by Grant Allen
An hour later, when Edie, with eyes very red and swollen, went out once more into the little front parlor to fetch some needlework, Warren Relf intercepted her with eager questioning. “How is she now?” he asked with an anxious face. “Is she very ill? And how did she take it?”
“She’s crying her eyes out, thank heaven,” Edie answered fervently. “And it’s broken her heart. It’s almost killed her, but not quite. She’s crushed and lacerated like a wounded creature.”
“But what will she do?” Warren asked, with a wistful look.
“Do? Just what I said. Nothing at all. Annihilate and efface herself. She’ll accept the position, leaving things exactly where that wretched being has managed to put them; and so far as he’s concerned, she’ll drop altogether out of existence.”
“How?”
“She’ll go with mamma and me to San Remo.”
“And the Meyseys?”
“She’ll leave them to form her own conclusions. Henceforth, she prefers to be simply nobody.”
CHAPTER XVIII.
COMPLICATIONS.
Elsie spent a full fortnight, or even more, at Lowestoft; and before she vacated her hospitable quarters in the Relfs’ rooms, it was quite understood between them all that she was to follow out the simple plan of action so hastily sketched by Edie to Warren. Elsie’s one desire now was to escape observation. Eyes seemed to peer at her from every corner. She wanted to fly forever from Hugh from that Hugh who had at last so unconsciously revealed to her the inmost depths of his own abject and self-centered nature; and she wanted to be saved the hideous necessity for explaining to others what only the three Relfs at present knew the way she had come to leave Whitestrand. Hungering for sympathy, as women will hunger in a great sorrow, she had opened to Edie, bit by bit, the floodgates of her grief, and told piecemeal the whole of her painful and pitiable story. In her own mind, Elsie was free from the reproach of an attempt at self-murder; and Edie and Mrs. Relf accepted in good faith the poor heart-broken girl’s account of her adventure; but she could never hope that the outer world could be induced to believe in her asserted innocence. She dreaded the nods and hints and suspicions and innuendoes of our bitter society; she shrank from exposing herself to its sneers or its sympathy, each almost equally distasteful to her delicate nature. She was threatened with the pillory of a newspaper paragraph. Hugh Massinger’s lie afforded her now an easy chance of escape. She accepted it willingly, without afterthought. All she wanted in her trouble was to hide her poor head where none would find it; and Edie Relf’s plan enabled her to do this in the surest and safest possible manner.
Besides, she didn’t wish to make Winifred unhappy. Winifred loved her cousin Hugh. She saw that now; she recognized it distinctly. She wondered she hadn’t seen it plainly long before. Winifred had often been so full of Hugh; had asked so many questions, had seemed so deeply interested in all that concerned him. And Hugh had offered his heart to Winifred be the same more or less, he had at least offered it. Why should she wish to wreck Winifred’s life, as that cruel, selfish, ambitious man had wrecked her own? She couldn’t tell the whole truth now without exposing Hugh. And for Winifred’s sake at least she would not expose him, and blight Winifred’s dream at the very moment of its first full ecstacy.
For Winifred’s sake. Nay, rather for his own. For in spite of everything, she still loved him. She could never forgive him, but she still loved him. Or if she didn’t love the Hugh that really was, she loved at least the memory of the Hugh that was not and that never had been. For his dear sake, she could never expose that other base creature that bore his name and wore his features. For her own love’s sake, she could never betray him. For her womanly consistency, for her sense of identity, she couldn’t turn round and tell the truth about him. To acquiesce in a lie was wrong, perhaps; but to tell the truth would have been more than human.
“I wish,” she cried in her agony to Edie, “I could go away at once and hide myself forever in America or Australia, or somewhere like that where he would never know I was really living.”
Edie stroked her smooth black hair with a gentle hand; she had views of her own already, had Edie. “It’s a far cry to Loch Awe, darling,” she murmured softly. “Better come with mother and me to San Remo.”
“San Remo?” Elsie echoed. “Why San Remo?” And then Edie explained to her in brief outlines that she and her mother went every winter to the Riviera, taking with them a few delicate English girls of consumptive tendency, partly to educate, but more still to escape the bitter English Christmas. They hired a villa the same every year on a slope of the hills, and engaged a resident governess to accompany them. But, as chance would have it, their last governess had just gone off, in the nick of time, to get married to her faithful bank clerk at Brixton; so here was an opportunity for mutual accommodation. As Edie put the thing, Elsie might almost have supposed, were she so minded, she would be doing Mrs. Relf an exceptional favor by accepting the post and accompanying them to Italy. And, to say the truth, a Girton graduate who had taken high honors at Cambridge was certainly a degree or two better than anything the delicate girls of consumptive tendency could reasonably have expected to obtain at San Remo. But none the less the offer was a generous one, kindly meant; and Elsie accepted it just as it was intended. It was a fair exchange of mutual services. She must earn her own livelihood wherever she went; trouble, however deep, has always that special aggravation and that special consolation for penniless people; and in no other house could she possibly have earned it without a reference or testimonial from her last employers. The Relfs needed no such awkward introduction. This arrangement suited both parties admirably; and poor heart-broken Elsie, in her present shattered condition of nerves, was glad enough to accept her new friends’ kind hospitality at Lowestoft for the present, till she could fly with them at last, early in October, from this desecrated England and from the chance of running up against Hugh Massinger.
Her whole existence summed itself up now in the one wish to escape Hugh. He thought her dead. She hoped in her heart he might never again discover she was living.
On the very first day when she dared to venture out in a Bath-chair, muffled and veiled, and in a new black dress lest any one perchance should happen to recognize her -she asked to be wheeled to the Lowestoft pier; and Edie, who accompanied her out on that sad first ride, walked slowly by her side in sympathetic silence. Warren Relf followed her too, but at a safe distance; he could not think of obtruding as yet a male presence upon her shame and grief; but still he could not wholly deny himself either the modest pleasure of watching her from afar, unseen and unsuspected. Warren had hardly so much as caught a glimpse of Elsie since that night on the “Mud-Turtle;” but Elsie’s gentleness and the profundity of her sorrow had touched him deeply. He began indeed to suspect he was really in love with her; and perhaps his suspicion was not entirely baseless. He knew too well, however, the depth of her distress to dream of pressing even his sympathy upon her at so inopportune a moment If ever the right time for him came at all, it could come, he knew, only in the remote future.
At the end of the pier, Elsie halted the chair, and made the chairman wheel it as she directed, exactly opposite one of the open gaps in the barrier of woodwork that ran round it. Then she raised herself up with difficulty from her seat. She was holding something tight in her small right hand; she had drawn it that moment from the folds of her bosom. It was a packet of papers, tied carefully in a knot with some heavy object. Warren Relf, observing cautiously from behind, felt sure in his own mind it was a heavy object by the curve it described as it wheeled through the air when Elsie threw it. For Elsie had risen now, pale and red by turns, and was flinging it out with feverish energy in a sweeping arch far, far into the water. It struck the surface with a dull thud the heavy thud of a stone or a metallic body. In a second it had sunk like lead to the bottom, and Elsie, bursting into a silent flood of tears, had ordered the chairman to take her home again.
Warren Relf, skulk
ing hastily down the steps behind that lead to the tidal platform under the pier, had no doubt at all in his own mind what the object was that Elsie had flung with such fiery force into the deep water; for that night on the “Mud-Turtle,” as he tried to restore the insensible girl to a passing gleam of life and consciousness, two distinct articles had fallen, one by one, in the hurry of the moment, out of her loose and dripping bosom. He was not curious, but he couldn’t help observing them. The first was a bundle of water-logged letters in a hand which it was impossible for him not to recognize. The second was a pretty little lady’s watch, in gold and enamel, with a neat inscription engraved on a shield on the back, “E. C. from H. M.,” in Lombardic letters. It wasn’t Warren Relf s fault if he knew then who H. M. was; and it wasn’t his fault if he knew now that Elsie Challoner had formally renounced Hugh Massinger’s love, by flinging his letters and presents bodily into the deep sea, where no one could ever possibly recover them.
They had burnt into her flesh, lying there in her bosom. She could carry them about next her bruised and wounded heart no longer. And now, on this very day that she had ventured out, she buried her love and all that belonged to it in that deep where Hugh Massinger himself had sent her.
But even so, it cost her hard. They were Hugh’s letters those precious much-loved letters. She went home that morning crying bitterly, and she cried till night, like one who mourns her lost husband or her lost children. They were all she had left of Hugh and of her day-dream. Edie knew exactly what she had done, but avoided the vain effort to comfort or console her. “Comfort comfort scorned of devils!” Edie was woman enough to know she could do nothing. She only held her new friend’s hand tight clasped in hers, and cried beside her in mute sisterly sympathy.
It was about a week later that Hugh Massinger, goaded by remorse, and unable any longer to endure the suspense of hearing nothing further, directly or indirectly, as to Elsie’s fate, set out one morning in a dogcart from Whitestrand, and drove along the coast with his own thoughts, in a blazing sunlight, as far as Aldeburgh. There, the road abruptly stops. No highway spans the ridge of beach beyond: the remainder of the distance to the Low Light at Orfordness must be accomplished on foot, along a flat bank that stretches for miles between sea and river, untrodden and trackless, one bare blank waste of sand and shingle. The ruthless sun was pouring down upon it in full force as Hugh Massinger began his solitary tramp along that uneven road at the Martello Tower, just south of Aldeburgh. The more usual course is to sail by sea; and Hugh might indeed have hired a boat at Slaughden Quay if he dared; but he feared to be recognized as having come from Whitestrand to make inquiries about the unclaimed body; for to rouse suspicion would be doubly unwise: he felt like a murderer, and he considered himself one by implication already. If other people grew to suspect that Elsie was drowned, it would go hard but they would think as ill of him as he himself thought of himself in his bitterest moments.
For, horrible to relate, all this time, with that burden of agony and anguish and suspense weighing down his soul like a mass of lead, he had had to play as best he might, every night and morning, at the ardor of young love with that girl Winifred. He had had to imitate with hateful skill the wantonness of youth and the ecstacy of the happily betrothed lover. He had had to wear a mask of pleasure on his pinched face while his heart within was full of bitterness, as he cried to himself more than once in his reckless agony. After such unnatural restraint, reaction was inevitable. It became a delight for him to get away for once from that grim comedy, in which he acted his part with so much apparent ease, and to face the genuine tragedy of his miserable life, alone and undisturbed, with his own remorseful thoughts for a few short hours or so. He looked upon that fierce tramp in the eye of the sun, trudging ever on over those baking stones, and through that barren spit of sand and shingle, to some extent in the light of a self-imposed penance a penance, and yet a splendid indulgence as well; for here there was no one to watch or observe him. Here he could let the tears trickle down his face unreproved, and no longer pretend to believe himself happy. Here there was no Winifred to tease him with her love. He had sold his own soul for a few wretched acres of stagnant salt marsh: he could gloat now at his ease over his hateful bargain; he could call himself “Fool” at the top of his voice; he could groan and sigh and be as sad as night, no man hindering him. It was an orgy of remorse, and he gave way to it with wild orgiastic fervor.
He plodded, plodded, plodded ever on, stumbling wearily over that endless shingle, thirsty and footsore, mile after mile, yet glad to be relieved for awhile from the strain of his long hypocrisy, and to let the tears flow easily and naturally one after the other down his parched cheek. Truly he walked in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity. The iron was entering into his own soul; and yet he hugged it. The gloom of that barren stretch of water-worn pebbles, the weird and widespread desolation of the landscape, the fierce glare of the midday sun that poured down mercilessly on his aching head, all chimed in congenially with his present brooding and melancholy humor, and gave strength to the poignancy of his remorse and regret. He could torture himself to the bone in these small matters, for dead Elsie’s sake; he could do penance, but not make restitution. He couldn’t even so tell out the truth before the whole world, or right the two women he had cruelly wronged, by an open confession.
At last, after mile upon mile of weary staggering, he reached the Low Light, and sat down, exhausted, on the bare shingle just outside the lighthouse-keeper’s quarters. Strangers are rare at Orfordness; and a morose-looking man, soured by solitude, soon presented himself at the door to stare at the newcomer.
“Tramped it?” he asked curtly, with an inquiring glance along the shingle beach.
“Yes, tramped it,” Hugh answered, with a weary sigh, and relapsed into silence, too utterly tired to think of how he had best set about the prosecution of his delicate inquiry, now that he had got there.
The man stood with his hand on his hip, and watched the stranger long and close, with frank mute curiosity, as one watches a wild beast in its cage at a menagerie. At last he broke the solemn silence once more with the one inquisitive word, “Why?”
“Amusement,” Hugh answered, catching the man’s laconic humor to the very echo.
For twenty minutes they talked on, in this brief disjointed Spartan fashion, with question and answer as to the life at Orfordness tossed to and fro like a quick ball between them, till at last Hugh touched, as if by accident, but with supreme skill, upon the abstract question of provisioning lighthouses., “Trinity House steam-cutter,” the man replied to his short suggested query, with a sidelong jerk of his head to southward. “Twice a month. Pritty fair grub. Biscuit and pork an’ tinned meat an’ soo on.”
“Queer employment, the cutter’s men,” Hugh interposed quietly. “Must see a deal of life in their way sometimes.”
The man nodded. “Yis, an’ death too,” he assented with uncompromising brevity.
“Wrecks?”
“And corpsus.”
“Corpses?”
“Ah, corpsus, I believe you. Drownded one. Plenty on ’em.”
“Here?”
“Sometimes. But moostly on the north side. Drift wooth the tide. Cutter’s man found one oonly a week agoo last Sarraday. Oover hinder against that groyne to windwud.”
“Sailor?”
“Not this time gal young woman.”
“Where did she come from?” Hugh asked eagerly, yet suppressing his eagerness in his face and voice as well as he was able.
“Doon’t know, u’m sure,” the man answered with something very like a shrug. “They doon’t carry their naames and poorts wroot on their foreheads as though they wor vessels. Lowstof, Whitestrand, Southwold, Aldeburgh might ha’ bin any on ’em.”
Hugh continued his inquiries with breathless interest a few minutes longer, then he asked again in a trembling voice: “Any jewellery on her?”
The man eyed him suspiciously askance. Detective in disguise,
or what? he wondered. “Ast the cutter’s man,” he drawled out slowly, after a long pause. “If there was anything val’able on the corpse, t’eent likely he’d leave it about har for the coroner to nail not he!”
The answer cast an unexpected flood of light on the seafaring view of the treasure-trove of corpses, for which Hugh had hardly before been prepared in his own mind. That would account for her not having been recognized. “Did they hold an inquest?” he ventured to ask nervously.
The lighthouse-man nodded. “But whot’s the use o’ that? noo evidence,” he continued. “Moost o’ theae drownded bodies aren’t ‘dentified. Jury browt it in ‘Foun d drownded.’ Convenient vardick save a lot o’ trouble.”
“Where do they bury them?” Hugh asked, hardly able to control his emotion.
The man waved his hand with a careless dash toward a sandy patch just beyond the High Light. “Cover hinder,” he answered. “There’s shiploads on ’em there. Easy diggin.’ Easier than the shingle. We buried the crew of a Hamburg brigantine there all in a lump last winter. They went ashore on the Oaze Sands. All hands drownded, about a baker’s dozen on ’em. Coroner carne oover from Orford an’ set on ’em, here on the spot, as yow may say. That’s consecrated ground. Bishop came from Norwich and said his prayers oover it. A corpse coon’t lay better, nor more comfortable, if it come to that, in Woodbridge Cemetery.”
He laughed low to himself at his own grim wit; and Hugh, unable to conceal his disgust, walked off alone, as if idly strolling in a solitary mood, toward that desolate graveyard. The lighthouse-man went back, rolling a quid in his bulged cheek, to his monotonous avocations. Hugh stumbled over the sand with blinded eyes and tottering feet till he reached the plot with its little group of rude mounds. There was one mound far newer and fresher than all the rest, and a wooden label stood at its head with a number roughly scrawled on it in wet paint 240.” His heart failed and sank within him. So this was her grave! Elsie’s grave! Elsie, Elsie, poor, desolate, abandoned, heart-broken Elsie. He took off his hat in reverent remorse as he stood by its side. Oh, heavens, how he longed to be dead there with her! Should he fling himself off the top of the lighthouse now? Should he cut his throat beside her nameless grave? Should he drown himself with Elsie on that hopeless stretch of wild coast? Or should he live on still, a miserable, wretched, self-condemned coward, to pay the penalty of his cruelty and his baseness through years of agony.
