Part 29 (1/2)

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, G.o.dfrey,” 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 appet.i.te 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 G.o.dfrey as her great disappointment, her lost illusion, her blunder; Amy as it were with a friendly stretching-out of hands across a gulf impa.s.sable; 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 grat.i.tude to Winnie Maxon.

G.o.dfrey 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.

CHAPTER XVIII

NOTHING SERIOUS

”By the law came sin----” quoted Stephen Aikenhead.

”He only meant the Jewish law. Man, ye're hopeless.” Dennehy tousled his hair.

The February afternoon was mild; Stephen was a fanatic about open air, if about nothing else. The four sat on the lawn at Shaylor's Patch, well wrapped up--Stephen, Tora, and Dennehy in rough country wraps, Winnie in a stately sealskin coat, the gift of Mrs. Lenoir. She had taken to dressing Winnie, in spite of half-hearted remonstrances and with notable results.

”But the deuce is,” Stephen continued--this time on his own account and, therefore, less authoritatively--”that when you take away the law, the sin doesn't go too.”

Winnie's story was by now known to these three good friends. Already it was being discussed more as a problem than as a tragedy. Some excuse might be found in Winnie's air and manner. She was in fine looks and good spirits, interested and alert, distinctly resilient against the blows of fortune and the miscarriage of theoretical experiments. So much time and change had done for her.

”And it seems just as true of any other laws, even if he did mean the Jewish, d.i.c.k,” Stephen ended.

”Don't lots of husbands, tied up just as tight as anything or anybody can tie them, cut loose and run away just the same?” asked Tora.

”And wives,” added Winnie--who had done it, and had a right to speak.

”It's like the old dispute about the franchise and the agricultural labourer. I remember my father telling me about it somewhere in the eighties--when I was quite a small boy. One side said the labourer oughtn't to have the vote till he was fit for it, the other said he'd never be fit for it till he had it.”

”Oh, well, that's to some extent like the woman question,” Tora remarked.

”Are we to change the law first or people first? Hope a better law will make better people, or tell the people they can't have a better law till they're better themselves?”

”Stephen, you've a glimmer of sense in you this afternoon.”

”Well, d.i.c.k, we don't want to end by merely making things easier for brutes and curs--male or female.”

”I think you're a little wanting in the broad view to-day, Stephen.

You're too much affected by Winnie's particular case. Isn't it better to get rid of brutes and curs anyhow? The quicker and easier, the better.”

Tora was, as usual, uncompromising.