by Grant Allen
It was with a heavy heart that next evening at seven he dropped into the club dining-room. Would Relf be there? he wondered silently. And if so, what course would Relf adopt toward him? Yes, Relf was there, at a corner table, as good luck would have it, with his back turned to him safely as he entered; and that fellow Potts, the other mudbank artist they hung their wretched daubs of flat Suffolk seaboard side by side fraternally on the walls of the Institute was dining with him and concocting mischief, no doubt, for the house of Massinger. Hugh half determined to turn and flee: then all that was manly and genuine within him revolted at once against that last disgrace. He would not run from this creature Relf. He would not be turned out of his own club he was a member of the committee and a founder of the society. He would face it out and dine in spite of him.
But not before the fellow’s very eyes; that was more than in his present perturbed condition Hugh Massinger could manage to stand. He skulked quietly round, unseen by Relf, into the side alcove a recess cut off by an arched doorway where he gave his order in a very low voice to Martin, the obsequious waiter. Martin was surprised at so much reserve. Mr. Massinger, he was generally the very freest and loudest-spoken gentleman in the whole houseful of ’em. He always talked, he did, as if the club and the kitchen and the servants all belonged to him.
From the alcove, by a special interposition of fate, Hugh could hear distinctly what Relf was saying. Strange incredible a singular stroke of luck: he had indeed caught the man in the very; act and moment of conspiring.
They were talking of Elsie! Their conversation came to him distinct, though low. Unnatural excitement had quickened his senses to a strange degree. He heard it all every sound every syllable.
“Then you promise, Frank, on your word of honor as a gentleman, you’ll never breathe a word of this or of any part of Miss Challoner’s affair to anybody anywhere?”
“My dear boy, I promise, that’s enough. I see the necessity as well as you do. So you’ve actually got the letter, have you?”
“I’ve got the letter. If you like, I’ll read it to you. It’s here in my pocket. I have to restore it by the time Mr. Meysey returns to-morrow.”
Mr. Meysey! Restore it! Then, for all his plotting, Relf didn’t know that Mr. Meysey was dead, and that his funeral was fixed to take place at Whitestrand on Monday or Tuesday!
There was a short pause. What letter? he wondered. Then Relf began reading in a low tone: “My darling Winifred, I can hardly make up my mind to write you this letter; and yet I must: I can no longer avoid it.”
Great heavens, it was his own forged letter to Winifred! How on earth had it ever come into Relf’s possession!
Plot, plot plot and counterplot! Dirty, underhand, hole-and-corner spy-business! Relf had wheedled it out of the Meyseys somehow, to help him to track down and confront his enemy! Or else he had suborned one of the Whitestrand servants to steal or copy their master’s correspondence!
He heard it through to the last word, “Ever your affectionate but heart-broken Elsie.”
What were they going to say next? Nothing. Potts just drew a long breath of surprise, and then whistled shortly and curiously. “The man’s a blackguard, to have broken the poor girl’s heart,” he observed at last, “let alone this. He’s a blackguard, Relf. I’m very sorry for her. And what’s become of Miss Challoner now, if it isn’t indiscreet to ask the question?”
“Well, Potts, I’ve only taken any other man into my confidence at all in this matter, because you knew more than half already, and it was impossible, without telling you the other half, fully to make you feel the necessity for keeping the strictest silence about it. I’d rather not tell either you or anybody else exactly where Miss Challoner’s gone now. But at the present moment, if you want to know the precise truth, I’ve no doubt she’s at Marseilles, on her way abroad to a further destination which I prefer on her account not to mention. More than that it’s better not to say. But she wishes it kept a profound secret, and she intends never to return to England.”
As Hugh Massinger heard those words, those reassuring words, a sudden sense of freedom and lightness burst instantly over him in a wild rush of reaction. Aha! aha! poor feeble enemy! Was this all? Then Relf knew really nothing! That mysterious “Yes” of his was a fraud, a pretense, a mistake, a delusion! He was all wrong, all wrong and in error. Instead of knowing that Elsie was dead dead and buried in her nameless grave at Orfordness he fancied she was still alive and in hiding! The man was a windbag. To think he should have been terrified he, Hugh Massinger by such a mere empty boastful eavesdropper! Why, Relf, after all, was himself deceived by the forged letters he had so cleverly palmed off upon them. The special information he pretended to possess was only the special information derived from Hugh Massinger’s own careful and admirable forgeries. He hugged himself in a perfect transport of delight. The load was lifted as if by magic from his breast. There was nothing on earth for him, after all, to be afraid of!
He saw it all at a glance now. Relf was in league with the servants at the Meyseys’. Some prying lady’s-maid or dishonest flunkey must have sent him the first letter to Winifred, or at least a copy of it: nay, more; he or she must have intercepted the second one, which arrived while Winifred was on her way to Scotland else how could Relf have heard this last newly fledged fiction about the journey abroad the stoppage at Marseilles the determination never to return to England? And how greedily and eagerly the man swallowed it all his nasty second-hand servants’-hall information! Hugh positively despised him in his own mind for his ready credulity and his mean duplicity. How glibly he retailed the plausible story, with nods and hints and additions of his own: “At the present moment, I’ve no doubt she’s at Marseilles, on her way abroad to a further destination, which I prefer on her account not to mention.” What airs and graces and what comic importance the fellow put on, on the strength of his familiarity with this supposed mystery! Any other man with a straigthfonvard mind would have said outright plainly, “to Australia;” but this pretentious jackanapes with his stolen information must make up a little mystification all of his own, to give himself importance in the eyes of his greedy gobemouche of a companion. It was too grotesque! too utterly ridiculous! And this w-as the man of whom he had been so afraid! His own dupe! the ready fool who swallowed at second-hand such idle tattle of the servants’ hall, and employed an understrapper or a pretty soubrette to open other people’s letters for his own information! From that moment forth, Hugh might cordially hate him, Hugh might freely despise him; but he would never, never, never be afraid of him.
One only idea left some slight suspicion of uneasiness on his enlightened mind. He hoped the lady’s maid that hypothetical lady’s-maid had sent on the forged letter after reading it to Winifred. Not that poor Winifred would have time to think much about Elsie at present, in the midst of this sudden and unexpected bereavement: she would be too full of her own dead father, no doubt, to pay any great attention to her governess’ misfortunes. But still, one doesn’t like one’s private letters to be so vulgarly tampered with. And the worst of it was, he could hardly ask her whether she had received the note or not. He could hardly get at the bottom of this low conspiracy. It was his policy now to let sleeping dogs lie. The less said about Elsie the better.
Yet in his heart he despised Warren Relf for his meanness. He might forge himself: nothing low or ungentlemanly or degrading in forgery. Dishonest, if you like; dishonest, not vulgar. But to open other people’s letters pah! the disgusting smallness and lowness and vulgarity of it! A sort of under-footmannish type of criminality. Peccafortiter, if you will, of course, but don’t be a cad and a disgrace to your breeding.
CHAPTER XXII.
HOLY MATRIMONY.
The way of the transgressor went easy for a while with Hugh Massinger. His sands ran smoother than he could himself have expected. His two chief bugbears faded away by degrees before the strong light of facts into pure nonentity. Relf did not know that Elsie Challoner lay dead and burie
d in a lonely grave at Orfordness; and Winifred Meysey was not left a ward in Chancery, or otherwise inconvenienced and strictly tied up in her plans for marrying him. On the contrary, the affairs of the deceased were arranged exactly as Hugh himself would have wished them to be ordered. The will in particular was a perfect gem: Hugh could have thrown his arms round the blameless attorney who drew it up: Mrs. Meysey appointed sole executrix and guardian of the infant; the estate and Hall bequeathed absolutely and without remainder to Winifred in person; a life-interest in certain specified sums only, as arranged by settlement, to the relict herself; and the coast all clear for Hugh Massinger. Everything had turned out for the best The late Squire had chosen the happiest possible moment for dying. The infant and the guardian were on Hugh’s own side. There need be no long engagement, no tremulous expectation of dead men’s shoes now: nor would Hugh have to put up for an indefinite term of years with the nuisance of a father-in-law’s perpetual benevolent interference and well-meant dictation. Even the settlements, those tough documents, would be all drawn up to suit his own digestion. As Hugh sat, decorously lugubrious, in the dining-room at Whitestrand with Mr. Heberden, the family solicitor, two days after the funeral, he could hardly help experiencing a certain subdued sense of something exceedingly akin to stifled gratitude in his own soul toward that defective breech-loader which had relieved him at once of so many embarrassments, and made him practically Lord of the Manor of Consumptum per Mare, in the hundred of Dunwich and county of Suffolk, containing by admeasurement so many acres, roods, and perches, be the same more or less and mostly less, indeed, as the years proceeded.
But for that slight drawback, Hugh cared as yet absolutely nothing. One only trouble, one visible kill-joy, darkened his view from the Hall windows. Every principal room in the house faced due south. Wherever he looked, from the drawing-room or the dining-room, the library or the vestibule, the boudoir or the billiard-room, the Whitestrand poplar rose straight and sheer, as conspicuous as ever, by the brink of the Char, where sea and stream met together on debatable ground in angry encounter. Its rugged boles formed the one striking and beautiful object in the whole prospect across those desolate flats of sand and salt marsh, but to Hugh Massinger that ancient tree had now become instinct with awe and horror a visible memorial of his own crime for it was a crime and of poor dead Elsie in her nameless grave by the Low Lighthouse. He grew to regard it as Elsie’s monument. Day after day, while he stopped at Whitestrand, he rose up in the morning with aching brows from his sleepless bed for how could he sleep, with the breakers that drowned and tossed ashore his dear dead Elsie thundering wild songs of triumph from the bar in his ears? and gazed out of his window over the dreary outlook, to see that accusing tree with its gnarled roots confronting him ever, full in face, and poisoning his success with its mute witness to his murdered victim. Every time he looked out upon it, he heard once more that wild, wild cry, as of a stricken life, when Elsie plunged into the careering current. Every time the wind shrieked through its creaking branches in the lonely night, the shrieks went to his heart like so many living human voices crying for sympathy. He hated and despised himself in the very midst of his success. He had sold his own soul for a wasted strip of swamp and marsh and brake and sandhill, and he found in the end that it profited him nothing.
Still, time brings alleviation to most earthly troubles. Even remorse grows duller with age till the day comes for it to burst out afresh in fuller force than ever and goad its victim on to a final confession. Days and weeks and months rolled by, and Hugh Massinger by slow degrees began to feel that Othello was himself again. He wrote, as of old, his brilliant leaders every day regularly for the “Morning Telephone”: he slashed three-volume novels with as much vigor as ever, and rather more cynicism and cruelty than before, in the “Monday Register:” he touched the tender stops of various quills, warbling his Doric lay to Ballade and Sonnet, in the wonted woods of the “Pimlico Magazine” with endless versatility. Nor was that all. He played high in the evening at Pallavicinfs, more recklessly even than had been his ancient use; for was not his future now assured to him? and did not the horrid picture of his dead drowned Elsie, tossed friendless on the bare beach at Orfordness, haunt him and sting him with its perpetual presence to seek in the feverish excitement of roulette some momentary forgetfulness of his life’s tragedy? True, his rhymes were sadder and gloomier now than of old, and his play wilder: no more of the rollicking, humorous, happy-go-lucky ballad-mongering that alternated in the “Echoes from Callimachus” with his more serious verses: his sincerest laughter, he knew himself, with some pain was fraught, since Elsie left him. But in their lieu had come a reckless abandonment that served very well at first sight instead of real mirth or heartfelt geniality. In the olden days, Hugh had always cultivated a certain casual vein of cheerful pessimism: he had posed as the man who drags the lengthening chain of life behind him good-humoredly: now, a grim sardonic smile usurped the place of his pessimistic bonhomie, and filled his pages with a Carlylese gloom that was utterly alien to his true inborn nature. Even his lighter work showed traces of the change. His wayward article, “Is Death Worth Dying?” in the “Nineteenth Century,” was full of bitterness; and his clever skit on the Blood-and-Thunder school of fiction, entitled “The Zulu-Had,” and published as a Christmas “shilling shocker,” had a sting and a venom in it that were wholly wanting to his earlier performances in the same direction. The critics said Massinger was suffering from a shallow spasm of Byronic affectation. He knew himself he was really suffering from a profound fit of utter self-contempt and wild despairing carelessness of consequence.
The world moves, however, as Galileo remarked, in spite of our sorrows. Three months after Wyville Meysey’s death, Whitestrand received its new master. It was strange to find any but Meyseys at the Hall, for Meyseys had dwelt there from time immemorial; the first of the bankers, even, though of a younger branch, having purchased the estate with his newly-gotten gold from an elder and ruined representative of, the main stock. The wedding was a very quiet affair, of course: half-mourning at best, with no show or tomfoolery; and what was of much more importance to Hugh, the arrangements for the settlements were most satisfactory. The family solicitor wasn’t such a fool as to make things unpleasant for his new client. Winifred was a nice little body in her way, too; affectionately proud of her captive poet: and from a lordly height of marital superiority, Hugh rather liked the pink and white small woman than otherwise. But he didn’t mean to live much at Whitestrand either “At least while your mother lasts, my child,” he said cautiously to Winifred, letting her down gently by gradual stages, and saving his own reputation for kindly consideration at the same moment. “The good old soul would naturally like still to feel herself mistress in her own house. It would be cruel to mother-in-law to disturb her now. Whenever we come down, we’ll come down strictly on a visit to her. But for ourselves, we’ll nest for the present in London.”
Nesting in London suited Winifred, for her part, excellently well. In ‘poor papa’s day, indeed, the Meyseys had felt themselves of late far too deeply impoverished since the sandhills swallowed up the Yondstream farms even to go up to town in a hired house for a few weeks or so in the height of the season, as they had once been wont to do, during the golden age of the agricultural interest. The struggle to keep up appearances in the old home on a reduced income had occupied to the full their utmost energies during these latter days of universal depression. So London w r as to Winifred a practically almost unknown world, rich in potentialities of varied enjoyment. She had been there but seldom, on a visit to friends; and she knew nothing as yet of that brillivit circle that gathers round Mrs. Bouverie Barton’s Wednesday evenings, where Hugh Massinger was able to introduce her with distinction and credit. True, the young couple began life on a small scale, in a quiet little house most aesthetically decorated on economical principles down a side-street in the remote recesses of Philistine Bayswater. But Hugh’s coterie, though unsuccessful, was nevertheless
ex officio distinguished: he was handin-glove with the whole Cheyne Row set the Royal Academicians still in embryo; the Bishops Designate of fate w r ho at present held suburban curacies; the Cabinet Ministers whose budget yet lingered in domestic arrears; the germinating judges whose chances of the ermine were confined in near perspective to soup at sessions, or the smallest of small devilling for rising juniors. They were not rich in this world’s goods, those discounted celebrities; but they were a lively crew, full of fun and fancy, and they delighted Winifred by their juvenile exuberance of wit and eloquence. She voted the men with their wives, when - they had any which wasn’t often, for Bohemia can seldom afford the luxury of matrimony the most charming society she had ever met; and Bohemia in return voted “little Mrs. Massinger,” in the words of its accepted mouthpiece and spokesman, Hatherley, “as witty a piece of Eve’s flesh as any in Illyria.” The’ little “arrangement in pink and white” became, indeed, quite a noted personage in the narrow world of Cheyne Row society.
To say the truth, Hugh detested Whitestrand. He never wanted to go near the place again, now that he had made himself in very deed its lord and master. He hated the house, the grounds, the river; but above all he hated that funereal poplar that seemed to rise up and menace him each time he looked at it with the pains and penalties of his own evil conscience. At Easter, Winifred dragged him home once more, to visit the relict in her lonely mansion. The Bard went, as in duty bound; but the duty was more than commonly distasteful. They reached Whitestrand late at night, and were shown upstairs it once into a large front bedroom. Hugh’s heart leaped up in his mouth when he saw it. It was Elsie’s room; the room into which he had climbed on that fateful evening; the room bound closest up in his memory with the hideous abiding nightmare of his poisoned life; the room he had never since dared to enter; the room he had hoped never more to look upon.
