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.
Things, then, were settling down in Woburn Square. By dint of being
ignored, Winnie and her raid on the family reputation might soon be
forgotten. The affair had been kept very quiet; that was the great
thing. (Here Woburn Square and the high moralists seem lamentably at
odds, but the high moralists also enjoin the speaking and writing of the
truth.) It was over. It ranked no more as a defiance; it became merely
an indiscretion--a thing young men will do now and then, under the
influence of designing women. There was really jubilation--if only Amy
would have looked a little less gloomy, and been rather more cordial
towards her brother.
"I don't understand the girl," Mr. Ledstone complained. "Our line is to
make things pleasant for him."
"It's that woman. She must have some extraordinary power," his wife
pleaded. Winnie's extraordinary power made it all the easier to forgive
her son Godfrey. Probably few young men would have resisted, and (this
deep down in the mother's heart) not so very many had occasion to
resist.
Then came the thunderbolt--from which jubilation fled shrieking. Who
hurled it? Human nature, Winnie, Lady Rosaline Deering--little as she
either had meant to do anything unkind to the household in Woburn
Square? Surely even the high moralists--or shall we say the high gods,
who certainly cannot make less, and may perhaps make more,
allowances?--would have pitied Mr. Ledstone. Beyond all the
disappointment and dismay, he felt himself the victim of a gross breach
of trust. He fumed up and down the back room on the ground floor which
was called his study--the place he read the papers in and where he slept
after lunch.
"But he said there were to be no proceedings. He said he didn't believe
in it. He said it distinctly more than once."
Mrs. Ledstone had gone to her room. The sinner had fled to his studio,
leaving Amy to break the news to Mr. Ledstone; Amy was growing
accustomed to this office.
"I suppose he's changed his mind," said Amy, with a weary listlessness.
"But he said it. I remember quite well. 'I am not a believer in
divorce.' And you remember I came home and told you there were to be no
proceedings? Monstrous! In a man of his position! Well, one ought to be
able to depend on his word! Monstrous!" Exclamation followed exclamation
like shots from a revolver--but a revolver not working very smoothly.
"It'll have to go through, I suppose, daddy."
"How can you take it like that? What'll your Uncle Martin say? And Aunt
Lena--and the Winfreys? It'll be a job to live this down! And my son--a
man with my record! He distinctly said there were to be no proceedings.
I left him on that understanding. What'll Mrs. Thurseley think? I shall
go and see this man Maxon myself." Of all sinners Mr. Maxon was ranking
top in Woburn Square to-day--easily above his wife even.
"I don't expect that'll do any good."
"Amy, you really are----Oh, well, child, I'm half off my head. A man has
no right to say a thing like that unless he means it. No proceedings, he
said!"
"I expect he did mean it. Something's changed him, I suppose."
Something had--and it never occurred to Cyril Maxon that the Ledstone
family had any right to a say in the matter. He would have been
astonished to hear the interpretation that Mr. Ledstone put on the
interview which he remembered only with vivid disgust, with the
resentment due to an intrusion entirely unwarrantable. So the poor old
gentleman must be left fuming up and down, quite vainly and uselessly
clamouring against the unavoidable, an object for compassion, even
though he was thinking more of the Thurseleys, of Uncle Martin, Aunt
Lena, and the Winfreys than of how his son stood towards divine or
social law on the one side, and towards a deserted woman on the other?
Respectability is, on the whole, a good servant to morality, but
sometimes the servant sits in the master's seat.
The culprit's state was no more enviable than his father's; indeed it
appeared to himself so much worse that he was disposed to grudge his
family the consternation which they displayed so prodigally and to find
in it an unfair aggravation of a burden already far too heavy. Nothing,
perhaps, makes a man feel so ill-used as to do a mean thing and then be
baulked of the object for whose sake he did it. A mean thing it
undoubtedly was, even if it had been the right thing also in the eyes of
many people--for to such unfortunate plights can we sometimes be reduced
by our own actions that there really is not a thing both right and
straight left to do; and it had been done in a mean and cowardly way.
Yet it was now no good. Things had just seemed to be settling down
quietly; he was being soothed by the consolatory petting of his mother
and father. Now this happened--and all was lost. His decent veil of
obscurity was rent in twain; he was exposed to the rude stare of the
world, to the shocked eyes of Aunt Lena and the rest. He had probably
lost the girl towards whom his thoughts had turned as a comfortable and
satisfactory solution of all his difficulties; and he had the perception
to know that, whether he had lost Mabel or not, he had finally and
irretrievably lost Winnie. Everybody would be against him now, both the
men of the law and the men of the code; he had been faithful to the
standards of neither.
He had not the grace to hate himself; that would have been a promising
state of mind. But fuming up and down in his studio off Fitzroy Square
(just like his father in the back room in Woburn Square) and lashing
himself into impotent fury, he began to feel that he hated everybody
else. They had all had a hand in his undoing--Bob Purnett and his lot
with their easy-going moralities, Shaylor's Patch and its lot with their
silly speculations and vapourings over things they knew nothing about,
Cyril Maxon who did not stand by what he said nor by what he believed,
Winnie with ridiculous exacting theories, Mabel Thurseley (poor
blameless Mabel!) by attracting his errant eyes and leading him on to
flirtation, his parents by behaving as if the end of the world had come,
his sister because she despised him and had sympathy with the deserted
woman. He was in a sad case. Nobody had behaved or was behaving
decently towards him, nobody considered the enormous--the
impossible--difficulties of his situation from beginning to end. Was
there no justice in the world--nor even any charity? What an
ending--what an ending--to those pleasant days of dalliance at
Shaylor's Patch! What was deep down in his heart was--"And I could have
managed it all right my way, if she'd only have let me!"
He did not go home to dinner that evening. He slunk back late at night,
hoping that all his family would be in bed. Yet when he found that
accusing sister sitting alone in the drawing-room, he grounded a
grievance on her solitude. She was sewing--and she went on sewing in a
determined manner and in unbroken silence.
"Well, where's everybody? Have you nothing to say? I'm sent to Coventry,
I suppose?"
"Mother's in bed. Oh, she's pretty easy now; you needn't worry. Daddy's
in his study; he was tired out, and I expect he's gone to sleep. I'm
quite ready to talk to you, Godfrey."
Perhaps--but her tone did not forebode a cheerful conversation.
He got up from the chair into which he had plunged himself when he came
in.
"Pretty gay here, isn't it? Oh, you do know how to rub it in, all of
you! I should think living in this house would drive any man to drink
and blue ruin in a fortnight."
Amy sewed on. She had offered to talk, but what he said seemed to call
for no comment. He strode to the door and opened it violently. "I'm off
to bed."
"Good-night, Godfrey," said Amy; her speech was smothered by the banging
of the door.
Poor sinner! Poor creature! Winnie Maxon might indeed plead that her
theory had not been fairly tried; she had chosen the wrong man for the
experiment.
Here, then--save for the one formality on which Cyril Maxon now
insisted--Winnie and the Ledstone family were at the parting of the
ways. Their concurrence had been fortuitous--it was odd what people met
one another at Shaylor's Patch, Stephen's appetite for humanity being so
voracious--fortuitous, and ill-starred for all parties. They would not
let her into their life; they would not rest till they had ejected her
from her tainted connexion with it. Now they went out of hers. She
remembered Godfrey as her great disappointment, her lost illusion, her
blunder; Amy as it were with a friendly stretching-out of hands across a
gulf impassable; the old folk with understanding and toleration--since
they did no other than what they and she herself had been taught to
regard as right. How could the old change their ideas of right?
Their memory of her was far harder--naturally, perhaps. She was a
raider, a brigand, a sadly disturbing and destructive invader. At last
she had been driven out, but a track of desolation spread behind her
retreating steps. Indeed there were spots where the herbage never grew
again. The old folk forgave their son and lived to be proud of him once
more. But Amy Ledstone had gauged her brother with an accuracy
destructive of love; and within twelve months Mabel Thurseley married a
stockbroker, an excellent fellow with a growing business. She never knew
it, but she, at least, had cause for gratitude to Winnie Maxon.
Godfrey returned to the obedience of the code. He was at home there. It
was an air that he could breathe. The air of Shaylor's Patch was
not--nor that of the Kensington studio.