Mrs. Maxon Protests

Dick 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. Dick's obstinate absence did not disprove its existence, but might be said to suspend its animation. Winnie, dwelling in the cottage where Godfrey Ledstone once abode, had a rest from the other sex; here, too, a truce was called, after her brisk series of engagements. She welcomed it; it would have seemed shallow to pass 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 compassionate amusement 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 scrapes 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 sex. 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 constituted 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 Dick 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 passionate. 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 assurances 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 buttressed 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 Dick 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.

Dick 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 amusement, 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 passage 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."

Dick 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 Dick Dennehy, there was more than one aspect on which a sense of humour could lay hold. Besides Dick, 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 Dick 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 gratitude 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 Dick now required to be seated in his daily life and surroundings. Dick 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. Dick 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, Dick Dennehy, in a desperate effort to be more gracious, said that he would go across and have another look at the house. Nobody offered to accompany him. Tora seemed not to hear his remark; Stephen observed sarcastically that Dick 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 Dick 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."

Tora might be a profound speculative thinker, but, no, she was not quick in the little matters of the world. "Do you mean to say that the man objects to seeing any single house from his windows? Really Dick is putting on airs!"

"It depends on who lives in the single house."

"But you live there." Tora stared at her. "Have you quarrelled with him? Do you mean to say he dislikes you?"

Winnie broke into a laugh. "On the contrary, Tora."

At last light dawned. A long-drawn "Oh!" proclaimed its coming. "I see. I never do notice things like that. Then you've refused him, have you?"

"Oh no, he's never asked me. He never told me anything about it – not directly, or meaning to, at least." This qualification in view of the talk at the railway station. "But I'm sure of it."

"Then why doesn't he tell you? Or have you snubbed him hopelessly?"

"I haven't done much either way, but it's not that. You see, he thinks that he's not free to marry me, and that I'm not free to marry anybody."

"Then he'd better stop thinking such nonsense," said Tora, with her habitual and most unphilosophical contempt for other people's opinions.

"I don't know about that." Winnie shook her head doubtfully. "But I think that it would ease the situation if you gave Stephen just a hint."

"I'll go and tell him at once." Hints were not in Tora's line.

The first result of her friend's mission which reached Winnie's ears was a ringing peal of laughter from the sanctum where the Synopsis was in course of preparation. It was Wednesday – a half-holiday for the assistants – and Stephen was alone. When once the situation was elucidated, he enjoyed the humour of it immensely.

"Well, we have been a pair of dolts, you and I, Tora. Poor old Dick! He must have been wishing us, and the house too, at the bottom of the sea. But what's to be done?"

"Why, you must tell him not to be so silly, of course; I don't know what she'll say, but let him take his chance."

"I'm getting a bit shy of taking a hand in these complications. We didn't make much of a success out of the Ledstone affair, among us! I think I shall let it alone, and leave them to settle it for themselves."

"You never have the courage of your convictions. It's one of your worst faults, Stephen." With this condemnation on her lips, Tora departed into the garden.

When Winnie went in to resume her labours, Stephen looked up from his books with a twinkle in his eye. "Trouble again, Winnie?"

"I really thought you'd better know about it, or you'd burn Dick's house down."

"You seem to have a knack of setting fires ablaze too."

"You might just let it appear that you've come to the conclusion that it's not the house which makes Dick so grumpy. Don't say a word about me, of course."

"He'll think me much cleverer than I have been."

"Well, I should think you'd like that, Stephen. I should, in your place."

He laughed good-humouredly. "Oh, well, I deserve that dig."

"It's rather funny how this sort of thing pursues me, isn't it? But it's quite half your fault. If you will collect a menagerie of opinions, and throw me into the middle of it – "

"It's not strange that the animals like the dainty morsel, even though the keepers don't approve of the diet? But I didn't collect all the animals."

"No," said Winnie, smiling reflectively. "I did pick up one or two for myself in the course of my journeyings through the world. I'm not quite sure I want any others."

"He's an awfully good fellow, old Dick."

"Yes. And now I'm going back to Utopia – where animals like only their proper diet."

Meanwhile Dick Dennehy was not taking another look at his house, nor endeavouring to form a more favourable estimate of it. He was walking up and down in the field behind it, which under Tora Aikenhead's skilled care had already assumed something of the semblance of a garden. He had to settle his question one way or the other. If one way, then good-bye, for a long while at least, to the new house and to Shaylor's Patch; if the other, he would try his fortune with a good courage. Although his case had points of similarity enough to justify Winnie in linking it with those others which had presented themselves in her experience, it was not identical with any one of them, but had its own complexion. He was not called upon to defy public opinion and to confuse the lines of social demarcation, as Godfrey Ledstone had been. Nor to revolutionize his ideas and mode of life, like Bob Purnett. Nor to be what he must deem disloyal to his profession and false to his work in the world, like Bertie Merriam. Cyril Maxon's case was closer; yet Cyril had only to pass, by an ingeniously constructed bridge, from the more extreme to the less extreme of two theories, and in so doing found abundance of approval and countenance among men of his own persuasion. Dick was confronted with a straight, rigid, unbending prohibition from an authority which he had always respected as final and infallible.

Yet he seemed asked to give up the whole of his real life, to empty life of what made it worth living. Save for one or two boyish episodes of sentiment, he had kept clear of love-affairs. He brought to Winnie's service both the fresh ardour of a young man and the settled conviction of maturity. He had never a doubt in his mind that for him it was this woman or no woman; his knowledge of himself and his past record made the certainty more trustworthy than it generally is. Given then that he had a chance of winning her, it was a mighty sacrifice which was demanded of him – even to the spoiling and maiming of his life, and the starvation of his spirit.

His was a perfectly straight case; there was no confusing it, there could be no golden bridge; a supreme authority on the one side, on the other the natural man, fortified by every secular justification – for he would be breaking no law of the land, infringing no code of honour, injuring no man whose rights or feelings he was under an obligation to respect. And he would be affording to the creature he loved best in the world happiness, as he believed, and, of a certain, peace, protection, and loving care – things of which she stood in need; to Dick Dennehy's notions, notwithstanding his love and admiration, her record showed that she stood sorely in need of them. Here, on one side of his mind, he found himself in a paradoxical agreement with the authority which the other side wanted to defy. It and he agreed about her past doings, but drew from them a different conclusion. He adored her, but he did not think that she could take care of herself. He believed that he could take care of her – at the cost of defying his supreme authority; or he would not use the word defying – he would throw himself on its mercy in a very difficult case. The creature he loved best of all things in life would do, he feared, more unpardonable things, unless he himself did a thing which he had been taught to think unpardonable in itself. He invited her to nothing that she was obliged to hold as wrongdoing; he did not ask her to sin against the light she possessed. That sin would be his. His chivalry joined forces with his love; to refrain seemed cowardice as well as almost impossibility. There was the dogma – but should there be no dispensation? Not when every fibre of a man's heart, every impulse of a man's courage, cried out for it?

The sun sank to its setting. He stood in the garden, and watched how its decline made more beautiful the gracious prospect. A little trail of smoke rose in leisurely fashion from the chimneys of Winnie's cottage. The air was very still. He turned and looked at the new house with a new interest. "Would it be good enough for her, now?" asked Dick Dennehy. The sudden vision of her in the house – of her dainty ways and gracious presence, her chaff and her sincerity – swept over his mind. She had been wrong – but she had been brave. Braver than he was himself?

To the horizon sank the sun. Dick Dennehy turned to look at it again. As the glow faded, peace and quiet reigned. Very gradually evening fell. He lifted his hat from his head and stood watching the last rays, the breeze stirring his hair and freshening his brow. He stood for a long time very still, as he was wont to stand, quiet, attentive, obedient, at the solemn offices of his Church – the Church that was to him creed, conscience, and half-motherland. Suddenly his soul was at peace, and he spoke aloud with his lips, even as though in response to the voice of One walking in the garden in the cool of the day. "I must do what I must do, and leave it to the mercy of God."

CHAPTER XXIX

IN THE RESULT

"On further inspection it turns out to be a perfectly corking house – a jewel of a house, Stephen!"

Winnie had gone home, and Stephen was working alone at the Synopsis when Dick Dennehy walked into the room with these words on his lips. Stephen looked up and saw that something had happened to his friend. The embarrassed hang-dog air had left his face. He looked a trifle obstinate about the mouth, but his eyes were peaceful and met Stephen's straightforwardly.

"In fact, there's only one fault at all to be found with it."

"Give it a name, and Tora will put it right," said Stephen, in genial response to his friend's altered mood.

Dick smiled. "I'm afraid Tora can't, but I know of another lady who can – if she will. It's a bit big for a bachelor; I'll be feeling lonely there."

"Oh, that's it, is it?" Stephen laughed. "Now I rather thought it was, all along." At some cost to truth, he was carrying out Winnie's injunction. "You were so – well – restless."

"I was. And Tora was cross with me, and you laughed at me, and then I got savage. But it's all over now – so far as I'm concerned, at least. You know who it is?"

"Well, I almost think I can guess, old fellow. We're not blind. Winnie?"

Dick Dennehy nodded his head. "I'll have it settled before I'm many days older."

His mouth was now very firm, and his eyes almost challenging. It was evident even to the lover of discussion that here was a decision which was not to be discussed, one which only the man who came to it himself could judge. Stephen felt the implication in Dick's manner so strongly that he even retrenched his faint smile of amusement, as he held out his hand, and said, "Good luck!"

Dick 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 Dick 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 Dick Dennehy ending the series with a striking example. But Godfrey 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.