what you are and do matters, not what people think you are or what they may discover you doing. A hard high doctrine! "He that is able to receive it, let him receive it." Mr. Cyril Maxon also had found occasion to consider these words.
For Winnie had been right. Jubilation had reigned in Woburn Square, provisionally when Godfrey fetched his portmanteau away from the studio, finally and securely (as it seemed) when Amy made known the result of her mission. Father read his paper again in peace; mother's spasms abated. There was joy over the sinner; and the sinner himself was not half as unhappy as he had expected – may it be said, hoped? – to be. Mercilessness of comment is out of place. He had been tried above that which he was able. Yet, if sin it had been, it was not of the sin that he repented. It had been, he thought, from the beginning really impossible on the basis she had defined – and extorted. In time he had been bound to recognize that. But he wore a chastened air, and had the grace to seek little of Miss Thurseley's society. He took another studio, in a street off Fitzroy Square, and ate his dinner and slept at his father's house.