by Grant Allen
Hugh was one of the very finest and most finished actors then performing on the stage of social England; but even he had a difficult part to play that stormy morning, and he went through his role, taking it altogether, with but indifferent success, though with sufficient candor to float him through unsuspected somehow. The circumstances, indeed, were terribly against him. When he fell the night before from Elsie’s window, he had bruised and shaken himself, already fatigued as he was by his desperate swim and his long unconsciousness; and it was with a violent effort, goaded on by the sense of absolute necessity alone, that he picked himself up, black bag and all, and staggered home, with one ankle strained, to his rooms at the Stannaways’. Once arrived there, after that night of terrors and manifold adventures, he locked away Elsie’s belongings cautiously in a back cupboard incriminating evidence, indeed, if anything should ever happen to come out and flung himself half undressed at last in a fever of fatigue upon the bed in the corner.
Strange to say he slept soundly. Worn out with overwork and exertion and faintness, he slept on peacefully like a tired child, till at nine o’clock Mrs. Stannaway rapped hard at the door to rouse him. Then he woke with a start from a heavy sleep, his head aching, but drowsy still, and with feverish pains in all his limbs from his desperate swim and his long immersion. He was quite unfit to get up and dress; but he rose for all that, as if all was well, and even pretended to eat some breakfast, though a cup of tea was the only thing he could really gulp down his parched throat in his horror and excitement. Last night’s events came clearly home to him now in their naked ghastliness, and with sinking heart and throbbing head, he realized the full extent of his guilt and his danger, the depth of his remorse, and the profundity of his folly.
Elsie was gone that was his first thought. There was no more an Elsie to reckon with in all this world. Her place was blank how blank he could never before have truly realized. The whole world itself was blank too. What he loved best in it all was gone clean out of it Elsie, Elsie, poor drowned, lost Elsie! His heart ached as he thought to himself of Elsie, gasping and struggling in that cold, cold sea, among those fierce wild breakers, for one last breath and knew it was he who had driven her, by his baseness and wickedness and cruelty, to that terrible end of a sweet young existence. He had darkened the sun in heaven for himself henceforth and forever. He had sown the wind, and he should reap the whirlwind. He hated himself; he hated Winifred; he hated everybody and everything but Elsie. Poor martyred Elsie! Beautiful Elsie! His own sweet, exquisite, noble Elsie! He would have given the whole world at that moment to bring her back again. But the past was irrevocable, quite irrevocable. There was nothing for a strong man now to do but to brace himself up and face the present.
“If not, what resolution from despair?” That was all the comfort his philosophy could give him.
Elsie’s things were locked up in the cupboard. If suspicion lighted upon him in any way now, it was all up with him. Elsie’s bag and jewel-case and clothing in the cupboard would alone be more than enough to hang him. Hang him! What did he care any longer for hanging? They might hang him and welcome, if they chose to try. For sixpence he would save them the trouble, and drown himself. He wanted to die. It was fate that prevented him. Why hadn’t he drowned when he might, last night? An ugly proverb that, about the man who is born to be hanged, etc., etc. Some of these proverbs are downright rude positively vulgar in the coarse simplicity and directness of their language.
He gulped down the tea with a terrible effort: it was scalding hot, and it burnt his mouth, but he scarcely noticed it. Then he pulled about the sole on his fork for a moment, to dirty the plate, and boning it roughly, gave the flesh to the cat, who ate it purring on the rug by the fireplace. He waited for a reasonable interval next before ringing the bell it takes a lone man ten minutes to breakfast but as soon as that necessary time had passed, he put on his hat, crushing it down on his head, and with fiery soul and bursting temples, strolled up, with the jauntiest air he could assume, to the Meyseys’ after breakfast.
Winifred met him at the front door. His new sweetheart was pale and terrified, but not now crying. Hugh felt himself constrained to presume upon their novel relations and insist upon a kiss she would expect it of him. It was the very first time he had ever kissed her, and, oh evil omen, it revolted him at last that he had now to do it with Elsie’s body tossed about that very moment by the cruel waves upon that angry bar or on the cold sea-bottom. It was treason to Elsie to poor dead Elsie that he should ever kiss any other woman. His kisses were hers, his heart was hers, forever and ever. But what would you have? He looked on, as he had said, as if from above, at circumstances wafting his own character and their actions hither and thither wherever they willed and this was the pass to which they had now brought him. He must play out the game play it out to the end, whatever it might cost him.
Winifred took the kiss mechanically and coldly, and handed him Elsie’s letter his own forged letter without one word of preface or explanation. Hugh was glad she did so at the very first moment it allowed him to relieve himself at once from the terrible strain of the affected gaiety he w? as keeping up just to save appearances. He couldn’t have kept it up much longer. His countenance fell visibly as he read the note or pretended to read it, for he had no need really to glance at its words every word of them all now burnt into the very fibers and fabric of his being.
“Why, what does this mean, Miss Meysey that is to say, Winifred?” he corrected himself hurriedly. “Elsie isn’t gone? She’s here this morning as usual, surely?”
As he said it he almost hoped it might be true. He could hardly believe the horrible, horrible reality. His face was pale enough in all conscience now a little too pale, perhaps, for the letter alone to justify. Winifred, eyeing him close, saw at a glance that he was deeply moved.
“She’s gone,” she said, not too tenderly either. “She went away last night, taking her things with her at least some of them. Do you know where she’s gone, Mr. Massinger? Has she written to you, as she promises?”
“Not Mr. Massinger,” Hugh corrected gravely, with a livid white face, yet affecting jauntiness. “It was agreed yesterday it should be ‘Hugh’ in future. No; I don’t at all know where she is, Winifred; I wish I did.” He said it seriously. “She hasn’t written a single line to me.”
Hugh’s answer had the very ring of truth in it for indeed it was true; and Winifred, watching him with a woman’s closeness, felt certain in her own mind that in this at least he was not deceiving her. But he certainly grew unnecessarily pale. Cousinly affection would hardly account for so much disturbance of the vaso-motor system. She questioned him closely as to all that had passed or might have passed between them these weeks or earlier. Did he know anything of Elsie’s movements or feelings? Hugh, holding the letter firmly in one hand, and playing with the key of that incriminating cupboard, in his waistcoat pocket, loosely with the other, passed with credit his examination. He had never, he said, with gay flippancy almost, been really intimate with Elsie, talked confidences with Elsie, or received any from Elsie in return. She did not know of his engagement to Winifred. Yet he feared, whatever her course might be, some man or other must be its leading motive. Perhaps but this with the utmost hesitation Warren Relf and she might have struck up a love affair.
He felt, of course, it was a serious ordeal. Apart from the profounder background of possible consequences the obvious charge of having got rid of Elsie two other unpleasant notions stared him full in the face. The first was, that the Meyseys might suspect him of having driven Elsie to run away by his proposal to Winifred. But supposing even then they never thought of that which was highly unlikely, considering the close sequence of the two events and the evident drift of Winifred’s questions there still remained the second unpleasantness that his cousin, through whom alone he had been introduced to the family should have disappeared under such mysterious circumstances. Was it likely they would wish their daughter to marry a man among whose relations such
odd and unaccountable things were likely to happen?
For, strangely enough, Hugh still wished to marry Winifred. Though he loathed her in his heart just then for not being Elsie, and even, by some illogical twist of thought, for having been the unconscious cause of Elsie’s misfortunes; though he would have died himself far rather than lived without Elsie; yet, if he lived, he wished for all that to marry Winifred. For one thing, it was the programme; and because it was the programme, he wanted, with his strict business habits, to carry it out to the bitter end. For another thing, his future all depended upon it; and though he didn’t care a straw at present for his future, he went on acting, by the pure force of habit in a prudent man, as deliberately and cautiously as if he had still the same serious stake in existence as ever. He wasn’t going to chuck up everything all at once, just because life was now an utter blank to him. He would go on as usual in the regular groove, and pretend to the world he was still ever)’ bit as interested and engaged in life as formerly.
So he brazened things out with the Meyseys somehow, and to his immense astonishment, he soon discovered they were ready dupes, in no way set against him by this untoward accident. On the contrary, instead of finding, as he had expected, that they considered this delinquency on the part of his cousin told against himself as a remote partner of her original sin, by right of heredity, he found the Squire and Mrs. Meysey nervously anxious for their part lest he, her nearest male relative, should suspect them of having inefficiently guarded his cousin’s youth, inexperience, and innocence. They were all apology, where he had looked for coldness; they were all on the defensive, where he had expected to see them vigorously carrying the war into Africa. One thing, above all others, he noted with profound satisfaction nobody seemed to doubt for one second the genuineness and authenticity of the forged letter. Whatever else they doubted, the letter was safe. They all took it fully for granted that Elsie had gone, of her own free-will, gone to the four winds, with no trace left of her; and that Hugh, in the perfect innocence of his heart, knew no more than they themselves about it.
Nothing else, of course, was talked of at Whitestrand that livelong day; and before night the gossips and quidnuncs of the village inn and the servants’ hall had a complete theory of their own account for the episode. Their theory was simple, romantic, and improbable. It had the dearly beloved spice of mystery about it. The coastguard had noticed that a ship, name unknown, with a red light at the masthead and a green on the port bow, had put in hastily about nine o’clock the night before, near the big poplar. The Whitestrand cronies had magnified this fact before nightfall, through various additions of more or less fanciful observers or non-observers for fiction, too, counts for something into a consistent story of a most orthodox elopement. Miss Elsie had let herself down by a twisted sheet out of her own window, to escape observation some said a rope, but the majority voted for the twisted sheet, as more strictly in accordance with established precedent she had slipped away to the big tree, where a gentleman’s yacht, from parts unknown, had put in cautiously, before a terrible gale, by previous arrangement, and had carried her over through a roaring sea across to the opposite coast of Flanders. Detail after detail grew apace; and before long there were some who even admitted to having actually seen a foreign-looking gentleman in a dark cloak the cloak is a valuable romantic property upon such occasions catch a whiterobed lady in his stout arms as she leaped a wild leap into an open boat from the spray-covered platform of the gnarled poplar roots. Hugh smiled a grim and hideous smile of polite incredulity as he listened to these final imaginative embellishments of the popular fancy; but he accepted in outline the romantic tale as the best possible version of Elsie’s disappearance for public acceptance. It kept the police at least from poking their noses too deep into this family affair, and it freed him from any possible tinge of blame in the eyes of the Meyseys. Nobody can be found fault with for somebody else’s elopement. Two points at least seemed fairly certain to the Whitestrand intelligence: first, that Miss Elsie had run away of her own accord,’ in the absence of the family; and second, that she neither went by road nor rail, so that only the sea or river appeared to be left by way of a possible explanation.
The Meyseys, of course, were less credulous as to detail; but even the Meyseys suspected nothing serious in the matter. That Elsie had gone was all they knew; why she went, was a profound mystery to them.
CHAPTER XIV.
LIVE OR DIE?
And all this time, what had become of Elsie and the men in the “Mud-Turtle?”
Hugh Massinger, for his part, took it for granted, from the moment he came to himself again on the bank of the salt marshes, that Elsie’s body was lying unseen full fathoms five beneath the German Ocean, and that no tangible evidence of his crime and his deceit would ever be forthcoming to prove the naked truth in all its native ugliness against him. From time to time, to be sure, one disquieting thought for a moment occurred to his uneasy mind: a back-current might perhaps cast up the corpse upon the long dike where he had himself been stranded, or the breakers on the bar might fling it ashore upon the great sands that stretched for miles on either side of the river mouth at Whitestrand. But to these terrible imaginings of the night-watches, the more judicial functions of his waking brain refused their assent on closer consideration. He himself had floated through that seething turmoil simply because he knew how to float. A woman, caught wildly by the careering current in its headlong course, would naturally give a few mad struggles for life, gasping and gulping and flinging up her hands, as those untaught to swim invariably do; but when once the stream had carried her under, she would never rise again from so profound and measureless a depth of water. He did not in any way doubt that the body had been swept away seaward with irresistible might by the first force of the outward flow, and that it now lay huddled at the bottom of the German Ocean in some deep pool, whence dredge or diver could never by human means recover it.
How differently would he have thought and acted all along had he only known that Warren Relf and his companion on the “Mud-Turtle” had found Elsie’s body floating on the surface, a limp burden, not half an hour after its first immersion.
That damning fact rendered all his bold precautions and daring plans for the future worse than useless. As things really stood, he was plotting and scheming for his own condemnation. Through the mere accident that Elsie’s body had been recovered, he was heaping up suspicious circumstantial evidence against himself by the forged letter, by the night escapade, by the wild design of entering Elsie’s bedroom at the Hall, by the mad idea of concealing at his own lodgings her purloined clothes and jewellery and belongings. If ever an inquiry should come to be raised in the way that Elsie met her death, the very cunning with which Hugh had fabricated a false scent would recoil in the end most sternly against himself. The spoor that he scattered would come home to track him. Could any one believe that an innocent man would so carefully surround himself with an enveloping atmosphere of suspicious circumstances out of pure wantonness?
And yet, technically speaking, Hugh was in reality quite innocent. Murderer as he felt himself, he had done no murder. Morally guilty though he might be of the causes which led to Elsie’s death, there was nothing of legal or formal crime to object against him in any court of so-called justice. Every man has a right to marry whom he will; and if a young woman with whom he has cautiously and scrupulously avoided contracting any definite engagement, chooses to consider herself aggrieved by his conduct, and to go incontinently, whether by accident or design, and drown herself in chagrin and despair and misery, why, that is clearly no fault of his, however much she may regard herself as injured by him. The law has nothing to do with sentiment. Judges quote no precedent from Shelley or Tennyson. If Hugh had told the whole truth, he would at least have been free from legal blame. By his extraordinary precautions against possible doubts, he had only succeeded in making himself seem guilty in the eyes even of the unromantic lawyers.
When Warren Relf drew Els
ie Challoner, a huddled mass, on board the “Mud-Turtle,” the surf was rolling so high on the bar that, with one accord, he and Potts decided together it would be impossible for them, against such a sea, to run up the tidal mouth to Whitestrand. Their piteous little dot of a craft could never face it. Wind had veered to the southeast. The only way possible now was to head her round again, and make before the shifting breeze for Lowestoft, the nearest northward harbor of refuge.
It was an awful moment. The sea roared onward through the black night; the cross-drift whirled and wreathed and eddied; the blinding foam lashed itself in volleys through the dusk and gloom against their quivering broadside. And those two men, nothing daunted, drove the “Mud-Turtle” once more across the flank of the wind, and fronted her bows in a direct line for the port of Lowestoft, in spite of wind and sea and tempest.
But how were they to manage meanwhile, in that tossing cockleshell of a boat, about the lady they had scarcely rescued? That Elsie was drowned, Warren Relf didn’t for a moment doubt; still, in every case of apparent drowning it is the duty to make sure life is really extinct before one gives up all hope; and that duty was a difficult one indeed to perform on board a tiny yawl, pitching and rolling before a violent gale, and manned against the manifold dangers of the sea by exactly two amateur sailors. But there was no help for it. The ship must drift with one mariner only. Potts did his best for the moment to navigate the dancing little yawl alone, now that they let her scud before the full force of the favoring wind, under little canvas; while Warren Relf, staggering and steadying himself in the cabin below, rolled the body round in nigs and blankets, and tried his utmost to pour a few drops of brandy down the pale lips of the beautiful girl who lay listless and apparently lifeless before him.
