soft rustle sounded again from within the parlour. Then Winnie Maxon stood in the doorway with shining, welcoming eyes.
"Well, would you like the story of the Princess with the Broken Heart?" asked Alice.
"Anything about a Princess!" said Stephen, with handsome liberality.
"It sounds sad, Alice. If it's sad, don't let's have it," Winnie pleaded.
"Oh, after all the old doctors had tried to mend it, one came, looking much older and much more wrinkled than all the rest – "
"I shall keep my eye on that practitioner, all the same," Stephen interposed. "I'm beginning to know the ropes!"
"And he mended it with an enormous gold ring that he'd cut off the little finger of a giant he had once killed on a walk he took."
"What a fellow!" said Stephen. "Prince in disguise, Alice?"
"Why, father, of course he was!"
Stephen shook his big head and turned his big spectacles up to heaven. "And that fellow Dennehy dares to call himself a republican! Now who – who, I ask you – would give a fig for a President in disguise? Read me some more Princesses, Alice."
They all enjoyed the Princesses. So sometimes, for an hour, a little child shall lead us into peace.
CHAPTER VIII
SUBVERSIVE
Embedded in his own conceptions as in a rock, Cyril Maxon refused to believe that his wife would not soon "have had enough of it." He refused to accept the failure of the envoy through whose mouth he had been induced to make such great concessions and such generous promises. Could they, in the end, fail to move her?
His duty towards her – that inexorable duty from which no act of hers could free him – called upon him for another effort. Attlebury was with him in this view, though now with less hope of a favourable issue; he detected the fact that his disciple's desire for self-vindication was no less strong than his hope of saving Mrs. Maxon, and feared for the result of this admixture of objects. He ventured on a reminder.
"Of course you want to be able to feel you've done all you could, but the great thing is to do it successfully. As we regard it, she has more at stake than you."
"I believe I can persuade her, if I go and see her."
Did he really mean persuade – or did he mean frighten? Attlebury doubted, and, because he doubted that, doubted yet more of the issue. The disciple did not give the cause fair play; a teacher has often to complain of that.
In whatever shape Cyril Maxon may have forecast in his own mind the interview that he proposed, there was no question as to how Winnie received the notice of his intention to seek her out in her asylum at Shaylor's Patch. It filled her with sheer panic; it drove her to what seemed now her only refuge. Her terror must surely make an appeal irresistible alike to the ardour and to the chivalry of her lover? Or he was no lover. Tora and she were at one on the point, though it was not put too bluntly between them.
"I can't see him; I won't," she declared to Stephen Aikenhead, running to the man of the house at last, rebel against male domination as she was.
"Rather difficult to refuse, if he comes here!"
"Then I won't be here when he comes, that's all." Her fright made her unjust. "If you won't protect me – or can't – I must act for myself." She flung out of the room, leaving Stephen no chance of protesting that the bolts and bars of Shaylor's Patch were at her service, and a siege by an angry lawyer all in the day's work.
She was afraid of herself; she distrusted her courage. She wanted to have a motive compulsory in its force; her instinct was to do something which should make a return home irrevocably impossible. Her husband's insistence hastened the crisis, though his patience could hardly have averted it.
Godfrey Ledstone had the news first from Tora Aikenhead. Her calm eyes asked him plainly enough what part it was his to play. Tora had taken her line and at once conceived hesitation to be impossible. His native idea would have been to comfort her before Maxon came, and again after he had gone, and to lie by in snug hiding when he was there. So ran the code, discreet and elastic. By now he knew – only too well – that this was not what these uncompromising people expected of him. In their odd view he had already gone too far for that convenient expedient. Social liberty might, it seemed, be more exacting than social bondage. For if you were always free to do as you liked, it was obviously necessary to be very careful about intimating too unreservedly what it was that you would like to do; since there could be no such thing as pleading impossibility in defence of a pledge unfulfilled.
"She's terribly unhappy. She declares that she must be gone before he comes. She daren't meet him."
"Why not?" he asked sharply. Another feeling was stirred in him.
"Well, he's always dominated her. He might break down her will again."
"You mean she might go back? Cave in, and go back?"
"That seems to be what she's afraid of, herself."
Tora entertained no more doubt of the soundness of her ideas than Cyril Maxon of his. Why should she, she would have asked, merely because hers were new, while his were old? To her mind newness was a presumption of merit in a view, since the old views had produced a world manifestly so imperfect all round. Holding her opinion strongly, she did not hesitate to use the weapons best suited to secure its triumph. If Godfrey's jealousy helped to that end, why was it illegitimate to let it play its part? Never was a woman less afraid of what men call responsibility.
"It's just awful to think of the poor little lady going back to that brute of a fellow," he said.
"Oh, don't abuse him. I dare say he's as unhappy as she is. And he thinks he's right. I'm not sure you don't think he's right, really." Tora smiled over her shrewd thrust. "So you're the last person who ought to abuse him."
"Oh, what does it matter what I think?" he cried impatiently.
There was still enough of his old mood and his old ideas in him to stir a resentment against Tora, to make him feel that she was forcing his hand and constraining him to accept a bigger liability than he had bargained for. Theorists must always be up to that! They seem to take a positive pleasure in proving that you are bound to go to lengths – to all lengths! That the comfortable half-way will never serve! Perhaps they do not enough reflect that the average man is not thereby encouraged to start at all.
But Winnie herself had genuine power to stir his heart – and now, indeed, as never before, since she seemed helpless save for him, and hopeless save in him, yet in and through him both brave and confident – the most profound, the most powerful, flattery from sex to sex. Mere friends could not help now; mere convictions, a naked sense of being in the right, would not avail. These she had, but she must have love too. To this mood all the man in him responded.
"It only needed this final trouble to – to make me speak."
"I don't think I need speak," she whispered, with her delicately quavering smile. "You know it all – all the great thing it is. I'm not ashamed of it, Godfrey. And you won't be ashamed of me, will you?"
The question did not disconcert him now. For the time he had lost that vision of the future which had once disquieted and alarmed him. His phrases might be well-worn, but they were heartily sincere when he told her he would face the world, if only she were by his side.
"It
