by Grant Allen
For as yet Elsie herself suspected nothing. It was best, Hugh thought, she should suspect nothing. That was a cardinal point in his easy-going practical philosophy of life. He never went half-way to meet trouble. Till Winifred had accepted him, why worry poor dear Elsie’s gentle little soul with what was, after ‘all, a mere remote chance, a contingent possibility? He would first make quite sure, by actual trial, where he stood with Winifred; and then and then, like a thunderbolt from a clear sky, he might let the whole truth burst in full force at once upon poor lonely Elsie’s devoted head. Meanwhile, with extraordinary cleverness and care, he continued to dissemble. He never made open love to Winifred before Elsie’s face; on the contrary, he kept the whole small comedy of his relations with Winifred so skillfully concealed from her feminine eyes, that to the very last moment Elsie never even dreamt of her pretty pupil as a possible rival, or regarded her in any other conceivable light than as the nearest of friends and the dearest of sisters. Whenever Hugh spoke of Winifred to Elsie at all, he spoke of her lightly, almost slightingly, as a nice little girl, in her childish way though much too blue-eyed with a sort of distant bread-and-butterish schoolroom approbation, which wholly misled and hoodwinked Elsie as to his real intentions. And whenever he spoke of Elsie to Winifred, he spoke of her jestingly, with a good-humored, unmeaning, brotherly affection that made the very notion of his ever contemplating marriage with her seem simply ridiculous. She was to him indeed as the deceased wife’s sister is in the eye of the law to the British widower. With his easy, off-hand London cleverness, he had baffled and deceived both those innocent, simple-minded, trustful women; and he stood face to face now with a general eclaircissement which could no longer be delayed, but whose ultimate consequences might perhaps prove fatal to all his little domestic arrangements.
Would Elsie in her anger set Winifred against him? Would Winifred, justly indignant at his conduct to Elsie, refuse, when she learned the whole truth to marry him?
Nonsense nonsense. No cause for alarm. He had never really been engaged to Elsie he had said so to her face a thousand times. If Elsie chose to misinterpret his kind attentions, bestowed upon her solely as his one remaining cousin and kinswoman, the only other channel for the blood of the Massingers, surely Winifred would never be so foolish as to fall blindly into Elsie’s self-imposed error, and to hold him to a bargain he had over and over again expressly repudiated. He was a barrister, and he knew his ground in these matters. Chitty on Contract lays it down as an established principle of English law that free consent of both parties forms a condition precedent and essential part of the very existence of a compact of marriage.
With such transparent internal sophisms did Hugh Massinger strive all day to stifle and smother his own conscience; for every man always at least pretends to keep up appearances in his private relations with that inexorable domestic censor. But as evening came on, cigarette in mouth, he strolled round after dinner, by special appointment, to meet Elsie at the big poplar. They often met there, these warm summer nights; and on this particular occasion, anticipating trouble, Hugh had definitely arranged with Elsie beforehand to come to him by eight at the accustomed trysting-place. The Meyseys and Winifred had gone out to dinner at a neighboring vicarage; but Elsie had stopped at home on purpose, on the hasty plea of some slight passing headache. Hugh had specially asked her to wait and meet him. Better get it all over at once, he thought to himself, in his shortsighted wisdom like the measles or the chicken-pox and know straight off exactly where he stood in his new position with these two women.
Women were the greatest nuisances in life. For his own part, now he came to look the thing squarely in the face, he really wished he was well quit of them all for good and ever.
He was early for his appointment; but by the tree he found Elsie, in her pretty white dress, already waiting for him. His heart gave a jump, a pleased jump, as he saw her sitting there before her time. Dear, dear Elsie; she was very, very fond of him! He would have given worlds to fling his arms tight around her then, and strain her to his bosom and kiss her tenderly. He would have given worlds, but not his reversionary chances in the Whitestrand property. Worlds don’t count; the entire fee-simple of Mars and Jupiter would fetch nothing in the real-estate market. He was bound by contract to Winifred now, and he must do his best to break it gently to Elsie.
He stepped up and kissed her quietly on the forehead, and took her hand in his like a brother. Elsie let it lie in her own without remonstrance. They rose and walked in lovers’ guise along the bank together. His heart sank within him at the hideous task he had next to perform nothing less than to break poor Elsie’s heart for her. If only he could have shuffled out of it sideways anyhow! But shuffling was impossible. He hated himself; and he loved Elsie. Never till that moment did he know how he loved her.
This would never do! He was feeling like a fool. He crushed down the love sternly in his heart, and began to talk about indifferent subjects the wind, the river, the rose-show at the vicarage. But his voice trembled, betraying him still against his will; and he could not refrain from stealing sidelong looks at Elsie’s dark eyes now and again, and observing how beautiful she was, after all, in a rare and exquisite type of beauty. Winifred’s blue eyes and light-brown hair, Winifred’s small mouth and molded nose, Winifred’s insipid smile and bashful blush, were cheap as dirt in the matrimonial lottery. She had but a doll-like, Lowther Arcade style of prettiness. Maidenly as she looked, one twist more of her nose, one shade lighter in her hair, and she would become simply barmaidenly. But Elsie’s strong and powerful, earnest face, with its serious lips and its long black eyelashes, its profound pathos and its womanly dignity, its very irregularity and faultiness of outline, pleased him ten thousand times more than all your baby-faced beauties of the conventional, stereotyped, ballroom pattern. He looked at her long and sighed often. Must he really break her heart for her? At last he could restrain that unruly member, his tongue, no longer. “Elsie,” he cried, eying her full in a genuine outburst of spontaneous admiration, “I never in all my life saw any one anywhere one-half so beautiful and graceful as you are!”
Elsie smiled a pleased smile. “And yet,” she murmured, with a half malicious, teasing tone of irony, “we’re not engaged, Hugh, after all, you remember.”
Her words came at the very wrong moment; they brought the hot blood at a rush into Hugh’s cheek. “No,” he answered coldly, with a sudden revulsion and a spasmodic effort; “we’re not engaged nor ever will be, Elsie!”
Elsie turned round upon him with sudden abruptness in blank bewilderment. She was not angry; she was not even astonished; she simply failed altogether to take in his meaning. It had always seemed to her so perfectly natural, so simply obvious that she and Hugh were sooner or later to marry one another; she had always regarded Hugh’s frequent reminder that they were not engaged as such a mere playful warning against too much precipitancy; she had always taken it for granted so fully and unreservedly that whenever Hugh was rich enough to provide for a wife he would tell her so plainly, and carry out the implied engagement between them that this sudden announcement of the exact opposite meant to her ears less than nothing. And now, when Hugh uttered those cruel, crushing, annihilating words, “Nor ever will be, Elsie,” she couldn’t possibly take in their reality at the first blush, or believe in her own heart that he really intended anything so wicked, so merciless, so unnatural.
“Nor ever will be!” she cried, incredulous. “Why, Hugh, Hugh, I I don’t understand you.”
Hugh steeled his heart with a violent strain to answer back in one curt, killing sentence: “I mean it, Elsie; I’m going to marry Winifred.”
Elsie gazed back at him in speechless surprise. “Going to marry Winifred?” she echoed at last vaguely, after a long pause, as if the words conveyed no meaning to her mind. “Going to marry Winifred? To marry Winifred! Hugh, did you really and truly say you were going to marry Winifred?”
“I proposed to her this morning,” Hugh answered outr
ight, with a choking throat and a glassy eye; “and she accepted me, Elsie; so I mean to marry her.”
“Hugh!”
She uttered only that one short word, in a tone of awful and unspeakable agony. But her bent brows, her pallid face, her husky voice, her startled attitude, said more than a thousand words, however wild, could possibly have said for her. She took it in dimly and imperfectly now; she began to grasp what Hugh was talking about; but as yet she could not understand to the full all the man’s profound and unfathomed infamy. She looked at him feebly for some word of explanation. Surely he must have some deep and subtle reason of his own for this astonishing act and fact of furtive treachery. Some horrible combination of adverse circumstances, about which she knew and could know nothing, must have driven him against his will to this incredible solution of an insoluble problem. He could not of his own mere motion have proposed to Winifred. She looked at him hard: he quailed before her scrutiny.
“I love you, Elsie,” he burst out with an irresistible impulse at last, as she gazed through and through him from her long black lashes.
Elsie laid her hand on his shoulder blindly. “You love me,” she murmured. “Hugh, Hugh, you still love me?”
“I always loved you, Elsie,” Hugh answered bitterly with a sudden pang of abject remorse; “and as long as I live I shall always love you.”
“And yet you are going to marry Winifred!”
“Elsie! We were never, never engaged.”
She turned round upon him fiercely with a burst of horror. He, to take refuge in that hollow excuse! “Never engaged!” she cried, aghast. “You mean it, Hugh? you mean that mockery? And I, who would have given up my life for love of you!”
He tried to assume a calm judicial tone. “Let us be reasonable, Elsie,” he said, with an attempt at ease, “and talk this matter over without sentiment or hysterics. You knew very well I was too poor to marry; you knew I always said we were only cousins; you knew I had my way in life to make. You could never have thought I really and seriously dreamt of marrying you!”
Elsie looked up at him with a scared white face. That Hugh should descend to such transparent futilities! “This is all new to me,” she moaned out in a dazed voice. “All, all quite, quite new to me.”
“But, Elsie, I have said it over and over a thousand times before.”
She gazed back at him like a stone. “Ah, yes; but till to-day,” she murmured slowly, “you never, never, never meant it.”
He sat down, unmanned, on the grass by the bank. She seated herself by his side, mechanically as it were, with her hand on his arm, and looked straight in front of her with a vacant stare at the angry water. It was growing dark. The shore was dark, and the sea, and the river. Everything was dark and black and gloomy around her. She laid his hand one moment in her own. “Hugh!” she cried, turning toward him with appealing pathos, “y “don’t mean it now: you will never mean it. You’re only saying it to try and prove me. Tell me it’s that. You’re yourself still. O Hugh, my darling, you can never mean it!”
Her words burnt into his brain like liquid fire; and the better self within him groaned and faltered; but he crushed it down with an iron heel. The demon of avarice held his sordid soul. “My child,” he said, with a tender inflection in his voice as he said it, “we must understand one another. I do seriously intend to marry Winifred Meysey.”
“Why?”
There was a terrible depth of suppressed earnestness in that sharp short why, wrung out of her by anguish, as of a woman who asks the reason of her death-warrant. Hugh Massinger answered it slowly and awkwardly with cumbrous, round-about, self-exculpating verbosity. As for Elsie, she sat like a statue and listened: rigid and immovable, she sat there still; while Hugh, for the very first time in her whole experience, revealed the actual man he really was before her appalled and horrified and speechless presence. He talked of his position, his prospects, his abilities. He talked of journalism, of the bar, of promotion. He talked of literature, of poetry, of fame. He talked of money, and its absolute need to man and woman in these latter days of ours. He talked of Winifred, of Whitestrand, and of the Meysey manor-house. “It’ll be best in the end for us both, you know, Elsie,” he said argumentatively, in his foolish rigmarole, mistaking her silence for something like unwilling acquiescence. “Of course I shall be very fond of you, as I’ve always been fond of you like a cousin only and I’ll be a brother to you now as long as I live; and when Winifred and I are really married, and I live here at Whitestrand, I shall be able to do a great deal more for you, and help you by every means in my power, and introduce you freely into our own circle, on different terms, you know, where you’ll have chances of meeting well, suitable persons. You must see yourself it’s the best thing for us both. The idea of two penniless people like you and me marrying one another in the present state of society is simply ridiculous.”
She heard him out to the bitter end, revealing the naked deformity of his inmost nature, though her brain reeled at it, without one passing word of reproach or dissent. Then she said in an icy tone of utter horror: “Hugh!”
“Yes, Elsie.”
“Is that all?”
“That is all.”
“And you mean it?”
“I mean it.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, before you kill me outright, Hugh, Hugh! is it really true? Are you realty like that? Do you really mean it?”
“I really mean to marry Winifred.”
Elsie clasped her two hands on either side of her head, as if to hold it together from bursting with her agony. “Hugh,” she cried, “it’s foolish, I know, but I ask you once more, before it’s too late, in sight of heaven, I ask you solemnly, are you seriously in earnest? Is that what you’re made of? Are you going to desert me? To desert and betray me?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Hugh answered stonily, rising as if to go for he could stand it no longer. “I’ve never been engaged to you. I always told you so. I owe you nothing. And now I mean to marry Winifred.”
With a cry of agony, she burst wildly away from him. She saw it all now; she understood to the full the cruelty and baseness of the man’s innermost underlying nature. Fair outside; but false, false, false to the core! Yet even so, she could scarcely believe it. The faith of a lifetime fought hard for life in her. He, that Hugh she had so loved and trusted he, the one Hugh in all the universe he to cast her off with such callous selfishness! He to turn upon her now with his empty phrases! He to sell and betray her for a Winifred and a manor-house! Oh, the guilt and sin of it! Her head reeled and swam round deliriously. She hardly knew what she felt or did. Mad with agony, love, and terror, she rushed away headlong from his polluted presence not from Hugh, but from this fallen idol. He saw her white dress disappearing fast through the deep gloom in the direction of the poplartree, and he groped his way after her, almost as mad as herself, struck dumb with remorse and awe and shame at the ruin he had visibly and instantly wrought in the fabric of that trustful girl’s whole being.
One moment she fled and stumbled in the dark along the grassy path toward the roots of the poplar. Then he caught a glimpse of her for a second, dimly silhouetted in the faint starlight, a wan white figure with outstretched arms against the black horizon. She was poising, irresolute, on the gnarled roots. It was but for the twinkling of an eye that he saw her; next instant, a splash, a gurgle, a shriek of terror, and he beheld her borne wildly away, a helpless burden, by that fierce current toward the breakers that glistened white and roared hoarsely in their savage joy on the bar of the river.
In her agony of disgrace, she had fallen, rather than thrown herself in. As she stood there, undecided, on the slippery roots, with all her soul burning within her, her head swimming and her eyes dim, a bruised, humiliated, hopeless creature, she had missed her foothold on the smooth worn stump, slimy with lichens, and raising her hands as if to balance herself, had thrown herself forward half wittingly, half unconsciously, on the tender mercies of the rushing stream. When
she returned for a moment, a little later, to life and thought, it was with a swirling sensation of many waters, eddying and seething in mad conflict round her faint numb form. Strange roaring noises thundered in her ear. A choking sensation made her gasp for breath. What she drank in with her gasp was not air, but water salt, brackish water, an overwhelming flood of it. Then she sank again, and was dimly aware of the cold chill ocean floating around her on every side. She took a deep gulp, and with it sighed out her sense of life and action. Hugh was lost to her, and it was all over. She could die now. She had nothing to live for. There was no Hugh; and she had not killed herself.
Those two dim thoughts were the last she knew as her eyes closed in the rushing current: there had never been a Hugh; and she had fallen in by accident.
CHAPTER XI
SINK OR SWIM?
Hugh was selfish, heartless, and unscrupulous; but he was not physically a coward, a cur, or a palterer. Without one second’s thought, he rushed wildly down to the water’s edge, and balancing himself for a plunge, with his hands above his head, on the roots of the big tree, he dived boldly into that wild current, against whose terrific force he had once already struggled so vainly on the morning of his first arrival at Whitestrand. Elsie had had but a few seconds’ start of him; with his powerful arms to aid him in the quest, he must surely overtake and save her before she could drown, even in that mad swirling tidal torrent. He flung himself on the water with all his force, and goaded by remorse, pity, and love for, after all, he loved her, he loved her he drew unwonted strength from the internal fires, as he pushed back the fierce flood on either side with arms and thews of feverish energy. At each strong push, he moved forward apace with the gliding current, and in the course of a few strokes he was already many yards on his way seaward from the point at which he had originally started. But his boots and clothes clogged his movements terribly, and his sleeves in particular so impeded his arms that he could hardly use them to any sensible advantage. He felt conscious at once that, under such hampering conditions, it would be impossible to swim for many minutes at a stretch. He must find Elsie and save her almost immediately, or both must go down and drown together.
