by Grant Allen
She spoke tenderly, with the innocent openness of an old acquaintance; and Hugh, still holding her hand in his own leaned forward with admiration in his sad dark eyes, and put out his face close to hers, as he had always done since they were children together. “One kiss, Elsie,” he said persuasively. “Quick, my child; we may have no other chance. Those dreadful old bores will stick to us like leeches. ‘Gather ye roses while you may: Old Time is still a-flying.’”
Elsie drew back her face half in alarm. “No, no, Hugh,” she cried, struggling with him for a second. “We’re both growing too old for such nonsense now. Remember, we’ve ceased long ago to be children.”
“But as a cousin, Elsie,” Hugh said, with a wistful look that belied his words.
Else preferred in her own heart to be kissed by Hugh on different grounds; but she did not say so. She held up her face, however, with a rather bad grace, and Hugh pressed it to his own tenderly. “That’s paradise, my houri,” he murmured low, looking deep into her beautiful liquid eyes.
“O son of my uncle, that was paradise indeed; but that was not like a cousin,” she answered, with a faint attempt to echo his playfulness, as she withdrew, blushing.
Hugh laughed, and glanced idly round him with a merry look at the dancing water. “You may call it what you like,” he whispered, with a deep gaze into her big dark pupils. “I don’t care in what capacity on earth you consider yourself kissed, so long as you still permit me to kiss you.”
For ten minutes they sat there talking — saying those thousand-and-one sweet empty things that young people say to one another under such circumstances — have not we all been young, and do not we all well know them? — and then Elsie rose with a sigh of regret. “I think,” she said, “we mustn’t stop here alone any longer; perhaps Mrs. Meysey wouldn’t like it.”
“Ob, bother Mrs. Meysey!” Hugh cried, with an angry sideward toss of his head. “These old people are a terrible nuisance in the world. I wish we could get a law passed by a triumphant majority that at forty everybody was to be promptly throttled, or at least transported. There’d be some hope of a little peace and enjoyment in the world then.”
“Oh, but, Hugh, Mrs. Meysey’s just kindness itself, and I know she’ll let you come and see me ever so often. She said at lunch I might go out on the water or anywhere I liked, whenever I chose, any time with my cousin.”
“A very sensible, reasonable, intelligent old lady,” Hugh answered approvingly, with a mollified nod. “I wish they were all as wise in their generation. The profession of chaperon, like most others, has been overdone, and would be all the better now for a short turn of judicious thinning. — But, Elsie, you’ve told them I was a cousin, I see. That’s quite right. Have you explained to them in detail the precise remoteness of our actual relationship?”
Elsie’s Bp quivered visibly. “No, Hugh,” she answered. “But why? Does it matter?”
“Not at all — not at all. Very much the contrary. I’m glad you didn’t. It’s better so. If I were you, my child, I think, do you know, I’d allow them to believe, in a quiet sort of way — unless, of course, they ask you point-blank, that you and I are first-cousins. It facilitates social intercourse considerably. Cousinhood’s such a jolly indefinite thing, one may as well enjoy as long as possible the full benefit of its charming vagueness.”
“But, Hugh, is it right? Do you think I ought to? — I mean, oughtn’t I to let them know at once, just for that very reason, how slight the relationship really is between us?”
“The relationship is not slight,” Hugh answered with warmth, darting an eloquent glance deep down into her eyes. “The relationship’s a great deal closer, indeed, than if it were a much nearer one. — That may be paradox, but it’s none the less true, for all that. — Still, it’s no use arguing a point of casuistry with a real live Girton girl. You know as much about ethics as I do, and a great deal more into the bargain. Only, a cousin’s a cousin anyhow; and I for my part wouldn’t go out of my way to descend gratuitously into minute genealogical particulars of once, twice, thrice, or ten times removed, out of pure puritanism. These questions of pedigree are always tedious. What subsists all through is the individual fact that I’m Hugh, and you’re Elsie, and that I love you dearly — of course with a purely cousinly degree of devotion.”
“Hugh, you needn’t always flourish that limitation in my face, like a broomstick.”
“Caution, my dear child — mere ingrained caution — the solitary resource of poverty and wisdom. What’s the good of loving you dearly on any other grounds, I should like to know, as long as poetry, divine poetry, remains a perfect drug in the publishing market? A man and a girl can’t live on bread and cheese and the domestic affections, can they, Elsie? Very well, then, for the present we are both free. If ever circumstances should turn out differently—” The remainder of that sentence assumed a form inexpressible by the resources of printer’s ink, even with the aid of a phonetic spelling.
When they turned aside from the guelder-roses at last with crimson faces, they strolled side by side up to the house once more, talking about the weather or some equally commonplace and uninteresting subject, and joined the Meyseys under the big tree. The Squire had disappeared, and Winifred came out to meet them on the path. “Mamma says, Mr. Massinger,” she began timidly, “we’re going a little picnic all by ourselves on the river to-morrow — up among the sandhills papa was showing you. They’re a delicious place to picnic in, the sandhills; and mamma thinks perhaps you wouldn’t mind coming to join us, and bringing your friend the artist with you. But I dare say you won’t care to come: there’ll be only ourselves — just a family party.”
“My tastes are catholic,” Hugh answered jauntily. “I love all innocent amusements — and most wicked ones. There’s nothing on earth I should enjoy as much as a picnic in the sandhills. — You’ll be coming too, of course, won’t you, Elsie? — Very well, then. I’ll bring Relf, and the Mud-Turtle to boot. I know he wants to go mud-painting himself. He may as well take us all up in a body.”
“We shall do nothing, you know,” Winifred cried apologetically. “We shall only just sit on the sandhills and talk, or pick yellow horned-poppies, and throw stones into the sea, and behave ourselves generally like a pack of idlers.”
“That’ll exactly suit me,” Hugh replied, with a smile. “My most marked characteristics are indolence and the practice of the Christian virtues. I hate the idea that when people invite their friends to a feast they’re bound to do something or other definite to amuse them. It’s an insult to one’s intelligence; it’s degrading one to the level of innocent childhood, which has to be kept engaged with Blindman’s Buff and an unlimited supply of Everton toffee, for fear it should bore itself with its own inanity. On that ground, I consider music and games at suburban parties the resource of incompetence. Sensible people find enough to amuse them in one another’s society, without playing dumb crambo or asking riddles. Relf and I will find more than enough, I’m sure, to-morrow in yours and Elsie’s.”
He shook hands with them all round and raised his hat in farewell with that inimitable grace which was Hugh Massinger’s peculiar property. When he left the Hall that afternoon, he left four separate conquests behind him. The Squire thought this London newspaper fellow was a most sensible, right-minded, intelligent young man, with a head on his shoulders, and a complete comprehension of the rights and wrongs of the intricate riparian proprietors’ question. Mrs. Meysey thought Elsie’s cousin was most polite and attentive, as well as an extremely high-principled and excellent person. (Ladies of a certain age are always strong on the matter of principles, which they discuss as though they were a definitely measurable quantity, like money or weight or degrees Fahrenheit.) Winifred thought Mr. Massinger was a born poet, and oh, so nice and kind and appreciative. Elsie thought dear darling Hugh was just the same good, sweet, sympathetic old friend and ally and comforter as ever. And they all four united in thinking he was very handsome, very clever, very brilliant, and
very delightful.
As for Hugh, he thought to himself, as he sauntered back by the rose-bordered lane to the village inn, that the Squire was a most portentous and heavy old nuisance; that Mrs. Wyville Meysey was a comic old creature; that Elsie was really a most charming girl; and that Winifred, in spite of her bread-and-butter blushes, wasn’t half bad, after all — for an heiress.
The heiress is apt to be plain and forbidding. She is not fair to outward view, as many maidens be. Her beauty has solid, not to say strictly metallic qualities, and resides principally in a safe at her banker’s. To have tracked down an heiress who was also pretty was indeed, Hugh felt, a valuable discovery.
When he reached the inn, he found Warren Relf just returned from a sketching expedition up the tidal flats. “Well, Relf,” he cried, “you see me triumphant. I’ve been reconnoitring Miss Meysey’s outposts, with an ultimate view to possible siege operations. To judge by the first results of my reconnaissance, she seems a very decent sort of little girl in her own way. If sonnets will carry her by storm, I don’t mind discharging a few cartloads of them from a hundred-ton-gun point-blank at her outworks. Most of them can be used again, of course, in case of need, in another campaign, if occasion offers.”
“And Miss Challoner?” Relf suggested, with some reproof in his tone. “Was she there too? Have you seen her also?”
“Yes, Elsie was there,” the poet answered unconcernedly, as he rang the bell for a glass of soda-water. “Elsie was there, looking as charming and as piquante and as pretty as ever; and, by Jove! she’s the cleverest and brightest and most amusing girl I ever met anywhere up and down in England. Though she’s my own cousin, and it’s me that says it, as oughtn’t to say it, she’s a credit to the family. I like Elsie. At times, I’ve almost half a mind, upon my soul, to fling prudence to the winds, and ask her to come and accept a share of my poor crust in my humble garret. — But it won’t do, you know — it won’t do. Sine Cerere et Baccho friget Venus. Either I must make a fortune at a stroke, or I must marry a girl with a fortune ready made to my hand already. Love in a cottage is all very well in its way, no doubt, with roses and eglantine — whatever eglantine may be — climbing round the windows; but love in a hovel — which is the plain prose of it in these hard times — can’t be considered either pretty or poetical. Unless some Columbus of a critic, cruising through reams of minor verse, discovers my priceless worth some day, and divulges me to the world, there’s no chance of my ever being able to afford anything so good and sweet as Elsie. — But the other one’s a nice small girl of her sort too. I think for my part I shall alter and amend those quaint little verses of Blackie’s a bit — make ’em run:
‘I can like a hundred women;
I can love a score;
Only with a heart’s devotion
Worship three or four.’”
Relf laughed merrily in spite of himself.
Massinger went on musing in an undertone: “Not that I like the first and third lines as they stand, at all: a careful versifier would have insisted upon rhyming them. I should have made ‘devotion’ chime in with ‘ocean,’ or ‘lotion,’ or ‘Goshen,’ or ‘emotion,’ or something of that sort, to polish it up a bit There’s very good business to be got out of ‘emotion,’ if you work it properly; but ‘ocean’ comes in handy, too, down here at Whitestrand. I’ll dress it up into a bit of verse this evening, I think, for Elsie — or the other girl. — Winifred’s her Christian name. Hard case, Winifred. ‘Been afraid’ is only worthy of Browning, who’d perpetrate anything in the way of a rhyme to save himself trouble. Has a false Ingoldsby gallop of verse about it that I don’t quite like. Winnie’s comparatively easy, of course: you’ve got ‘skinny’ and ‘finny,’ and ‘Minnie’ and ‘spinney.’ But Winifred’s a very hard case indeed. ‘Winnie’ and ‘guinea’ are good enough rhymes; but not quite new: they’ve been virtually done before by Rossetti, you know:
‘Lazy, laughing, languid Jenny,
Fond of a kiss and fond of a guinea.’
But I doubt if I could ever consent to make love to a girl whose name’s so utterly and atrociously unmanageable as plain Winifred. — Now, Mary — there’s a name for you, if you like: with ‘fairy’ and ‘airy,’ and ‘chary’ and ‘vagary,’ and all sorts of other jolly old-world rhymes to go with it. Or, if you want to be rural, you can bring in ‘dairy’ — do the pretty-milkmaid business to perfection. But ‘Winifred’—’ bin afraid’ — the things impossible. It compels you to murder the English language. I wouldn’t demean myself — or I think it ought to be by rights bemean myself — by writing verses to her with such a name as that. — I shall send them to Elsie, who, after all, deserves them more, and will be flattered with the attention into the bargain.”
At ten o’clock, he came out once more from his own room to the little parlour, where Warren Relf was seated “cooking” a sky in one of his hasty seaside sketches. He had an envelope in his hand, and a hat on his head. “Where are you off?” Relf asked carelessly.
“Oh, just to the post,” Hugh Massinger answered, with a gay nod. “I’ve finished my new batch of verses on the ocean-emotion — potion — devotion theme, and I’m sending them off, all hot from the oven, to my cousin Elsie. — They’re not bad in their way. I like them myself. I shall print them, I think, in next week’s Athenaeum.
CHAPTER VI.
WHICH LADY?
Hugh found the day among the sandhills simply delightful. He had said with truth he loved all innocent pleasures, for his was one of those sunny, many-sided, aesthetic natures, in spite of its underlying tinge of pessimism and sadness, that throw themselves with ardor into every simple country delight, and find deep enjoyment in trees and flowers and waves and scenery, in the scent of new-mown hay and the song of birds, and in social intercourse with beautiful women. Warren Relf had readily enough fallen in with Hugh’s plan for their day’s outing; for Warren Relf in his turn was human too, and at a first glance he had been greatly taken with Hugh’s pretty cousin, the dark-eyed Girton girl. His possession of the “Mud-Turtle” gave him for the moment a title to respect, for a yacht’s a yacht, however tiny. So he took them all up together in the yawl to the foot of the sandhills; and while Mrs. Meysey and the girls were unpacking the hampers and getting lunch ready on the white slopes of the drifted dunes, he sat down by the shore and sketched a little hit of the river foreground that exactly suited his own peculiar style — an islet of mud, rising low from the bed of the sluggish stream, crowned with purple sea-aster and white-flowered scurvy-grass, and backed by a slimy bed of tidal ooze, that shone with glancing rays of gold and crimson in the broad flood of the reflected sunlight.
Elsie was very happy, too, in her way; for had she not Hugh all the time by her side, and was she not wearing the ardent verses she had received from him by post that very morning, inside her dress, pressed dose against her heart, and rising and falling with every pulse and flutter of her bosom? To him, the handicraftsman, they were a mere matter of ocean, and potion, and lotion, and devotion, strung together on a slender thread of pretty conceit; but to her, in the innocent ecstacy of a first great love, they meant more than words could possibly utter.
She could not thank him for them; her pride and delight went too deep for that; and even were it otherwise, she had no opportunity. But once, while they stood together by the sounding sea, with Winifred by their side, looking critically at the picture Warren Relf had sketched in hasty outline, and began to color, she found an occasion to let the poet know, by a graceful allusion, she had received his little tribute of verse in safety. As the painter with a few dainty strokes filled in the floating iridescent tints upon the sunlit ooze, she murmured aloud, as if quoting from some well-known poem
“Red strands that faintly fleck and spot
The tawny flood thy banks enfold;
A woof of Tyrian purple, shot
Through cloth of gold.”
Hugh looked up at her appreciatively with a smile of recognition. They were his own ve
rses, out of the Song of Char he had written and posted to her the night before. “Mere faint Swinburnian echoes, nothing worth,” he murmured low in a deprecating aside; but he was none the less flattered at the delicate attention, for all that. “And how clever of her, too,” he thought to himself with a faint thrill, “to have pieced them in so deftly with the subject of the picture! After all, she’s a very intelligent girl, Elsie! A man might go further and fair worse — if it were not for that negative quantity in doits and stivers.”
Warren Relf looked up also with a quick glance at the dark-eyed girl. “You’re right, Miss Challoner,” he said, stealing a lover’s sidelook at the iridescent peacock hues upon the gleaming mud. “It shines like opal. No precious stone on earth could be lovelier than that. Few people have the eye to see beauty in a flat of tidal mud like the one I’m painting; but cloth of gold and Tyrian purple are the only words one could possibly find to express in fit language the glow and glory of its exquisite coloring. If only I could put it on canvas now, as you’ve put it in words, even the Hanging Committee of the Academy, I believe — hard-hearted monsters — would scarcely be stony enough to dream of rejecting it.”
Elsie smiled. How every man reads things his own way, by the light of his own personal interests’ Hugh had seen she was trying to thank him unobtrusively for his copy of verses; Warren Relf had only found in her apt quotation a passing criticism on his own little water-color.
After lunch, the two seniors, the Squire and Mrs. Meysey, manifested the distinct desire of middle age for a quiet digestion in the shade of the sandhills; and the four younger folks, nothing loath to be free, wandered off in pairs at their own sweet will along the bank of the river. Hugh took Elsie for his companion at first, while Warren Relf had to put himself off for the time being with the blueeyed Winifred. Now Relf hated blue eyes. “But we must arrange it like a set of Lancers,” Hugh cried with an easy flourish of his graceful hand; “at the end of the figure, set to corner and change partners.” Elsie might have felt half jealous for a moment at this equitable suggestion, if Hugh hadn’t added to her in a lower tone, and with his sweetest smile: “I mustn’t monopolize you all the afternoon, you know, Elsie; Relf must have his innings too; I can see by his face he’s just dying to talk to you.”
