by Grant Allen
She noticed how ingeniously he had mixed them all up together in a single list, as if none were more interesting to her mind than the other; and she added in an almost inaudible voice: “If you go to Whitestrand, I wish very much you would let me know about poor dear Winifred.”
“I will let you know,” he answered, with a bound of his heart, proud even to be intrusted with that doubtful commission. “I’ll make it my business to go there almost at once. And I may write and tell you how I find her, mayn’t I?”
Elsie drew back, a little frightened at his request. “Edie could tell me, couldn’t she? That would save you the trouble,” she murmured after a pause, not without some faint undercurrent of conscious hypocrisy.
His face fell. He was disappointed that he might not write to her himself on so neutral a matter. “As you will,” he answered, with a downcast look. “Edie shall do it, then.”
Elsie’s heart was divided within her. She saw her reply hid hurt and distressed him. He was such a good fellow, and he would be so pleased to write. But if only he knew how hopeless it was! What folly to encourage him, when nothing on earth could ever come of it! She wished she knew what she ought to do under these trying circumstances. Gratitude would urge her to say “Yes, of course;” but regard for his own happiness would make her say “No” with crushing promptitude. It was better he should understand, at once, without appeal, that it was quite impossible a dream of the wildest. She glanced at him shyly and caught his eye; she fancied it was just a trifle dimmed. She was so sorry for him. “Very well, Mr.
Relf,” she murmured, relenting and taking his hand for a moment to say good-bye. “You can write yourself, if it’s not too much trouble.”
Warren’s heart gave a great jump. “Thank you,” he said, wringing her hand, oh, so hard! “You are very kind. Good-by, Miss Challoner.” And he raised his hat and departed all tremulous. He went down that afternoon to the “Mud-Turtle” in the harbor the happiest man alive in the whole of San Remo.
CHAPTER XXV.
CLOUDS ON THE HORIZON.
The Massingers pitched their tent at Whitestrand again for August. Hugh did his best indeed to put ff the evil day; but if you sell your soul for gold, you must take the gold with all its incumbrances; and Winifred’s will was a small incumbrance that Hugh had never for one moment reckoned upon in his ante-nuptial calculations of advantages and drawbacks. He took it for granted he was marrying a mere girl, whom he could mold and fashion to his own whim and fancy. That simple, childish, blushing little thing had a will of her own, however ay, more, plenty of it. When Hugh proposed with an insinuating smile that they should run down for the summer to Barmouth or Aberystwith he loved North Wales Winifred replied with quiet dignity: “Wales is stuffy. There’s nothing so bracing as the east coast. After a London season, one needs bracing. I feel pulled down. We’ll go and stop with mamma at Whitestrarid.” And she shut her little mouth upon it with a snap like a rat-trap. Against that solid rock of sheer resolution, Hugh shattered himself to no purpose in showery spray of rhetoric and reasoning. Gibraltar is not more disdainful of the foam that dashes upon its eternal cliffs year after year than Winifred was to her husband’s running fire of argument and expostulation. She never deigned to argue in return; she merely repeated with naked iteration ten thousand times over the categorical formula, “We’ll go to Whitestrand.”
And to Whitestrand they went in due time. The plastic male character can no more resist the ceaseless pressure of feminine persistence than clay can resist the hands of the potter, or wood the weeping effect of heat and dryness. Hugh took his way obediently to dull flat Suffolk when August came, and relinquished with a sigh his dreams of delicious picnics by the Dolgelly waterfalls, and his mental picture of those phenomenally big trout three pounds apiece, fisherman’s weight that lurk uncaught in the deep green pools among the rocks and stickles of the plashing Wnion. The Bard had sold himself for prompt cash to the first bidder: he found when it was too late he had sold himself unknown into a mitigated form of marital slavery. The purchaser made her own terms r Hugh was compelled meekly to accept them.
Two strong wills were clashing together. In serious matters, neither would yield. Each must dint and batter the other.
They did not occupy Elsie’s room this time. Hugh had stipulated with all his might for that concession beforehand. He would never pass a night in that room again, he said: the paint or the woodwork or the chairs or something made him hopelessly sleepless. In those old houses, sanitary arrangements were always bad. Winifred darted a piercing look at him as he shuffled uneasily over that lame excuse. Already a vague idea was framing itself piecemeal in her woman’s mind a very natural idea, when she saw him so moody and preoccupied and splenetic that Hugh had been really in love with Elsie, and was in love with Elsie still, even now that Elsie was away in Australia else why this unconquerable and absurd objection to Elsie’s room? Did he think he had deceived and ill-treated Elsie?
A woman’s mind goes straight to the bull’s-eye. No use pretending to mislead her with side-issues; she flings them aside with a contemptuous smile, and proceeds at once to worm her way to the kernel of the matter.
August wore away, and September came in; and Hugh continued to mope and to bore himself to his heart’s content at that detestable Whitestrand. To distract his soul, he worked hard at his “Ode to Manetho;” but even Manetho, audacious theme, gave him scanty consolation. Nay, his quaint “Legend of Fee-Faw-Fum,” that witty apologue, with its grimly humorous catalogue of all possible nightly fears, supplied him with food but for one solitary morning’s meditation. You can’t cast out your blue-devils by poking fun at them; those cerulean demons will not be laughed down or rudely exorcised by such simple means. They recur in spite of you with profound regularity. The fons et origo mail was still present. That hateful poplar still fronted his eyes wherever he moved: that window with the wistaria still haunted his sight whenever he tried to lounge at his ease on the lawn or in the garden. The river, the sandhills, the meadows, the walks, all, all were poisoned to him: all spoke of Elsie. Was ever Nemesis more hideous or more complete? Was ever punishment more omnipresent? He had gained all he wished, and lost his ow r n soul; at every turn of his own estate some horrible memento of his shame and his guilt rose up to confuse him. He wished he was dead every day he lived: dead, and asleep in his grave, beside Elsie. As that dreaded anniversary, the seventeenth of September, slowly approached the anniversary, as Hugh felt it, of Elsie’s murder his agitation and his gloom increased visibly. Winifred wondered silently to herself what on earth could ail him. During the last few weeks, he seemed to have become another man. An atmosphere of horror and doubt surrounded him. On the fifteenth, two days before the date of Elsie’s disappearance, she went up hastily to their common room. The door was half-locked, but not securely fastened: it yielded to a sudden jerk of her wrist, and she entered abruptly to find Hugh, with a guilty red face, pushing away a “small bundle of letters and a trinket of some kind info a tiny cabinet which he always mysteriously carried about w’ith him. She had hardly tinae to catch them distinctly, but the trinket looked like a watch or a locket. The letters, too, ske managed to note, were tied together with an elastic band, and numbered in clear red ink on the envelopes. More than that she had no chance to see. But her feminine curiosity was strongly excited; the more so as Hugh banged down the lid on its spring lock with guilty haste, and proceeded with hot and fiery fingers to turn the key upon the whole set in his own portmanteau.
“Hugh,” she cried, standing still to gaze upon him, “what do you keep in that little cabinet?”
Hugh turned upon her as she had never before seen him turn. No longer clay in the hands of the potter, he stood stiff and hard like adamant then. “If I had meant you to know,” he said coldly, “I would have told you long ago. I did not tell you, therefore I did not mean you to know. Ask me no questions. This incident is now closed. Say nothing more about it.” And he turned on his heel and left her astonished.
That was all. Winifred cried the night through, but Hugh remained still absolute adamant. Next morning, she altered her tactics completely, and drying her eyes once for all, said never another word on the subject. She even pretended to be cheerful and careless. When a woman pretends to be cheerful and careless after a domestic scene, the luckless man whose destiny she holds in the hollow of her hand may well tremble, especially if there is something he wants to conceal from her. She means to egg it all out, and egged out it will all be, as certainly as the sun will rise to-morrow. It may take a long time; but it will come for all that. A woman on the track of a secret, pretending carelessness, is a dangerous animal. She will go far. Hanc tu, Romane, caveto.
On the sixteenth, Winifred formed a little plan of her own, which she ventilated with childish effusion at lunchtime. “Hugh, dear,” she said in her most winning voice, “do you happen to remember if you’ve time for such trifles that to-morrow’s a very special anniversary?”
Hugh’s cheek blanched as if by magic. What devilry was this? What deliberate cruelty? For the moment his usual courage and presence of mind forsook him. Had Winifred, then, found out everything? A special anniversary, indeed! As if he could forget it! And that she, for whose sake with the manor of Whitestrand thrown in he had done it all and made himself next door to a murderer that she, of all people in the world, should cast it in his teeth, and make bitter game of him about Elsie’s death! “Well, Winifred,” he answered in a strange low voice, looking hard at her eyes: “I suppose I’m not likely to forget it, am I?”
Winifred noted the tone silently. Aloud, she gave no token in any way of having observed his singular manner. “It’s a year to-morrow since Hugh proposed to me, you know, mamma dear,” she went on, in her quietest and most cutting voice, turning round to her mother, “and he does me the honor to say politely he isn’t likely to forget the occasion. For a whole year, he’s actually remembered it But it seems to make him terribly grumpy. Never mind, Hugh; I’ll let you off. I’m a sweet little angel, and I’m not going to be angry with my great bear: so there, Mr. Constellation, you see I’ve forgiven you. Now, what I was going to say’s just this. As to-morrow’s a special anniversary in our lives, I propose we shall celebrate it with becoming dignity.”
“Which means, I suppose, the ordinary British symbol of merry-making, a plum-pudding for dinner,” Hugh interposed bitterly. He saw his mistake with perfect clearness now, but he hadn’t the tact or the grace to conceal it, with a woman’s cleverness, under a show of goodhumor.
“A plum-pudding is banal,” Winifred answered with a smile “distinctly banal. I’m surprised a member of the Cheyne Row set should even dream of suggesting it. What would Mr. Hatherley say if he heard the Immortal One make such a proposition? He’d detect in it the strong savor of Philistia; he’d declare you’d joined the hosts of Goliath. No. It isn’t a plum-pudding. My idea’s this. Why shouldn’t we go for a family picnic, just our three selves, in honor of the occasion?”
“A picnic!” Hugh cried, aghast “a picnic to-morrow! On the seventeenth!” Then recollecting himself once more, he added hastily: “In this unsettled weather! The sandhills are soaked. There isn’t a place on the whole estate one could arrange to seat one’s self down on comfortably.”
“I hadn’t thought of the sandhills,” Winifred answered with quiet dignity. “I thought it’d be awfully nice if we all bespoke a dry seat in Mr. Relf’s yawl.”
“Relf’s yawl!” Hugh cried aloud, with increasing ex-, citement. “You don’t mean to say that creature’s here again!”
“That creature, I’m in a position to state without reserve,” Winifred answered chillily, “ran up the river to the Fisherman’s Rest late last night, as lively as ever. I saw the ‘Mud-Turtle’ come in myself, before a chipping breeze! And Mr. Stannaway told me this morning Mr. Relf was a-lying off the hard, just opposite Stannaway ‘s. So I thought it’d be a capital plan, in memory of old times, if we got Mr. Relf to take us down in the yawl to Orfordness, land us comfortably at the Low Light, and let us picnic on the nice dry ridge of big shingle just above the graveyard where they bury the wretched sailors.”
Hugh’s whole soul was on fire within him; but his face was pale, and his hands deadly cold. Was this pure accident, mere coincidence, or was it designed and deliberate torture on Winifred’s part, he wondered? To picnic in sight of Elsie’s nameless grave, on the very anniversary of Elsie’s death, with every concomitant of pretended rejoicing that could make that ghastly act more ghastly still than it would otherwise be in its own mere naked brutality. It was too sickening to think upon. But did Winifred know? Could Winifred mean it as a punishment for his silence? Or had she merely blundered upon that horrible proposition as a sheer coincidence out of pure accident?
As a matter of fact the last solution was the true and simple one. The sandhills, or Orfordness, were the two recognized alternative picknicking places where all Whitestrand invariably disported itself. If you didn’t go to the one, you went as a matter of course to the other. There was no third way open to the most deliberate and statesmanlike of mortals. The Meyseys had gone to Orfordness for years. Why not go there on the anniversary of Winnie’s engagement? To Winifred, the proposal seemed simplicity itself; to Hugh, it seemed like a strangely perverse and cunning piece of sheer feminine cruelty.
“There’s nothing to see at Orfordness,” he said shortly “nothing but a great bare bank of sand and shingle, and a couple of lighthouses, standing alone in a perfect desert of desolation. Besides, the weather’s just beastly. Much better stop at home as usual by ourselves, and eat our dinner here in peace and quietness! This isn’t the sort of season for picnicking.”
“Oh! but Hugh,” Mrs. Meysey put in, with her maternal authority, “you know we always go to Orfordness. It’s really quite a charming place in its way. The sands are so broad and hard and romantic. We sail down, and picnic at the lighthouse; and then we get a man to row us across the river at the back to Orford Castle there’s a splendid view from Orford Castle and altogether it makes a delightful excursion, of its kind, for Suffolk. We ought to do something to commemorate the day. If we weren’t in such deep mourning still” and Mrs. Meysey glanced down with a conventional sigh at her crape excrescences “we’d ask a few friends in to dinner; but I’m afraid it’s a little too soon for that. Still, at any rate, there could be no harm not the slightest harm in our just running down to Orfordness for a family picnic. It’s precisely the same as lunching at home here together.”
“Do you remember, Hugh,” Winifred went on, musingly, putting the screw on, “how we walked out that morning, a year ago, by the water-side; and how you picked a bit of forget-me-not and meadow sweet from the bank and gave it me; and what pretty verses about undying love you repeated as you gave it? And in the evening, mamma, I had to go out to dinner, all alone with you and poor dear papa, to Snade vicarage! I recollect how angry and annoyed I was because I had to go out and leave Hugh that particular evening! and because I’d worn that same dinner dress at Snade vicarage three parties running!”
“Yes,” Mrs. Meysey continued, with another deep-drawn sigh; “and what a night that was, to be sure! So full of surprises! It was the night, you know, when poor Elsie Challoner ran away from us. You got engaged to Hugh in the morning, and in the evening Elsie disappeared as if by magic! Such a coincidence! Poor dear Elsie! Not a year ago! A year, to-morrow!”
“No, mother dear. That was the eighteenth. I was engaged on the Wednesday, you recollect, and it was the Thursday when we found out Elsie had gone away from us.”
“Thursday, the eighteenth, when we found it out, dear,” Mrs. Meysey repeated in a decisive voice (the maternal mind is strong on dates); but Wednesday, the seventeenth, late in the evening, of course, when she went away from us. Poor dear Elsie! I wonder what’s become of her! It’s curious she doesn’t write to you oftener, Winifred.”
Were they working upon his feelings, of malice prepense? Were they trying to make him blur
t out the truth? he wondered. Hugh Massinger in his agony could stand it no longer. He rose from the table and went over to the window. There, the poplar stared him straight in the face. He turned around and looked hard at Winifred. Her expressionless blue eyes were placid as usual. “Then, if it’s fine,” she said, in an insipid voice, “we’ll ask Mr. Relf to give us a lift down to Orfordness to-morrow in the ‘Mud-Turtle.’”
“No!” Hugh thundered in an angry tone. “However you go, Relf shan’t take you. I don’t want to see any more of Relf. I dislike Relf; I object to Relf. He’s a mean cur! I won’t go anywhere with Relf in future.”
“But, children, you should never let your angry passions rise,” Winifred murmured provokingly. “‘ Your little hands were never meant to tear each other’s eyes,’ If he doesn’t want to go in Mr. Relf’s boat, he shan’t be made to, then, poor little fellow. He shall do exactly as he likes himself. He shall have another boat all of his own. I’ll order one this evening for him at Martin’s or at Stannaway’s.”
“If it’s fine,” Mrs. Meysey interposed parenthetically.
“If it’s fine, of course,” Winifred answered, rising. “We don’t want to picnic in a torrent of rain. Whatever else we may be, we’re rational animals. But how do you know, Hugh, what Orfordness is like? You can’t tell. You’ve never been there.”
“I went there once alone last year,” Hugh answered sulkily; “and I saw enough of the beastly hole then to know very well I don’t desire its further acquaintance.”
“But you never told me you’d been over there.”
Hugh managed to summon up a sardonic smile. “I wasn’t married to you then, Winnie,” he answered, with a savage snarl, that showed his projecting canines with most unpleasant distinctness. “My goings-out and my comings-in were not yet a matter of daily domestic inquisition. I hadn’t to report myself every time I came or Went, like a soldier in barracks to his commanding officer. I went to Orfordness one day for a walk by myself unbidden for my own amusement.”
