by Grant Allen
Elsie’s grave! If only he could be sure it was really Elsie’s! He wished he could. In time, then, he might venture to put up a headstone with just her initials those sacred initials. But no; he dared not. And perhaps, after all, it might not be Elsie. Corpses came up here often and often. Had they not buried whole shiploads together, as the lighthouse-man assured him, after a terrible tempest?
He stood there long, bareheaded in the sun. His remorse was gnawing the very life out of him. He was rooted to the spot. Elsie held him spellbound. At length he roused himself, and with a terrible effort returned to the lighthouse. “Where did you say this last body came up?” he asked the man in as careless a voice as he could easily master.
The man eyed him sharp and hard. “Yow fare anxious about that there young woman,” he answered coldly. “She Mooted longside by the groyne oover hinder. Tide flung har up. That’s where they moostly do come ashore from Lowstof or Whitestrand. Current sweep ’em right along the coost till they reach the ness: then it fling ’em up by the groyne as reg’lar as clockwork. There’s a cross-current there; that’s what make the point and the sandbank.”
Hugh faltered. He knew full well he was rousing suspicion; yet he couldn’t refrain for all that from gratifying his eager and burning desire to know all he could about poor martyred Elsie. He dared not ask what had become of the clothes, much as he longed to learn, but he wandered away slowly, step after step, to the side of the groyne. Its further face was sheltered by heaped-up shingle from the lighthouse-man’s eye. Hugh sat down in the shade, close under the timber balks, and looked around him along the beach where Elsie had been washed ashore a lifeless burden. Something yellow glittered on the sand hard by. As the sun caught it, it attracted for a second his casual attention by its golden shimmering. His heart came up with a bound into his mouth. He knew it he knew it he knew it in a flash. It was Elsie’s watch! Elsie’s! Elsie’s! The watch he himself had given years and years ago no; six weeks since only as a birthday present to poor dear dead Elsie.
Then Elsie was dead! He was sure of it now. No need for further dangerous questioning. It was by Elsie’s grave indeed he had just been standing. Elsie lay buried there beyond the shadow of a doubt, unknown and dishonored. It was Elsie’s grave and Elsie’s watch. What room for hope or for fear any longer?
It was Elsie’s watch, but rolled by the current from Lowestoft pier, as the lighthouse-man had rightly told him was usual, and cast ashore, as everything else was always cast, by the side of the groyne where the stream in the sea turned sharply outward at the extreme easternjnost point of Suffolk.
He picked it up with tremulous fingers and kissed it tenderly; then he slipped it unobserved into his breastpocket, close to his heart Elsie’s watch! and began his return journey with an aching bosom, over those hot bare stones, away back to Aldeburgh. The beach seemed longer and drearier than before. The orgy of remorse had passed away now, and the coolness of ‘utter despair had come over him instead of it. Half-way on, he sat down at last, wearier than ever, on the long pebble ridge, and gazed once more with swimming eyes at that visible token of Elsie’s doom. Hope was dead’ in his heart now. Horror and agony brooded over his soul. The world without was dull and dreary; the world within was a tempest of passion. He would freely have given all he possessed that moment to be dead ‘and buried in one grave with Elsie.
At that same instant at the Low Light the cutter’s man, come across in an open boat from Orford, was talking carelessly to the underling at the lighthouse.
“Well, Tom, bor, how’re things lookin’ wi’ yow?” he asked with a laugh.
“Middlin’ like, an’ that stodgy,” the other answered grimly. “How do yow git on?”
“Well, we ha’ tracked down that there body,” the Trinity House man said casually; “the gal’s, I mean, what I picked up on the ness; an’ arter all my trouble, Tom, yow’ll hardly believe it, but blow me if I made a penny on it.”
“Yow din’t?” the lighthouse-man murmured interrogatively.
“Not a farden,” the fellow Bill responded in a disconsolate voice. “The body worn’t a nob’s; so far, in that respeck, she worn’t nobody arter all, but oonly one o’ them there light-o’-loves down hinder at Lowstof. She was a sailor’s moll, I reckon. Flung harself off Lowstof pier one dark night, maybe a fortnight agoo, or maybe three weeks. She’d bin hevin’ some wuds wooth a young man she’d bin a-keepin’ company wooth. I never see a more promisin’ or more disappointin’ corpse in my breathin’ life. When I picked har up, I say to Jim, I say, ‘Yow may take yar davy on’t, bor, that this gal is a nob. I goo by har looks, an’ I ‘spect there’s money on har.’ Why, har dress aloon would ha’ made any one take har for a real lady. And arter all, what do it amount to? Nothen at all! Jest the parish paay for har. That’s Suffolk all cover, and rile me when I think on’t. If it han’t bin for a val’able in the way o’ rings what fell off har finger, in a manner of speakin,’ and dropped as yow may say into an honest man’s pocket when he was a-takin’ har to the dead-house why, it fare to me, that there honest man would a bin out o’ pocket a matter of a shillen or soo, and all thraow the interest he took in a wuthless an’ goodfor-nothen young woman. Corpsus may look out for theirselves in future, as far as I’m consarned, and that’s to a sartinty. I ha’ had too much on ’em. They’re more bother than they’re wuth. That’s jest the long an’ short on’t blow me if it een’t.”
CHAPTER XIX.
AU RENDEZVOUS DBS SONS CAMARADES.
In the cosy smoking-room of the Cheyne Row Club, a group of budding geniuses, convened from the four quarters of the earth, stood once more in the bay-window, looking out on the dull October street, and discussing with one another in diverse tones the various means which each had adopted for killing time through his own modicum of summer holidays. Reminiscences and greetings were the order of the day. A buzz of voices pervaded the air. Everybody was full to the throat of fresh impressions, and everybody was laudably eager to share them all, still hot from the press, with the balance of humanity as then and there represented before him. The mosquitoes at the North Cape were really unendurable: they bit a piece out of your face bodily, and then perched on a neighboring tree to eat it; while the midnight sun, as advertised, was a hoary old imposter, exactly like any other sun anywhere, when you came to examine him through a smoked glass at close quarters.
Cromer was just the jolliest place to lounge on the sands, and the best center for short excursions, that a fellow could find on a year’s tramp all round the shores of England, Scotland, Wales, or Ireland.
Grouse were scanty and devilish cunning in Aberdeenshire this year; the young birds packed like old ones; and the accommodation at Lumphanan had turned out on nearer view by no means what it ought to be.
A most delightful time indeed at Beatenberg, just above the Lake of Thun, you know, with exquisite views over the Bernese Oberland; and such a pretty little Swiss maiden, with liquid blue eyes and tow-colored hair, to bring in one’s breakfast and pour out coffee in the thick white coffee-cups. And then the flowers! a perfect paradise for a botanist, I assure you.
Montreal in August was hot and stuffy, but the Thousand Islands were simply delicious, and black-bass fishing among the back lakes was the only sport now left alive worthy a British fisherman’s distinguished consideration. Oh yes; the yacht behaved very well indeed, considering, on her way to Iceland as well as any yacht that sailed the seas but just before reaching Reykjavik that’s how they pronounce it, with the j soft and a falling intonation on the last syllable a most tremendous gale came thundering down with rain and lightning from the Yatna Jokull, and, by George, sir, it nearly foundered her outright with its sudden squalls in the open ocean. You never saw anything like the way she heeled over; you could touch the trough of the waves every time from the gunwale.
Had anything new been going on, you fellows, while we were all away? and had anybody heard anything about the Bard, as Cheyne Row had unanimously nicknamed Hugh Massinger?
“And what’s the Immortal Singer been doing with himself this hot summer?” cried a dozen voices for it was generally felt in Cheyne Row circles that Hugh Massinger, though still as undiscovered as the sources of the Congo, was a coming man of proximate eventuality. “Has he hooked his heiress yet? He swore, when he left town in July, he was going on an angling expedition as a fisher of women in the eastern counties.”
“Well, yes,” the recipient of young love’s first confidences responded guardedly; “I should say he had. To be sure, the Immortal One doesn’t exactly ‘mention the fact or amount of the young lady’s fortune; but he does casually remark in a single passing sentence that he has not himself engaged to a Thing of Beauty somewhere down in Suffolk.”
“Suffolk! most congruous indeed for an idyllic, bucolic, impressionist poet. He’ll come back to town with a wreath round his hat, and his pockets stuffed with stanzas and sonnets to his mistress’ eyebrow, where ‘Suffolk punches’ shall sweetly rhyme to ‘the red-cheek apple that she gaily munches,’ with slight excursions on lunches, bunches, crunches, and hunches, all a la Massinger, in endless profusion. Now then, Hatherly; there’s a guinea’s worth ready made for you to your hand already. Send it by the first post yourself to the lady, and cut out the Bard on his own ground with the beautiful and anonymous East Anglian heiress. I suppose, by the way, Massinger didn’t happen to confide to you the local habitation and the name of the proud recipient of so much interested and anapaestic devotion?”
“He said, I think, if I remember right, her name was Meysey.”
“Meysey! Oh, then, that’s one of the Whitestrand Meyseys, you may be sure; daughter of old Tom Wyville Meysey, whose estates have all been swallowed up by the sea. They lie in the prebend of Consumptum per Mare. If he’s going to marry her on the strength of her red, red gold, or of her vested securities in Argentine and Turkish, he’ll have to collect his arrears of income from a sea-green mermaid at the bottom of the deep blue sea; which will be worse than even dealing with that horrid Land League, for the Queen’s writ doesn’t run beyond the foreshore, and Xo Rent is universal law on the bed of the ocean.”
“I don’t think they’ve all been quite swallowed up,” one of the bystanders remarked in a pensive voice: he was Suffolk born; “at least, not yet, as far as I’ve heard of them. The devouring sea is engaged in taking them a bite at a time, like Bob Sawyer’s apple; but he’s left the Hall and the lands about it to the present day so’ Relf tells me.”
“Has she money, I wonder?” the editor of that struggling periodical, the “Night-Jar,” remarked abstractedly.
“Oh, I expect so, or the Bard wouldn’t ever have dreamt of proposing to her. The Immortal Singer knows his own worth exactly, to four places of decimals, and estimates himself at full ‘market value. He’s the last man on earth to throw himself away for a mere trifle.
When he sells his soul in the matrimonial exchange, it’ll be for the highest current market quotation, to an eligible purchaser for cash only, who must combine considerable charms of body and mind with the superadded advantage of a respectable balance at Drummond’s or at Coutts’. The Bard knows down to the ground the exact moneyworth of a handsome poet; he wouldn’t dream of letting himself go dirt cheap, like a common every-day historian or novelist.”
As the last speaker let the words drop carelessly from his mouth, the buzz of voices in the smoking-room paused suddenly: there was a slight and awkward lull in the conversation for half a minute; and then the crowd of budding geniuses was stretching out its dozen right hands with singular unanimity in rapid succession to grasp the ringers of a tall dark new-corner who had slipped in, after the fashion usually attributed to angels or their opposite, in the very nick of time to catch the last echoes of a candid opinion from his peers and contemporaries upon his own conduct.
“Do you think he heard us?” one of the peccant gossipers whispered to another with a scared face.
“Can’t say,” his friend whispered back uneasily. “He’s got quick ears. Listeners generally hear no good of themselves. But anyhow, we’ve got to brazen it out now. The best way’s just to take the bull by the horns boldly. Well, Massinger, we were all talking about you when you came in. You’re the chief subject of conversation in literary circles at the present day. Do you know it’s going the round of all the clubs in London at this moment that you shortly contemplate committing matrimony?”
Hugh Massinger drew himself up stiff and erect to his full height, and withered his questioner with a scathing glance from his dark eyes such as only he could dart at will to scarify and annihilate a selected victim. “I’m going to be married in the course of the year,” he answered coldly, “if that’s what you mean by committing matrimony. Mitchison,” turning round with marked abruptness to an earlier speaker, “what have you been doing with yourself all the summer?”
“Oh, I’ve been riding a bicycle through the best part of Finland, getting up a set of articles on the picturesque aspect of the Far North for the ‘Porte-Crayon,’ you know, and at the same time working in the Russian anarchists for the leader column in the ‘Morning Telephone.’ Bates went with me on the illegitimate machine yes, that means a tricycle; the bicycle alone’s accounted lawful: he’s doing the sketches to illustrate my letterpress, or I’m doing the letterpress to illustrate his sketches whichever you please, my little dear; you pays your money and takes your choice, all for the small sum of sixpence weekly. The roads in Finland are abominably rough, and the Finnish language is the beastliest and most agglutinative I ever had to deal with, even in the entrancing pages of Ollendorff. But there’s good copy in it very good copy. The ‘Telephone’ and the ‘Porte-Crayon’ shared our expenses. And where have you been hiding your light yourself since we last saw you?”
“My particular bushel was somewhere down about Suffolk, I believe,” Hugh Massinger answered with magnificent indefiniteness, as though minute accuracy to the matter of a county or two were rather beneath his sublime consideration. “I’ve been stopping at a dead-alive little place they call Whitestrand: a” sort of moribund fishing village, minus the fish. It’s a lost corner among the mudflats and the salt marshes; picturesque, but ugly, and dull as ditch-water. And having nothing else on earth to do there, I occupied myself with getting engaged, as you fellows seem to have heard by telegraph already. This is an age of publicity. Everything’s known in London nowadays. A man can’t change his coat, it appears, or have venison for dinner, or wear red stockings, or stop to chat with a pretty woman, but he finds a flaring paragraph about it next day in the society papers.”
“May one venture to ask the lady’s name?” Mitchison inquired courteously, a little apart from the main group.
Hugh Massinger’s manner melted at once. He would not be chaffed, but it rather relieved him, in his present strained condition of mind, to enter into inoffensive confidences with a polite listener.
“She’s a Miss Meysey,” he said in a lower tone, drawing over toward the fireplace: “one of the Suffolk Meyseys you’ve heard of the family. Her father has a very nice place down by the sea at Whitestrand. They’re the banking people, you know: remote cousins of the old hanging judge’s. Very nice old things in their own way, though a trifle slow and out of date not to say mouldy. But after all, rapidity is hardly the precise quality one feels called upon to exact in a prospective father-in-law: slowness goes with some solid virtues. The honored tortoise has never been accused by its deadliest foes of wasting its patrimony in extravagant expenditure.”
“Has she any brothers?” Mitchison asked with apparent ingenuousness, approaching the question of Miss Meysey’s
fortune (like Hugh himself) by obscure byways, as being a politer mode than the direct assault. “There was a fellow called Meysey in the fifth form with me at Winchester, I remember; perhaps he might have been some sort of relation.”
Hugh shook his head in emphatic dissent. “No,” he answered; “the girl has no brothers. She’s an only child the last of her family. There was one son, a captain in the Forty-fourth, or something of the sort; but he was killed in Zululand, and was never at Winchester, or I’m sure I should have heard of it. They’re a kinless lot, extremely kinless: in fact, I’ve almost realized the highest ambition of the American humorist, to the effect that he might have the luck to marry a poor lonely friendless orphan.”
“She’s an heiress, then?”
Hugh nodded assent. “Well, a sort of an heiress,” he admitted modestly, as who should say, “not so good as she might be.”
“The estate’s been very much impaired by the inroads of the sea for the last ten years; but there’s still a decent remnant of it left standing. Enough for a man of modest expectations to make a living off in these hard times, I fancy.”
“Then we shall all come down in due time,” another man put in a painter by trade joining the group as he spoke, “and find the Bard a landed proprietor on his own broad acres, living in state and bounty in the baronial Hall, lord of Burleigh, fair and free, or whatever other name the place may be called by!”
