Mrs. Maxon Protests

by Anthony Hope

"That's just what I came here to do—exactly as I put it to myself!"

"You shan't do it. You're much too young and pretty. I shall get some young men down, to tempt you."

Two or three young men came, but they did not tempt Winnie. She found herself possessed by a great caution. Her old confidence in her own impulses was replaced by a deep distrust of any impulse. She stood on the defensive against the approach of even a liking; she constituted herself advocatus diaboli whenever Stephen ventured to praise any of his young friends. She found one shallow and conceited, another learned but a bore, a third—well, there were limits to the allowable degree of ugliness, now weren't there? Stephen laughed; his poor friends were contributing to the payment of a score run up by other men.

At last in very decency Dick Dennehy had to come; Stephen sent him word that, as he had built the house, so he would pull it down, if its owner continued to show such a want of appreciation of his friendly labours. He arrived early one afternoon in mid-September. He was perceptibly changed; being broken into London harness had set its mark on him in manner and in appearance. He was better groomed, his hair had been persuaded to lie down, he had cut off the upturned bristly ends of his moustache. His brogue had lost in richness; he said 'ye' much seldomer when he meant 'you.' His ways were quieter, his arguments less tempestuous, and his contradictions not so passionate. Though thus a little outwardly and possibly inwardly conventionalized, he displayed all his old friendly heartiness in his greeting of Tora and Stephen—Alice had just gone back to school. Only when he turned to Winnie, who was in the garden with them, did a shade of constraint appear in his demeanour. She put it down to the memory of the note he had sent her; she had not replied, and probably he thought that she had resented it.

The constraint was due to a deeper cause. He had determined not to make love to Winnie Maxon, and now, at the sight of her, he found that he wanted to do it, and that the assurances which he had managed to make to himself that he would not want to do it—at least would not be seriously tempted to do it—were all in vain. In loyalty to his convictions, and in accordance with a personal obstinacy which buttressed the convictions, all these months he had fought his fight. Winnie was forbidden to him; he had taken no pains to conceal his views from his and her friends; he had taken great pains to conceal his feelings from her, and conceived that he had, in the main at least, succeeded. But for that house of his—but for wounding the Aikenheads' feelings—he would have given himself a little longer period of quarantine. Yet he had felt pretty safe until he saw Winnie. And he had brought his bag; he was booked for a three days' stay—there in the very zone of danger.

"I was a fool to come," he kept saying to himself, while he was being politely, and now and then urgently, requested to take note of and to admire this and that feature of his new house. In truth he could take very little interest in the house, for it had come over him, with sudden but irresistible certainty, that he would never be able to live in it. He could not say so, of course—not just now, and not without a much better parade of reasons than he could manage to put into line impromptu. But there the certainty was—full-blown in his mind. Unless he could away with his convictions and his obstinacy, unless he could undertake and succeed in his quest, it would be impossible for him to live in the house here on the hill, with Winnie hardly a stone's throw away at the cottage on the road to Nether End. The idea was preposterous. Yet he had to go on looking at the house and admiring it. The Aikenheads demanded nothing short of enthusiasm. About a house he could never live in! Poor Dick Dennehy did his best to pump it up, but the trials inherent in his position were terribly aggravated by this incidental addition of the house. Cyril Maxon and Bertie Merriam, in their kindred struggles with loyalties and convictions, had at least been spared this irritating feature. Why, there, actually visible from his study windows, were the chimneys of Winnie's cottage! Tora triumphantly pointed them out to him.

Dick Dennehy had the gift—the genius—of his race; he saw the fun of his own sufferings. As he surveyed the tops of Winnie's chimneys—with Winnie at his elbow, discreetly awaiting his opinion as to whether their presence enhanced the beauty of the landscape—his face wore a look of rueful amusement, instead of the simple admiration which the outlook from his study ought to have inspired in him. At the moment Tora and Stephen were having an animated wrangle in the passage outside, relative to the merits of a dustbin, sent on approval.

"I hope I don't intrude?" said Winnie, waving her hand towards her chimney-pots.

"I'll be reminded of you, if I'm ever in danger of forgetting."

"We could almost start a system of communication—flag-wagging, or even wireless. Anything except thought-transference! I couldn't risk that with you—though you could with me quite safely."