by Grant Allen
“A telegram from London!” Warren Relf cried in blank surprise. “Do you think Miss Challoner’s in London, then? That’s very remarkable. A telegram to Massinger! asking you to send her luggage on to London! You’re quite sure it came from London, are you?”
“Quite sure! Why, I’ve got it in my pocket this very moment, my dear sir,” the Squire replied somewhat testily. “When an elder man says “My dear sir” to a very much younger one, you may take it for granted he always means to mark his strong disapprobation of the particular turn the talk has taken.) “Here it is look: To Hugh Massinger, Fisherman’s Rest, Whitestrand, Suffolk. Ask Winifred to send the rest of my luggage and property to 27, Holmbury Place, Duke Street, St. James’. Explanations by post hereafter. Elsie Challoner.’ And here’s the letter she wrote to Winifred: a very disappointing, disheartening letter. I’d like you to read it, as you seem interested in the girl. It’s an immense mistake ever to be interested in anybody anywhere! A very bad lot, after all, I’m afraid; though she’s clever, of course, undeniably clever. We had her with the best credentials, too, from Girton. We’re only too thankful now to think she should have associated for so very short a time with my daughter Winifred.”
Warren Relf took the letter and telegram from the Squire’s hand in speechless astonishment. This was evidently a plot a dark and extraordinary plot of Massinger’s. Just at first he could hardly unravel its curious intricacies. He knew the address in Holmbury Place well; it was where the club porter of the Cheyne Row lived. But he read the letter with utter bewilderment.
Then the whole truth dawned piecemeal upon his astonished mind as he read it over and over slowly. It was all a lie a hideous, hateful lie. Hugh Massinger believed that Elsie was drowned. He had forged the letter to Winifred to cover the truth, and, incredible as it seemed to a straightforward, honest nature like Warren Relf’s, he had managed to get the telegram sent from London by some other person, in Elsie’s name, and to have Elsie’s belongings forwarded direct to the club porter’s, as if at her own request, by Miss Meysey. Warren Relf stood aghast with horror at this unexpected revelation of Massinger’s utter baseness and extraordinary cunning. He had suspected the man of heartlessness and levity; he had never suspected him of anything like so profound a capacity for serious crime for forgery and theft and concealment of evidence.
His fingers trembled as he held and examined the two documents. At all hazards, he must show them to Miss Challoner. It was right she should know herself for exactly what manner of man she had thrown herself away. He hesitated a moment, then he said boldly: “These papers are very important to me, as casting light on the whole matter. I’m an acquaintance of Massinger’s, and I’m deeply interested in the young lady. It’s highly desirable she should be traced and looked after. I have some reason to suspect where she is at present I want to ask a favor of you now. Will you lend me these documents, for three days only, and will you kindly mention to nobody at present the fact of your having seen me or spoken to me here this morning?” To gain time at least was always something.
The Squire was somewhat taken aback at first by this unexpected request; but Warren Relf looked so honest and true as he asked it, that, after a few words of hesitation and explanation, the Squire, convinced of his friendly intentions, acceded to both his propositions at once. It flashed across his mind as a possible solution that the painter had been pestering Elsie with too-pressing attentions, and that Elsie, with hysterical girlish haste, had run away from him to escape them or perhaps only to make him follow her. Anyhow, there would be no great harm in his tracking her down. “If the girl’s in trouble, and you think you can help her,” he said good-naturedly, “I don’t mind giving you what assistance I can in this matter. You can have the papers. Send them back next week or the week after. I’m going to Scotland for a fortnight’s shooting now at Farquharson’s of Invertanar and I shan’t be back till the 10th or 11th. But I’m glad somebody has some idea where the girl is. As it seems to be confidential, I’ll ask no questions at present about her; but I do hope she hasn’t got into any serious mischief.”
“She has got into no mischief at all of any sort,” Warren Relf answered slowly and seriously. “You are evidently laboring under a complete misapprehension, Mr. Meysey, as to her reasons for leaving you. I have no doubt that misapprehension will be cleared up in time. Miss Challoner’s motives, I can assure you, were perfectly right and proper; only the action of another person has led you to mistake her conduct in the matter.”
This was mysterious, and the Squire hated mystery; but after all, it favored his theory and besides, the matter was to him a relatively unimportant one. It didn’t concern his own private interest. He merely suspected Warren Relf of having got himself mixed up in some foolish love affair with Elsie Challoner, his daughter’s governess, and he vaguely conceived that one or other of them had taken a very remarkable and romantic way of wriggling out of it. Moreover, at that precise moment his train came in; and since time and train wait for no man, the Squire, with a hasty farewell to the young painter, installed himself forthwith on the comfortable cushions of a first-class carriage, and steamed unconcernedly out of Almundham Station.
It was useless for Warren Relf now to go on to Whitestrand. To show himself there would be merely to display his hand openly before Hugh Massinger. The caprice of circumstances had settled everything for him exactly as he would have wished it. It was lucky indeed that’ the Squire would be away for a whole fortnight; his absence would give them time to concert a connected plan of action, and to devise means for protecting Elsie. For to Warren Relf that was now the one great problem in the case how to hush the whole matter up, without exposing Elsie’s wounded heart to daws and jays without making her the matter of unnecessary suspicion, or the subject of common gossip and censorious chatter. At all costs, it must never be said that Miss Challoner had tried to drown herself in spite and jealousy at Whitestrand poplar, because Hugh Massinger had ventured to propose to Winifred Meysey.
That was how the daws and jays would put it, after their odious kind, over the five o’clock tea, in their demure drawing-rooms.
What Elsie herself would say to it all, or think of doing in these difficult circumstances, Warren Relf did not in the least know. As yet, he was only very imperfectly informed as to the real state of the case in all its minor details. But he knew this much that he must screen Elsie at all hazards from the slanderous tongues of five o’clock tea-tables, and that the story must be kept as quiet as possible, safeguarded by himself, his mother, and his sister.
So he took the next train back to Lowestoft, to consult at leisure on these new proofs of Hugh Massinger’s guilt with his domestic counselors.
CHAPTER XVI.
FROM INFORMATION RECEIVED.
At Whitestrand itself, that same afternoon, Hugh Massinger sat in his own little parlor at the village inn, feverish and eager, as he had always been since that terrible night when “Elsie was drowned,” as he firmly believed without doubt or question; and in the bar across the passage, a couple of new-comers, rough waterside characters, were talking loudly in the seafaring tongue about some matter of their own over a pint of beer and a pipe of tobacco. Hugh tried in vain for many minutes to interest himself in the concluding verses of his “Death of Alaric” anything for an escape from this gnawing remorse but his Hippocrene was dry, his Pegasus refused to budge a feather: he could find no rhymes and grind out no sentiments; till, angry with himself at last for his own unproductiveness, he leaned back in his chair with profound annoyance and listened listlessly to the strange disjointed echoes of gossip that came to him in fragments through the half-open door from the adjoining taproom. To his immense surprise, the talk was not now of topsails or of spinnakers: conversation seemed to have taken a literary turn; he caught more than once through the haze of words the unexpected names of Charles Dickens and Rogue Riderhood.
The oddity of their occurrence in such company made him prick up his ears. He strained his hearing to
catch the context.
“Yis,” the voice was drawling out, in very pure Suffolk, just tinged with the more metropolitan Wapping accent; “I read that there book, ‘Our Mutual Friend,’ I think he call it. A mate o’ mine, he say to me one day, ‘Bill,’ he say, ‘he ha’ bin a-takin’ yow off, bor. He ha’ showed yow up in print, under the naame o’ Roogue Ridenhood,’ he say, ‘and yow owt to read it, if oonly for the likeness. Blow me if he heen’t got yow what ye call proper.”Yow don’t mean that?’ I say, ‘cos I thowt he was ajookin’, ye know. ‘I dew, though,’ he answer; ‘and yow must look into it.’ Well, I got howd o’ the book, an’ I read it right throu’; leastways, my missus, she read it out loud to me; she ha’ got more larnin’ than me, ye know; and the whool lot is what I call a bargain o’ squit. It’s noo more like me than chalk’s like cheese.”
“The cap doon’t fare to fit yow, then,” the other voice retorted, with a gurgle of tobacco. “He heen’t drew yow soo any one would know who it is?”
“Know me? I should think not. What he say’s a parcel of rubbidge. This here Roogue Ridenhood, accordin’ to the tale, ye see, he used to row about Limehouse Reach, a-searchin’ for bodies.”
“Searchin’ for bodies!” the second man repeated, with an incredulous whiff. “Why, what, the deuce and turfy did he want to do that for?”
“Well, that’s jest where it is, doon’t ye see? He done it for a livin’. ‘For a livin’, I say, when my missus up an’ read that part out to me; ‘why, what manner o’ livin’ could a poor beggar make out o’ that?’ I say. ‘It een’t as though a body was wuth anything nowadays, as a body, I say, argifyin’ like. ‘A man what knew anything about the riverside wouldn’t a wroot such rubbidge as that, an’ put it into a printed book, what ought to be ackerate. My belief is,’ I say, ‘that that there Dickens is an overrated man. In fact, the man’s a fule. A body nowadays, whether it be a drownded body or a nat’ral one, een’t wuth nothin’, not the clothes it stand upright in, as a body,’ I put it. Times goon by,’ I say to har, ‘a body was actshally a body, an’ wuth savin’ for itself, afore body-snatchin’ was done away wooth by that there ‘Xatamony Act. But what is it now? Wuth half a crown for landin’ it, paid by the parish, if it’s landed in Essex, or five bob if yow tow it cover Surrey side of river. Not but what I grant yow there’s bodies an’ bodies. If a nob drownd hisself, why then, in course, there’s sometimes as much as fifty pound, or maybe a hundred, set on the body. His friends are glad to get the corpse back, an’ prove his death, an’ hev it buried reglar in the family churchyard. Saves a deal in lawyer’s expenses, that do. I doon’t deny but what they offer free enough for a nob. But how many nobs goo and drownd theirselves in a season, do yow suppose? And w r ho that knew anything about the river would goo a-lookin’ for nobs in Limehouse Reach or down about Bermondsey way?’”
“It stand to reason they woon’t, Bill,” the other voice answered with a quiet chuckle.
“In course it stand to reason,” Bill replied warmly with an emphatic expletive. “When a nob drownd hisself, he doon’t hull hisself off London Bridge; no, nor off Blackfriars nather, I warrant ye. He doon’t put hisself out aforehand for nothin’ like that, takin’ a ‘bus into the city out o’ pure fulishness. He jest clap his hat on his hid an’ stroll down to Westminster Bridge, or to Charen Cross or Waterloo a lot on ’em goo cover Waterloo, pleece or no pleece; an’ he jump in cloose an’ handy to his own door, in a way of speakin’, and a done wooth it. But what’s the use of lookin’ for him arter that below bridge, down Limehouse way? Anybody what know the river know well enough that a body startin’ from Waterloo, or maybe from Westminster, doon’t goo down to Limehouse, ebb or flow, nor nothin’ like it. It get into the whirlpool off Saunders’ wharf, an’ ketch the back-current, and turn round and round till it’s flung up by the tide, as yow may say, upward, on the mud at Milbank, or by Lambeth Stangate. Soo there een’t a livin’ to be made anyhow by pickin’ up bodies down about Limehouse; an’ it’s allus been my opinion ever since then that that there Dickens is a very much ooverrated pusson.”
“There een’t the least doubt about that,” the other answered. “If he said soo, yow can’t be far wrong there nather.”
To Hugh Massinger, sitting apart in his own room, these strange scraps of an alien conversation had just then a ghastly and horrible fascination. These men were accustomed, then, to drowned corpses! They were connoisseurs in drowning. They knew the ways of bodies like regular experts. He listened, spellbound, to catch their next sentences. There was a short pause, during which as he judged by the way they breathed each took a long pull at the pewter mug, and then the last speaker began again. “Yow owt to know,” he murmured musingly, “for I s’pose there een’t any man on the river anywhere what ‘a had to do wooth as many bodies as yow hev!”
“Yow’re right, bor,” the first person assented emphatically. “Thutty year I ha’ sarved the Trinity House, sunshine or rain, an’ yow doon’t pervision lightships that long woothout larnin’ a thing or two on the way about corpsus. The current carry ’em all one way round. A body what start on its jarney at Westminster, as it may be here, goo ashore at Milbank. A body which begin at London Bridge, come out, as reglar as clockwuck, on the fuddcr ind o’ the Isle o’ Dogs. It’s jest the same along this here east coost. I picked up that gal I ha’ come about to-day on the north side o’ the Orfordness Light, by tfie back o’ the Trinity groin or cloose by. A body which come up on the north side of Orfordness has allus drifted down from the nor’-west’ard. Soo it stand to reason this here gal I ha’ got layin’ up there in the deadhouse must ha’ come wooth the ebb from Walzerwig or Aldeburgh or maybe Whitestrand. There een’t another way out of it anyhow. Well, they towd me at Walzerwig there was a young lady missin’ cover here at Whitestrand a young lady from the Hall a nob, niver doubt: an’ as there might be money in it, or agin there mightn’t, why, in course, I come up here to make all proper inquiries.”
Hugh Massinger’s heart gave a terrible bound. Oh, heavens! that things should have come to this pass. That wretch had found Elsie’s body!
In what a tangled maze of impossibilities had he enmeshed himself forever by that one false step of the forged letter. This wretch had found Elsie’s body the body that he loved with all his soul and he could neither claim it himself nor look upon it, bury it nor show the faintest interest in it, without involving his case still further in endless complications, and rousing suspicions of fatal import against his own character.
He waited breathlessly for the next sentence. The second speaker went on once more. “And it doon’t fit?” he suggested inquiringly.
“No, it doon’t fit, drot it,” the man called Bill answered in an impatient tone. “She een’t drownded at all, wuss luck, the young lady what’s missin’ from the Hall. They ha’ had letters an’ talegraphs from har, dated later’n the day I found har. I ha’ handed oover the body to the county pleece; it’s in the dead-house at the Low Light: an’ I shan’t hev noo more than half a crown from the parish arter all for all my trouble. Suffolk an’ Essex are half-a-crown counties; Surrey’s more liberal; it goo to five bob on ’em. Why, I’m more’n eight shillin’s out o’ pocket by that there gal a’ready, what wooth loss o’ time an’ travelin’ expenses an’ soo on. Next time I ketch a body knockin’ about on a lee shore, wooth the tide runnin’, an’ the breakers poundin’ it on its face on the shingle, they may whistle for it theirselves, that’s what they may doo; I een’t a-gooin’ to trouble my hid about it. Make a livin’ out on it, indeed! Why, it’s all rubbidge, nothin’ more or less. It’s my opinion that there Dickens is a very much ooverrated pusson.”
Hugh Massinger rose slowly, like one stunned, walked across the room, as in a dream, to the door, closed it noiselessly, for he could contain himself no longer, and then, burying his face silently in his arms, cried to himself a long and bitter cry, the tears following one another hot and fast down his burning cheeks, while his throat was choked by a rising ball that seemed to
check his breath and impede the utterance of his stifled sobs. Elsie was dead, dead for him as if he had actually seen her drowned body cast up, unknown, as the man so hideously and graphically described it in his callous brutality, upon the long spit of the Orfordness lighthouse. He didn’t for one moment doubt that it was she indeed whom the fellow had found and placed in the mortuary. His own lie reacted fatally against himself. He had put others on a false track, arid now the false track misled his own spirit. From that day forth, Elsie was indeed dead, dead, dead for him. Alive in reality, and for all else save him, she was dead for him as though he had seen her buried. And yet, most terrible irony of all, he must still pretend before all the world strenuously and ceaselessly to believe her living. He must never in a single forgetful moment display his grief and remorse for the past; his sorrow for the loss of the one woman he had really loved and basely betrayed; his profound affection for her now she was gone and lost to him forever. He dare not even inquire for the present at least where she would be laid, or what would be done with her poor dishonoured and neglected corpse. It must be buried, unheeded, in a pauper’s nameless grave, by creatures as base and cruel as the one who had discovered it tossing on the shore, and regarded it only as a lucky find to make half a crown out of. Hugh’s inmost soul was revolted at the thought. And yet And yet, even so, he was not man enough to go boldly down to Orfordness and claim and rescue that sacred corpse, as he truly and firmly believed it to be, of Elsie Challoner’s. He meant still in his craven soul to stand well with the world, and to crown his perfidy by marrying Winifred.
