For the rest—well, it was not exactly pleasant. But she seemed so completely to have ceased to be Mrs. Maxon that at heart it concerned her little what people said of Mrs. Maxon. They—her Maxon circle, the legal profession, the public—would not understand her provocation, her principles, or her motives; they would say hard and scornful things. She was in safe hiding; she would not hear the things. It would be like what they say of a man after he has gone out of the room and (as Sir Peter Teazle so kindly did in the play) left his character behind him. Of that wise people take no notice.
But Godfrey? It must be owned that the thought of him came second; indeed third—after the aspect which concerned her husband and that which touched herself. But when it came, it moved her to vexation, to regret, to a pity which had even an element of the old tenderness in it. Because this development was just what poor Godfrey had always been so afraid of, just what he hated, a thing analogous to the position which in the end he had not been able to bear. And poor Woburn Square! Oh, and poor Mabel Thurseley too, perhaps! What a lot of people were caught in the net! The news of her husband's action did much to soften her heart towards Godfrey and towards Woburn Square. "I really didn't want to make them unhappy or ashamed any more," she sighed; for had not her action in the end produced Cyril's? But, as Mrs. Lenoir would, no doubt, point out, there was no help for it—short of Winnie's suicide, which seemed an extreme remedy, or would have, if it had ever occurred to her: it did not.
Her solicitude was not misplaced. The high moralists say Esse quam videri—what you are and do matters, not what people think you are or what they may discover you doing. A hard high doctrine! "He that is able to receive it, let him receive it." Mr. Cyril Maxon also had found occasion to consider these words.
For Winnie had been right. Jubilation had reigned in Woburn Square, provisionally when Godfrey fetched his portmanteau away from the studio, finally and securely (as it seemed) when Amy made known the result of her mission. Father read his paper again in peace; mother's spasms abated. There was joy over the sinner; and the sinner himself was not half as unhappy as he had expected—may it be said, hoped?—to be. Mercilessness of comment is out of place. He had been tried above that which he was able. Yet, if sin it had been, it was not of the sin that he repented. It had been, he thought, from the beginning really impossible on the basis she had defined—and extorted. In time he had been bound to recognize that. But he wore a chastened air, and had the grace to seek little of Miss Thurseley's society. He took another studio, in a street off Fitzroy Square, and ate his dinner and slept at his father's house.
Things, then, were settling down in Woburn Square. By dint of being ignored, Winnie and her raid on the family reputation might soon be forgotten. The affair had been kept very quiet; that was the great thing. (Here Woburn Square and the high moralists seem lamentably at odds, but the high moralists also enjoin the speaking and writing of the truth.) It was over. It ranked no more as a defiance; it became merely an indiscretion—a thing young men will do now and then, under the influence of designing women. There was really jubilation—if only Amy would have looked a little less gloomy, and been rather more cordial towards her brother.
"I don't understand the girl," Mr. Ledstone complained. "Our line is to make things pleasant for him."
"It's that woman. She must have some extraordinary power," his wife pleaded. Winnie's extraordinary power made it all the easier to forgive her son Godfrey. Probably few young men would have resisted, and (this deep down in the mother's heart) not so very many had occasion to resist.
Then came the thunderbolt—from which jubilation fled shrieking. Who hurled it? Human nature, Winnie, Lady Rosaline Deering—little as she either had meant to do anything unkind to the household in Woburn Square? Surely even the high moralists—or shall we say the high gods, who certainly cannot make less, and may perhaps make more, allowances?—would have pitied Mr. Ledstone. Beyond all the disappointment and dismay, he felt himself the victim of a gross breach of trust. He fumed up and down the back room on the ground floor which was called his study—the place he read the papers in and where he slept after lunch.
"But he said there were to be no proceedings. He said he didn't believe in it. He said it distinctly more than once."
Mrs. Ledstone had gone to her room. The sinner had fled to his studio, leaving Amy to break the news to Mr. Ledstone; Amy was growing accustomed to this office.