by Grant Allen
They had meant to make Whitestrand before evening; but half-way down, an incident of a sort that Warren Relf could never bear to pass intervened to delay them. They fell in casually with a North Sea trawler, disabled and distressed by last night’s gale, now scudding under bare poles before the free breeze, that churned and whitened the entire surface of the German Ocean. The men on board were in sore straits, though not as yet in immediate danger; and the yawl gallantly stood in close by her, to pick up the swimmers in case of serious accident. The shrill wind tore at the mainmast; the waves charged her in vague ranks; the gaff quivered and moaned at the shocks; and ever and anon, with a bellowing rush, the resistless sea swept over her triumphantly from stem to stern. Meanwhile, Warren Relf, eager to fix this stray episode on good white paper while it was still before his eyes, made wild and rapid dashes on his pad with a sprawling hand, which conveyed to his mind, in strange shorthand hieroglyphics, some faint idea of the scene as it passed before him.
“She’s a terrible bad sitter, this smack,” he observed in a loud voice to Potts, with good-humored enthusiasm, as they held together with struggling hands on the deck of the “Mud-Turtle.”
“The moment you think you’ve just caught her against the skyline on the crest of a wave, she lurches again, and over she goes, plump down into the trough, before you’ve had a chance to make a single mark upon your sheet of paper. Ships are always precious bad sitters at the best of times; but when you and your model are both plunging and tossing together in dirty weather on a loppy channel, I don’t believe even Turner himself could make much out of it in the way of a sketch from nature Hold hard, there, Frank! Look out for your head! She’s going to ship a thundering big sea across her bows this very minute. By Jove! I wonder how the smack stood that last high wave! Is she gone? Did it break over her? Can you see her ahead there?”
“She’s all right still,” Potts shouted from the bow, where he stood now in his oilskin suit, drenched from head to foot with the dashing spray, but cheery as ever, in true sailor fashion. “I can see her mast just showing above the crest. But it must have given her a jolly good wetting. Shall we signal the men to know if they’d like to come aboard here?”
“Signal away,” Warren Relf answered good-humouredly above the noise of the wind. “No more sketching for me to-day, I take it. The last lot she shipped wet my pad through and through with the nasty damp brine. I’d better put my sketch, as far as it goes, down below in the locker. Wind’s freshening. We’ll have enough to do to keep her nose straight in half a gale like this. We’re going within four or five points of the wind now, as it is. I wish we could run clear ahead at once for the poplar at Whitestrand. I would, too, if it weren’t for the smack. This is getting every bit as hot as I like it. But we must keep an eye upon her, if we don’t want her crew to be all dead men. She can’t live six hours longer in a gale like to-day’s, I’ll bet you any money.”
They signalled the men, but found them unwilling still, with true seafaring devotion, to abandon their ship, which had yet some hours of life left in her. They’d stick to the smack, the skipper signalled back in mute pantomime, as long as her timbers held out the water. There was nothing for it, therefore, but to lie hard by her, for humanity’s sake, as close as possible, and to make as slowly as the strength of the wind would allow, by successive tacks, for the river-mouth at Whitestrand.
All day long, they held up bravely, lurching and plunging on the angry waves; and only toward evening did they part company with the toiling smack, as it was growing dusk along the low flat stretch of shore by Dunwich. There, a fish-carrier from the North Sea, one of those fast long steamers that plow the German Ocean on the lookout for the fishing fleet whose catches they take up with all speed to the London market, fell in with them in the very nick of time, and transferring the crew on board with some little difficulty, made fast the smack or rather her wreck with a towline behind, and started under all steam to save her life for the port of Harwich. Warren Relf and his companion, despising such aid, and preferring to live it out by themselves at all hazards, were left behind alone with the wild evening, and proceeded in the growing shades of twilight to find their way up the river at Whitestrand.
“Can you make out the poplar, Frank?” Warren Relf shouted out, as he peered ahead into the deep gloom that enveloped the coast with its murky covering. “We’ve left it rather late, I’m afraid, for pushing up the creek with a sea like this! Unless we can spot the poplar distinctly, I should hardly like to risk entering it by the red light on the sandhills alone. Those must be the lamps at Whitestrand Hall, the three windows to starboard yonder. The poplar ought to show by rights a point or so west of them, with the striped buoy just a little this side of it.”
“I can make out the striped buoy by the white paint on it,” his companion answered, gazing eagerly in front of him; “but I fancy it’s a shade too dark now to be sure of the poplar. The lights of the Hall don’t seem quite regular. Still, I should think we could make the creek by the red lantern and the beacon at the hithe, without minding the tree, if you care to risk it. You know your way up and down the river as well as any man living by this time; and we’ve got a fair breeze at our backs, you see, for going up the mouth to the bend at Whitestrand.”
The wind moaned like a woman in agony. The timbers creaked and groaned and crackled. The black waves lashed savagely over the deck. The “Mud-Turtle” was almost on the shore before they knew it.
“Luff, Luff!” Relf called out hastily, as he peered once more into the deepening gloom with all his eyes. “By George! we’re wrong. I can see the poplar over yonder; do you catch it? We’re out of our bearings a quarter of a mile. We’ve gone too far now to make it this tack. We must try again, and get our points better by the high light. That was a narrow squeak of it, by Jove! Frank. I can twig where we’ve got to now, distinctly. It’s the lights in the house that led us astray. That’s not the Hall; it’s the windows of the vicarage.”
They ran out to eastward again, for more sea-room, a couple of hundred yards, or farther, and tacked afresh for the entrance of the creek, this time adjusting their course better for the open mouth by the green lamp of the beacon on the sandhills. The light fixed on their own masthead threw a glimmering ray ahead from time to time upon the angry water. It was a hard fight for mastery with the wind. The waves were setting in fierce and strong toward the creek now; but the tide and stream on the other hand were ebbing rapidly and steadily outward. They always ebbed fast at the turn of the tide, as Relf knew well: a rushing current set in then round the corner by the poplar tree, the same current that had carried out Hugh Massinger so resistlessly seaward in that little adventure of his on the morning of their first arrival at Whitestrand. Only an experienced mariner dare face that bar. But Warren Relf was accustomed to the coast, and made light of the danger that other men would have trembled at.
As they neared the poplar a second time, making straight for the mouth with nautical dexterity, a pale object on the port bow, rising and falling with each rise or fall of the waves on the bar, attracted Warren Relf’s casual attention for a single moment by its strange weird likeness to a human figure. At first, he hardly regarded the thing seriously as anything more than a bit of floating wreckage; but presently, the light from the masthead fell full upon it, and with a sudden flash he felt convinced at once it was something stranger than a mere plank or fragment of rigging.
“Look yonder, Frank,” he called out in echoing tones to his mate; “that can’t be a buoy upon the port bow there!”
The other man looked at it long and steadily. As he looked, the “Mud-Turtle” lurched once more, and cast a reflected pencil ray of light from the masthead lamp over the surface of the sea, away in the direction of the suspicious object. Both men caught sight at once of some floating white drapery, swayed by the waves, and a pale face upturned in ghastly silence to the uncertain starlight, “Port your helm hard;” Relf cried in haste. “It’s a man overboard. Washed off the smack perh
aps. He’s drowned by this time, I expect, poor fellow.”
His companion ported the helm at the word with all his might The yawl answered well in spite of the breakers. With great difficulty, between wind and tide, they lay up toward the mysterious thing slowly in the very trough of the billows that roared and danced with hoarse joy over the shallow bar; and Relf, holding tight to the sheet with one hand, and balancing himself as well as he was able on the deck, reached out with the other a stout boathook to draw the tossing body alongside within hauling distance of the “Mud-Turtle.” As he did so, the body, eluding his grasp, rose once more on the crest of the wave, and displayed to their view an open bosom and a long white dress, with a floating scarf or shawl of some thin material still hanging loose around the neck and shoulders. The face itself they couldn’t as yet distinguish; it fell back languid beneath, the spray at the top, so that only the throat and chin were visible; but by the dress and the open bosom alone, it was clear at once that the object they saw was not the corpse of a sailor. Warren Relf almost let drop the boathook in horror and surprise.
“Great heavens!” he exclaimed, turning round excitedly, “it’s a woman a lady dead in the water!”
The billow broke, and curled over majestically with resistless force into the trough below them. Its undertow sucked the “Mud-Turtle” after it fiercely toward the shore, away from the body. With a violent effort, Warren Relf, lunging forward eagerly at the lurch, seized hold of the corpse by the floating scarf. It turned of itself as the hook caught it, and displayed its face in the pale starlight. A great awe fell suddenly upon the astonished young painter’s mind. It was indeed a woman that he held now by the dripping hair a beautiful young girl, in a white dress; and the wan face was one he had seen before. Even in that dim half-light he recognized her instantly.
“Frank!” he cried out in a voice of hushed and reverent surprise “never mind the ship. Come forward and help me. We must take her on board. I know her! I know her! She’s a friend of Massinger’s.”
The corpse was one of the two young girls he had seen that day two months before sitting with their arms round one another’s waists, close to the very spot where they now lay up, on the gnarled and naked roots of the famous old poplar.
CHAPTER X.
SHUFFLING IT OFF.
The day had been an eventful one for Hugh Massinger: the most eventful and pregnant of his whole history. As long as he lived, he could never possibly forget it. It was indeed a critical turning-point for three separate lives his own, and Elsie’s, and Winifred Meysey’s. For, as Hugh had walked that morning, stick in hand and orchid in buttonhole, down the rose-embowered lane in the Squire’s grounds with Winifred, he had asked the frightened, blushing girl, in simple and straight-forward language, without any preliminary, to become his wife. His shy fish was fairly hooked at last, he thought now: no need for daintily playing his catch any longer; it was but a question, as things stood, of reel and of landing-net. The father and mother, those important accessories, were pretty safe in their way too. He had sounded them both by unobtrusive methods, with dexterous plummets of oblique inquiry, and had gauged their profoundest depths of opinion with tolerable accuracy, as to settlements and other ante-nuptial precontracts of marriage. For what is the use of catching an heiress on your own rod, if your heiress’ parents, upon whose testamentary disposition in the last resort her entire market value really depends, look askance with eyes of obvious disfavor upon your personal pretensions as their future son-in-law? Hugh Massinger was keen enough sportsman in his own line to make quite sure of his expected game before irrevocably committing himself to duck-shot cartridge. He was confident he knew his ground now; so, with a bold face and a modest assurance, he ventured, in a few plain and well-chosen words, to commend his suit, his hand, and his heart to Winifred Meysey’s favorable attention.
It was a great sacrifice, and he felt it as such. He was positively throwing himself away upon Winifred. If he had followed his own crude inclinations alone, like a romantic schoolboy, he would have waited forever and ever for his cousin Elsie. Elsie was indeed the one true love of his youth. He had always loved her and he would always love her. Twas foolish, perhaps, to indulge overmuch in these personal preferences, but after all it was very human; and Hugh acknowledged regretfully in his own heart that he was not entirely raised in that respect above the average level of human weaknesses. Still, a man, however humanesque, must not be governed by impulse alone. He must judge calmly, deliberately, impersonally, disinterestedly of his own future, and must act for the best in the long-run by the light of his own final and judicial opinion. Now, Winifred was without doubt a very exceptional and eligible chance for a briefless barrister; your sucking poet doesn’t get such chances of an undisputed heiress every day of the week, you may take your affidavit. If he let her slip by on sentimental’ grounds, and waited for Elsie poor, dear old Elsie heaven only knew how long they might both have to wait for one another and perhaps even then be finally disappointed. It was a foolish dream on Elsie’s part; for, to say the truth, he himself had never seriously entertained it. The most merciful thing to Elsie herself would be to snap it short now, once for all, before things went farther, and let her stand face to face with naked facts: ah, how hideously naked! let her know she must either look out another husband somewhere for herself, or go on earning her own livelihood in maiden meditation, fancy free, for the remaining term of her natural existence. Hugh could never help ending up a subject, however unpleasant, even in his own mind, with a poetical tag: it was a trick of manner his soul had caught from the wonted peroration of his political leaders in the first editorial column of that exalted print, the “Morning Telephone.” So he made up his mind; and he proposed to Winifred.
The girl’s heart gave a sudden bound, and the red blood flushed her somewhat pallid cheeks with hasty roses as she. listened to Hugh’s graceful and easy avowal of the profound and unfeigned love that he proffered her. She thought of the poem Hugh had read her aloud in his sonorous tones the evening before much virtue in a judiciously selected passage of poetry, well marked in delivery:
“‘He does not love me for my birth, Nor for my lands so broad and fair:
He loves me for my own true worth, And that is well,’ said Lady Clare.”
That was how Hugh Massinger loved her, she was quite sure. Had he not trembled and hesitated to ask her? Her bosom fluttered with a delicious fluttering; but she cast her eyes down, and answered nothing for a brief space. Then her heart gave her courage to look up once more, and to murmur back, in answer to his pleading look: “Hugh, I love you.” And Hugh, carried away not ungracefully by the impulse of the moment, felt his own heart thrill responsive to hers in real earnest, and in utter temporary forgetfulness of poor betrayed and abandoned Elsie. They walked back to the Hall together next minute, whispering low, in the fool’s paradise of first young love a fool’s paradise, indeed, for those two poor lovers, whose wooing set out under such evil auspices.
But when Hugh had left his landed prey at the front door of the square-built manor-house, and strolled off by himself toward the village inn, the difficulty about Elsie for the first time began to stare him openly in the face in all its real and horrid magnitude. He would have to confess and to explain to Elsie. Worst still, for a man of his mettle and his sensitiveness, he would have to apologize for and excuse his own conduct. That was unendurable that was ignominious that was even absurd. His virility kicked at it. There is something essentially insulting and degrading to one’s manhood in having to tell a girl you’ve pretended to love, that you really and truly don’t love her that you only care for her in a sisterly fashion. It is practically to unsex one’s self. A pretty girl appeals quite otherwise to the man that is in us. Hugh felt it bitterly and deeply for himself, not for Elsie. He pitied his own sad plight most sincerely. But then, there was poor Elsie to think of too. No use in the world in blinking that. Elsie loved him very, very dearly. True, they had never been engaged to one another so gre
at is the love of consistency in man, that even alone in his own mind Hugh continued to hug that translucent fiction; but she had been very fond of him, undeniably fond of him, and he had perhaps from time to time, by overt acts, unduly encouraged the display of her fondness. It gratified his vanity and his sense of his own power over women to do so; he could make them love him few men more easily and he liked to exercise that dangerous faculty on every suitable subject that flitted across his changeful horizon. The man with a mere passion for making conquests affords no serious menace to the world’s happiness; but the man with an innate gift for calling forth wherever he goes all the deepest and truest instincts of a woman’s nature is when he abuses his power the most deadly, terrible, and cruel creature known in our age to civilized humanity. And yet he is not always deliberately cruel; sometimes, as in Hugh Massinger’s case, he almost believes himself to be good and innocent.
He had warned Winifred to whisper nothing for the present to Elsie about this engagement of theirs. Elsie was his cousin, he said his only relation and he would dearly like to tell her the secret of his heart himself in private. He would see her that evening and break the news to her. “Why break it?” Winifred had asked in doubt, all unconscious. And Hugh, a strange suppressed smile playing uneasily about the corners of his thin lips, had answered with guileless alacrity of speech: “Because Elsie’s like a sister to me, you know, Winifred; and sisters always to some extent resent the bare idea of their brothers marrying.”
