He looked stunned. Clearly it had never crossed his stupid mind that his view of Mr Lomax was not the only possible one,or that anyone would want to marry him. How could he betray her so? Walter, her dearest friend, who would never be more than a friend, never be the husband she longed for, yet seemed determined to prevent anyone else from assuming that rôle.
“If it is a husband you want,” he said slowly, “then I will marry you.”
“Oh!” She almost screamed in frustration. “After what you have done to me? I would not marry you if you were the last man on earth!”
And she ran sobbing from the room and up the stairs to her chamber, where she threw herself onto the bed, spilling the endless tears into the pillow.
21: Home
Walter sat, heart pounding. Dear God, what had he done? He had ruined Winnie’s life, all unwittingly and with the best of intentions, but he had done it, nevertheless. His dearest friend, who had every right to look to him for protection, and he had destroyed all her prospects of happiness. If he could only go back and undo his mistake! If he could make it right again… but it was too late.
She had cried. He could not remember the last time Winnie had cried. Not since childhood, perhaps, when she scraped a knee, or that time she fell out of the tree house. No, he rather thought she had only laughed about that, and showed him the bruises on her arms the next day. But about this, she had cried, and it was his fault. He had made Winnie cry, and that was the most unbearable part of all of it.
How foolish he had been not to realise that she liked Lomax. He had allowed his own prejudice to blind him to the truth — that for Winnie, he was an extremely eligible suitor, to be encouraged at every turn. He had thought her merely polite inallowing Lomax to pay court to her, but he realised now that she had seen him in a very different light. Was she in love with him? Would she have cried so much if she were not?
After a while, he remembered that he was supposed to be taking care of Winnie, and he had let her run off… somewhere. In her room, most likely, but he needed to be certain. He half ran up the stairs to Winnie’s room, then paused to listen at the door before knocking. Even through the solid wooden door, he could hear the muffled sounds of weeping.
Oh, Winnie! What an absolute heel he was, to make her cry so long and so passionately! He leaned his forehead against the door, and closed his eyes. In that moment, he hated himself for what he had done to her, hated everything about himself. He had never accorded her the respect that was due to her… had never seen her as anything other than good old Winnie, his best friend. Now, to his astonishment, all he wanted was to take her in his arms and comfort her. Dear Winnie! Sweet Winnie, who had never harmed a soul, who had trusted him, and he had betrayed her trust. He was despicable.
Eventually, he crept downstairs again and into the parlour.
“Ah, Walter, there you are!” said Alfred Strong. “Have you—? But whatever has happened, boy? You look as if you have the weight of the world on your shoulders.”
“I have done a dreadful thing, sir,” Walter said, too grief-stricken to dissemble.
“To Winnie?” Strong said sharply.
“Yes… oh, no, no! Not anything of that nature!” he cried, seeing the thunderous expression on Strong’s face. “You know I would never harm Winnie, not for the world. But I have done her the gravest disservice, regarding Lomax.”
“Ah.” Strong pushed a glass towards him. “Is this your wine? Sit down, calm yourself and tell me the whole.”
And Walter did, although his mind was in such confusion that the story came out jumbled and barely comprehensible. But by asking a question here and there, Strong got the gist of it. For a while, he sat in silence, his face… not angry or disgusted, but merely thoughtful.
He sighed. “Well, I guessed something of the sort must have occurred, something that made Lomax veer away at the last moment. He actually asked my permission, you know, and said, very properly, that he would submit himself to Sir Hubert as soon as he could, but he wanted to settle matters before Winnie went north again. And then he vanished, so there had to be some reason for it, some incident that made him think better of it.”
“It was entirely my fault,” Walter said despondently. “I have ruined Winnie’s life through my stupidity.”
“Hmm. As to that, I am not sure that a man who shies away from matrimony merely on the hearsay of one person is worth having. Do you not think that, if he were truly, deeply in love with Winnie, he would have disbelieved the story instantly? At the very least, he could have come to me and said — I have heard a different story, so what is the truth? We could have sat down, you, me and Lomax, like sensible men, and discussed the business rationally, and if he still felt he could not marry Winnie, then good riddance, I say. I have never been entirely easy about him, to be honest. Oh, it would have been a wonderful match for Winnie, and if it were her choice, I should say nothing, for I saw nothing objectionable in the man, nothing to cause me concern.”
“He is a coxcomb,” Walter said, with a glimmer of his old spirit.
Strong gave a bark of laughter. “Yes! Never trust a man who cares quite so much about his appearance, that is my motto. But that alone is not enough. Now we can see that his supposed love for Winnie is not strong enough to sustain the least knock. You told him of the rumours, he believed you without hesitationand threw away his own happiness as well as Winnie’s. That is foolish. Besides, even if it were true, marriage would restore her reputation. He had it in his power to wipe away any stain, if such a stain existed. Walter, how could you believe such a thing of Winnie? You, who have known her all her life, must know how strong her moral sense is.”
“The tale came to me from my father who had it from Seymour’s father who had it from Seymour himself. I should not have given it credence had it not originated with Seymour.”
“Yes, and even if it had been true, what sort of man would circulate such a story about a lady? That is despicable behaviour.”
“It is, but so is mine, in repeating it to Lomax.”
Strong sipped his wine thoughtfully. “I am not sure that I agree with you. If I had been in your position, and a man had made it clear that the purity of his bride was an absolute requirement, I might very well have given him a hint, too, although hedged about with caveats — only rumour, not sure of the exact circumstances and so on and so forth. But I should certainly have told him. There should be honesty between gentlemen, I feel, and you did not know the story was untrue.”
“Oh.” Walter’s spirits lifted marginally. “Then… you do not blame me?”
“Not entirely, no. Your reasoning was faulty, in assuming that Winnie saw him as you did and would be glad to be rid of him, but your heart was in the right place, and perhaps she is better off without him. So in the end it may turn out that there is no harm done.”
“But there is,” Walter said sadly. “My friendship with Winnie is quite broken, and I do not think it can ever be repaired. Lomax may have lost something exceptionally precious, but so have I.”
“Now there I cannot help you,” Strong said. “You must trust to time to heal the breach. Winnie is sensible, and will come round eventually.”
