by Grant Allen
Elsie took the watch, when Hugh produced it, with a little cry of delight and surprise; then, looking at the initials so hastily engraved in neat Lombardic letters on the back, the tears rose to her eyes irrepressibly as she said, with a gentle pressure of his hand in hers: “I know now, Hugh, what that telegram was about the other morning. How very, very kind and good of you to think of it. But I almost wish you hadn’t given it to me. I shall never forgive myself for having said before you I should like one the same sort as Winifred’s. I’m quite ashamed of your having thought I meant to hint at it.”
“Not at all,” Hugh answered, with just the faintest possible return of her gentle pressure. “I was twisting it over in my own mind what on earth I could ever find to give you. I thought first of a copy of my last little volume; but then that’s nothing I’m only too sensible myself of its small worth. A book from an author is like spoiled peaches from a market-gardener: he gives them away only when he has a glut of them. So, when you said you’d like a watch of the same sort as Miss Meysey’s, it seemed to me a perfect interposition of chance on my behalf. I knew what to get, and I got it at once. I’m only glad those London watchmaker fellows, whose respected name I’ve quite forgotten, had time to engrave your initials on it.”
“But, Hugh, it must have cost you such a mint of money.”
Hugh waved a deprecatory hand with airy magnificence over the broad shrubbery. “A mere trifle,” he said, as who could command thousands. “It came to just the exact sum the ‘Contemporary’ paid me for that last article of mine on The Future of Marriage.’ “ (Which was quite true, the article in question having run to precisely twenty-five pages, at the usual honorarium of a guinea a page.) “It took me a few hours only to dash it off.” (Which was scarcely so accurate, it not being usual for even the most abandoned or practiced of journalists to “dash off” articles for a leading review; and the mere physical task of writing twenty-five pages of solid letterpress being considerably greater than most men, however rapid their pens, could venture to undertake in a few hours.)
Winifred looked up at him with a timid glance. “It’s a lovely watch,” she said, taking it over with an admiring look from Elsie: “and the inscription makes it ever so much nicer. One would prize it, of course, for that alone. But if I’d been Elsie, I’d a thousand time rather have had a volume of poems, with the author’s autograph dedication, than all the watches in England.”
“Would you?” Hugh answered, with an amused smile. “You rate the autographs of a living versifier immensely above their market value. Even Tennyson’s may be bought at a shop in the Strand, you know, for a few shillings. I feel this indeed fame. I shall begin to grow conceited soon at this rate. And by the way, Elsie, I’ve brought you a little bit of verse too. Your Laureate has not forgotten or neglected his customary duty. I shall expect a butt of sack in return for these: or may I venture to take it out instead in nectar?” They stood all three behind a group of syringa bushes. He touched her lips with his own lightly as he spoke. “Many happy returns of the day as a cousin,” he added, laughing. “And now, what’s your programme for the day, Elsie?”
“We want you to row us up the river to Snade, if it’s not too hot, Hugh,” his pretty cousin responded, all blushes.
“Tuus, O Regina, quid optes, Explorare labor; mihi jussa capessere fas est,” Hugh quoted merrily. “That’s the best of talking to a Girton girl, you see. You can fire off your most epigrammatic Latin quotation at her, as it rises to your lips, and she understands it. How delightful that is, now. As a rule, my Latin quotations, which are frequent and free, as Truthful James says, besides being neat and appropriate, like after-dinner speeches, fall quite flat upon the stony ground of the feminine intelligence which last remark, I flatter myself, in the matter of mixed’ metaphor, would do credit to Sir Boyle Roche in his wildest flight of Hibernian eloquence. I made a lovely Latin pun at a picnic once. We had some chicken and ham sausage a great red German sausage of the polony order, in a sort of huge boiled-lobster-colored skin; and toward the end of lunch, somebody asked me for another slice of it. ‘There isn’t any,’ said I. ‘It’s all gone. Finis Poloniae!’ Nobody laughed. They didn’t know that ‘Finis Poloniae’ were the last words uttered by a distinguished patriot and soldier, ‘when Freedom shrieked as Kosciusko fell.’ That comes of firing off your remarks, you see, quite above the head of your respected audience.”
“But what does that mean that you just said this minute to Elsie?” Winifred asked doubtfully.
“What! A lady in these latter days who doesn’t talk Latin!” Hugh cried, with pretended rapture. “This is too delicious! I hardly expected such good fortune. I shall have the well-known joy, then, of explaining my own feeble little joke, after all, and grimly translating my own poor quotation. It means, ‘Thy task it is, O Queen, to state thy will: Mine, thy behests to serve for good or ill.’ Rough translation, not necessarily intended for publication, but given merely as a guarantee of good faith, as the newspapers put it. Eolus makes the original remark to Juno in the first ‘Enid,’ when he’s just about to raise the wind literally, not figuratively on her behalf, against the unfortunate Trojans. He was then occupying the same post as clerk of the weather, that is now filled jointly by the correspondent of the ‘New York Herald’ and Mr. Robert Scott of the Meteorological Office. I hope they’ll send us no squalls to-day, if you and Mrs. Meysey are going up the river with us.”
On their way to the boat, Hugh stopped a moment at the inn to write hastily another telegram. It was to his London publisher: “Please kindly send a copy of ‘Echoes from Callimachus,’ by first post to my address as under.” And in five minutes more, the telegram dispatched, they were all rowing upstream in a merry party toward Snade meadows. Hugh’s plan of campaign was now finally decided. He had nothing to do but to carry out in detail his siege operations.
In the meadows he had ten minutes or so alone with Winifred. “Why, Mr. Massinger,” she said, with a surprised look, “was it you, then, who wrote that lovely article, in the ‘Contemporary,’ on ‘The Future of Marriage,’ we’ve all been reading?”
“I’m glad you liked it,” Hugh answered, with evident pleasure; “and I suppose it’s no use now trying any longer to conceal the fact that I was indeed the culprit.”
“
“But there’s another name to it,” Winifred murmured in reply. “And Mamma thought it must be Mr. Stone, the novelist.”
“Habitual criminals are often wrongly suspected,” Hugh answered, with a languid laugh. “I didn’t put my own name to it, however, because I was afraid it was a trifle sentimental, and I hate sentiment. Indeed, to say the truth it was a cruel trick, perhaps, but I imitated many of Stone’s little mannerisms, because I wanted people to think it was really Stone himself who wrote it. But for all that, I believe it all every word of it, I assure you, Miss Meysey.”
“It was a lovely article,” Winifred cried, enthusiastically. “Papa read it, and was quite enchanted with it. He said it was so sensible just what he’d always thought about marriage himself, though he never could get anybody else to agree with him. And I liked it too, if you won’t think it dreadfully presumptuous of a girl to say so. I thought it took such a grand, beautiful, etheral point of view, all up in the clouds, you know, with no horrid earthly materialism or nonsense of any sort to clog and spoil it. I think it was splendid, all that you said about its being treason to the race to take account of wealth or position, or prospects or connections, or any other worldly consideration, in choosing a husband or wife for one’s self and that one ought rather to be guided by instinct alone, because instinct or love, as we call it was the voice of nature speaking within us. Papa said that was beautifully put. And I thought it was really true as well. I thought it was just what a great prophet would have said if he were alive to say it; and that the man who wrote it “ She paused, breathless, partly because she was quite abashed by this time at her own temerity, and partly because Hugh Massinger, wicked man! was actually smili
ng a covert, smile through the corners of his mouth at her youthful enthusiasm.
The pause sobered him. “Miss Meysey,” he broke in, with unwonted earnestness, and with a certain strange tinge of subdued melancholy in his tremulous voice, “I didn’t mean to laugh at you. I really believe it. I believe in my heart every single word of what I said there. I believe a man or a woman either ought to choose in marriage just the one other special person toward whom their own hearts inevitably lead them. I believe it all I believe it without reserve. Money or rank, or connection or position, should be counted as nothing. We should go simply where nature leads us; and nature will never lead us astray. For nature is merely another name for the will of heaven made clear within us.”
Ingenuous youth blushed itself crimson. “I believe so too,” the timid girl answered in a very low voice and with a heaving bosom.
He looked her through and through with his large dark eyes. She shrank and fluttered before his searching glance. Should he put out a velvet paw for his mouse now, or should he play with it artistically a little longer? Too much precipitancy spoils the fun. Better wait till the “Echoes from Callimachus” had arrived. They were very fetching. And then, besides, he was not entirely without a conscience. A man should think neither of wealth nor of position, nor prospects nor connections, in choosing himself a partner for life. His own heart led him straight toward Elsie, not toward Winifred. Could he turn his back upon it, with those words on his lips, and trample poor Elsie’s tender heart under foot ruthlessly? Principle demanded it; but he had not the strength of mind to follow principle at that precise moment. He looked long and deep into Winifred’s eyes. They were pretty blue eyes, though pale and mawkish by the side of Elsie’s. Then he said with a sudden downcast, half-awkward glance that consummate actor “I think we ought to go back to your mother now, Miss Meysey.”
Winifred sighed. Not yet! Not yet! But he had looked at her hard! he had fluttered and trembled! He was summoning up courage. She felt sure of that. He didn’t venture as yet to assault her openly. Still, she was certain he did really like her; just a little bit, if only a little.
Next morning, as she strolled along on the lawn, a village boy in a corduroy suit came lounging up from the inn, in rustic insouciance, with a small parcel dangling by a string from his little finger. She knew the boy, and called him quickly toward her. “Dick,” she cried,” what’s that you’ve got there?”
The boy handed it to her with a mysterious nod. “It’s for you, miss,” he said, in his native Suffolk, screwing up his face sideways into a most excruciating pantomimic expression of the profoundest secrecy. “The gentleman at our house him wooth the black moostash, ye know he towd me to give it to yow, into yar own hands, he say, if I could manage to ketch ye aloon anyhow. He fared partickler about yar own hands. I heen’t got to wait, cos he say, there oon’t be noo answer.”
Winifred tore the packet open with trembling hands. It was a neat little volume, in a dainty delicate sage-green cover “Echoes from Callimachus, and other Poems;” by Hugh Massinger, sometimes Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. She turned at once with a flutter from the titlepage to the fly-leaf: “A Mile. Winifred Meysey; Hommage de l’ateur.” She only waited a moment to slip a shilling into Dick’s hand, and then rushed up, all crimson with delight, into her own bedroom. Twice she pressed the flimsy little sage-green volume in an ecstasy to her lips; then she laid it hastily in the bottom of a drawer, under a careless pile of handkerchiefs and lace bodices. She wouldn’t tell even Elsie of that tardy much-prized birthday gift. No one but herself must ever know Hugh Massinger had sent her his volume, of poems.
When Dick returned to the inn, ten minutes later, environed in a pervading odor of peppermint, the indirect result of Winifred Meysey’s shilling, Hugh called him in lazily with his quiet authoritative air to the prim little parlor, and asked him in an undertone to whom he had given the precious parcel.
“To the young lady herself,” Dick answered confidentially, thrusting the bull’s-eye with his tongue into his pouched cheek. “I give it to har behind the laylacs, too, where noo’one coon’t see us.”
“Dick,” Hugh Massinger said, in a profoundly persuasive and sententious voice, laying his hand magisterially on the boy’s shoulder, “you’re a sharp lad; and if you develop your talents steadily in this direction, you may rise in time from the distinguished post of gentleman’s gentleman to be a private detective or confidential agent, with an office of your own at the top of Regent Street. Dick, say nothing about this on any account, to anybody; and there, my boy there’s half a crown for you.”
“The young lady ha’ gin me one shillen a’ready,” Dick replied with alacrity, pocketing the coin with a broad grin. Business was brisk indeed this morning.
“The young lady was well advised,” Hugh answered grimly. “They’re cheap at the price dirt cheap, I call it, those immortal poems with an autograph inscription by the bard in person. And I’ve done a good stroke of business myself too. The ‘Echoes from Callimachus’ are a capital landing-net. If they don’t succeed in bringing her out,’ all napping, on the turf, gaffed and done for, a pretty speckled prey, why, no angler on earth that ever fished for women will get so much as a tiny rise out of her. It’s a very fair estate still, is Whitestrand. Taris vaut bien une messe,’ said Henri. I must make some little sacrifices myself if I want to conquer Whitestrand fair and even.”
“Paris vaut bien une messe,” indeed. Was Whitestrand worth sacrificing Elsie Challoner’s heart for?
CHAPTER IX.
HIGH-WATER.
Meanwhile, Warren Relf, navigating the pervasive and ubiquitous little “Mud-Turtle,” had spent his summer congenially in cruising in and out of Essex mud-flats and Norfolk broads, accompanied by his friend and chum Potts, the marine painter now lying high and dry with the ebbing tide on some broad bare bank of ribbed sand, just relieved by a battle-royal of gulls and rooks from the last reproach of utter monotony; now working hard at ‘the counterfeit presentment of a green-grown wreck, all picturesque with waving tresses of weed and sea-wrack, in some stranded estuary of the Thames backwaters; and now again tossing and lopping on the uneasy bosom of the German Ocean, whose rise and fall would seem to suggest to a casual observer’s mind the physiological notion that its own included crabs and lobsters had given it a prolonged and serious fit of marine indigestion. For a couple of months at a stretch the two young artists had toiled away ceaselessly at their labor of love, painting the sea itself and all that therein is, with the eyots, creeks, rivers, sands, cliffs, banks, and inlets adjacent, in every variety of mood or feature, from its glassiest calm to its angriest tempest, with endless patience, delight, and satisfaction. They enjoyed their work, and their work repaid them. It was almost all the payment they ever got, indeed, for, like loyal sons of the Cheyne Row Club, the crew of the “Mud-Turtle” were not successful. And now, as September was more than half through, Warren Relf began to bethink him at last of Hugh Massinger, whom he had left in rural ease on dry land at Whitestrand under a general promise to return for him “in the month of the long decline of roses,” some time between the I5th and the 2Oth. So, on a windy morning, about that precise period of the year, with a northeasterly breeze setting strong across the North Sea, and a falling barometer threatening squalls, according to the printed weather report, he made his way out of the mouth of the Yare, and turned southward before the flowing tide in the direction of Whitestrand.
The sea was running high and splendid, and the two young painters, inured to toil and accustomed to danger, thoroughly enjoyed its wild magnificence. A storm to them was a study in action. They could take notes calmly of its fiercest moments. Almost every wave broke over the deck; and the patient little “Mud-Turtle,” with her flat bottom and center-board keel, tossed about like a walnut shell on the surface of the water, or drove her nose madly from time to time into the crest of a billow, to emerge triumphantly one moment later, all shining and dripping with sticky brine, in the deep trough on the
other side. Painting in such a sea was of course simply impossible; but Warren Relf, who loved his art with supreme devotion, and never missed an opportunity of catching a hint from his ever-changing model under the most unpromising circumstances, took out pencil and paper a dozen times in the course of the day to preserve at least in black and white some passing aspect of her mutable features. Potts for the most part managed sheet and helm; while Relf, in the intervals of luffing or tacking, holding hard to the mainmast with his left arm, and with the left hand just grasping his drawing-pad on the other side of the mast, jotted hastily down with his right whatever peculiar form of spray or billow happened for the moment to catch and impress his artistic fancy. It was a glorious day for those who liked it: though a landlubber would no doubt have roundly called it a frightful voyage.
