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.
Small wonder! thought Stephen; for these opinions were a motley
host--enemies among themselves. If one of them were putting up a good
fight, another was already ready to fall on its flank. If one were
making a strong case, there was another to whisper its weak point in the
adversary's ear, or to suggest insinuatingly--"Well, if he can't allow
you what you want, try me! I'm much more accommodating. I recognize
exceptions. I know the meaning of counsels of perfection. I understand
the limits of human nature." Or conversely--"You'll get no real comfort
from that shifty fellow. He'll betray you in this world, to say nothing
of the next. Rest on me. I'm a rock. Rocks make hard beds, you say? A
little, perhaps, now and then, but think how safe they are! And how they
appeal to your imagination, rising foursquare to heaven, unshakable,
eternal!" And then there was that plausible little rogue of an opinion
which protests always that it is not an opinion at all--nothing so
troublesome--"Don't bother your head with any of those fellows. Please
yourself! What does it matter? Anyhow, what do any of them really know
about it? You might just as well toss up as try to decide between them.
I'm an opinion myself, you say--just as bad as they are? Not at all! How
dare you?" So they went on, betraying, competing, outbidding one
another--like a row of men selling penny toys in the street, each trying
to shout louder and to get more custom than the other. In such an
irreverent image did Stephen Aikenhead envisage the Quest after Truth,
whereof he was himself so ardent a devotee.
He had got back to his old formula. Things were 'in solution.' It was a
very welter of opinions. Was that state of things to last for ever?
"Or"--he mused--"shall we to some future age seem, oh, ridiculously
mixed? Will they have settled things? Will they have straightened out
the moral and social world as the scientific fellows are straightening
out the physical universe? If they have, they'll never understand how we
doubted and squabbled. Only some great historian will be able to make
that intelligible to them. Or will men go on for ever swirling round and
round in a whirlpool, and never sail on a clear strong stream to the
ocean of truth?"
So the muser mused in his quiet study, with the roar of the water in his
ears. Had he chanced to think of it, he would have found that he was
himself an example of the conclusion to which his survey of Winnie
Maxon's experiences had led him. His speculations might ask, with
'jesting Pilate,' 'What is truth?' and stay not for an answer that could
never come. The natural man, Stephen Aikenhead, was irresistibly bent on
finding out. He returned briskly to the Synopsis--to his own little task
of blasting away, if by chance he could, one fragment of the rocks that
dammed the current.
He worked on, reading and making notes. The clock struck six, and seven,
and half-past. He did not notice. Five minutes later the door opened,
and Winnie came in.
"What's come over the house?" she asked. "You invited me to dinner at
half-past seven! Here you are, not only not dressed, but with your hair
obviously unbrushed! And Tora and Dick went off to the new house, Ellen
tells me, at half-past five, with a lantern, and haven't come back yet!"
"Oh, did they? Then Dick's evidently made it all right with Tora too."
He rose and stretched himself. "I think you'll have to look out for
something to-night or to-morrow, Winnie. Dick has made up his mind; he's
decided that the house is otherwise delightful, but has just one fault.
He'd be lonely in it as a bachelor."
Winnie sat down and looked at him thoughtfully. "I wish it hadn't come
so soon. I'm not ready. And I do have such bad luck!"
"He'll wait as long as you like. And how does the bad luck come in
here?"
"I'm always forced into seeming to exact a sacrifice of some sort."
"Well, from some points of view that was likely to follow from the line
you took. From your own side of the matter, is it altogether a bad thing
that a man should have to search his heart--to ask what you're really
worth to him?"
"Suppose he should bear me a grudge afterwards?"
"Dick's too square with his conscience to do that. He knows it's his own
act and his own responsibility."
"At any rate I won't have any more vows, Stephen, no more on either
side. I don't like them. I broke mine once. I thought I had a right to,
but I didn't like doing it. Cyril had broken most of his, in my view,
but people seem so often to forget that there's more than one." She gave
an abrupt little laugh. "Cyril vowed to 'comfort' me! Imagine Cyril
being obliged to vow to comfort anybody, poor man! He couldn't possibly
do it."
"In the matter of vows they let you down easy at the registry office."
"In his heart Dick won't think that a marriage at all."
"You put that just wrong. In his opinions he mayn't, in his heart he
will. I know Dick Dennehy pretty well, and you may be sure of that."
"I never wanted to be a lawless woman. But it was coming, or had come,
to hatred; and it's such awful ruin to live with a person you hate--much
worse, I think, than the things they do set you free for."
Stephen smiled. "I can find you some very respectable authority for
that--a good passage in Döllinger--but, I think, don't you, to-morrow?
After all, there's such a thing as dinner!"
"There is, and it'll be disgracefully overcooked." She rose and came
across to him. "Give me your blessing and a kiss, Cousin Stephen. I
think I see happiness glimmering a long way off."
"I don't think it's ever very far off, if you can see it," said Stephen,
and kissed her.
Winnie shook her head doubtfully. She had suffered such a tossing and
buffeting; the quiet of harbour seemed a distant goal, even if she could
now steer a straight course towards it. Her feelings were still on edge;
she shrank instinctively from any immediate call to strong emotion.
There was another trouble in her mind secret, hardly explicit, but real;
if, because of what she had done, Dick Dennehy, still dominated by the
convictions which he meant to disobey, should show that he thought she
was to be had for the asking, she would resent it bitterly--even to a
curt and final refusal. That would be almost as great a failure as
Godfrey Ledstone's, and such a rock might still lie in the way of her
ship to its harbour. Much turned on Dick Dennehy's bearing towards her.
But the days that ensued at Shaylor's Patch were full of healing grace.
There was the cordiality of friendship again unclouded, Tora's serenity,
Stephen's alert and understanding comradeship. Dick came when his work
allowed--it may be surmised that he stretched its allowance to the
full--and there were now infinite interest and unbounded fun over
furnishing his house. In this work a formula was hit upon, suitable to
the state of suspense in which the master's affairs stood.
"Eventualities must be borne in view," said Stephen, with treacherous
gravity. Dick bore them in view to the full limit of his purse--and how
could Winnie refuse a friendly opinion on questions of taste? Nobody
mentioned Mrs. Lenoir's furniture, now at the cottage. It was not really
very suitable for a country house, and in any case it would be
pleasanter to make the fresh start in wholly fresh surroundings. Winnie
mentally transmuted it into new frocks, in which shape it would serve a
purpose, temporary indeed, but less charged with associations.
In no set confession, but in various intimate talks, the whole of her
story, and the whole of her own attitude towards it, came to Dick's
knowledge. She attempted to conceal neither her passion for Godfrey
Ledstone nor the attraction with which at the last Merriam had drawn
her. The latter case she was especially anxious that he should
understand.
"I was angry at first at being thought impossible, but he made me see
his point of view, and then I almost fell in love with him," she said,
smiling. "Only almost!"
It was not the old Dick Dennehy who listened; he would have had a ready
explanation of how all the troubles had come about, and a vehement,
though good-humoured, denunciation for the origin of them. Not only his
feeling for Winnie, but his own struggle, with its revelation and its
compromise, changed him. He listened with a grave attention or,
sometimes, with a readily humorous sympathy. If he was rightly or
wrongly--probably he himself would have used neither word, but would
have said 'perforce'--disobeying his supreme authority, yet, as a man
here in this world, he found some compensation in an increased humanity,
a widened charity, an intensified sense of human brotherhood. He
deliberately abandoned the effort to strike a balance between loss and
gain, but the gain he accepted gladly, with a sense, as it were, of
discovery, of opened eyes, of a vision more penetrating. He got rid of
the idea that it was easy for everybody to believe what he believed, if
only they would be at the pains, or that it was mere perverseness of
spirit which prevented them from acting in exact accord with his
standards--or even with their own. Thus, as the days passed, his aim was
no more to forgive and forget, but to appreciate and to understand. With
Winnie this was an essential, if their harmony were to be complete. So
much of the spirit--or the pride--of the theorist survived in her. She
would not take even a great love if it came accompanied by utter
condemnation; perhaps she could not have believed in it, or, believing
in it for the time, would have seen no basis of permanence.
In the early days the ardour of love was all on his side; her heart was
not so easily kindled again into flame. Only gradually did the woman's
absolute faith and grateful affection for the man blossom into their
natural fruit--even as by degrees Winnie's joy in life and delight in
her own powers emerged from their eclipse. Again, now, her eyes sparkled
and her laugh rang out exultantly.
"She sounds in a good humour," said Stephen Aikenhead. "If one did
happen to want anything of her, it might be rather a good moment to ask
it, I should think."
Dick looked up from the evening paper. "Is she ready, Stephen?"
"I think so, Dick."
With a buoyant step Dick Dennehy walked out into the garden, whence the
laugh had come. Winnie was alone; her laugh had been only for a hen
ludicrously scuttling back to her proper territory in fear of the menace
of clapped hands. She wore a black lace scarf twisted about her head;
from under its folds her eyes gleamed merrily.
"Would you be walking with me in the meadow a bit, by chance?" he asked.
Something in his gaze caught her attention. She blushed a little. "Yes,
Dick."
But they walked in silence for a long while. Then she felt her eyes
irresistibly drawn to him. As she turned her head, he held out his
hands. Slowly hers came forward to meet them.
"You couldn't send me away now, could you, Winnie?"
"Oh, Dick, have you thought it all over, looked at every side of
it--twenty times, a hundred times, five hundred times?"
"Not I! I looked at it all round once for all, and I've never doubted of
it since. I've been waiting for you to do all that." His smile was happy
and now confident.
"Well, in the end, I like it better like that. I like you to think so,
anyhow, even if you're deceiving yourself. Because it shows----" She
broke off mischievously. "What does it show, Dick?"
"Why, that you're the jewel of the world! What else would it be
showing?"
"But what about the lady you were unhappy over, that evening at the
station?"
"You knew it was yourself all the time!"
"Then how did you dare to say it wasn't serious? And to call
yourself--or me--a fool?"
"You're teasing me to the end, Winnie."
She grew grave and slipped her arm through his. "I knew really why it
wasn't and couldn't be serious to you--and why just in that way it
became terribly serious. Time was when I should have thought you silly
to think it so serious, and when you would have kept it 'not serious'
right to the end. We've changed one another, Dick. I you, you me--and
life both of us! And so we can make terms with one another."
"Terms of perfect peace," he answered. He knew what was in her mind. "I
give you my honour--in my soul I'm at peace."
"Then so be it, dear old Dick. For neither am I ashamed." She turned
round to face him, and, putting her hands on his shoulders, kissed his
lips. "Now let's go over to your house, and see that this eventuality
really has been properly borne in view. Dear Stephen! He'll philosophize
over us, Dick!"
That was, of course, only to be expected. Yet it did not happen when
Stephen and his wife were told the great news after dinner. On the
contrary, after brief but hearty congratulations, the host and hostess
disappeared. Winnie thought that she had detected a glance passing
between them.
"They needn't be so very tactful!" she said laughing.
They were very tactful; for even to lovers the time they stayed away was
undeniably long. There could be no illusion about the progress of the
hands of the clock. Yet when Tora and Stephen came in and were accused
of an excessive display of the useful social quality in question, Tora
blushed, denied the charge rather angrily, and bade them all a brief
good night. Stephen glared through his spectacles in mock fury.
"You two think yourselves everybody! As a matter of fact, for the last
hour or so--how late is it? Eleven! Oh, I say! Yes, of course! Well, for
the last two hours or so, Tora and I have forgotten your very existence;
and, if I may use the candour of an old friend, it's rather a jar to
find you here. You'd better escort your friend home, Mr. Dennehy."
"Well, what have you been doing then?" laughed Winnie.
"It's one of Tora's theories that I should propose to her all over again
about once a year--and somehow to-night seemed rather a suitable
opportunity," Stephen explained. "She's at perfect liberty to refuse me,
and, as a matter of fact, she's generally rather difficult about it.
That's why it's so late." His eyes twinkled again. "She imposes all
sorts of conditions as to my future conduct. I argue a bit, or she
wouldn't respect me. Then I give in--but, of course, I don't observe
them all, or what fun would it be next year? She's accepted me this
time, but she says it's the last time, unless I mend my ways
considerably."
A spark of Dick Dennehy's old scorn blazed out. "So that's the way she
gets round her precious theory, is it? And the woman a respectable wife
and mother all the time!"
Winnie laid her hand on his arm. "There is one thing that can get round
everything, Dick."
"A fact which, in all its bearings for good and evil, must be carefully
brought out in the Synopsis," said Stephen Aikenhead.
They left him twinkling luminously at them through clouds of tobacco
smoke.
"Hang the man, is he in earnest about his old Synopsis, as he calls the
thing?" asked Dick Dennehy, as they started for the cottage.
Winnie considered. "I don't quite know. That's the fun of Stephen! But,
anyhow"--she pressed his arm--"if this thing--our thing--doesn't end
before the Synopsis does, we're all right! It'll last our lives, I
think, and be still unfinished." Her laugh ended in a sigh, her sigh
again in a smile. "Oh, I'm talking as if it were a fairy-tale ending,
out of one of Alice's stories. Well, just for to-night! But it isn't
really--it can't be, Dick. It's not an ending at all. It's a beginning,
and a beginning of something difficult. Look what you're giving up for
me--the great thing I'm accepting from you! And it's not a thing to be
done once and for all. It'll be a continuing thing, always cropping up
over other things great and small. Oh, it's not an ending; it's only a
start. Is it even a fair start, Dick?"
"It's a matter of faith, like everything else in the world that's worth
a rap," said Dick Dennehy. "At all events, we know this about one
another--that we're equal to putting up a fight for what we believe in
and love. And odds against don't frighten us! I call that a fair start.
What do you make of life, anyhow, unless it's a fight? We'll fight our
fight to a finish!"
His voice rang bravely confident; his sanguine spirit soared high in
hope. When she opened the cottage door, and the light from a hanging
lamp in the narrow passage fell on him, his face was happy and serene.
With a smile he coaxed her apprehensions. "Ah, now, you're not the girl
you were if ye're afraid of an experiment!"
She put her hands in his. "Not the girl I was, indeed! How could I be,
after it all? But here's my life--am I to be afraid of it? Any use I
am, any joy I have--am I to turn tail? I won't, Dick!"
"Always plucky! As plucky as wrong-headed, Winnie!"
"Wrongheaded still?" she laughed, now gaily. "That question, like
everything else, is, as Stephen says, 'in solution.' It's not my fate to
settle questions, but it seems as if I couldn't help raising them!"
To those who would see design in such matters--in the interaction of
lives and minds--it might well seem that here she put her finger on a
function to which she had never aspired, but for which she had been
effectually used in several cases. She had raised questions in
unquestioning people. Her management of her life put them on inquiry as
to the foundations and the canons of their own. For Dick Dennehy even
her chimney-pots had streaked the sky with notes of interrogation! She
had been, as it were, a touchstone, proving true metal, detecting the
base, revealing alloy; a test of quality, of courage, of faith; an
explorer's shaft sunk deep in the ore of the human heart. She had struck
strata scantily auriferous, she had come upon some sheer dross, yet the
search left her not merely hopeful, but already enriched. Twice she had
found gold--in the soldier who would not desert his flag even for her
sake, in the believer who, for her soul's sake and his love of her,
flung himself on the mercy of an affronted Heaven. Both could dare,
sacrifice, and dedicate. They obeyed the call their ears heard, though
it were to their own hurt--in this world or, mayhap, in another. There
was the point of union between the man who forswore her for his
loyalty's sake and the man who sheltered her against his creed.
In the small circle of those with whom she had shared the issues of
destiny she had unsettled much; of a certainty she had settled nothing.
Things were just as much 'in solution' as ever; the welter was not
abated. Man being imperfect, laws must be made. Man being imperfect,
laws must be broken or ever new laws will be made. Winnie Maxon had
broken a law and asked a question. When thousands do the like, the
Giant, after giving the first-comers a box on the ear, may at last put
his hand to his own and ponderously consider.
* * * * *
_Printed by_
MORRISON & GIBB LIMITED
_Edinburgh_
* * * * *
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
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