by Grant Allen
“So she’s an heiress?” Hugh inquired, getting warmer at last, as children say at Hide-and-seek.
“Ye-es. In her way — no doubt, an heiress. — Not a very big one, I suppose, but still what one might fairly call an heiress. She’ll have whatever’s left to inherit. — You seem very anxious to know all about her.”
“Oh, one naturally likes to know where one stands — before committing one’s self to anything foolish,” Hugh murmured placidly. “And in this wicked world of ours, where heiresses are scarce — and actions for breach of promise painfully common — one never knows beforehand where a single false step may happen to land one. I’ve made mistakes before now in my life; I don’t mean to make another one through insufficient knowledge, if I can help it.”
He took up a pen that lay upon the table of the little sitting-room before him, and began drawing idly with it some curious characters on the back of an envelope he pulled from his pocket. Relf sat and watched him in silence.
Presently, Massinger began again. “You’re very much shocked at my sentiments, I can see,” he said quietly, as he glanced with approval at his careless hieroglyphics.
Relf drew his hand over his beard twice. “Not so much shocked as grieved, I think,” he replied after a moment’s pause.
“Why grieved?”
“Well, because, Massinger, it was impossible for any one who saw her this morning to doubt that Miss Challoner is really in love with you.”
Hugh went on fiddling with the pen and ink and the envelope nervously. “You think so?” he asked, with some eagerness in his voice, after another short pause. “You think she really likes me?”
“I don’t merely think so,” Relf answered with confidence; “I’m absolutely certain of it — as sure as I ever was of anything. Remember, I’m a painter, and I have a quick eye. She was deeply moved when she saw you come. It meant a great deal to her. — I should be sorry to think you would play fast and loose with any girl’s affections.”
“It’s not the girl’s affections I play fast and loose with,” Massenger retorted lazily. “I deeply regret to say it’s very much more my own I trifle with. I’m not a fool; but my one weak point is a too susceptible disposition. I can’t help falling in love — really in love — not merely flirting — with any nice girl I happen to be thrown in with. I write her a great many pretty verses; I send her a great many charming notes; I say a great many foolish things to her; and at the time I really mean them all. My heart is just at that precise moment the theatre of a most agreeable and unaffected flutter. I think to myself, ‘This time it’s serious.’ I look at the moon, and feel sentimental. I apostrophize the fountains, meadows, valleys, hills, and groves to forebode not any severing of our loves. And then I go away and reflect calmly, in the solitude of my own chamber, what a precious fool I’ve been — for, of course, the girl’s always a penniless one — I’ve never had the luck or the art yet to captivate an heiress; and when it comes to breaking it all off, I assure you it costs me a severe wrench, a wrench that I wish I was sensible enough to foresee or adequately to guard against, on the prevention-better-than-cure principle.”
“And the girl?” Relf asked, with a growing sense of profound discomfort, for Elsie’s face and manner had instantly touched him.
“The girl,” Massinger replied, putting a finishing stroke or two to the queer formless sketch he had scrawled upon the envelope, and fixing it up on the frame of a cheap lithograph that hung from a nail upon the wall opposite; “well, the girl probably regrets it also, though not, I sincerely trust, so profoundly as I do. In this case, however, it’s a comfort to think Elsie’s only a cousin. Between cousins there can be no harm, you will readily admit, in a little innocent flirtation.”
“It’s more than a flirtation to her, I’m sure,” Relf answered, with a dubious shake of the head. “She takes it all au grand sérieux. — I hope you don’t mean to give her one of these horrid wrenches you talk so lightly about? — Why, Massinger, what on earth is this? I — I didn’t know you could do this sort of thing!”
He had walked across carelessly, as he paced the room, to the lithograph in whose frame the poet had slipped the back of his envelope, and he was regarding the little addition now with eyes of profound astonishment and wonder. The picture was a coarsely executed portrait of a distinguished statesman, reduced to his shirt-sleeves, and caught in the very act of felling a tree; and on the scrap of envelope, in exact imitation of the right honourable gentleman’s own familiar signature, Hugh had written in bold free letters the striking inscription, “W. E. Gladstone.”
The poet laughed. “Yes, it’s not so bad,” he said, regarding it from one side with parental fondness. “I thought they’d probably like to have the Grand Old Man’s own genuine autograph; I’ve turned one out for them off-hand, as good as real, and twice as legible. I flatter myself it’s a decent copy. I can imitate anybody’s hand at sight. — Look here, for example; here’s your own.” And taking another scrap of paper from a bundle in his pocket, he wrote with rapid and practised mastery, “Warren H. Relf” on a corner of the sheet in the precise likeness of the painter’s own large and flowing handwriting.
Relf gazed over his shoulder in some surprise, not wholly unmingled with a faint touch of alarm. “I’m an artist, Massinger,” he said slowly, as he scanned it close; “but I couldn’t do that, no, not if you were to pay me for it. I could paint anything you chose to set me, in heaven above, or earth beneath, or the waters that are under the earth; but I couldn’t make a decent facsimile of another man’s autograph. — And, do you know, on the whole, I’m awfully glad that I could never possibly learn to do it.”
Massinger smiled a languid smile. “In the hands of the foolish,” he said, addressing his soul to the beefsteak which had at last arrived, “no doubt such abilities are liable to serious abuse. But the wise man is an exception to all rules of life: he can safely be trusted with edge-tools. We do well in refusing firearms to children: grown people can employ them properly. I’m never afraid of any faculty or knowledge on earth I possess. I know seventeen distinct ways of cheating at loo, without the possibility of a moment’s detection, and yet that doesn’t prevent me, whenever I play, from being most confoundedly out of pocket by it. The man who distrusts himself must be conscious of weakness. Depend upon it, no amount of knowledge ever hurts those who repose implicit confidence in their own prudence and their own sagacity.”
CHAPTER V.
ELECTIVE AFFINITIES.
THE Girton governess of these latter days stands on a very different footing indeed in the family from the forty-pound-a-year-and-all-found young person who instructed youth as a final bid for life in the last generation. She ranks, in fact, in the unwritten table of precedence with the tutor who has been a university man; and, as the outward and visible sign of her superior position, she dines with the rest of the household at seven-thirty, instead of taking an early dinner in the schoolroom with her junior pupils off hashed mutton and ricepudding at half-past one. Elsie Challoner had been a Girton girl. She was an orphan, left with little in the world but her brains and her good looks to found her fortune upon; and she had wisely invested her whole small capital in getting herself an education which would enable her to earn herself in after life a moderate livelihood. In the family at Whitestrand, where she had lately come, she lived far more like a friend than a governess: the difference in years between herself and Winifred was not extreme; and the two girls, taking a fancy to one another from the very first, became companions at once, so intimate together that Elsie could hardly with an effort now and again bring herself to exert a little brief authority over the minor details of Winifred’s conduct. And, indeed, the modern governess, though still debarred the possession of a heart, is now no longer exactly expected to prove herself in everything a moral dragon: she is permitted to recognize the existence of human instincts in the world we inhabit, and not even forbidden to concede at times the abstract possibility that either she or her pupils might
conceivably get married to an eligible person, should the eligible person at the right moment chance to present himself, with the customary credentials as to position and prospects.
“I wonder, Elsie,” Winifred said, after lunch, “whether your cousin will really come up this afternoon? Perhaps he won’t now, after that dreadful wetting. I dare say, as he only came down in the yawl, he hasn’t got another suit of clothes with him. I shouldn’t be surprised if he had to go to bed at the inn, as Mr. Relf does, while they dry his things for him by the kitchen fire! Mr. Relf never brings more, they say, than his one blue jersey.”
“That’s not like Hugh,” Elsie answered confidently. “Hugh wouldn’t go anywhere, by sea or land, without proper clothes for every possible civilized contingency. He’s not a fop, you know — he’s a man all over — but he dresses nicely and appropriately always. You should just see him in evening clothes; he’s simply beautiful then. They suit him splendidly.”
“So I should think, dear,” Winifred answered with warmth. “I wonder, Elsie, whether papa and mamma will like your cousin?”
“It’s awfully good of you, darling, to think so much of what sort of reception my cousin gets,” Elsie replied, with a kiss, in perfect innocence. (Winifred blushed faintly.) “But, of course, your papa and mamma are sure to like him. Everybody always does like Hugh. There’s something about him that insures success. He’s a universal favourite, wherever he goes. He’s so clever and so nice, and so kind and so sympathetic. I never met anybody else so sympathetic as Hugh. He knows exactly beforehand how one feels about everything, and makes allowances so cordially for all one’s little private sentiments. I suppose that’s the poetic temperament in him. Poetry must mean at bottom, I should think, keen insight into the emotions of others.”
“But not always power of responding sympathetically to those emotions. — Look, for example, at such a case as Goethe’s,” a clear voice said from the other side of the hedge. They were walking along, as they often walked, with arms clasped round one another’s waists, just inside the grounds, close to the footpath that led across the fields; and only a high fence of privet and deg-rose separated their confidences from the ear of the fortuitous public on the adjoining footpath. So Hugh had come up, unawares from behind, and overheard their confidential chit-chat! How far back had he overheard? Elsie wondered to herself. If he had caught it all, she would be so ashamed of herself!
“Hugh!” she cried, running on to the little wicket gate to meet him. “I’m so glad you’ve come. It’s delightful to see you. But oh, you must have thought us two dreadful little sillies. — How much of our conversation did you catch, I wonder?”
“Only the last sentence,” Hugh answered lightly, taking both her hands in his and kissing her a quiet cousinly kiss on her smooth broad forehead. “Just that about poetry meaning keen insight into the emotions of others; so, if you were saying any ill about me, my child, or bearing false witness against your neighbour, you may rest assured at any rate that I didn’t hear it. — Good-morning, Miss Meysey. I’m recovered, you see: dried and clothed and in my right mind — at least, I hope so. I trust the hat is the same also.”
Winifred held out a timid small hand. “It’s all right, thank you,” she said, with a sudden flush; “but I shall never, never wear it again, for all that. I couldn’t bear to. I don’t think you ought to have risked your life for so very little.”
“A life’s nothing where a lady’s concerned,” Hugh answered airily, with a mock bow. “But indeed you give me credit for too much gallantry. My life was not in question at all; I only risked a delightful bath, which was somewhat impeded by an unnecessarily heavy and awkward bathing-dress. — What a sweet place this is, Elsie; so flowery and bowery, when you get inside it. The little lane with the roses overhead seems created after designs by Birket Foster. From outside, I confess, to a casual observer the first glimpse of East Anglian scenery is by no means reassuring.”
They strolled up slowly together to the Hall door, where the senior branches were seated on the lawn, under the shade of the one big spreading lime-tree, enjoying the delicious coolness of the breeze as it blew in fresh from the open ocean. Elsie wondered how Hugh and the Squire would get on together; but her wonder indeed was little needed; for Hugh, as she had said, always got on admirably with everybody everywhere. He had a way of attacking people instinctively on their strong point; and in ten minutes, he and the Squire were fast friends, united by firm ties of common loves and common animosities. They were both Oxford men — at whatever yawning interval of time, that friendly link forms always a solid bond of union between youth and age; and both had been at the same college, Oriel. “I dare say you know my old rooms,” the Squire observed, with a meditative sigh. “They looked out over Fellows’ Quad, and had a rhyming Latin hexameter on a pane of stained glass in one of the bay windows.”
“I know them well,” Hugh answered, with a rising smile of genuine pleasure — for he loved Oxford with a love passing the love of her ordinary children. “A friend of mine had them in my time. And I remember the line: ‘Oxoniam quare venisti premeditare.’ An excellent leonine, as leonines go, though Jimp in its quantity. — be you know, I fell in love with that pane so greatly, that I had a wire framework made to put over it, for fear some fellows should smash it some night, flinging about oranges at a noisy wine-party.”
From Oxford, they soon got off upon Suffolk, and the encroachment of the sea, and the blown sands; and then the Squire insisted upon taking Hugh for a tour du propriétaire round the whole estate, with running comments upon the wasting of the foreshore and the abominable remissness of the Board of Admiralty in not erecting proper groynes to protect the interests of coast-wise proprietors. Hugh listened to it all with his grave face of profound sympathy and lively interest, putting in from time to time an acquiescent remark confirmatory of the wickedness of government officials in general, and of the delinquent Board of Admiralty in particular.
“Æolian sands!” he said once, with a lingering cadence, rolling the words on his tongue, as the Squire paused by the big poplar of that morning’s adventure to point him out the blown dunes on the opposite shore—”Æolian sands! Is that what they call them? How very poetical! What a lovely word to put in a sonnet! Æolian — just the very thing of all others to go on all-fours with an adjective like Tmolian? — So it swallowed up forty acres of prime salt-marsh pasture — did it, really? That must have been a very serious loss indeed. Forty acres of prime salt-marsh! I suppose it was the sort of land covered with tall rank reedy grasses, where you feed those magnificent rough-coated, long-homed, Highland-looking cattle we saw this morning? Splendid beasts: most picturesque and regal. ‘Bulls that walk the pastures in kingly-flashing coats,’ George Meredith would call them. We passed a lot of them as we cruised up stream to-day to Whitestrand. — And the sand has absolutely overwhelmed and wasted it all? Dear me! dear me! What a terrible calamity! It was the Admiralty’s fault! Might make a capital article out of that to bully the government in the Morning Telephone.”
“If you did, my dear sir,” the Squire said warmly, with an appreciative nod, “you’d earn the deepest gratitude of every owner of property in the county of Suffolk, and indeed along the whole neglected East Coast. The way we’ve been treated and abused, I assure you, has been just scandalous — simply scandalous. Governments, buff or blue, have all alike behaved to us with incredible levity. When the present disgraceful administration, for example, came into power—”
Hugh never heard the remainder of that impassioned harangue, long since delivered with profound gusto on a dozen distinct election platforms. He was dimly aware of the Squire’s voice, pouring forth denunciation of the powers that be in strident tones and measured sentences; but he didn’t listen; his soul was occupied in two other far more congenial pursuits: one of them, watching Elsie and Winifred with Mrs. Meysey; the other, trying to find a practical use for Æolian sands in connection with his latest projected heroic poem on the Burial of Alaric. Æ
olian; dashes: Tmolian; abashes: not a bad substratum, that, he flattered himself, for the thunderous lilt of his opening stanza.
It was not till the close of the afternoon, however, that he could snatch a few seconds alone with Elsie. They wandered off by themselves then, near the water’s edge, among the thick shrubbery; and Hugh, sitting down in a retired spot under the lee of a sheltering group of guelder-roses, took his pretty cousin’s hands for a moment in his own, and looking down into her great dark eyes with a fond look, cried laughingly, “Oh, Elsie, Elsie, this is just what I’ve been longing for all day long. I thought I should never manage to get away from that amiable old bore, with his encroachments, and his mandamuses, and his groynes, and his interlocutors. As far as I could understand him, he wants to get the Board of Admiralty, or the Court of Chancery, or somebody else high up in station, to issue instructions to the east wind not to blow Æolian sands in future over his sacred property. It’s too grotesque: quite, quite too laughable. He’s trying to bring an action for trespass against the German Ocean.
‘Will ye bridle the deep sea with reins? will ye chasten the high sea with rods?
Will ye take her to chain her with chains who is older than all ye gods?’
Or will you get an injunction against her in due form on stamped paper from the Lord Chief Justice of England? Canute tried it on, and found it a failure. And all the time, while the good old soul was moaning and droning about his drowned land, there was I, just sighing and groaning to get away to a convenient corner with a pretty little cousin of mine with whom I had urgent private affairs of my own to settle.’ — My dear Elsie, Suffolk agrees with you. You’re looking this moment simply charming.”
“It’s your own fault, Hugh,” Elsie answered, with a blush, never heeding overtly his last strictly personal observation. “You shouldn’t make yourself so universally delightful. I’m sure I thought, by the way you talked with him, you were absolutely absorbed in the wasting of the cliff, and personally affronted by the aggressive east wind. I was just beginning to get quite jealous of the encroachments. — For you know, Hugh, it’s such a real pleasure to me always to see you.”
