'I--I don't know, sir.'
'You _do_ know, Winifred. I see that you know, and you shall tell me.
Why didn't your aunt let you answer my letter?'
Winifred's eyes looked into mine beseechingly. Then that light of
playful humour, which I remembered so well, shot like a sunbeam
across and through them as she replied--
'My aunt said we must both forget our pretty dream.'
Almost before the words were out, however, the sunbeam fled from her
eyes and was replaced by a look of terror. I now perceived that my
mother, in passing to the carriage, had lingered on the gravel-path
close to us, and had, of course, overheard the dialogue. She passed
on with a look of hate. I thought it wise to bid Winifred good-bye
and join my mother.
As I stepped into the carriage I turned round and saw that Winifred
was again looking wistfully at some particular part of me--looking
with exactly that simple, frank, 'objective' expression with which I
was familiar.
'I knew it was the crutches she missed,' I said to myself as I sat
down by my mother's side; 'she'll have to love me now because I am
_not_ lame.'
I also knew something else: I must prepare for a conflict with my
mother. My father, at this time in Switzerland, had written to say
that he had been suffering acutely from an attack of what he called
'spasms.' He had 'been much subject to them of late, but no one
considered them to be really dangerous.'
During luncheon I felt that my mother's eyes were on me. After it was
over she went to her room to write in answer to my father's letter,
and then later on she returned to me.
'Henry,' she said, 'my overhearing the dialogue in the churchyard
between you and Wynne's daughter was, I need not pay, quite
accidental, but it is perhaps fortunate that I did overhear it.'
'Why fortunate, mother? You simply heard her say that her aunt in
Wales had forbidden her to answer a childish letter of mine written
years ago.'
'In telling you which, the girl, I must say, proclaimed her aunt to
be an exceedingly sensible and well-conducted woman,' said my mother.
'On that point, mother,' I said, 'you must allow me to hold a
different opinion. I, for my part, should have said that Winifred's
story proclaimed her aunt to be a worthy member of a flunkey society
like this of ours--a society whose structure, political and moral and
religious, is based on an adamantine rock of paltry snobbery.'
It was impossible to restrain my indignation.
'I am aware, Henry,' replied my mother calmly, 'that it is one of the
fashions of the hour for young men of family to adopt the language of
Radical newspapers. In a country like this the affectation does no
great harm, I grant, and my only serious objection to it is that it
implies in young men of one's own class a lack of originality which
is a little humiliating. I am aware that your cousin, Percy Aylwin,
of Rington Manor, used to talk in the same strain as this, and ended
by joining the Gypsies. But I came to warn you, Henry, I came to urge
you not to injure this poor girl's reputation by such scenes as that
I witnessed this morning.'
I remained silent. The method of my mother's attack had taken me by
surprise. Her sagacity was so much greater than mine, her power of
fence was so much greater, her stroke was so much deadlier, that in
all our encounters I had been conquered.
'It is for the girl's own sake that I speak to you,' continued my
mother. 'She was deeply embarrassed at your method of address, and
well she might be, seeing that it will be, for a long time to come,
the subject of discussion in all the beer-houses which her father
frequents.'
'You speak as though she were answerable for her father's faults,' I
said, with heat.
'No,' said my mother; 'but _your_ father is the owner of Raxton Hall,
which to her and her class is a kind of Palace of the Cæsars. You
belong to a family famous all along the coast; you are well known to
be the probable heir of one of the largest landowners in England; you
may be something more important still; while she, poor girl, what is
she that you should rush up to her before all the churchgoers of the
parish and address her as Winifred? The daughter of a penniless,
drunken reprobate. Every attention you pay her is but a slur upon her
good name.'
'There is not a lady in the county worthy to unlace her shoes,' I
cried, unguardedly. Then I could have bitten off my tongue for saying
so.
'That may be,' said my mother, with the quiet irony peculiar to her;
'but so monstrous are the customs of England, Henry, so barbaric is
this society you despise, that she, whose shoes no lady in the county
is worthy to unlace, is in an anomalous position. Should she once
again be seen talking familiarly with you, her character will have
fled, and fled for ever. It is for you to choose whether you are set
upon ruining her reputation.'
I felt that what she said was true. I felt also that Winifred herself
had recognised the net of conventions that kept us apart in spite of
that close and tender intimacy which had been the one great fact of
our lives. In a certain sense I was far more of a child of Nature
than Winifred herself, inasmuch as, owing to my remarkable childish
experience of isolation, I had imbibed a scepticism about the
sanctity of conventions such as is foreign to the nature of woman, be
she ever so unsophisticated, as Winifred's shyness towards me had
testified.
As a child I had been neglected for the firstborn, I had enjoyed
through this neglect an absolute freedom with regard to associating
with fisher-boys and all the shoeless, hatless 'sea-pups' of the
sands, and now, when the time had come to civilise me, my mother had
found that it was too late. I was bohemian to the core. My childish
intercourse with Winifred had been one of absolute equality, and I
could not now divest myself of this relation. These were my thoughts
as I listened to my mother's words.
My great fear now, however, was lest I should say something to
compromise myself, and so make matter worse. Before another word upon
the subject should pass between my mother and me I must see
Winifred--and then I had something to say to her which no power on
earth should prevent me from saying. So I merely told my mother that
there was much truth in what she had said, and proceeded to ask
particulars about my father's recent illness. After giving me these
particulars she left the room, perplexed, I thought, as to what had
been the result of her mission.