by Grant Allen
They walked back slowly to the Hall in silence, passing through the village even so, out of pure habit, for the three herrings. Hugh was evidently very much put out. Hatherley considered him even rude and bearish. A man should restrain himself before the faces of his guests. At the door, Hatherley strolled off round the garden walks and lit a cigar. Hugh went up to his own dressing-room.
The rest Hatherley never knew; he only knew that at dinner that night Mrs. Massinger’s eyes were red and sore with crying. For when Hugh reached his own room that pretty little dressing-room with the pomegranate wall-paper and the pale blue Lahore hangings he found Winifred fiddling at his private desk, a new tall blackwalnut desk with endless drawers and niches and pigeonholes. A sudden something rose in his throat as he saw her fumbling at the doors of the cabinet. Where had she found that carefully guarded key? Aha, he knew! That fellow Hatherley! Hatheriey had taken a cigar from his case as they went out for their stroll together that luckless morning; and instead of returning the case to its owner, had laid it down in his careless way on the study table. He always kept the key concealed in the case. Winifred must accidentally have found it, and tried to worm out her husband’s secrets. He hated such meanness in other people. How much, he wondered, had she found out now after all for her trouble?
Ah!
They both cried out in one voice together; for Winifred had opened a pigeon-hole box with the special key, and was looking intently with rigid eyes at a small gold watch and a bundle of letters.
With a wild dart forward, Hugh tore them from her grasp and crunched them in his hand; but not before Winifred had seen two things: first, that the watch was a counterpart of her own the very watch Hugh had given to Elsie Challoner; second, that the letters were in a familiar hand no other hand than Elsie Challoner’s.
She fronted him long with a pale cold face. Hugh took the watch and letters before her very eyes, and locked them up again in their pigeon-hole, angrily. “So this is how you play the spy upon me!” he cried at last with supreme contempt in his voice and manner.
But Winifred simply answered nothing. She burst into a fierce wild flood of tears. “I knew it!’” she moaned in an agony of slighted affection. “I knew it! I knew it!”
So, after all, in spite of her flight and her pretended coolness, Elsie was corresponding still with her husband! Cruel, cruel, cruel Elsie! Yet why had she given him back his watch again? That was more than Winifred could ever explain in her simple philosophy. She could only cry and cry her eyes out
CHAPTER XXXI.
COMING ROUND.
When Warren Relf steered back his bark to San Remo and Elsie that next autumn, he had not yet exactly been “boomed,” as Edie had predicted; but his artistic, or rather his business prospects had improved considerably through the intervening summer. Hatherley’s persistent friendly notices of his work in the “Charing Cross Review,” and Mitchison’s constant flow of rhapsodies about his “charming morbidezza” in West End drawing-rooms, had begun to bring his sea-pieces at last more prominently into notice. The skipper of the “Mud-Turtle” had gone up one. It was the mode to speak of him now in artistic coteries, no longer as a melancholy instance of well-meaning failure, but as a young man of rising though misunderstood talent. His knowledge of “values” was allowed to be profound. If you wish to lead the fore-front of opinion, indeed, you referred familiarly in a parenthetical side-sentence to “genius like Burne Jones,’ or Relf’s, or Watts’. To be sure, he didn’t yet sell; but it was understood in astute buying circles that people who could pick up an early Relf dirt cheap and were prepared to hang on long enough to their purchase, would be sure in the end to see the color of their money. It was even asserted by exceptionally knowing connoisseurs at the Burlington and the Savage that that color would most probably have changed meanwhile, by the subtle alchemy of unearned increment, from silvery white to golden yellow. Warren Relf sat perched on the flowing tide of opportunism; and all critics are abandoned opportunists by use and by nature. They invariably salute the rising sun; the coming man has their warmest suffrages.
That winter at San Remo was the happiest Warren had yet passed there; for he began to perceive that Elsie was relenting. In a timid, tremulous, shamefaced, unacknowledged sort of way, she was learning little by little to love him. She would not confess it at first even to herself. Elsie was too much of a woman to admit in the intimacy of her own heart, far less in the ear of any outside confidante, that having once loved Hugh she could now veer round and love Warren. The sense of personal consistency runs deep in women. They can’t bear to turn their backs upon their dead selves, even though it be in order to rise to higher and ever higher planes of affection and devotion. Still, in spite of everything, Elsie Challoner grew by degrees dimly aware that she did actually love the quiet young marine painter. She had a hard struggle with herself, to be sure, before she could quite recognize the fact; but she recognized it at last, and in her own heart frankly admitted it. Warren was not indeed externally brilliant and vivid, like Hugh; he didn’t sparkle with epigram and repartee; the soul that was in him let itself out more fully and freely on quiet canvas, in beautiful dreamy poetic imaginings, than in the feverish give-and-take of modern society. It let itself out more fully and freely, too, in the gentle repose of tete-a-tete talk than in the stimulating atmosphere of a big dining-room, or of Mrs. Bouverie Barton’s celebrated Wednesday evening receptions. But while Hugh scintillated, Warren Relf’s nature burned rather with a clear and steady flame. It was easy enough for anybody to admire Hugh: his strong points glittered in the eye of day: only those who dip a little below the surface ever reached the profoundei depths of good and beauty that lay hid in such a mind as Warren’s. Yet Elsie felt in her own soul it was a truer thing after all to love Warren than to love Hugh; a greater triumph to have won Warren’s deep and earnest regard than to have impressed Hugh’s fancy one with a selfish passion. She felt all that; but being a woman, of course she never acknowledged it. She went on fighting hard against her own heart, on behalf of the old dead worse love, and to the detriment of the new and living better one; and all the while she pretended to herself she was thereby displaying her profound affection and her noble consistency. She must never marry Warren, whom she truly loved, and who truly loved her, for the sake of that Hugh who had never loved her, and whom she herself could never have loved had she only known him as he really was in all his mean and selfish inner nature. That may be foolish, but it’s intensely womanly. We must take women as they are. They were made so at first, and all our philosophy will never mend it.
She couldn’t endure that anyone should imagine she had forgotten her love and her sorrow for Hugh. She couldn’t endure, after her experience with Hugh, that any man should take her, thus helpless and penniless. If she’d been an heiress like Winifred, now, things might perhaps have been a little different; if by marrying Warren she could have put him in a position to prosecute his art, as she would have wished him to prosecute it, without regard for the base and vulgar necessity of earning breadand-cheese for himself and his family, she might possibly have consented in such a case to forego her own private and personal feelings, and to make him happy for art’s sake and humanity’s. But to burden his struggling life still further, when she knew how little his art brought him, and how much he longed to earn an income for his mother and Edie to retire upon that she couldn’t bear to face for a moment. She would dismiss the subject; she would make him feel she could never be his; it was only tantalizing poor kind-hearted Warren to keep him dangling about any longer.
“Elsie,” he “said to her one day on the hills, as they strolled together, by olive and pinewood, among the asphodels and anemones, “I had another letter from London this morning. The market’s looking up. Benson has sold the ‘Rade de Villefranche.’”
“I’m so glad, Warren,” Elsie answered warmly. “It’s a sweet picture one of your loveliest. Did you get a good price for it?”
“Forty guineas. That’s not so bad as prices go. So I
’m going to buy Edie that new dinner-dress you and I were talking about. I know you won’t mind running over to Mentone and choosing some nice stuff at the drapers there for me. Things are looking up. There’s no doubt I’m rising in the English market. My current quotations improve daily. Benson says he sold that bit to a rich American. Americans, if you can once manage to catch them, are capital customers ‘patrons’, I suppose one ought to say; but I decline to be patronized by a rich American. I think ‘customer’, after all, a much truer and sincerer word ten thousand times as manly and independent.”
“So I think too. I hate patronage. It savors of flunkeydom; betrays the toadyism of fashionable art the Tortrait-of-a-Gentleman’ style of painting. But, oh, Warren, I’m so sorry the Rade’s to be transported to America. It’s such a graceful, delicate, dainty little picture. I quite loved it. To me that seems the most terrible part of all an artist’s trials and troubles. There you toil and moil and slave and labor at one of your exquisite, poetical, selfabsorbing pictures; you throw a part of your life, a share of your soul, a piece of your own inner spiritual being, on to your simple square of dead canvas; you make it live and breathe and feel almost; you work away at it, absorbed and entranced in it, living in it and dreaming of it, for days and weeks and months together; you give it a thousand last long loving touches; you alter and correct, and improve and modify; you wait till it all absolutely satisfies your own high and exacting critical standard; and then, after you’ve lavished on it your utmost care and skill and pains after you’ve learned to know and to love it tenderly after it’s become to you something like your own child an offspring of your inmost and deepest nature you sell it away for prompt cash to a rich American, who’ll hang it up in his brand-new drawing-room at St Louis or Chicago between two horrid daubs by fashionable London or Paris painters, and who’ll say to his friends with a smile after dinner: ‘Yes, that’s a pretty little thing enough in its way, that tiny sea-piece there. I gave forty guineas in England for that: it’s by Relf of London. But observe this splendid “Cleopatra” over here, just above the sideboard: she’s a real So-and-so’ torture itself will not induce the present chronicler to name the particular painter of fashionable nudities whom Elsie thus pilloried on the scaffold of her high disdain ‘I paid for that, sir, a cool twenty thousand dollars!’”
Warren smiled a smile of thrilling pleasure, and investigated his boots with shy timidity. Such sympathy from her outweighed a round dozen of American purchasers. “Thank you, Elsie,” he said simply. “That’s quite true. I’ve felt it myself. But still, in the end, all good work, if it’s really good, will appeal somehow, at some time, to somebody, somewhere. I confess I often envy authors in that Their finished work is impressed upon a thousand copies, and scattered broadcast over all the world. Sooner or later it’s pretty sure to meet the eyes of most among those who are capable of appreciating it. But a painting is a much more monopolist product. If the wrong man happens at first to buy it and to carry it into the wholly wrong society, the painter may feel for the moment his work is lost, and his time thrown away, so far as any direct appreciation or loving sympathy with his idea is concerned. Still, Elsie, it gets its reward in due time. When we’re all dead and gone, some soul will look upon the picture and be glad. And it’s a great thing to have sold the Rade, anyway, because of the dear old Mater and Edie. I’m able to do a great deal more for them now; I hope I shall soon be in a position to keep them comfortably. And do you know, somehow, these last few years I’m ashamed to say it, but it’s the fact none the less I’ve begun to feel a sort of nascent desire to be successful, Elsie.”
Elsie dropped her voice a tone lower. “I’m sorry for that, Warren,” she answered shyly.
“Why so?”
Elsie dissimulated. “Because one of the things I most admired about you when I first knew you was your sturdy desire to do good work for its own sake, and to leave success to take care of itself in the dim background.”
“But, Elsie, I’ve many more reasons now to wish for success. You know why I’ve never told you, but I begin to hope I’ve ventured to hope the last few months I know it’s presumptuous of me, but still I hope that when I can earn enough to make a wife happy.”
Elsie stopped dead short at once on the narrow path that wound in and out among the clambering pine-woods, and fronting him full, with her parasol planted firmly on the grotmd, cut him off in a desperately resolute tone: “Warren, if I wouldn’t marry you unsuccessful, you may be quite sure success at any rate would never, never induce me to marry you.”
It was the first time in all her life she had said a single word about marriage before him, and Warren therefore at once accepted it, paradoxically but rightly, as a good omen. “Then you love me, Elsie?” he cried, all trembling.
Elsie’s heart fluttered with painful tremors. “Don’t ask me, Warren!” she murmured, thrilling. “Don’t make me say so. Don’t worm it out of me! Dear Warren, you know I like you dearly. I feel and have always felt toward you like a sister. After all I’ve suffered, don’t torment me any more. I can never, never, never marry you!”
“But you do love me, Elsie?”
Elsie’s eyes fell irresolute to the ground. It was a hard fight between love and pride. But Warren’s pleading face conquered in the end. “I do love you, Warren,” she answered simply.
“Then I don’t mind the rest,” Warren cried with a joyous burst, seizing her hand in his. “If you love me, Elsie, I can wait for ever. Success or no success, marriage or no marriage, I can wait for ever. I only want to know you love me.”
“You will have to wait for ever,” Elsie answered low. “You have made me say the word, and in spite of myself I have said it. I love you, Warren, but I can never, never, never marry you!”
“And I say,” Edie Relf remarked with much incisiveness, when Elsie told her, bit by bit, the whole story that same evening at the Villa Rossa, “that you treated him very shabbily indeed, and that Warren’s a great deal too good and kind and sweet to you. Some girls don’t know when they’re well off. Warren’s a brick that’s what I call him.”
“That’s what I call him, too,” Elsie answered, half tearful. “At least I would, if brick was a word I ever applied to anybody anywhere. But still I can never, never, never marry him!”
“Thank goodness,” Edie said, with a jerk of her head, “I wasn’t born romantic and hysterical Whenever any nice good fellow that I can really like swims into my ken and asks me to marry him which unfortunately none of the nice good fellows of my acquaintance show the slightest inclination at present to do I shall answer them promptly, ‘Like a bird Arthur,’ or Thomas, or Guy, or Walter, or Reginald, or whatever else his nice good name may happen to be Mr. Hatherley’s is Arthur and proceed at once to make him happy forever. But some people seem to prefer tantalizing them. For my own part, my dear, I’ve a distinct preference for making men happy whenever possible. I was born to make a good man happy, and I’d make him happy with the greatest pleasure in life, if only the good man would recognize my abilities for the production of happiness, and give me the desired opportunity for translating my benevolent wishes toward him into actual practice. But good men are painfully scarce nowadays. They don’t swarm. They retire bashfully. Very few of them seem to float by accident in their gay shallops toward the port of San Remo.”
CHAPTER XXXII.
ON TRIAL.
Matters at Whitestrand had been going, meanwhile from bad to worse. Winifred never spoke another word to Hugh about Elsie’s watch. Her pride prevented her. She would not stoop to demand an explanation. And Hugh had no explanation of his own to volunteer. No ready lie rose spontaneous to his lips. He dropped the subject, then and forever.
But the question of the encroachments could not be quite so cavalierly dropped; it pressed itself insidiously and silently upon Hugh’s attention. An eminent engineer came down from London to inspect the sand-drifts, shortly after Hatherley’s visit. By that time, the sand had risen high on the post of the aggress
ive notice-board which informed the would-be tourist explorer, with the usual churlishness and the usual ignorance of English procedure that Trespassers would be Prosecuted with the Utmost Rigor of the Law. The ocean, however, refused to be terrorized, and trespassed unabashed in the very face of the alarming notice. Hugh took his new ally down to inspect the threatened corner of the estate. The eminent engineer stroked a reflective chin and remarked cheerfully with a meditative smile that currents were very ticklish things to deal with, on their own ground: that when you interfered with the natural course of a current, you never could tell which way it would go next; and that diverting it was much like taking a leap in the dark, as far as probable consequences to the shore were concerned. After which reassuring vaticinations, the eminent engineer proceeded at once with perfect confidence to erect an expensive and ingenious breakwater off the site of the poplar, which strained the slender balloon of Hugh’s remaining credit to the very verge of Its utmost bursting point. A year passed by in the work of building and throwing out the breakwater: and as soon as it was finished, with much acclamation, a scour set in just round its sides which ate away the grounds behind even faster than ever. The eminent engineer, pocketing his check, stroked his chin once more in placid contentment, and observed with the complacency of a scientific looker-on: “Just as I told you. It’s impossible to calculate the exact effect of these things beforehand. The scour will do more harm than the sea did. We have the satisfaction of knowing, however, that we’ve done our duty. Perhaps, now, the safest thing for the estate would be to turn right round and pull it all down again.”
The estate, in fact, was simply doomed. Aeolian, Pactolian, indeed: ah me, the irony of it! Those Aeolian sands were overwhelming Whitestrand. The poplar had formed its one frail support. In destroying the poplar, Hugh had simply outwitted himself. No earthly science could now repair that fatal step. Physicians were in vain. Engineers and breakwaters were of no avail. The cruel crawling sea had begun remorselessly to claim its own, and day after day it claimed it piecemeal.
