Mrs. Maxon Protests. Anthony Hope
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flat in London."
"I didn't ask where you were going to live, but what you were going to do." Hobart was a patient man, but few people's tempers are quite unaffected by blank failure, by a serene disregard of their arguments.
"Do? Oh, I dare say I shall take up some movement. I hear a lot about that sort of thing down here, and I'm rather interested."
"Oh, you're not the sort of woman who buries herself in a movement, as you call it."
"I can make friends, like other people, I suppose. I needn't bury myself."
"Yes, you can make friends fast enough! Winnie, you're avoiding the crux of the matter."
"Oh, you're back to your dangers! Well, I think I can trust myself to behave properly."
"You ought to be sure of it."
"Are you being polite?"
"Oh, hang politeness! This is a vital question for you."
The colour mounted in her cheeks; for the first time she showed some sign of embarrassment. But the embarrassment and the feelings from which it sprang—those new feelings of the last fortnight—could not make her waver. They reinforced her resolution with all the power of emotion. They made "going back" still more terrible, a renunciation now as well as a slavery. Her eyes, though not her words, had promised Godfrey Ledstone that she would not go back. What then, as Hobart Gaynor asked, was she going to do? The time for putting that question had not come. There was the pleasure now—not yet the perplexity.
She gave a vexed laugh. "Whether it's vital or not, at any rate it's a question for me, as you say yourself, and for me only. And I must risk it, Hobart. After all, there are different—well, ideas—on that sort of subject, aren't there?" Here Shaylor's Patch showed its influence again.
"I rather wish you hadn't come to this house," he said slowly.
"I've been happier here than anywhere in the world. What have you against it?"
"Well, I can't claim to know much about it, but don't some queer people come?"
"Plenty!" she laughed. "It's very amusing."
He smiled, frowned, looked, and indeed felt, a little foolish—as the average man does when he finds himself called upon to take the moral line.
"Rather—er—unsettling?" he hazarded lamely.
"Very stimulating."
"Well, I can say no more. I've done my job. Take care of yourself, Winnie."
"Oh yes, I will; you may be sure of that. Hobart, will you tell Cyril that I'm very, very sorry, and that I hope he'll be happy, and wish him splendid success and prosperity?"
"I'll tell him—if you won't write yourself."
"I couldn't. That would open it all again. I'll write to you, if there's any business to be settled."
Hobart Gaynor, thinking over the conversation on his way back to town, decided that Winnie had got on apace. Well, if she chose to take her life into her own hands, she herself must make the best of it. He did not pretend to feel quite easy—he could not get Godfrey Ledstone out of his head—but he said nothing about such apprehensions when he reported the failure of his mission. He also delivered Winnie's message to her husband. Cyril Maxon's lips set hard, almost savagely, over it. "We shall see," he said. He could not prevent her from doing what she had done, but he would not acknowledge it as setting up a permanent or recognized state of affairs. For the time disobedient, Winnie was still his wife. He would not accept her valediction. His house was still open to her and, after a decent period of penance, his heart.
A plain case of Stephen Aikenhead's "In solution"! What to Cyril was an indissoluble relationship (and more than that), not even temporarily suspended, but rather defied and violated, was to his wife a thing now at last—by her final decision—over and done with so far as it affected her position towards Cyril himself. He was out of her life—at last. She had her life—at last. Not quite entirely free, this life she had won by her bold defiance. She still acknowledged limitations, even while she nibbled at the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge that grew at Shaylor's Patch. Yet how incomparably more free than the old life! She was amazed to find with how little difficulty, with how slight a pang, and with how immense a satisfaction she had broken the bond—or had broken bounds, for she felt remarkably like a school-boy on a forbidden spree. What great things a little courage will effect! How the difficulties vanish when they are faced! Why, for five whole years, had she not seen that the door was open and walked out of it? Here she was—out! And nothing terrible seemed to happen.
"Well, I've done it now for good and all," she said to Stephen Aikenhead.
"Oh yes, you've done it. And what are you going to do next?"
"Just what Hobart asked me! Why should he—or why should you? If a woman doesn't marry, or becomes a widow, you don't ask her what she's going to do next! Consider me unmarried, or, if you like, a widow."
"That's all very well—excellently put. I am rebuked!" Stephen smiled comfortably and broadly. "You women do put things well. But may I observe that, if you were the sort of woman you're asking me to think about, you'd probably be living pretty contentedly with Cyril Maxon?"
The point was presented plainly enough for her. She smiled reflectively. "I think I see. Yes!"
"People differ as well as cases."
She sat down by him, much interested. They were, it seemed, to talk about herself.
"Hobart Gaynor's rather uneasy about me, I think."
"And you about yourself?"
"No, I'm just rather excited, Stephen."
"You're a small boat—and it's a big sea."
"That's the excitement of it. I've been—land-locked—for years. Oh, beached—whatever's your best metaphor for somebody wasting all this fine life!"
"Do you suppose you made your husband happy?"
The question was unexpected. But there was no side of a situation too forlorn for Stephen's notice.
"I really don't know," said Winnie. "I always seemed to be rather—well, rather a minor interest."
"I expect not—I really expect not, you know."
"Supposing I was, or supposing I wasn't—what does it amount to?"
"I was only just looking at it from his point of view for a minute."
"Did he make me happy?"
"Oh, certainly the thing wasn't successful all round," Stephen hastily conceded.
"He said marriage wasn't invented solely to make people happy."
"Well, I suppose he's got an argument there. But you probably thought that the institution might chuck in a little more of that ingredient incidentally?"
"Rather my feeling—yes. You put things well too, now and then, Stephen."
"You suffer under the disadvantage of being a very attractive woman."
"We must bear our infirmities with patience, mustn't we?"
She was this evening in a rare vein of excited pleasure, gay, challenging, admirably provoking, exulting in her freedom, dangling before her own dazzled eyes all its possibilities. Stephen gave a deep chuckle.
"I think I'll go in and tell Tora that I'm infernally in love with you," he remarked, rising from his chair.
"It would be awfully amusing to hear what she says. But—are you?"
A rolling laugh, full of applause, not empty of pity, rumbled over the lawn as Stephen walked back to the house.
No, Stephen was not in love with her; that was certain. He admitted every conceivable doubt as to his duty, but harboured none as to his inclination. That trait of his might,