by Grant Allen
All that afternooon and late into the evening, Hugh watched the clouds and the barometer eagerly. His fate that day hung upon a spider’s web. If it rained to-morrow, all might yet be well; if not, he felt in his own soul they stood within measurable distance of a domestic cataclysm. He would not go to Orfordness with Winifred. He could not go to Orfordness with Winifred. That much was certain. He could not picnic, on the anniversary of Elsie’s death, within sight of Elsie’s nameless grave, in company with those two strange women his wife and his motherin-law. Ugh! how he hated the bare idea! If it came to the worst if it was fine to-morrow he must either break forever with Winifred for she would never give in or else he must fling himself off the roots of the poplar, where Elsie had flung herself off that day twelve months ago, and drown as she had drowned among the angry breakers.
There would be a certain dramatic completeness and roundness about that particular fate which commended itself especially to Hugh Massinger’s poetical nature. It would read so like a Greek tragedy a tale of Ate and Hubris and Nemesis. Even from the point of view of the outer world, who knew but the husk, it would seem romantic enough to drown one’s self, disconsolate, on the very anniversary of one’s first engagement to the young wife, one meant to leave an untimely widow. But to Hugli Massinger himself, who knew the whole kernel and core of the story it would be infinitely more romantic and charming in its way to drown one’s self off the same poplar on the self-same day that Elsie had drowned herself. No bard could wish for a gloomier or more appropriate death. Would it rain or shine? On that slender thread of doubt h’is whole future now hung and trembled.
The morning of the seventeenth dawned at last, and Hugh rose early, to draw aside the bedroom blinds for a moment A respite! a respite! It was pouring a regular English downpour. There was no hope or no danger, rather of a picnic to-day. Thank heaven for that. It put off his fate. It saved him the inconvenience and worry of having to drown himself this particular morning. And yet the denouement would have been so strictly dramatic that he almost regretted a shower of rain should intervene to spoil it.
At ten o’clock he started out alone in the blinding downpour and took the train as far as Aldeburgh. Thence he followed the shingle beach to Orfordness, plodding on, as he had done a year before, over the loose stones, but through drenching rain, instead of under hot and blazing sunlight. When he reached the lighthouse, he sat himself down in pilgrim guise beside Elsie’s grave in the steady drip, and did penance once more by that unknown tomb in solemn silence. Not even the lighthouse-man came out this time to gaze at him in wonder; it poured too hard and too persistently for that. He sat there alone for half an hour, by Elsie’s watch; for he had wound it that morning with reverent hands, and brought it away with him for that very purpose. A little rusty, perhaps, from the sea, it would keep good time enough still for all he needed. At the end of the half-hour he rose once more, plodded back again over the shingle in his dripping clothes, and catching the last train home to Almundham, reached Whitestrand just in time to dress for dinner.
Winifred was waiting for him at the front door, white with emotion not so much anger as slighted attention. “Where have you been?” she asked, in a cold voice, as he arrived at the porch, a dripping, draggled, wearied pedestrian, in a soaking suit of last year’s tweeds.
“Didn’t I say well I was bound to report myself to my commanding officer?” Hugh answered tauntingly. “All right, then; I proceed at once to report myself. I may as well tell you as leave you to worry. I’ve been to Orfonlness alone tramped it.”
“To Orfordness!” his wife echoed in profound astonishment. “You didn’t want to go with us there if it was fine. Why, what on earth, Hugh, did you ever go there in this pelting rain for?”
“Your mother recommended it,” Hugh answered sullenly, “as a place of amusement. She said it was altogether a most delightful excursion. She praised the sands as firm and romantic. So I thought I’d try it on her recommendation. I found it damp, decidedly damp. Send me my shoes, please!” And that was all the explanation he ever vouchsafed her.
CHAPTER XXVI.
REPORTING PROGRESS.
Warren Relf spent many days that summer at Whitestrand, cruising vaguely about the mouth of the Char, or wandering and sketching among the salt-marsh meadows; but he never happened to come face to face, by accident or design, with Hugh Massinger. Fate seemed persistently to interpose between them. Once or twice, indeed, Winifred said with some slight asperity to her husband, “Don’t you think, Hugh, if it were only for old acquaintance’ sake, we ought to ask that creature Relf some day to dinner?”
But Hugh, who was yielding enough in certain matters, was as marble here: he could never consent to receive his enemy, of his own accord, beneath his own roof for Whitestrand, after all, was his own in reality. “No,” he growled out, looking up from his paper testily. “I don’t like the fellow. I’ve heard things about him that make me sorry I ever accepted his hospitality. If you happen to meet him, Winifred, prowling about the place and trying to intercept you, I forbid you to speak to him.”
“You forbid me, Hugh?”
“Yes” coldly “I forbid you.”
Winifred bit her lip, and was discreetly silent. No need to answer. Those two proud wills were beginning already to clash more ominously one against the other. “Very well,” the young wife thought in silence to herself; “if he means to mew me up, seraglio and zenana fashion, in my own rooms, he should hire a guard and some Circassian slaves, and present me with a yashmak to cover my face with.”
A day or two later, as she strolled on some errand into the placid village, she came suddenly upon Warren Relf, in his rough jersey and sailor cap, hanging about the lane, sketch-book in hand, not without some vague expectation, as Hugh had said, of accidentally intercepting her. It was a painful duty, but Elsie had laid it upon him; and Elsie’s will was law now. Naturally, he had never told Elsie about the meeting with Hugh at the Cheyne Row Club. If he had, she would never have imposed so difficult, delicate, and dangerous a task upon him. But she knew nothing; and so she had sent him on this painful errand.
Winifred smiled a frank smile of recognition as she came up close to him. The painter pulled off his awkward cap awkwardly and unskillfully.
“You were going to pass me by, Mr. Relf,” she said, with a good-humored nod. “You won’t recognize me or have anything to do with me, perhaps, now I’m married and done for!”
The words gave him an uncomfortable thrill; they seemed so ominous, so much truer than she thought them.
“I hardly did know you,” he answered with a forced smile. “I’ve not been accustomed to see you in black before, Mrs. Massinger. And to say the truth, when I come to look at you, you’re paler and thinner than when I last met you.”
Winifred coughed a little dry cough. Women always take sympathetic remarks about their ill health in a disparaging sense to their personal appearance. “A London season!” she answered, smiling; yet even her smile had a certain unwonted air of sadness about it. “Too many of Mrs. Bouverie Barton’s literary evenings have unhinged me, I suppose. My small brains have been over-stimulated. You’ve not been up to the Hall yet to see us, Mr. Relf. I saw the ‘Mud-Turtle’ come ploughing bravely in some three or four days ago, and I wondered you’d never looked up old friends. For of course you know I owe you something: it was you who first brought dear Hugh to Whitestrand.”
How Warren ever got through the remainder of that slippery interview, gliding with difficulty over the thin ice, he hardly knew. He walked with Winifred to the end of the lane, talking in vague generalities of politeness; and then, with some lame excuse of the state of the tide, he took a brusque and hasty leave of her. He felt himself guilty for talking to her at all, considering the terms on which he stood with her husband. But Elsie’s will overrode everything. When he wrote to Elsie, that letter he had looked forward to so long and eagerly, it was with a heavy heart and an accusing conscience; for he felt somehow, from the forced gaiet
y of Winifred’s ostentatiously careless manner, that things were not going quite so smoothly as a wedding-bell at the Hall already. That poor young wife was ill at ease. However, for Elsie’s sake, he would make the best of it. Why worry and trouble poor heart-broken Elsie more than absolutely needful with Winifred’s possible or actual misfortunes?
“I didn’t meet your cousin himself,” he wrote with a very doubtful hand it was hard to have even to refer to the subject at all to Elsie; “but I came across Mrs. Massinger one afternoon, strolling in the lane, with her pet pug, and looking very pretty in her light half-mourning, though a trifle paler and thinner than I had yet known her. She attributes her paleness, however, to too much gaiety during the London season and to the late hours of Bohemian society. I hope a few weeks at Whitestrand will set her fully up again, and that when I have next an opportunity of meeting her, I may be able to send you a good report of her health and happiness.”
How meager, how vapid, how jejune, how conventional! Old Mrs. Walpole of the vicarage herself could not have worded it more baldly or more flabbily. And this was the letter he had been burning to write: this the opportunity be had been so eagerly awaiting! What a note to send to his divine Elsie! He tore it up and wrote it again half a dozen times over, before he was finally satisfied to accept his dissatisfaction as an immutable, inevitable, and unconquerable fact. And then, he compensated himself by writing out in full, for his own mere subjective gratification, the sort of letter he would have liked to write her, if circumstances permitted it a burning letter of fervid love, beginning, “My own darling, darling Elsie,” and ending, with hearts and darts and tears and protestations, “Yours ever devotedly and lovingly, Warren.” Which done, he burned the second genuine letter in a solemn holocaust with a lighted fusee, and sent off that stilted formal note to “Dear Miss Challoner,” with many regrets and despondent aspirations. And as soon as he had dropped it into the village letter-box, all aglow with shame, the “Mud-Turtle” was soon under way, with full canvas set, before a breathless air, on her voyage once more to Lowestoft.
But Winifred never mentioned to Hugh that she had met and spoken to “that creature Relf,” with whom he had so sternly and authoritatively forbidden her to hold any sort of communication. That was bad a beginning of evil. The first great breach was surely opening out by slow degrees between them.
A week later, as the yawl lay idle on her native mud in Yarmouth harbor, Warren Relf, calling at the postoffice for his expected budget, received a letter with a French stamp on it, and a postmark bearing the magical words, “St. Martin Lantosque, Alpes Maritimes,” which made his quick breath come and go spasmodically. He tore it open with a beating heart.
“Dear Mr. Relf” (it said simply), “How very kind of you to take the trouble of going to Whitestrand and sending me so full and careful an account of dear Winifred. Thank you ever so much for all your goodness. But you are always kind. I have learnt to expect it.
“Yours very sincerely, “Elsie Challoner.”
That was all: those few short words; but Warren Relf lived on that brief note night and morning, till the time came when he might return once more in his small craft to the South and to Elsie.
When he did return, with the southward tide of invalids and swallows, Elsie had left the first poignancy of her grief a year behind her; but Warren saw quite clearly still, with sinking heart, that she was true as ever to the Hugh that was not and that never had been. She received him kindly, like a friend and a brother; but her manner was none the less the cold fixed manner of a woman who has lived her life out to the bitter end, and whose heart has been broken once and forever. When Warren saw her, his soul despaired. He felt it was cruel even to hope. But Edie, most cheerful of optimists, laughed him to scorn. “If I were a man,” she cried boldly, and then broke off. That favorite feminine aposiopesis is the most cutting known form of criticism. Warren noted it, and half took heart, half desponded again more utterly than ever.
Still, he had one little buttress left for his failing hopes: there was no denying that Elsie’s interest in his art, as art, increased daily. She let him give her lessons in watercolors now, and she watched his own patient and delicate work with constant attention and constant admiration, among the rocks and bays of the inexhaustible Riviera. During that second sunny winter at San Remo, in fact, they grew for the first time to know one another. Warren’s devotion told slowly, for no woman is wholly proof in some lost corner of her heart against a man’s determined and persistent love. She could not love him in return, to be sure: oh no; impossible: all that was over long ago, forever: an ingrained sense of womanly consistency barred the way to love for the rest of the ages. But she liked him immensely; she saw his strong points; she admired his earnestness, his goodness, his singleness of purpose, his worship of his art, and his hopeless and chivalrous attachment to herself into the bargain. It? very hopelessness touched her profoundly. He could never expect her to return his love; of that she was sure; but he loved her for all that; and she acknowledged it gratefully. In one word, she liked him as much as it is possible for a woman to like a man she is not and cannot ever be in love with.
“Is that right yet, Miss Challoner?” Warren asked one day, with a glance at his canvas, as he sat with Edie and Elsie on the deck of the “Mud-Turtle,” painting in a mass of hanging ruddy-brown seaweed, whose redness of tone Elsie thought he had somewhat needlessly exaggerated.
“Why ‘Miss Challoner’?” Edie asked with one of her sudden arch looks at her brother. “We’re all in the family, now, you know, Warren. Why not ‘Elsie’? She’s Elsie of course to all the rest of us.”
Warren glanced into the depths of Elsie’s dark eyes with an inquiring look. “May it be, Elsie?” he asked, all tremors.
She looked back at him, frankly and openly. “Yes, Warren, if you like,” she said in a simple straightforward tone that disarmed criticism. The answer, in fact, half displeased him. She granted it too easily, with too little reserve. He would have preferred it even if she had said “No,” with a trifle more coyness, more maidenly timidity. The half is often better than the whole. She assented like one to whom assent is a matter of slight importance. It was clear the permission meant nothing to her. And to him it might have meant so much, so much! He bit his lip, and answered shyly, “Thank you.”
Edie noted his downcast look and his suppressed sigh. “You goose!” she said afterward. “Pray, what did you expect? Do you think the girl’s bound to jump down your throat like a ripe gooseberry? If she’s worth winning, she’s worth waiting for. A woman who can love as Elsie has loved can’t be expected to dance a polka at ten minutes’ notice on the mortal remains of her dead self. But then, a woman who can love as Elsie has loved must love in the end a man worth loving. I don’t say I’ve a very high opinion of you in other ways, Warren. As a man of business, you’re simply nowhere; you wouldn’t have sold those three pictures in London, you know, last autumn if it hadn’t been for your amiable sister’s persistent touting; but as a marrying man, I consider you’re Ai, eighteen carat, a perfect hundred-guinea prize in the matrimonial market.”
Before the end of the winter, Elsie and Warren found they had settled down into a quiet brotherly and sisterly relation, which to Elsie’s mind left nothing further to be desired; while to Warren it seemed about as bad an arrangement as the nature of things could easily have permitted.
“It’s a pity he can’t sell his pictures better,” Elsie said one day confidentially to Edie. “He does so deserve it; they’re really lovely. Every day I watch him, I find new points in them. I begin to see now how really great they are.”
“It is a pity,” Edie answered mischievously. “He must devote his energies to the harmless necessary pot-boiler. For until he finds his market, my dear, he’ll never be well enough off to marry.”
“Oh, Edie, I couldn’t bear to think he should sink to pot-boiling. And yet I should like to see him married some day to some nice good girl who’d make him happy,” Elsie assent
ed innocently.
“So should I, my child,” Edie rejoined with a knowing smile. “And what’s more, I mean to arrange it too. I mean to put him in a proper position for asking the nice good girl’s consent. Next summer and autumn, I shall conspire with Mr. Hatherley to boom him.”
“To what?” Elsie asked, puzzled.
“To boom him, my dear. B, double o, in boom him. A most noble verb, imported, I believe, with the pickled pork and the tinned peaches, direct from Chicago. To boom means, according to my private dictionary, to force into sudden and almost explosive notoriety. That’s what I’m going to do with’ Warren. I intend,’ by straightforward and unblushing advertising in short by log-rolling to make him go down next season with’ the moneygetting classes as a real live painter. Their gold shall pour itself into Warren’s pocket. If he wasn’t a genius, I should think it wrong; but as I know he is one, why shouldn’t I boom him?”
“Why not, indeed?” Elsie answered all unconscious. “And then he might marry that nice good girl of yours, if he can get her to take him.”
“The nice good girl will have to take him,” Edie replied with a nod. “When I puts my foot down, I puts it down. And I’ve put it down that Warren shall succeed, financially, artistically, and matrimonially. So there’s nothing more to be said about it.”
And indeed when Warren returned to England in the spring, to be boomed, it was with distinct permission this time from Elsie to write to her as often and as much as he wanted in a strictly fraternal and domestic manner.
CHAPTER XXVII.
ART AT HOME.
