by Grant Allen
As for Winifred, with a red rose spreading over all her face, she said nothing; but twirling her hat still in her hand, she gazed and gazed open-eyed, and almost open-mouthed — except that an open mouth is so very unbecoming — upon the wonderful stranger with the big dark eyes, who had thus dropped down from the clouds upon the manor of Whitestrand. He was handsome, indeed — as handsome as her dearest dreams; he had a black moustache, strictly according to contract; and he talked with an easy offhand airy grace — the easy grace of the Cheyne Bow Club — that was wholly foreign to all her previous experience of the live young men of the county of Suffolk. His tongue was the pen of a ready writer. He poured forth language with the full and regular river-like flow of a practised London journalist and first-leader hand. Crisp adjectives to him came easy as Yes or No, and epigram flowed from his lips like water.
“I’ll put her in nearer,” Warren Relf said quietly, after a few minutes, glancing with mute admiration at Elsie’s beautiful face and slim figure. “We’re in no hurry to go, of course, Massinger; we’ve got the whole day all free before us. — That’s the best of navigating your own craft you see, Miss Challoner; it makes you independent of all the outer world beside. Bradshaw ceases to exercise over you his iron tyranny. You’ve never to catch the four-twenty. You go where you like; you stop when you please; you start when you choose; and if, when you get there, you don’t like it, why you simply go on again till you reach elsewhere. It’s the freest life, this life on the ocean wave, that ever was imagined; though I believe Byron has said the same thing already. — We’ll lie by here for half an hour, Hugh, and if you prefer it, I’ll put you ashore, and you can walk up through the grounds of the Hall, while I navigate the ship to the Fisherman’s Rest, up yonder at Whitestrand.”
As he spoke, he put over the boom for a moment, to lay her in nearer to the roots of the tree. It was an unlucky movement. Winifred was sitting close to the water’s edge, with her hat in her hand, dangling over the side. The boom, flapping suddenly in the wind with an unexpected twirl, struck her wrist a smart blow, and made her drop the hat with a cry of pain into the current of the river. Tide was on the ebb; and almost before they had time to see what had happened, the hat had floated on the swift stream far out of reach, and was careering hastily in circling eddies on its way seaward.
Hugh Massinger was too good an actor, and too good a swimmer into the bargain, to let slip such a splendid opportunity for a bit of cheap and effective theatrical display. The eyes of Europe and of Elsie were upon him — not to mention the unknown young lady, who, for aught he knew to the contrary, might perhaps turn out to be a veritable heiress to the manor of Whitestrand. He had on his old gray tourist knickerbocker suit, which had seen service, and would be none the worse, if it came to that, for one more wetting. In a second, he had pulled off his coat and boots, sprung lightly to the further deck of the Mud-Turtle, and taken a header in his knickerbockers and stockings and flannel shirt into the muddy water. In nothing does a handsome man look handsomer than in knickerbockers and flannels. The tide was setting strong in a fierce stream round the corner of the tree, and a few stout strokes, made all the stouter by the consciousness of an admiring trio of spectators, brought the eager swimmer fairly abreast of the truant hat in mid-current. He grasped it hastily in his outstretched hand, waved it with a flourish high above his head, and gave it a twist or two of playful triumph, all wet and dripping, in his graceful fingers, before he turned. An act of daring is nothing if not gracefully or masterfully performed. — And then he wheeled round to swim back to the yawl again.
In that, however, he had reckoned clearly without his host. The water proved in fact a most inhospitable entertainer. Hand over hand, he battled hard against the rapid current, tying the recovered hat loosely around his neck by its ribbon strings, and striking out vigorously with his cramped and trammelled legs in the vain effort to stem and breast the rushing water. For a minute or so he struggled manfully with the tide, putting all his energy into each stroke of his thighs, and making his muscles ache with the violence of his efforts. But it was all to no purpose. The stream was too strong for him. Human thews could never bear it down. After thirty or forty strokes, he looked in front of him casually, and saw, to his surprise, not to say discomfiture, that he was farther away from the yawl than ever. This was distressing — this was even ignominious; to any other man than Hugh Massinger, it would indeed have been actually alarming. But to Hugh the ignominy was far more than the peril: he was so filled with the sentimental and personal side of the difficulty — the consciousness that he was showing himself off to bad advantage before the eyes of two beautiful girls — that he never even dreamt of the serious danger of being swept out to sea and there drowned helplessly. He only thought to himself how ridiculous and futile he must needs look to that pair of womankind in having attempted with so light a heart a feat that was utterly beyond his utmost powers.
Vanity is a mighty ruler of men. If Hugh Massinger had stopped there till he died, he would never have called aloud for help. Better death with honour, on the damp bed of a muddy stream, than the shame and sin of confessing one’s self openly beaten in fair fight by a mere insignificant tidal river. It was Elsie who first recognized the straits ‘ he was in — for though love is blind, yet love is sharp-eyed — and cried out to Warren Relf in an agony of fear: “He can’t get back! The stream’s too much for him! Quick, quick! You’ve not a moment to lose! Put about the boat at once and save him!”
With a hasty glance, Relf saw she was right, and that Hugh was unable to battle successfully with the rapid current. He turned the yawl’s head with all speed outward, and took a quick tack to get behind the baffled swimmer and intercept him, if possible, on his way towards the sea, whither he was now so quickly and helplessly drifting.
CHAPTER IV.
BURIDAN’S ASS.
FOR a minute the two girls stood in breathless suspense: then Warren Relf, cutting in behind with the yawl, flung out a coil of rope in a ring towards Hugh with true seafaring dexterity, so that it struck the water straight in front of his face fiat like a quoit, enabling him to grasp it and haul himself in without the slightest difficulty. The help came in the nick of time, yet most inopportunely. Hugh would have given worlds just then to be able to disregard his proffered aid, and to swim ashore by the tree in lordly independence without extraneous assistance. It is grotesque to throw yourself wildly in, like a hero or a Leander, and then have to be tamely pulled out again by another fellow. But he recognized the fact that the struggle was all in vain, and that the interests of English literature, and of a well-known insurance office in which he held a small life policy, imperatively demanded acquiescence on his part in the friendly rescue. He grasped the rope with a very bad grace indeed, and permitted Relf to haul him in, hand over hand, to the side of the Mud-Turtle.
Yet, as soon as he stood once more on the yawl’s deck, dripping and unpicturesque in his clinging clothes, but with honour safe, and the lost hat now clasped tight in his triumphant right hand, it began to occur to him that, after all, the little adventure had turned out in its way quite as romantic, not to say effective, as could have been reasonably expected. He did not know the current ran so fast, or perhaps he would never have attempted the Quixotic task of recovering that plain straw hat with the blue ribbon — worth at best half a crown net — from its angry eddies; yet the very fact that he had exposed himself to danger, real danger, however unwittingly, on a lady’s behalf, for so small a cause, threw a not unpleasing dash of romance and sentiment into his foolish and foolhardy bit of theatrical gallantry. To risk your life for a plain straw hat — and for a lady’s sake — smacks, when one comes to think of it, of antique chivalry. He forgave himself his wet and unbecoming attire, as he handed the hat, with as graceful a bow as circumstances permitted, from the yawl’s side to Winifred Meysey, who stretched out her hands, all blushes and thanks and apologetic regrets, from the roots of the poplar by the edge, to receive it.
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��And now, Elsie,” Hugh cried, with such virile cheerfulness as a man can assume who stands shivering in wet clothes before a keen east wind, “perhaps we’d better make our way at once up to Whitestrand without further delay to change our garments. Hood makes garments rhyme under similar conditions to ‘clinging like cerements,’ and I begin to perceive now the wisdom of his allusion. A very bad rhyme, but very good reason. They do cling, if you’ll permit me to say so — they cling, indeed, a trifle unpleasantly. — Good-bye for the present. I’ll see you again this afternoon in a drier and, I hope, a more becoming costume. — Miss Meysey, I’m afraid your hat’s spoiled. — Put her about now, Relf. Let’s run up quick. I don’t mind how soon I get to Whitestrand.”
Warren Relf headed the yawl round with the wind, and they ran merrily before the stiff breeze up stream towards the village. Meanwhile, Hugh stood still-on the deck in his dripping clothes, smiling as benignly as if nothing had happened, and waving farewell with one airy hand — in spite of chattering teeth — to Elsie and Winifred. The two girls, taken aback by the incident, looked after them with arms clasped round one another’s waists. Winifred was the first to break abruptly the hushed silence of their joint admiration.
“Oh, Elsie,” she cried, “it was so grand! Wasn’t it just magnificent of him to jump in like that after my poor old straw? I never saw anything so lovely in my life. Exactly like the sort of things one reads about in novels!”
Elsie smiled a more sober smile of maturer appreciation. “ Hugh’s always so,” she answered, with proprietary pride in her manly and handsome and chivalrous cousin. “He invariably does just the right thing at just the right moment; it’s a way he has. Nobody else has such splendid manners. He’s the dearest, nicest, kindest-hearted fellow—” She checked her self suddenly, with a flushed face, for she felt her own transports needed moderating now, and her praise was getting perhaps somewhat beyond the limits of due laudation as expected from cousins. A governess, even when she comes from Girton, must rise, like Cæsar’s wife, above suspicion. It must be generally understood in her employer’s family, that, though apparently possessed of a circulating fluid like other people’s, she carries no such compromising and damaging an article as a heart about with her. And yet, if, as somebody once observed, there’s “a deal of human nature in man,” is it not perhaps just equally true that there’s a deal of the self-same perilous commodity in woman also?
The men made their way up stream to Whitestrand, and landed at last, with an easy run, beside the little hithe. At the village inn — the Fisherman’s Rest, by W. Stannaway — Hugh Massinger, in spite of his disreputable dampness, soon obtained comfortable board and lodging, on Warren Relf’s recommendation. Relf was in the habit of coming to Whitestrand frequently, and was “well-beknown,” as the landlord remarked, to the entire village, children included, so that any of his friends were immediately welcome at the quaint old public-house by the water’s edge. For his own part the painter preferred the freedom of the yawl, where he paid of course neither rent nor taxes, and came and went at his own free-will; but as Massinger, not being a “vagrom man,” meant to spend his entire summer holiday in harness at Whitestrand, he desired to have some more settled pied-à-terre for his literary labours than the errant Mud-Turtle.
“I’ll change my clothes in a jiffy,” the poet cried to his friend as he leapt ashore, “and be back with you at once, a new creature. — Relf, you’ll stop and have some lunch, of course. — Landlord, we’d like a nice tender steak — you can raise a steak at Whitestrand, I suppose? — That’s well. Underdone, if you please. — Just hand me out my portmanteau there. — Thank you, thank you.” And with a graceful bound, he was off to his room — a low-roofed old chamber on the ground-floor — as airy and easy as if nothing had ever occurred at all to ruffle his temper or disturb the affectedly careless set of his immaculate collar and his loosely knotted necktie.
In ten minutes he emerged again, as he had predicted, in the front room, another man — an avatar of glory — resplendent in a light-brown velveteen coat and Rembrandt cap, that served still more obviously than ever to emphasize the full nature and extent of his poetical pretensions. It was a coat that a laureate might have envied and dreamt about. The man who could carry such a coat as that could surely have written the whole of the “Divina Commedia” before breakfast, and tossed off a book or two of “Paradise Lost” in a brief interval of morning leisure.
“Awfully pretty girl that!” he said as he entered, and drummed on the table with impatient forefinger for the expected steak; “ the little one, I mean, of course — not my cousin. Fair, too. In some ways I prefer them fair. Though dark girls have more go in them, after all, I fancy; for dark and true and tender is the North, according to Tennyson. But fair or dark, North or South, like Horniman’s teas, they’re ‘all good alike,’ if you take them as assorted. And she’s charmingly fresh and youthful and naive.”
“She’s pretty, certainly,” Warren Relf replied, with a certain amount of unusual stiffness apparent in his manner; “but not anything like so pretty, to my mind, or so graceful either, as your cousin, Miss Challoner.”
“Oh, Elsie’s well enough in her own way, no doubt,” Hugh went on, with a smile of expansive admiration. “I like them all in their own way. I’m nothing, indeed, if not catholic and eclectic. On the whole, one girl’s much the same as another, if only she gives you the true poetic thrill. As Alfred de Musset calmly puts it, with delicious French bluntness, ‘Qu’importe le goblet pourvu qu’on a l’ivresse?’ Do you remember that delightful student song of Blackie’s? —
“‘I can like a hundred women;
I can love a score;
Only one with heart’s devotion
Worship and adore.’
I subscribe to that: all but the last two verses; about those I’m not quite so certain. As to loving a score, I’ve tried it experimentally, and I know I can manage it. But anyway, Elsie’s extremely pretty. I’ve always allowed she’s extremely pretty. The trouble of it is that she hasn’t, unfortunately, got a brass farthing. Not a sou, not a cent, not a doit, not a stiver. I don’t myself know the precise exchange value of doits and stivers, but I take them to be something exceptionally fractional. I could rhyme away (without prejudice) to Elsie and Chelsea and braes of Kelsie, or even at a pinch could bring in Selsey — you must know Selsey Bill, as you go in for yachting — if it weren’t that I feel how utterly futile and purposeless it all is when a girl’s fortune consists altogether of a negative quantity in doits and stivers. But the other — Miss Meysey, now — who’s she, I wonder? — Good name, Meysey. It sounds like money, and it suggests daisy. There was a Meysey a banker in the Strand, you know — not very daisy-like, that, is it? — and another who did something big in the legal way — a judge, I fancy. — He doubtless sat on the royal bench of British Themis with immense applause (which was instantly suppressed),.and left his family a pot of money. Meysey — lazy — crazy — hazy. None of them’ll do, you see, for a sonnet but daisy. How many more Miss Meyseys are there, if any? I wonder. And if not, has she got a brother? So pretty a girl deserves to have tin. If I were a childless, rich old man, I think I’d incontinently establish and endow her, just to improve the beauty and future of the race, on the strictest evolutionary and Darwinian principles.”
“Her father’s the Squire here,” Warren Relf replied, with a somewhat uneasy glance at Hugh, shot sideways. “He lords the manor and a great part of the parish. Wyville Meysey’s his full name. He’s rich, they [say, tolerably rich still; though a big slice of the estate south of the river has been swallowed up by the sea, or buried in the sand, or otherwise disposed of. The sea’s encroaching greatly on this coast, you know; some places, like Dunwich, have almost all toppled over bodily into the water, churches included; while in others, the shifting sand of the country has just marched over the ground like a conquering army, pitching its tent and taking up its quarters, to stay, in the meadows. Old Meysey’s lost a lot of land that way, I believe
, on the south side; it’s covered by those pretty little wave-like sandhills you see over yonder. But north of the river they say he’s all right. That’s his place, the house in the fields, just up beyond the poplar. I dare say you didn’t notice it as we passed, for it’s built low — Elizabethan, half hidden in the trees. All the big houses along the East Coast are always planned rather squat and flat, to escape the wind, which runs riot here in the winter, the natives say, as if it blew out of the devil’s bellows! But it’s a fine place, the Hall, for all that, as places go, down here in Suffolk. The old gentleman’s connected with the bankers in the Strand — some sort of a cousin or other, more or less distantly removed, I fancy.”
“And the sons?” Hugh asked, with evident interest, tracking the subject to its solid kernel.
“The sons? There are none. They had one once, I believe — a dragoon or hussar — but he was shot, out soldiering in Zulu-land or somewhere; and this daughter’s now the sole living representative of the entire family.”
