by Grant Allen
“Are we to sleep here, Winnie?” he cried aghast, in a tone of the utmost horror and dismay. And Winifred, looking up at him in silent surprise, answered merely in an unconcerned voice: “Why, yes, my dear boy; what’s wrong with the room? It’s good enough. We’re to sleep here, of course certainly.”
He dared say no more. To remonstrate would be madness. Any reason he gave must seem inadequate. But he would sooner have slept on the bare ground by the river-side than have slept that night in that desecrated and haunted room of Elsie’s.
He did not sleep. He lay awake all the long hours through, and murmured to himself, ten thousand times over, “Elsie, Elsie, Elsie, Elsie!” His lips moved as he murmured sometimes. Winifred opened her eyes once he felt her open them, though it was as dark as pitch and seemed to listen. One’s senses grow preternaturally sharp in the night watches. Could she have heard that mute movement of his silent lips? He hoped not. Oh no; it was impossible. But he lay awake till morning in a deadly terror, the cold sweat standing in big drops on his brow, haunted through the long vigils of the dreary night by that picture of Elsie, in her pale white dress, with arms uplifted above her helpless head, flinging herself wildly from the dim black poplar, through the gloom of evening, upon the tender mercies of the swift dark water.
Elsie, Elsie, Elsie, Elsie! It was for this he had sold and betrayed his Elsie!
In the morning when he rose, he went over to the window Elsie’s window, round whose sides the rich wistaria clambered so luxuriantly and looked out with weary sleepless eyes across the weary dreary stretch of barren Suffolk scenery. It was still winter, and the wistaria on the wall stood bald and naked and bare of foliage. How different from the time when Elsie lived there! He could see where the bough had broken with his weight that awful night of Elsie’s disappearance. He gazed vacantly across the lawn and meadow toward the tumbling sandhills. “Winifred,” he said he was in no mood just then to call her Winnie “what a big bare bundle of straight tall switches that poplar is! So gaunt and stiff! I hate the very sight of it. It’s a great disfigurement. I wonder your people ever stood it so long, blocking out the view from their drawing-room windows.’.’
Winifred rose from the dressing-table and looked out by his side in blank surprise. “Why, Hugh,” she cried, noting both his unwonted tone and the absence of his now customary pet form of her name, “how r can you say so? I call it just lovely. Blocking out the view, indeed! Why, it is the view. There’s nothing else. It’s the only good point in the whole picture. I love to see it even in winter the dear old poplar so tall and straight with its twigs etched out in black and gray against the sky like that. I love it better than anything else at Whitestrand.”
Hugh drummed his fingers on the frosted pane impatiently. “For my part, I hate it,” he answered in a short but sullen tone. “Whenever I come to live at Whitestrand, I shall never rest till I’ve cut it down and stubbed it up from the roots entirely!”
“Hugh!”
There was something in the accent that made him start. He knew why. It reminded him of Elsie’s voice as she cried aloud “Hugh!” in her horror and agony upon that fateful evening by the grim old poplar.
“Well, Winnie,” he answered much more tenderly. The tone had melted him.
Winifred flung her arms around him with every sign of grief and dismay and burst into a sudden flood of tears. “Oh, Hugh,” she cried, “you don’t know what you say: you can’t think how you grieve me. Don’t you know why? You must surely guess it. It isn’t that the Whitestrand poplar’s a famous tree a seamark for sailors a landmark for all the country round historical almost, not to say celebrated! It isn’t that it was mentioned by Fuller and Drayton, and I’m sure I don’t know how many other famous people poor papa knew, and was fond of quoting them. It’s not for all that, though for that alone I should be sorry to lose it, sorrier than for anything else in all Whitestrand. But, oh, Hugh, that you should say so! That you should say, Tor my part, I hate it.’ Why, Hugh, it was on the roots of that very tree, you know, that you saw me for the very first time in my life, as I sat there dangling my hat with Elsie. It was from the roots of that tree that I first saw you and fell in love with you, when you jumped off Mr. Relf’s yawl to rescue my poor little half-crown hat for me. It was from there you first won my heart you won my heart my poor little heart. And to think you really want to cut down that tree would nearly, very nearly break it. Hugh, dear Hugh, never, never, never say so!”
No man can see a woman cry unmoved. To do so is more or less than human. Hugh laid her head tenderly on his big shoulder, soothed and kissed her with loving gentleness, swore he was speaking without due thought or reflection, declared that he loved that tree every bit as much in his heart as she herself did, and pacified her gradually by every means in his large repertory of masculine blandishments. But deep down in his bosom, he crushed his despair. If ever he came to live at Whitestrand, then, that hateful tree must ever rise up in mute accusation to bear witness against him!
It could not! It should not! He could never stand it Either they must never live at Whitestrand at all, or else or else, in some way unknown to Winifred, he must manage to do away with the Whitestrand poplar.
CHAPTER XXIII.
UNDER THE PALM-TREES.
A lone governess, even though she be a Girton girl, vanishes readily into space from the stage of society. It’s wonderful how very little she’s missed. She comes and goes and disappears into vacancy, almost as the cook and the housemaid do in our modern domestic phantasmagoria; and after a few months, everybody; ceases even to inquire what has become of her. Our round horizon knows her no more. If ever at rare intervals she happens to flit for a moment across our zenith again, it is but as a revenant from some distant sphere. She has played her part in life, so far as we are concerned, when she has “finished the education” of our growing girls, as we cheerfully phrase it what a happy idea that anybody’s education could ever be finished! and we let her drop out altogether from our scheme of things accordingly, or feel her, when she invades our orbit once more, as inconvenient as all other revenants proverbially find themselves. Hence, it was no great wonder indeed that Elsie Challoner should subside quietly into the peaceful routine of her new residence at the Villa Rossa at San Remo, with “no questions asked,” as the advertisements frankly and ingenuously word it. She had a few girl-friends in England old Girton companions who tracked her still on her path through the cosmos, and to these she wrote unreservedly as to her present whereabouts. She didn’t enter into details, of course, about the particular way she came to leave her last temporary home at the Meyseys’ at Whitestrand: no one is bound to speak out everything; but she said in plain and simple language she had accepted a new and she hoped more permanent engagement on the Riviera. That was all. She concealed nothing and added nothing. Her mild deception was purely negative. She had no wish to hide the fact of her being alive from anybody on earth but Hugh and Winifred; and even from them, she desired to hide it by passive rather than by active concealment.
But it is an error of youth to underestimate in the long run the interosculation of society in our modern Babylon. You may lurk and languish and lie obscure for a while; but you do not permanently evade anybody: you may suffer eclipse, but you cannot be extinguished. While we are young and foolish, we often think to ourselves, on some change in our environment, that Jones or Brown has now dropped entirely out of our private little universe that we may safely count upon never again happening upon him or hearing of him anyhow or anywhere. We tell Smith something we know or suspect about Miss Robinson, under the profound but, alas, too innocent conviction that they two revolve in totally different planes of life, and can never conceivably collide against one another. We leave Mauritius or Eagle City, Nebraska, and imagine we are quit for good and all of the insignificant Mauritians or the free-born, free-mannered and free-spoken citizens of that far western mining camp. Error, error, sheer juvenile error! As comets come back in time from the abysses of space, so
everybody always turns up everywhere. Jones and Brown run up against us incontinently on the King’s Road at Brighton; or occupy the next table to our own at Delmonico’s; or clap us on the shoulder as we sit with a blanket wrapped round our shivering forms, intent upon the too wintry sunrise on the summit of the Rigi. Miss Robinson’s plane bisects Smith’s horizon at right angles in the dahabeeyah on the Upper Nile, or discovers our treachery at an hotel at Orotava in the Canary Islands. Our Mauritian sugar-planter calls us over the coals for our pernicious views on differential duties and the French bounty system among the stormy channels of the Outer Hebrides; and Colonel Bill Manningham, of the “Eagle City National Examiner,” intrudes upon the quiet of our suburban villa at remote Surbiton to inquire, with Western American picturesqueness and exuberance of vocabulary, what the Hades we meant by our casual description of Nebraskan society as a den of thieves, in the last number of the St. Petersburg “Monitor?” Oh no; in the pre-Columbian days of Boadicea, and Romulus and Remus, and the Twenty-first Dynasty, it might perhaps have been possible to mention a fact at Nineveh or Pekin with tolerable security against its being repeated forthwith in the palaces of Mexico or the huts of Honolulu; but in our existing world of railways and telegraphs and penny postage, and the great ubiquitous special correspondent, when Morse and Wheatstone have wreaked their worst, and whosoever enters Jerusalem by the Jaffa Gate sees a red-lettered noticeboard staring him in the face, “This way to Cook’s Excursion Office” the attempt to conceal anything has become simply and purely a ridiculous fallacy. When we go to Timbuctoo, we expect to meet with some of our wife’s relations in confidential quarters; and we are not surprised when the aged chief who entertains us in Parisian full dress at an eight o’clock dinner in the Fiji Islands relates to us some pleasing Oxford anecdotes of the missionary bishop whom in unregenerate days he assisted to eat, and under whom we ourselves read Aristotle and Tacitus as undergraduates at dear sleepy old Oriel. More than ever nowadays is the proverb true, “Quod taciturn velis nemini dixeris.”
It was ordained, therefore, in the nature of things, that sooner or later Hugh Massinger must find out Elsie Challoner was really living. No star shoots ever beyond the limits of our galaxy. But the discovery might be postponed for an indefinite period; and besides, so far as Elsie herself was concerned, her only wish was to keep the fact secret from Hugh in person, not from the rest of the world at large; for she knew everybody else in her little sphere believed her merely to have left the Meyseys’ in a most particular and unexplained hurry. Now, Hugh for his part, even if any vague rumor of her having been sighted here or there in some distant nook of the Riviera by So-and-so or What’s-his-name might happen at any time to reach his ear, would certainly set it down in his own heart as one more proof of the signal success of his own clever and cunningly designed deception. As a matter of fact, more than one person did accidentally, in the course of conversation, during the next few years mention to Hugh that somebody had said Miss Challoner had been seen at Marseilles or Cannes, or Genoa or somewhere; and Hugh in every case did really look upon it only as another instance of Warren Relf’s blind acceptance of his bland little fictions. The more people thought Elsie was alive, the more did Hugh Massinger in his own heart pride himself inwardly on the cleverness and farsightedness of the plot he had laid and carried out that awful evening at the Fisherman’s Rest at Whitestrand in Suffolk.
Thus it happened that Elsie was not far wrong, for the present at least, in her calculation of chances as to Hugh and Winifred.
The very day Elsie reached San Remo, news of Mr. Meysey’s death came to her in the papers. It was a sudden shock, and the temptation to write to Winifred then was very strong; but Elsie resisted it. She had to resist it to crush down her sympathy for sympathy’s sake. She couldn’t bear to break poor Winifred’s heart at such a moment by letting her know to the full all Hugh’s baseness. It was hard indeed that Winifred should think her unfeeling, should call her ungrateful, should suppose her forgetful; but she bore even that for Winifred’s sake without murmuring. Some day, perhaps, Winifred would know; but she hoped not. For Winifred’s sake, she hoped Winifred would never find out what manner of man she proposed to marry.
And for Hugh’s, too. For with feminine consistency and steadfastness of feeling, Elsie even now could not learn to hate him. Nay, rather, though she recognized how vile and despicable a thing he was, how poor in spirit, how unworthy of her love, she loved him still she could not help loving him. For Hugh’s sake, she wished it all kept secret forever from Winifred, even though she herself must be the victim and the scapegoat. Winifred would think harshly of her in any case: why let her think harshly of Hugh also?
And so, in the little Villa Rossa at San Remo, among that calm reposeful scenery of olive groves and lemon orchards, Elsie’s poor wounded heart began gradually to film over a little with external healing. She had the blessed deadening influence of daily routine to keep her from brooding; those six pleasant, delicate, sensitive, sympathetic consumptive girls to teach and look after and walk out with perpetually. They were bright young girls, as often happens with their type; extremely like Winifred herself in manner too like, Elsie sometimes thought in her own heart with a sigh of presentiment. And Elsie’s heart was still young, too. They clambered together, like girls as they were, among the steep hills that stretch behind the town; they explored that pretty coquettish country; they wandered along the beautiful olive-clad shore; they made delightful excursions to the quaint old villages on the mountain sides Taggia and Ceriana, and San Romolo and Perinaldo moldering gray houses perched upon pinnacles of mouldering gray rock, and pierced by arcades of Moorish gloom and medieval solemnity. All alike helped Elsie to beat down the memory of her grief, or to hold it at bay in her poor tortured bosom. That she would ever be happy again was more than in her most sanguine moments she dared to expect; but she was not without hope that she might in time grow at least insensible.
One morning in December, at the Villa Rossa, about the hour for early breakfast, Elsie heard a light knock at her door. It was not the cook with the cafe-au-lait arid roll and tiny pat of butter on the neat small tray for the first breakfast: Elsie knew that much by the lightness of the knock. “Come in,” she said; and the door opened and Edie entered. She held a letter in her right hand, and a very grave look sat upon her usually merry face. “Somebody dead?” Elsie thought with a start. But no; the letter was not black-bordered. Edie opened it and drew from it slowly a small piece of paper, an advertisement ( from the “Times.” Then Elsie’s breath came and went hard. She knew now what the letter portended. Not a death: not a death but a marriage!
“Give it me, dear,” she cried aloud to Edie. “Let me see it at once. I can bear it I can bear it”
Edie handed the cutting to her, with a kiss on her forehead, and sat with her arm round Elsie’s waist as the poor dazed girl, half erect in the bed, sat up and read that final seal of Hugh’s cruel betrayal: “On Dec. 11th, at Whitestrand Parish Church, Suffolk, by the Rev. Percy W. Bickersteth, M. A., cousin of the bride, assisted by the Rev. J. Walpole, vicar, Hugh Edward de Carteret Massinger, of the Inner Temple, Barrister-at-law, to Winifred Mary, only daughter of the late Thomas Wyville Meysey, of Whitestrand Hall, J. P.”
Elsie gazed at the cutting long and sadly; then she murmured at last in a pained voice: “And he thought I was dead! He thought he had killed me!”
Edie’s fiery indignation could restrain itself no longer. “He’s a wicked man,” she cried: “a wicked, bad, horrible creature; and I don’t care what you say, Elsie; I hope he’ll be punished as he well deserves for his cruelty and wickedness to you, darling.”
“I hope not I pray not,” Elsie answered solemnly. And as she said it, she meant it. She prayed for it profoundly.
After a while, she set down the paper on the table by her bedside, and laying her head on Edie’s shoulder, burst into tears a torrent of relief for her burdened feelings. Edie soothed her and wept with her, tenderly. For half an ho
ur Elsie cried in silence; then she rose at last, dried her eyes, burned the little slip of paper from the “Times” resolutely, and said to Edie: “Now it’s all over.”
“All over?” Edie echoed in an inquiring voice.
“Yes, darling, all over,” Elsie answered very firmly. “I shall never, never cry any more at all about him. He’s Winifred’s now, and I hope he’ll be good to her. But, oh, Edie, I did once love him so!”
And the winter wore away slowly at San Remo. Elsie had crushed down her love firmly in her heart now crushed it down and stifled it to some real purpose. She knew Hugh for just what he was; she recognized his coldness, his cruelty, his little care for her; and she saw no sign as how should she see it? of the deadly remorse that gnawed from time to time at his tortured bosom. The winter wore away, and Elsie was glad of it Time was making her regret less poignant.
Early in February, Edie came up to her room one afternoon, when the six consumptive pupils were at work in the schoolroom below with the old Italian music-master, under Mrs. Relf’s direction, and seating herself, girl-fashion, on the bed, began to talk about her brother Warren.
Edie seldom talked of Warren to Elsie: she had even ostentatiously avoided the subject hitherto, for reasons of her own which will be instantly obvious to the meanest intelligence. But now, by a sort of accident or design, she mentioned casually something about how he had always taken them, most years, for so many nice trips in his yawl to the lovely places on the coast about Bordighera and Mentone, and even Monte Carlo.
