"I don"t mind," smiled Winnie. "It"s a great change, of course, but really I don"t often think of him--nor he of me, I expect." She added, with a little laugh: "At least I hope he doesn"t, because he wouldn"t think anything complimentary. Of course I was surprised about the divorce."
"We were all rather surprised at that," Lady Rosaline murmured discreetly; her object was to obtain, not to give, information.
"It"s the one inconsistent thing I"ve ever known him do." She laughed.
"I wonder if it"s possible that he"s fallen in love with somebody else!"
Lady Rosaline threw no light. "Oh, well, he wouldn"t have to ask in vain, I should think."
Winnie said nothing. She looked at the sea with a smile which her companion felt justified in calling inscrutable. Lady Rosaline took another risk.
"So much the worse for the woman, you"d say, I suppose?"
"I don"t want to say anything. What I felt seems pretty well indicated by what I did, doesn"t it, Lady Rosaline? Because I wasn"t in love with anybody else then, you know."
No, what she felt was not sufficiently indicated for Lady Rosaline"s purposes. What Winnie had done showed that, to her, life with Cyril was impossible; but it did not show why. Just the point essential to Lady Rosaline was omitted.
"I should think some women might get on very well with him, though?" she hazarded.
Winnie gazed over the lake; she appeared to ruminate. Then she turned to her companion, smiling.
"Perhaps!" she said. "And now I really must go and see how Mrs.
Lenoir--my friend--is. I hope we shall have another talk before we go--I don"t mean about Cyril!"
Lady Rosaline watched her erect figure and her buoyant step as she walked back to the hotel, recalled her gaiety and the merriment of her smile as she enjoyed lake, mountains, and the little town, caught again the elusive twinkle of her eyes as she referred to the one inconsistent thing that Cyril Maxon had ever done. And that "Perhaps!"--that most unsatisfactory, tantalizing "Perhaps!" Was it a genuine a.s.sent, or merely a civil dismissal of the question, as one of no moment to the person interrogated? Or was it in effect a dissent--a reception of the suggestion profoundly sceptical, almost scornful? Probably a different woman could--possibly some woman might--no woman conceivably could--that "Perhaps!" seemed susceptible of any of the three interpretations. Lady Rosaline made impotent clutches at the slippery word; it gave her no hand-hold; it was not to be tackled.
It was no use consulting Mrs. Ladd; she had not heard the elusive answer. Could Lady Rosaline unbosom herself plainly to Mrs. Maxon? That was her secret and urgent instinct, but, somehow, it did not seem an admissible thing to do; it was bizarre, and distasteful to her feelings.
Yet before long she must answer Cyril"s letter. To allow him to come and meet her would be tantamount to an acceptance. To refuse to allow him would be, at least, such a postponement as he would bitterly resent and probably decline to agree to; he would either take it as a definite rejection, or he would come without leave--and "bully" her again? She could hide herself--but could she? Mrs. Ladd would want to know why, and laugh at her--and not improbably put Cyril on the track. Lady Rosaline felt herself wrapped in perplexity as in a garment.
"Bother the man!" she suddenly said to herself aloud. Then she started violently. A tall, handsome, elderly lady, carrying a parasol, a large cushion, and a book, was absolutely at her elbow. She recognized Winnie"s companion, Mrs. Lenoir.
"I"m afraid I startled you? May I sit down here? Winnie Maxon told me who you were, and you"ve been talking to her, haven"t you?" Mrs.
Lenoir"s amused expression left no doubt that she was aware of the subject of the conversation. "Oh, she only just mentioned that you were a friend of Mr. Maxon"s," she added. "She didn"t betray your confidences."
"I really don"t think I made any," smiled Lady Rosaline. "But Mr. Maxon is a friend of mine. Oh, do let me settle that cushion comfortably for you. You"re not feeling very well this morning, Mrs. Maxon told me."
"I feel better now," said Mrs. Lenoir, graciously accepting the proffered service. "And the day"s so beautiful that I thought I"d come out. But I didn"t mean to make you jump, Lady Rosaline."
She gave a sigh of contentment as she achieved a satisfactory position in regard to the cushion. "I don"t know Mr. Maxon myself," she remarked.
"I like him very much."
"Yes?" She was just as non-committal as Winnie had been with her "Perhaps!"
"Of course, you"ve heard her side of the story."
"I have," said Mrs. Lenoir. "Or as much of it as she"d tell me."
Lady Rosaline determined to try what a little provocation would do.
"Of course, we who are his friends think that all might have gone well with a little more wisdom on her part."
Mrs. Lenoir raised her brows ever so slightly. "Oh, perhaps!" she murmured gently.
It was really exasperating! To be baffled at every turn by that wretched word, with its pretence of conceding that was no real concession, with its feigned a.s.sent which might so likely cloak an obstinate dissent! It was like listening for an expected sound from another room--the noise of voices or of movements--and finding, instead, absolute silence and stillness; there was something of the same uncanny effect. Lady Rosaline pa.s.sed from mere perplexity into a vague discomfort--an apprehension of possibilities which she was refused the means of gauging, however vitally they might affect her. Dare she walk into that strangely silent room--and let them bolt and bar the door on her?
"After all, it"s not our business," Mrs. Lenoir remarked, with a smile.
"Winnie couldn"t stand it, but, as you say, perhaps a wiser woman----"
"Couldn"t stand what?" Lady Rosaline broke in impatiently.
"Oh, Cyril Maxon, you know."
Not a step in advance! Silence still! Lady Rosaline, frowning fretfully, rose to her feet. Mrs. Lenoir looked up, smiling again. She was not sure of the case, but she was putting two and two together, helped by the exclamation which she had involuntarily overheard. In any case, she had no mind to interfere. This woman was Cyril Maxon"s friend, not Winnie"s.
Mrs. Lenoir instinctively a.s.sociated the husband"s women-friends with the wife"s hardships. Let this friend of Maxon"s fend for herself!
"But, of course, one woman"s poison may be another woman"s meat. Are you going in?"
"Yes, I think so. The sun"s rather hot."
"Oh, I"m a salamander! Good-bye, then, for the present, Lady Rosaline."
Lady Rosaline had come from abroad for a breathing s.p.a.ce, to take stock of the situation, to make up her mind about Cyril Maxon. It had not proved easy, and her encounter with these two women made it harder still. The perplexity irked her sorely. She bore a grudge against the two for their baffling reticence; insensibly the grudge extended itself to the man who was the ultimate cause of her disquiet. He was spoiling her holiday for her. "I shall fret myself into a fever!" she declared, as she wandered disconsolately up to her bedroom, to make herself tidy for _dejeuner_.
On her dressing-table lay a letter--from Venice. She had not forgotten her promise to send an address to the Hotel Danieli. Now Sir Axel Thrapston informed her that he was starting for home in a couple of days" time, and would make it convenient--and consider it delightful--to pa.s.s through Bellaggio on his way; would she still be there, and put up with his company for a day or two? "Pictures and churches and gondolas are all very well; but I shall like a gossip with a friend better still," wrote Sir Axel.
As she read, Lady Rosaline was conscious of a relief as vague as her discomfort had been, and yet as great. The atmosphere about her seemed suddenly changed and lightened. Almost with a start she recalled how she had experienced a similar feeling when Cyril Maxon had gone and Sir Axel had come that afternoon in Hans Place. The feeling was not of excitement, nor even primarily of pleasure; it was of rest, instead of struggle--of security, as against some unascertained but possibly enormous liability. And it was present in her in even stronger force than it had been before, because of those two women and their baffling slippery "Perhaps!" As she took off her hat and arranged her hair before going downstairs, the import of this vague change of feeling began to take shape in her mind. Slowly it grew to definiteness. Lady Rosaline was making up her mind at last! The possibilities lurking in the darkness of that "Perhaps!" were too much for her. "If I feel like this about it, how can I dare to do it?" was the shape her thoughts took.
Yet, even if she dared not do it, there was trouble before her. Cyril Maxon would not sit down tamely under that decision. He would protest, he would persist, he might "bully" her again; he might seek her even though she forbade him, and, if he found her, she was not quite confident of her power to resist.
A smile came slowly to her lips as she looked at herself in the pier-gla.s.s and put the finishing touches to her array. It would be pleasant to have Sir Axel"s company; it might even be agreeable to travel home under Sir Axel"s escort, if that gentleman"s leisure allowed. Lady Rosaline"s thoughts embraced the idea of Sir Axel as an ally, perhaps envisaged him as a shield. Possibly they went so far as to hazard the suggestion that a man who will not bow before a decision may be confronted with a situation which he cannot but accept. At any rate, when she went downstairs to the dining-room, Lady Rosaline"s fretful frown had disappeared; pa.s.sing Mrs. Lenoir and Winnie in the doorway, she smiled at them with no trace of grudge. "I"m glad I met them now,"
was her reflection. She forgave "Perhaps!"
CHAPTER XXVI
A FRIEND DEPARTS
Mrs. Lenoir and Winnie stayed at Bellaggio four or five days, during which time their acquaintance with the other two ladies blossomed into more intimate cordiality. Yet neither of the two who knew the position, nor yet the one who confidently suspected it, thought it well to suggest to Winnie the existence of any special situation or any urgent question in which Lady Rosaline and Cyril Maxon were concerned. Such a disclosure would, it was felt by all three, lead to awkwardness. But when once the two parties had said farewell, and Winnie and she were on their way home, Mrs. Lenoir saw no reason against mentioning the conclusion at which she had arrived, or against conjecturing what, if any, bearing on the state of affairs the arrival of Sir Axel Thrapston might have; he had reached Bellaggio the day before their own departure, and had been received by Lady Rosaline with much graciousness.
Winnie had not stumbled on the truth for herself; indeed her mind had been occupied with the thought of another man than Cyril Maxon. She heard it from her friend without surprise, and was not unable to appreciate Mrs. Lenoir"s grimly humorous embroidering of the situation.
Yet her native and intimate feeling was one of protest against that way of the world which, under the pressure of her various experiences, she was beginning to recognize and to learn that she would have to accept.
On the day she left Cyril Maxon"s house for good and all, she had conceived herself to be leaving Cyril Maxon also for good and all, to be putting him out of her life, away from and behind her, without the right or power to demand one backward glance from her as she trod a path conditioned, indeed, in one respect by his existence, but, for the future, essentially independent of him. The course of events had hardly justified this forecast. Freedom from the thought of him had not proved possible; he did more than impose conditions; he still figured as rather a determining factor in life and her outlook on it. She seemed to take him with her where she went, so to say, and thus to bring him into contact with all those with whom she had relations herself. Both in small things and in great it happened--as, for example, in this queer encounter with Rosaline Deering, and in the moving episode of her acquaintance with Bertie Merriam, no less than in the earlier history of the West Kensington studio. She had not succeeded in disa.s.sociating her destiny from his, in severing to the last link the tie which had once so closely bound her to him. Complete freedom, and the full sense of it, might come in the future; for the moment her feeling was one of scorn for the ignorant young woman who had thought that a big thing could so easily be undone--robbed of effect and made as if it had never been. And suppose that complete freedom, now possible in action to her, should really come, and with it a corresponding inward emanc.i.p.ation; yet there stood and would stand the effect on those other lives--effects great or small, transitory or permanent, but in the ma.s.s amounting to a considerable sum of human experience, owing its shape and colour in the end to her own action.
Though she had not loved Bertie Merriam, their intercourse, his revelation of himself, and the manner of their parting had deeply affected her. For the first time she had seen the enemy, convention--the established order, the proper thing--in a form which she could not only understand, but with which she was obliged to sympathize. What had seemed to her hard dogmatism in her husband and Attlebury, and a mere caste-respectability, external, narrow, and cowardly, in the denizens of Woburn Square, took on a new shape when it was embodied in the loyalty of a soldier and found its expression, not in demands upon another, but in the sacrifice of self to an obligation and an ideal. Liberty had been her G.o.d, and she would not desert the shrine at which Shaylor"s Patch had taught her to worship; but Merriam had shown her, had brought home to her through the penetrating appeal of vivid emotion, that there were other deities worthy of offerings and n.o.ble worshippers who made them.
It was a great revulsion of feeling which drove her to declare that Merriam could do no other than sacrifice his hope of her to his sworn service and to the regiment.
In justifying, or more than justifying, himself, in some sort Merriam pleaded for Cyril Maxon. Winnie held herself to a stricter account of her dealings with her husband. When she understood why he had deviated from his strict conviction, and how it was likely that the deviation would be in vain, she was anxious to rid her soul of any sense of responsibility. She recalled just what she had said, as near as she could; she listened carefully to Mrs. Lenoir"s account of her own conversation with Lady Rosaline.