by Grant Allen
He wanted nothing more than to drown with her now. “Elsie, Elsie, my darling Elsie!” he cried aloud on the top of the wave. To lose Elsie was to lose everything. The sea was running high as he neared the bar, and Elsie had disappeared as if by magic. Even in that dark black water on that moonless night he wondered he couldn’t catch a single glimpse of her white dress by the reflected starlight. But the truth was, the current had sucked her under sucked her under wildly with its irresistible force, only to fling her up again, a senseless burden, where sea and river met at last in fierce conflict among the roaring breakers that danced and shivered upon the shallow bar.
He swam about blindly, looking round him on every side through the thick darkness with eager eyes for some glimpse of Elsie’s white dress in a stray gleam of starlight; but he saw not a trace of her presence anywhere. Groping and feeling his way still with numbed limbs, that grew weary and stiff with the frantic effort, he battled on through the gurgling eddy till he reached the breakers on the bar itself. There, his strength proved of no avail he might as well have tried to stem Niagara. The great waves, rolling their serried line against the stream from the land, caught him and twisted him about resistlessly, raising him now aloft on their foaming crest, dashing him now down deep in their hollow trough, and then flinging him back again over some great curling mountain of water far on to the current from which he had just emerged with his stout endeavor. For ten minutes or more he struggled madly against those titanic enemies; then his courage and his muscle failed together, and he gave up the unequal contest out of sheer fatigue and physical inability to continue it longer. It w r as indeed an awful and appalling situation. Alone there in the dark, whirled about by a current that no man could stem, and confronted with a rearing wall of water that no man could face, he threw himself wearily back for a moment at full length, and looked up in his anguish from his floating couch to the cold stars overhead, whose faint light the spray every instant hid from his sight as it showered over him from the curling crests of the great billows beyond him. And it was to this that he had driven poor, innocent, trustful, wronged Elsie! the one woman he had ever truly loved! the one woman who, with all the force of a profound nature profounder ten thousand times than his own had truly loved him!
Elsie was tossing up and down there just as hopelessly now, no doubt. But Elsie had no pang of conscience added to torment her. She had only a broken heart to reckon with.
He let himself float idly where wind and waves might happen to bear him. There was no help for it: he could swim no farther. It was all over, all over now. Elsie was lost, and for all the rest he cared that moment less than nothing. Winifred! He scorned and hated her very name. He might drown at his ease, for anything he would ever do himself to prevent it. The waves broke over him again and again. He let them burst across his face or limbs, and floated on, without endeavoring to swim or guide himself at all. Would he never sink? Was he to float and float and float like this to all eternity?
Roar roar roar on the bar, each roar growing fainter and fainter in his ears. Clearly receding, receding still. The current was carrying him away from it now, and whirling him along in a black eddy, that set strongly southwestward toward the dike of the salt marshes.
He let himself drift wherever it might take him. It took him back, back, back, steadily, till he saw the white crest of the breakers on the ridge extend like a long gray line in the dim distance upon the sea beyond him. He was well into safer water by this time: the estuary was only very rough here. He might swim if he chose. But he did not choose. He cared nothing for life, since Elsie was gone. In a sudden revulsion of wild despair, a frantic burst of hopeless yearning, he knew, for the first time in his whole life, now it was too late, how truly and deeply and intensely he had loved her. As truly and deeply as he was capable of loving anybody or anything on earth except himself. And that, after all, was nothing too much to boast of.
Still, it was enough to overwhelm him for the moment with agonies of remorse and regret and pity, and to make him long just then and there for instant death, as the easiest escape from his own angry and accusing conscience. He wanted to die; he yearned and prayed for it. But death obstinately refused to come to his aid. He turned himself round on his face now, and striking out just once with his wearied thighs, gazed away blankly toward the foam on the bar, where Elsie’s body must still be tossing in a horrible ghastly dance of death among the careering breakers.
As he looked, a gleam of ruddy light showed for a second from a masthead just beyond the bar. A smack a smack! coming in to the river! The sight refilled him with a faint fresh hope. That hope was too like despair; but still it was something. He swam out once more with the spasmodic energy of utter despondency. The smack might still be in time to save Elsie! He would make his way out to it, though it ran him down; if it ran him down, so much the better! he would shout aloud at the top of his voice, to outroar the breakers: “A lady is drowning! Save her! save her!”
He struck out again with mad haste through the black current. This time, he had to fight against it with his wearied limbs, and to plough his way by prodigious efforts. The current was stronger, now 7 he came to face it, than he had at all imagined when he merely let himself drift on its surface. Battling with all his might against the fierce swirls, he hardly seemed to make any headway at all through the angry water. His strength was almost all used up now; he could scarcely last till he reached the smack. Great heavens, what was this? She was turning! she was turning! The surf was too much for her timbers to endure. She couldn’t make the mouth of the creek. She was luffing seaward again, and it was all up, all up with Elsie.
It was Warren Relf’s yawl, bearing down from Lowestoft, and trying for the first time to enter the river through the wall of breakers.
Oh, if he had only lain right in her path just then, as she rode over the waves, that she might run him down and sink him forever, with his weight of infamy, beneath those curling billows! He could never endure to go ashore again and to feel that he had virtually murdered Elsie.
Elsie, Elsie, poor murdered Elsie! He should hate to live, now he had murdered Elsie!
And then, as he battled still fiercely with the tide, in a flash of his nerves, he felt suddenly a wild spasm of pain seize on both his thighs, and an utter disablement affect his entire faculty of bodily motion. It was a paroxysm of cramp overwhelming inexpressible and it left him in one second powerless to move or think or act or plan, a mere dead log, incapable of anything but a cry of pain, and helpless as a baby in the midst of that cruel and unheeding eddy.
He flung himself back for dead on the water once more. A choking sensation seized hold of his senses. The sea was pouring in at his nostrils and his ears. He knew he was going, and he was glad to know it. He would rather die than live with that burden of guilt upon his black soul. The waves washed over his face in serried ranks. He didn’t mind; he didn’t struggle; he didn’t try for one instant to save himself. He floated on, unconscious at last, back, slowly back, toward the bank of the salt marsh.
When Hugh Massinger next knew anything, he was dimly conscious of lying at full length on a very cold bed, and fumbling with his fingers to pull the bed-clothes closer around him. But there was no bed-clothes, and everything about was soaking wet. He must be stretched in a pool of water, he thought so damp it was all round to the touch with a soft mattress or couch spread beneath him. He put out his hands to feel the mattress. He came upon mud, mud, deep layers of mud; all cold and slimy in the dusk of night. And then with a flash he remembered all Elsie dead! Elsie drowned! and knew he was stranded by the ebbing tide on the edge of the embankment. No hope of helping Elsie now. With a violent effort, he roused himself to consciousness, and crawled feebly on his knees to the firm ground. It was difficult work, floundering through the mud, with his numb limbs; but he floundered on, upon hands and feet, till he reached the shore, and stood at last, dripping with brine and crusted with soft slimy tidal ooze, on the broad bank of the moated dike that hemme
d in the salt marshes from the mud-bank of the estuary. It was still dark night, but the moon had risen. He could hardly say what the time might be,- for his watch had stopped, of course, by immersion in the water; but he roughly guessed, by the look of the stars, it was somewhere about half-past ten. We have a vague sense of the lapse of time even during sleep or other unconscious states; and Hugh was certain he couldn’t have been floating for much more than an hour or thereabouts.
He gazed around him vaguely at the misty meadows. He was a mile or so from the village inn. The estuary, with its acrid flats of mud, lay between him and the hard at Whitestrand. Sheets of white surf still shimmered dimly on the bar far out to sea. And Elsie was lost to him irrevocably.
He sat down and pondered on the bank for a while. Those five minutes were the turning-point of his life. What should he do and how comport himself under these sudden and awful and unexpected circumstances? Dazed as he was, he saw even then the full horror of the dilemma that hedged him in. Awe and shame brought him back with a rush to reason. If he went home and told the whole horrid truth, everybody would say he was Elsie’s murderer. Perhaps they would even suggest that he pushed her in to get rid of her. He dared not tell it; he dared not face it. Should he fly the village the county the country? That would be foolish and precipitate indeed, not to say wicked: a criminal surrender. All was not lost, though Elsie was lost to him. In his calmer mood, no longer heroic with the throes of despondency, sitting shivering there with cold in the keen breeze, between his dripping clothes, upon the bare swept bank, he said to himself many times over that all was not lost; he might still go back and marry Winifred.
Hideous horrible ghastly inhuman: he reckoned even so his chances with Winifred.
The shrewd wind blew chill upon his wet clothes. It bellowed and roared with hoarse groans round the stakes on the dike-sluices. His head was whirling still with asphyxia and numbness. He felt hardly in a condition to think or reason. But this was a crisis, a life-and-death crisis. He must pull himself together like a man, and work it all out, his doubtful course for the next three hours, or else sink for ever in a sea of obloquy, remembered only as Elsie’s murderer. Everything was at stake for him live or die. Should he jump once more into the cold wild stream or go home quietly like a sensible man, and play his hand out to marry Winifred?
If he meant to go, he must go at once. It was no use to think of delaying or shilly-shallying. By eleven o’clock the inn would be closed. He must steal in, unperceived, by the open French window’s before eleven, if he intended still to keep the game going. But he must have his plan of action definitely mapped out none the less beforehand; and to map it out, he must wait a moment still; he must sum up chances in this desperate emergency.
Life is a calculus of varying probabilities. Was it likely he had been perceived at the Hall that evening? Did anybody know he had been walking with Elsie?
He fancied not he believed not. He was certain not, now he came to think of it. Thank heaven, he had made the appointment verbally. If he’d written a note, that damning evidence might have been produced against him at the coroner’s inquest. Inquest? Unless they found the body Elsie’s body pah! how horrible to think of but still, a man must steel himself to face facts, however ghastly and however horrible. Unless they found the body, then, there would be no inquest; and if only things were managed well and cleverly, there needn’t even be any inquiry. Unless they found the body Elsie’s body poor Elsie’s body, whirled about by the waves! But they would never find it they would never find it. The current had sucked it under at once, and carried it away careering madly to the sea. It would toss and whirl on the breakers for a while, and then sink unseen to the fathomless abysses of the German Ocean.
He hated himself for thinking all this with Elsie drowned or not yet drowned even and yet he thought it, because he was not man enough to face the alternative.
Had Elsie told any one she was going to meet him? No; she wouldn’t even tell Winifred of that, he was sure. She met him there often by appointment, it was true, but always quietly: they kept their meetings a profound secret between them.
Had any one seen them that evening together? He couldn’t remember noticing anybody. How shrill the wind blew through his dripping clothes. It cut him in two; and his head reeled still. No; nobody, nobody. He was quite safe upon that score at least Nobody knew he was out with Elsie.
Could he go back, then, and keep it all quiet, saying nothing himself, but leaving the world to form its own conclusions? A sudden thought flashed in an intuitive moment across his brain. A Plan! a Plan! How happy! A Policy! He saw his way out of it all at once. He could set everything right by a simple method. Yes, that would do. It was bold, but not risky. He might go now: the scheme for the future was all matured. Nobody need ever suspect anything. A capital idea! Honor was saved; and he might still go back and marry Winifred.
Elsie dead! Elsie drowned! The world lost, and his life a blank! But he might still go back and marry Winifred.
He rose, and shook himself in the wind like a dog. The Plan was growing more definite and rounded in his mind each moment. He turned his face slowly toward the lights at Whitestrand. The estuary spread between him and them with its wide mud-flats. Cold and tired as he was, he must make at all speed for the point where it narrowed into the running stream near Snade meadows. He must swim the river there, with what legs he had left, and cross to the village. There was no time to be lost. It was neck or nothing. At all hazards, he must do his best to reach the inn before the doors were shut and locked at eleven.
When he left the spot where he had been tossed ashore, his idea for the ‘future was fully worked out. He ran along the bank with eager haste in the direction of Whitestrand. Once only did he turn and look behind him. A ship’s light gleamed feebly in the offing across the angry sea. She was beating up against a head wind to catch the breeze outside toward Lowestoft or Yarmouth.
CHAPTER XII.
THE PLAN IN EXECUTION.
Hugh hurried along the dike that bounded the salt-marsh meadows seaward, till he reached the point in his march up where the river narrowed abruptly into a mere thirdclass upland stream. There he jumped in, and swam across, as well as he was able in the cold dark water, to the opposite bank. Once over, he had still to straggle as best he might through two or three swampy fields, and to climb a thickset hedge or two regular bullfinches before he fairly gained the belated little high-road. His head swam. Wet and cold and miserable without, he was torn within by conflicting passions; but he walked firm and erect now along the winding road in the deep gloom, fortunately never meeting a soul in the half-mile or so of way that lay between the point where he had crossed the stream and the Fisherman’s Rest by the ‘bank at Whitestrand. He was glad of that, for it was his cue now to escape observation. In his own mind, he felt himself a murderer; and every flicker of the wind among the honey-suckles in the hedge, every rustle of the leaves on the trees overhead, every splash of the waves upon the distant shore, made his heart flutter, and his breath stop short in response, though he gave no outer sign of fear or compunction in his even tread and erect bearing the even tread and erect bearing of a proud, self-confident, English gentleman.
How lucky that his rooms at the inn happened to be placed on the ground-floor, and that they opened by French windows down to the ground on to the little garden! How luckily, too, that they lay on the hither side of the door and the taproom, where men were sitting late over their mug of beer, singing and rollicking in vulgar mirth with their loud half-Danish, East-Anglian merriment! He stole through the garden on tiptoe, unperceived, and glided like a ghost into the tiny sitting-room. The lamp burned brightly on the parlor table, as it had burnt all evening, in readiness for his arrival. He slipped quietly, on tiptoe still, into the bedroom behind, tossed off a stiff glassful of brandy-and-water cold, and changed his clothes from head to foot with as much speed and noiselessness as circumstances permitted. Then, treading more easily, he went out once more with a bold f
ront into the other room, flung himself down at his ease in the big armchair, took up a book, pretending to read, and rang the bell with ostentatious clamor for the good landlady. His plan was mature; he would proceed to put it into execution.
The landlady, a plentiful body of about fifty, came in with evident surprise and hesitation. “Lord a mussy, sar,” she cried aloud in a slight flurry, “I thowt yow wor out; an’ them min a-singin’ and a-bellerin’ like that cover there in the bar! Stannaway’ll be some riled when he find yow’re come in an’ all that noise gooin’ on in the house! ‘Teen’t respectable. But we din’t hear ye. I hoop yow’ll ‘scuse ’em: they’re oonly the fishermen from Snade, enjoyin’ theirselves in the cool of the evenin’.”
Hugh made a manful effort to appear unconcerned. “I came in an hour ago or more,” he replied, smiling a sugar-of-lead smile. “But, pray don’t interfere with these good people’s merriment for worlds, I beg of you. I should be sorry, indeed, if I thought I put a stopper upon anybody’s innocent amusement anywhere. I don’t want to be considered a regular kill-joy. I rang the bell, Mrs. Stannaway, for a bottle of seltzer.”
It was a simple way of letting them know he was really there; and though the lie about the length of time he had been home was a fairly audacious one for somebody might have come in meanwhile to trim the lamp, or look if he was about, and so detect the falsehood he saw at once, by Mrs. Stannaway’s face, that it passed muster without rousing the slightest suspicion.
