by Grant Allen
“How did the Relfs first come to pick her up?” the other speaker asked curiously.
“Oh, I fancy it was Mr. Warren Relf himself who made her acquaintance somewhere unearthly down in Suffolk, where she used to be a governess. He’s always there, I believe, lying on a mudbank, yachting and sketching.”
Winifred could restrain her curiosity no longer. “I beg your pardon,” she said, leaning forward eagerly, “but I think you mentioned a certain Miss Challoner. May I ask, does it happen by any chance to be Elsie Challoner, who was once at Girton? Because, if so, she was a governess of mine, and I haven’t heard of her for a long time past. Governesses drop out of one’s world so fast. I should be glad to know where she’s living at present.”
The lady nodded. “Her name’s Elsie,” she said with a quiet inclination, “and she was certainly a Girton girl; but I hardly think she can be the same you mention. I should imagine, indeed, she’s a good deal too young a girl to have been your governess.”
It was innocently said, but Winifred’s face was one vivid flush of mingled shame and humiliation. Talk about beaute du diable indeed; she never knew before she had grown so very plain and ancient. “I’m not quite so old as I look, perhaps,” she answered hastily. “I’ve had a great deal to break me down. But I’m glad to learn where Elsie is, anyhow. You said she was living at San Remo, I fancy?”
“At San Remo. Yes. She spends her winters there. For the summers, she always goes up to St. Martin.”
“Thank you,” Winifred answered with a throbbing heart. “I’m glad to have found out at last what’s become of her. Mrs. Barton, if you can tear yourself away from Dr and Mrs. Tyacke, who are always so alluring, suppose we go upstairs now and look at the pictures.”
In the studio, Warren Relf recognized her at once, anc with much trepidation came up to speak to her it would all be out now, he greatly feared; and Hugh would learn at last that Elsie was living. For Winifred’s own sake she looked so pale and ill he would fain have kept the secret to himself a few months longer v Winifred held out her hand frankly. She liked Warren; she had always liked him; and besides, Hugh had forbidden her to see him. Her lips trembled, but she was bold, and spoke. “Mr. Relf,” she said with quiet earnestness, “I’m so glad to meet you here to-day again glad on more than one account. You go to San Remo often, I believe. Can you tell me if Elsie Challoner is living there?”
Warren Relf looked back at her in undisguised astonishment. “She is,” he answered. “Did my sister tell you so?”
“No,” Winifred replied with bitter truthfulness. “I found it out.” And with that one short incisive sentence, she moved on coldly, as if she would fain look at the pictures.
“Does does Massinger know it?” Warren asked all aghast, taken aback by surprise, and unwittingly trampling on her tenderest feelings.
Winifred turned round upon him with an angry flash. This was more than she could bear. The tears were struggling hard to rise to her eyes; she kept them back with a supreme effort. “How should I know, pray?” she answered fiercely, but very low. “Does he make me the confidante of all his loves, do you suppose, Mr. Relf? He said she was in Australia. He told me a lie. Everybody’s combined and caballed to deceive me. How should I know whether he knows or not? I know nothing. But one thing I know: from my mouth at least he shall never, never, never hear it.”
She turned away, stern and hard as iron. Hugh had deceived her; Elsie had deceived her. The two souls she had loved the best on earth! From that moment forward, the joy of her life, whatever had been left of it, was all gone from her. She went forth from the room a crushed creature.
How varied in light and shade the world is! While Winifred was driving gloomily back to her own lodgings solitary and heart-broken, in Mrs. Bouverie Barton’s comfortable carriage revolving in her own wounded soul this incredible conspiracy of Hugh’s and Elsie’s Edie Relf and her mother and brother were joyfully discussing their great triumph in the now dismantled and empty front drawing-room at 128 Bletchingley Road, South Kensington.
“Have you totted up the total of the sales, Warren?” Edie Relf inquired with a bright light in her eye and a smile on her lips; for the private view her own inception had been more than successful from its very beginning.
Warren jotted down a series of figures on the back of an envelope and counted them up mentally with profound trepidation. “Mother,” he cried, clasping her hand with a convulsive clutch in his, “I’m afraid to tell you; it’s so positively grand. It seems really too much. If this goes on, you need never take any pupils again. Edie, we owe it all to you. It can’t be right, yet it comes out square. I’ve reckoned up twice and got each time the same total Four Hundred and fifty!”
“I thought so,” Edie answered with a happy little laugh of complete triumph. “I hit upon such a capital dodge, Warren. I never told you beforehand what I was going to do, for I knew if I did, you’d never allow me to put it into execution; but I wrote the name and price of each picture in big letters and plain figures on the back of the frame. Then, whenever I took up a person with a good, coiny, solvent expression of countenance, and a picture-buying crease about the corners of the mouth, to inspect the studio, I waited for them casually to ask the name of any special piece they particularly admired. ‘Let me see,’ said I. ‘What does Warren call that? I think it’s on the back here.’ So I turned round the frame, and there they’d see it, as large as life: ‘By Stormy Seas Ten Pounds;’ or, The Haunt of the Sea-Swallows Thirty Guineas.’ That always fetched them, my dear. They couldn’t resist it. It’s a ticklish thing to inquire about prices. People don’t like to ask, for fear they should offend you, or the figure should happen to be too stiff for their purses; and it makes them feel small to inquire the price and find it’s ten times as much as they expected. But when they see the amount written down in black and white before their own eyes, at our astonishingly low cash quotations, what on earth can they do, being human, but buy them? Warren, you may give me a kiss, if you like. I’ll tell you what I’ve done: I’ve made your fortune.”
Warren kissed her affectionately on the forehead, half abashed. ‘You’re a bad girl, Edie,” he said good-humoredly; “and if I’d only known it, I’d certainly have taken a great big cake of best ink-eraser and rubbed your plain figures all carefully out again. But I don’t care a pin in the end, after all, if I can make this dear mother and you comfortable.”
“And marry Elsie,” Edie put in mischievously.
Warren gave a quiet sigh of regret. “And marry Elsie,” he added low. “But Elsie will never marry me.”
“You goose!” said Edie, and laughed at him to his face. She knew women better than he did.
“That dear Mr. Hatherley managed quite half,” she went on after a pause. “If you’d only heard him discussing textures, or listened to the high-flown nonsense he talked about ‘delicate touch,’ and ‘crystaline purity,’ and ‘poetical undertones,’ and ‘keen insight into the profoundest recesses of nature,’ you’d have blushed to learn what a great painter you are, Warren. Why, he made out that a wave to your artistic eyes shone like opal and beryl to the ignoble vulgar. He remarked that liquid sapphires simply strewed your summer seas, and mud in your hands became more gorgeous than marble to the common understanding. The dear good fellow! That’s what I call something like a friend for you. Your artistic eye, indeed! I could have just thrown my arms around his neck and kissed him!”
“Edie!” her mother exclaimed reprovingly. The last generation deprecates such open expression of feminine approbation.
“I could, mother,” Edie answered with a bounce, unabashed. “And what’s more, I should have awfully liked to do it. I should love to kiss him; and I don’t care twopence who hears me say so. Goodness gracious, I do hope that isn’t Air. Hatherley out on the staircase there!”
But it was only Martha bringing back from the attics the strictly necessary in the way of furniture for the meal that was to serve them in lieu of dinner.
And all
this while, poor lonely Winifred was rocking herself wildly backward and forward in Mrs. Bouverie Barton’s comfortable carriage, and muttering to herself in a mad fever of despair: “I could have believed it of Hugh; but of Elsie, of Elsie never, never!”
Elsie’s ring gleamed bright on her finger the ring, as she thought, that Elsie had sent her; the ring that Hugh had really enclosed in the forged letter. Hateful, treacherous, cruel -souvenir! At Hyde Park Corner, where the crowd of carriages and riders was thickest, she tore it off and flung it with mad energy into the midst of the roadway. The horses might trample it under foot and destroy it. Elsie, too Elsie Elsie was a traitor! She flung it from her like some poisonous thing; and then she sank back exhausted on the cushions.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
THE STRANDS DRAW CLOSER.
“I feel it my duty to let you know,” Sir Anthony Wraxall wrote to Hugh a day or two later by the hand of his amanuensis “that Mrs. Massinger’s lungs are far more seriously and dangerously affected than I deemed it at all prudent to inform her in person last week, when she consulted me here on the subject. Galloping consumption, I regret to say, may supervene at any time. The phthisical tendency manifests itself in Mrs. Massinger’s case in an advanced stage; and general tuberculosis may therefore on the shortest notice carry her off with startling rapidity. I would advise you, under these painful circumstances, to give her the benefit of a warmer winter climate; if not Egypt or Algeria, then at least Mentone, Catania, or Malaga. She should not on any account risk seeing another English Christmas. If she remains in Suffolk during the colder months of the present year, I dare not personally answer for the probable consequences.”
Hugh laid down the letter with a sigh of despair. It was the last straw, and it broke his back with utter despondency. How to finance a visit to the south he knew not Talk about Algeria, Catania, Malaga! he had hard enough work to make both ends meet anyhow at Whitestrand. During the time that had elapsed since Hatherley’s visit, his dreams had fled, his acres had melted, and his exchequer had emptied itself with unexampled rapidity. The Whitestrand currency was already very much inflated indeed: half of it consisted frankly of unredeemed mortgage, and the other half of unconsolidated floating debt to the butcher and baker. He had trusted first of all to the breakwater to redeem everything: but the breakwater, that broken reed, had only pierced the hand that leaned upon it. The sea shifted and the sand drifted worse than ever. Then he had hoped the best from “A Life’s Philosophy;” but a “A Life’s Philosophy,” published after long and fruitless negotiations, at his own risk for no firm would so much as touch it as a busines speculation had never paid the long printer’s bill, let alone recouping him for his lost time and trouble. Nobody wanted to read about his life or his philosophy. Xo epic poem could have fallen flatter. It went as dead as a blank-verse tragedy, waking laughter in indolent reviewers. He had in his desk at that very moment the first statement of accounts for the futile venture; and it showed a balance on the debit side of some 54 7s nd. There was a fatal precision that was simply crushing about the odd item of 7s i id. He had dreamed of thousands, and he had this to pay! Foiled and by an accountant! the melodramatist within him remarked angrily. Hugh groaned as he thought of his own high hopes, and their utter frustration by a numerical deficit of so base a sum as 54 75. I id. He would have endured the round hundred with far greater complacency. That was at least heroic. But 75. nd.! The degredation sank deep into his poet’s heart. To be balked of Parnassus by 75. ud.!
Of Winifred’s health, Hugh thought far less than of the financial difficulty. He saw she was ill, decidedly ill, but not so ill as everybody else who saw her imagined. Wrapped up in his own selfish hopes and fears, never really fond of his poor small wife, and now estranged for months and months by her untimely discovery of Elsie’s watch, which both he and she had entirely misinterpreted, Hugh Massinger had seen that frail young creature grow thinner and paler day by day without at any time realizing the profundity of the change or the actual seriousness of her failing condition. Even when those whom we devotedly love grow ill by degrees before our very eyes, we are apt long to overlook the gradual stages, if we see them constantly from day to day; our standard varies too slowly for comparison: the stranger who comes at long intervals finds himself often far better able to mark and report upon the progress of disease than those who watch and observe the patient most anxiously. But with Hugh, complete indifference helped also to mask the insidious effect of a creeping illness; he didn’t care enough about Winifred’s health to notice whether she was looking really feebler or otherwise. And even now, when Sir Anthony Wraxall wrote in such plain terms, the main thought in his own mind was merely that these doctors were always terrible alarmists. He would take Winifred away to the south, of course: a doctor’s orders must be obeyed at all hazards. So much, conventional morality imposed upon him. But she wasn’t half so ill, he felt certain, as Sir Anthony thought her. Most of it was just her nasty hysterical temperament. A winter with the swallows would soon bring her round. She’d be all right again with a short course of warmer weather.
He went out into the drawing-room to join Winifred. He found her lying lazily on the sofa, pretending to read the first volume of Besant’s last new novel from Mudie’s. “The wind’s shifted,” he began uneasily. “We shall get it warmer, I hope, soon, Winifred.”
“Yes, the wind’s shifted,” Winifred answered gloomily, looking up in a hopeless and befogged way from the pages of her story. “It blew straight across from Siberia yesterday; to-day it blows straight across from Greenland. That’s all the change we ever get, it seems to me, in the weather in England. One day the wind’s easterly and cold; another day it’s westerly and damp. Bronchitis on one side; rheumatism on the other. There’s the whole difference.”
“How would you like to go abroad for the winter, I wonder?” Hugh asked tentatively, with some faint attempt at his old kindliness of tone and manner.
His wife glanced over at him with a sudden and strangely suspicious smile. “To San Remo, I suppose?” she answered bitterly.
She meant the name to speak volumes to Hugh’s conscience; but it fell upon his ears as flat and unimpressive as any other. “Not necessarily to San Remo,” he replied, all unconscious. “To Algeria, if you like or Mentone, or Bordighera.”
Winifred rose, and walked without one word of explanation, but with a resolute air, into the study, next door. When she came out again, she carried in her two arms Keith Johnston’s big Imperial Atlas. It was a heavier book than she could easily lift in her present feeble condition of body, but Hugh never even offered to help her to carry it. The day of small politenesses and courtesies was long gone past. He only looked on in mute surprise, anxious to know whence came this sudden new-born interest in the neglected study of European geography.
Winifred laid the atlas down with a flop on the five o’clock tea-table, that staggered with its weight, and turned the pages with feverish haste till she came to the map of Northern Italy. “I thought so,” she gasped out, as she scanned it close, a lurid red spot burning bright in her cheek. “Mentone and Bordighera are both of them almost next door to San Remo. The nearest stations on the line along the coast. You could run over there often by rail from either of them.”
“Run over often by rail to San Remo?” Hugh repeated with a genuine puzzled expression of countenance.
“Oh, you act admirably!” Winifred cried with a sneer. “What perfect bewilderment! What childish innocence! I’ve always considered you an Irving wasted upon private life. If you’d gone upon the stage, you’d have made your fortune; which you’ve scarcely succeeded in doing, it must be confessed, at your various existing assorted professions.”
Hugh stared back at her in blank amazement. “I don’t know what you mean,” he answered shortly.
“Capital! capital!” Winifred went on in her bitter mood, endeavoring to assume a playful tone of unconcerned irony. “I never saw you act better in all my life not even when you were pretending t
o fall in love with me. It’s your most successful part the injured innocent: much better than the part of the devoted husband. If I were you, I should always stick to it. It suits your features. Well, well, we may as well go to San Remo itself, I suppose, as anywhere else in the immediate neighborhood. I’d rather be on the spot and see the whole play with my own eyes, than guess at it blindly from a distance, at Mentone or Bordighera. You may do your Romeo before an admiring audience. San Remo it shall be, since you’ve set your heart upon it. But it’s very abrupt, this sudden conversion of yours to the charms of the Riviera.”
“Winifred,” Hugh cried with transparent conviction in every note of his voice, “I see you’re laboring under some distressing misapprehension; but I give you my solemn word of honor I don’t in the least know what it is you’re driving at. You’re talking about somebody or something unknown that I don’t understand. I wish you’d explain. I can’t follow you.”
But he had acted too often and too successfully to be believed now for all his earnestness. “Your solemn word of honor!” Winifred burst out angrily, with intense contempt. “Your solemn word of honor, indeed! And pray, who do you think believes now in your precious word or your honor either? You can’t deceive me any longer, thank goodness, Hugh. I know you want to go to San Remo; and I know for whose sake you want to go there. This solicitude for my health’s all a pure fiction. Little you cared for my health a month ago! Oh no, I see through it all distinctly. You’ve found out there’s a reason for going to San Remo, and you want to go for your own pleasure accordingly.”
“I don’t want to go to San Remo at all,” Hugh cried, getting angry. “I never said a word myself about San Remo; I never proposed or thought of San Remo. It was you yourself who first suggested the very name. I’ve nothing to do with it; and what’s more, I won’t go there.”
