JUDGMENT ACCORDINGLY
Certainly the quartette made a very agreeable party in Madeira. It
proved to be as happily composed as the Major had anticipated. The two
elders enjoyed the sunshine, the fine nights, the casino, much gossip
with one another and with casual coevals who had anything to add. The
young couple made their excursions, had their bath and a little
lawn-tennis (Winnie could not be roused to enthusiasm over this),
gambled mildly and danced enthusiastically. Not all these things with
one another exclusively. There were other young women there, and other
young men. The Major was in request among the former; Winnie among the
latter. There was no overdoing of the _tête-à-tête_. Among the colours,
the flowers, and the fun, life ran very pleasantly.
But Mrs. Lenoir was a little impatient. Her pet scheme seemed to hang
fire. She could not quite make out why. It was not, she thought, the
other young men and women; there was no sign of any foreign attraction
such as might induce either of her predestined lovers to wander from the
appointed path. Yet the Major's advances were, in her judgment,
painfully deliberate, and Winnie's good fellowship with him was almost
demonstratively unsentimental. Mrs. Lenoir felt her experience at fault;
she had expected that, in such a favourable climate, the affair would
ripen more quickly. But there are ways of forcing plants, and she was a
skilful gardener.
One day, a week after the party had arrived on the island, she came out
into the hotel garden after lunch and settled herself, with the
General's gallant assistance, in a long chair; the spot commanded a view
over the harbour. The General, his offices performed, sat in a shorter
chair and smoked his cigar. Far below them the ramshackle pretty town
seemed to blink in the sunshine; a rather sleepy blinking is the
attitude it takes towards existence, except when a tourist ship comes
in, or a squadron of men-of-war. Then it sits up, and eats, and anon
sleeps again.
"I suppose, when they come down from the Mount, they'll go straight to
the casino," said the General.
"Yes, I told them we'd meet them there. Hugh!"
She did not very often call him Hugh. In the use of his name he was in
the habit of recognizing some rather special call on his services or his
attention.
"Yes, my dear Clara? Now you're not going to worry about your share of
the wine again?"
"No," said she, smiling, "I'm not. I've a little confession to make to
you. I told you a fib about Winnie. I told you the fib I told
everybody--that she was a distant cousin. She isn't. I met her at some
friends'--very nice people. She was quite adrift. I asked her to come to
me for a bit, and we got on so well that she's stayed. She's an orphan,
I know--her father was a parson--and I think she's quite alone in the
world, though she has a small income." She laughed. "You see what a long
story it is. With most people it's so much easier to tell the little
fib. But I've told you the truth about her now." Yet not all the truth.
Mrs. Lenoir's conscience certainly seemed sometimes to work on easy
springs.
"Thank you for telling me, Clara. I suppose I know why you told me. But
I think my boy knows already that, if he has any designs about Miss
Winnie, he'll not find me an obstacle. Only she doesn't seem to me to be
anything more than friendly towards him."
"Well, she'd naturally wait for a lead, wouldn't she?"
"You think it's that?" Mrs. Lenoir's slight wave of her fan was
non-committal. "He's a very conscientious fellow. He looks at a thing
all round. I'm sure he'd consider not only whether he liked her, but
whether he could satisfy her--whether the life he could offer her would
be to her liking. Being a soldier's wife isn't all beer and skittles.
And getting on with all the regiment!"
"Dear me, is there all that to consider?" Her tone was playful, yet
rather contemptuous. "It doesn't look as if he was desperately in love."
"Men differ," mused the General. "Look at my three sons. Bertie's as I
tell you--slow and solid--make an excellent husband to a woman of sense.
The Colonel never looks at a woman, so far as I know. George runs after
every petticoat he meets, and hangs the consequences--confound him!"
"And which," asked Mrs. Lenoir, "is most like father, Hugh?"
"Ancient history, ancient history!" he murmured, half in pleasure, half
in contrition, yet with a glance at his companion. "Shall I tell him
what you've told me about Miss Winnie?"
"Just as you like." She laughed. "I don't think he's gone far enough to
have any rights yet, you know."
"I don't think he has," agreed the General, laughing too--and not aware
of the bearings of his admission.
Mrs. Lenoir, however, treasured it in her armoury: she might have need
of it. Plainly the General might consider that, confession once begun,
confession ought to have gone further. She had the same plausible
answers she had given to Winnie herself. She had another; she
acknowledged her own fib, but she would plead that she had no right to
betray her friend. In the end she had not much doubt that she could
manage the General. She had managed him before--in a much more difficult
case; and he was very fond of Winnie. Something of partisanship
influenced her mood; the free lance renewed memories of old raids in
this little skirmish against convention; she was minded to fight at the
best advantage she could--with the father 'contained' and the son as
deeply committed to his position as she could get him before the blow
was struck.
As a result of this conversation the General carried away an uneasy
idea--born of the confidence so pointedly reposed in him, enforced by
the slight touch of contempt in Mrs. Lenoir's voice--that one of the
ladies, even possibly both, considered his son, if not a laggard, yet at
least somewhat prosaically circumspect in his love-making. Such a view,
if really entertained, did some injustice to Bertie Merriam. He was not
impulsive; he was not passionate. He took time to make up his mind. It
would be almost true to say that, before falling in love, he made up his
mind that he would--not the commonest order of events. But he had pretty
well made up his mind by now. Only he received very little
encouragement. Winnie was always 'jolly' to him; but she asked nothing
of him, made no special claims on him--and took the same liberty as she
accorded. In the pleasant round of their life he was one comrade among
many; more intimate than the rest, no doubt, by reason of his habitual
escort, the excursions, and the messing together at table, but not
different in kind. Vaguely the Major felt that there was some barrier,
real but imperceptible, which he could not pass--a thing made up out of
a thousand unobtrusive trifles, yet composing in the mass a defence that
he could not see how to penetrate.
There was a curious little man in the hotel--a man of about forty-five,
short, bald, shabby, yet clean, though he did not bathe. In fact he did
nothing--no excursions, no sports, no dancing, no flirtation. He did not
even read; he sat about--meditating, it must be presumed. Something in
him made the girls giggle and the men wink, as he passed by; the men
said 'Dotty!' and the girls sniggered at the witticism. His name, sought
out in the hotel register, proved to be Adolphus Wigram. The wit who had
made the search called him 'Dolly'--and the name became his at once,
varied back to 'Dotty' sometimes by an ultra-witticism.
When Winnie came home from the casino this evening, having some minutes
to spare before dressing for dinner, she went on to the hotel balcony,
which overlooks the town from a loftier and, so to say, a more
condescending altitude than the garden. She rested her elbows on the
balcony and surveyed the beauty of the scene, so artfully composed of
hill and slope and sea that one can hardly conceive it the outcome of
nature's mere--and probably violent--caprice. She was lost in thought,
and was startled to find elbows on a level with hers and a head in close
neighbourhood, though rather lower. She recognized 'Dolly'--in the
shabbiest of all suits, looking meditatively down on the lights of the
town and harbour of Funchal.
"Quite a small place, Miss Wilson," said 'Dolly.' "Full of people!"
"I suppose it is," Winnie agreed politely. She had come out on the
balcony occupied with another question than the population of Madeira.
"I tried to understand things once--to grasp them in the large, you
know. Seems easy to some people, but I couldn't do it. I teach history.
I was a bit overworked; some of my friends subscribed to send me out
here for just a fortnight. Doing me good."
Winnie turned her face towards the funny jerky little man. "Are you
going to grasp things in the large when you get back?" she asked.
"No, no; I'm afraid not. Thirty thousand or so of them down there, I
suppose! All thinking they're very important. All being born, or dying,
or love-making, or starving, or filling their bellies, and so on. Quite
a small place!"
Winnie smiled. "Yes, I dare say. It sounds true, but rather trite. I
have problems of my own, Mr. Wigram."
"So have I--income, and taxation, and necessary expenditure. Still,
these thirty thousand are interesting."
"They're awfully lucky to want very few clothes and hardly any fires,
and to live in such a beautiful place. What do you mean by things in the
large, Mr. Wigram?"
"Well, I mean truth," said the absurd little man, clutching the balcony
railings, just as if he were going to vault over them and crack his
skull on the nut-shaped stones which served for a path thirty or forty
feet beneath. "Truth is things in the large, you know."
"I don't think I know that, but I know a friend in England who talks
rather like you."
"Poor devil! How much money does he make?"
"He's got independent means, Mr. Wigram."
"Then he can afford to talk a great deal better."
"You really make me rather uncomfortable. Surely everybody can say what
they like nowadays?"
The little man gave an abrupt hoarse laugh. "I teach history in a
school, and get a hundred and fifty pounds a year for it. Can I say
what I like? Do I tell the truth about the history? Oh dear, no!"
"I've got just a hundred and fifty pounds a year. Can I do what I like?"
asked Winnie.
'Dolly' turned to her with a queer ridiculous solemnity. "It seems to
me," he observed, "a competency for an able-bodied young woman. I don't
know what you can do, but I think you're quite in a position to tell the
truth--if you happen to know it. Anybody dependent on you?"
"Not a soul," smiled Winnie.
"I've a mother and an unmarried sister. You see the difference? I think
I heard the gong. Good evening."
"Good evening, Mr. Wigram." Winnie rushed in to dress for dinner,
pitiful, smiling, and thoughtful.
The quartette was not as merry as usual that evening. Bertie Merriam was
rather glum, and when Winnie perceived it she grew remorseful. Up at the
Mount he had, at last, shown signs of making a definite advance; if she
had not snubbed him, she had at least fought him off by affected
unconsciousness of his meaning, by persistent unsentimentality. It was
almost against her own will; she could not help it; the instinct in her
was irresistible. She might have been equal to standing by Tora
Aikenhead's view--"As long as my own conscience is clear, it's no affair
of yours what I did before I knew you, and I shan't say a word about
it." She could certainly have followed Stephen's atavistic
'public-school' idea of honour with perfect readiness. These were both,
in their different ways, forms of defiance. But Mrs. Lenoir's
compromise--"I'll wait till the truth can't hurt me, though it may hurt
you"--was not defiance; it was deceit. Under the influence of gratitude
to the friend to whom she owed so much kindness, and of the deference
which she honestly accorded to her adviser's experience and wisdom, she
had accepted it. All very well to accept it in words! She found that she
could not act upon it. Instead of making Bertie Merriam like her so well
that the truth could be told to him without risk--or, at any rate, with
the minimum of risk--she was spending her time in trying to prevent him
from liking her in that way at all. If she went on, she would succeed;
he was sensitive, proud, easy to discourage. Yet, as things stood, she
knew that she would not be able to resist going on. Then it came to
this--Mrs. Lenoir's compromise would not work. It might or might not be
justifiable, but it simply would not work in Winnie's hands. She could
not carry it out, because it meant in the end that she was to behave
just as Godfrey Ledstone had. The gravamen of his offence was that he
had been ashamed of her; now she was being ashamed of herself. He had
conceded to his family the right to think her shameful; she was allowing
the same right to the Major, and merely trying to curry favour enough to
override his judgment. Such a course was not only flat against her
theories; it was flat against the nature which had produced the
theories. And, in practice, it resulted in a deadlock; it kept the Major
at a standstill. He did not retreat, because his feelings dictated an
advance. He could not advance, because she would not let him. There he
stuck--up against that impalpable, impenetrable barrier.
"I've been talking--out on the balcony--with that funny little man they
call 'Dolly,'" she remarked. "He told me that, if you had nobody
dependent on you, and had a hundred and fifty pounds a year, you were in
a position to tell the truth."
"Is it exactly a question of what money you've got, Miss Winnie?" asked
the General.
She let the question pass. "Anyhow, that happens to be exactly my
income. Rather funny!" She looked across the small table at Mrs.
Lenoir--and was not surprised to find that Mrs. Lenoir was looking at
her already.
"I suppose he meant that if you weren't absolutely obliged to get or
keep some job----" the Major began.
"That's what he meant; and there's a lot in it, isn't there, Major
Merriam?"
"Well, it's not what we're taught at school, but perhaps there is."
"More luxuries for the rich," smiled Mrs. Lenoir.
"The Radicals can make a new grievance out of it at the next election,"
said the General.
Of course, the two men did not know what underlay Winnie's talk. Equally
of course, Mrs. Lenoir did; she saw it in a minute, and her reading
hardly needed the confirmation of Bertie's glum demeanour. Winnie was in
rebellion--probably in irreconcilable rebellion. Mrs. Lenoir glanced
across at her with a satirically protesting smile. Winnie smiled back,
but her eyes were resolute--rather merrily resolute, as though she liked
this new taste of her favourite cup of defiance.
"There are times and seasons," said Mrs. Lenoir. "Isn't there even a
thing called the economy of truth? I don't think I know the exact
doctrine."
"You wouldn't tell a child everything--or a fool either," observed the
General.
"Would you choose the wrong time to tell the truth to anybody?" Mrs.
Lenoir asked.
"Are you entitled to settle what's the right time--all by yourself?"
Winnie retorted gaily. Her spirits had begun to rise. This was almost
like a discussion at Shaylor's Patch. There was a deeper reason. With
her determination had come a sense of recovered honesty, and, more, of
liberty regained. Whatever the Merriams might think, she would be
herself again--herself and no longer Miss Winnie Wilson, a young person
whom, in the last week or so, she had begun to hate cordially.
Winnie did not go to the casino that evening; she left the General and
his son to walk there together. She followed Mrs. Lenoir into the
drawing-room, and sat down by her.
"So you've made up your mind, Winnie?" Mrs. Lenoir did not seem angry or
hurt. She merely recognized Winnie's resolution.
"Yes. I can't go on with it. And it's a good moment. The newspapers come
to-morrow, and, if what Hobart Gaynor told me was right, there'll be
something about me in them."
"Yes, I remember. Well, if you're set on doing it, that doesn't make
such a bad--occasion." Mrs. Lenoir was considering how the 'occasion'
could best be twisted into a justification of previous silence. With the
Major that would not be so much a pressing question--other factors would
probably decide his action--but it was a point that her friend the
General might raise. She looked thoughtfully at Winnie. "How much do you
like him?" she asked.
"I like him as much as I know him, but I don't know him very much. I
shall know a little more to-morrow." She paused. "I should like the
life, the whole thing, very much, I think."
"She's not in love, but she'd take him," Mrs. Lenoir inwardly
interpreted.
"I'm sorry to act against your advice, after all you've done for me. It
does look ungrateful."
"Oh, I don't expect people to give up their liberty, just because I'm
fond of them." She rose. "I'm off to my room, my dear. Good night--and
good luck."
Winnie went out on the balcony, to seek for Mr. Adolphus Wigram and some
more talk about truth. But he was not there; he had gone down to the
casino, where he lost exactly half a dollar with unbroken bad luck every
night--probably one of the things which the claims of his family and the
figure of his salary would cause him to suppress the truth about when he
got back to his school. So she remembered that there was an impromptu
dance going on downstairs, and went and danced and flirted furiously
till midnight. The girls said that they had never seen Miss Wilson look
so well, and never had the young men crowded round Miss Wilson so
eagerly. In fact Miss Wilson had her fling. Small blame to her. It was
the last night of her life--at least, so far as that life had any real
significance. Though Winnie did not propose to change her name in the
hotel book or on the lips of casual companions during her stay in
Madeira, yet for essential purposes that night saw an end of Miss Winnie
Wilson.
Since English newspapers arrive in the island only once a week, the
competition for them on the mail day is formidable. Persons who combine
agility and selfishness with a healthy interest in public affairs may be
observed sitting on five copies of their favourite journal, reading a
sixth, and anon glaring angrily round at potential applicants for one of
the spare copies. Winnie took no part in the scramble, and attacked
nobody's reserve pile of intelligence. She knew that her paper would
come in a separate wrapper, addressed to her personally by Hobart
Gaynor; she wanted only one day's paper.
She found it laid by her plate at lunch--a meal which passed in the
discussion of the news of the world; the Major had been a successful
competitor in the struggle, and was well-primed. Winnie rose when coffee
appeared, her paper in her hand. She addressed Bertie Merriam rather
pointedly.
"I'm going into the garden--that seat under the trees. You know?"
"I'll come too. Directly I've drunk my coffee." As Winnie walked off he
exchanged a glance with his father. They had had a confidential little
talk at the casino the evening before, in which Winnie's behaviour was
the subject of some puzzled comment. This invitation to the garden
looked more promising. Mrs. Lenoir was busy reading a letter. Winnie had
read one letter too--from Hobart Gaynor, telling her all she needed to
know, and referring her to a certain page of her paper.
Yes, there it was--very short, matter-of-fact, and hard. Well, what else
should it be? Only it seemed oddly to reproduce Cyril Maxon himself. The
report sounded as if his exact words, nay, his very tones, had been
caught; they seemed to echo in her ears; she almost heard him saying it
all. And what more appropriate, what so inevitable, an ending could
there be to Cyril's utterances than the words which closed this brief
record--'Judgment accordingly'? Those words might always have been
written at the end of Cyril's remarks. 'Judgment accordingly.' It seemed
to sum up, as well as to close, the story of her relations with him.
From the beginning right through to this, the end, on her and her
works--on all she did and was--there had been 'Judgment accordingly.'
She let the copy of the _Times_ fall on her lap, and sat idle--waiting
for Bertie Merriam, yet not thinking much of him. The figure of 'Dolly'
shuffled into view. The odd little man was smoking a cigarette, and, in
the intervals of puffing, was apparently talking to himself in a
cheerful and animated way--no sounds, but the lips moved quickly. As he
passed, Winnie hailed him. "Had your mail, Mr. Wigram?"
He stopped. "I've had good news, Miss Wilson--good news from home.
They've raised my salary."
"Oh, I am glad, Mr. Wigram."
"A twenty-pound rise, Miss Wilson. Well, I've done fifteen years. But
still it's liberal." He seemed to swell a little. "And it's a
recognition. I value it as a recognition." The transient swelling
subsided. "And it'll help," he ended soberly.
"Shall you be able to tell the truth to any greater extent, Mr. Wigram?"
"Oh, I think not, I think not. I--I hadn't thought of it from that point
of view, Miss Wilson."
"I've had no rise in my income, but I'm going to do it."
He was not really listening. He gave a feeble cackle of a laugh. "I'm
just making a few calculations, Miss Wilson." On he went, apportioning
every penny of that hard-earned increase of twenty pounds per annum.
Valuable--but not enough to enable him to teach true history.
Major Merriam sauntered towards her with his cigar. He was really rather
eager, but he did not look it. The invitation might be merely a tardy
apology for the snubs of yesterday.
"May I sit down by you?"
"Please do. Have you seen the _Times_?"
"I looked through the lot of them."
"Have you seen this one--the 26th?" She held up her copy.
"I suppose I have. I had a run through them all."
"Read that." Her finger indicated the report.
He read it; the process did not take long. He took his cigar out of his
mouth. "Well, Miss Wilson?"
"I was Mrs. Maxon; that's all," said Winnie.