Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  “Oh yes, I know,” Winifred answered provokingly, with another of her frequent sharp fits of coughing. “You didn’t mention it. Of course I noticed that. You’re a great deal too sharp to commit yourself so. You carefully avoided naming San Remo, for fear you should happen to rouse my intuitive suspicions. You proposed we should go to Mentone or Bordighera instead, where you could easily run across whenever you liked to your dear San Remo, and where I should be perhaps a little less likely to find out the reason you wanted to go there for. But I see through your plans. I checkmate your designs. I won’t give in to them. Whatever comes, you may count at least upon finding me always ready to thwart you. I shall go to San Remo, if I go away at all, and to nowhere else on the whole Riviera. I prefer to face the worst at once, thank you. I shall know everything, if there’s anything to know. And I won’t be shuffled off upon your Mentone or your Bordighera, while you’re rehearsing your balcony scenes at San Remo alone; so that’s flat for you.”

  An idea flashed sudden across Hugh’s mind. “I think, Winifred,” he said calmly, “you’re laboring under a mistake about the place you’re speaking of. The gaming tables are not at San Remo, as you suppose, but at Monte Carlo, just beyond Mentone. And if you thought I wanted to go to the Riviera for the sake of repairing our ruined estate at Monte Carlo, you’re very much mistaken. I wanted to go, I solemnly declare, for your health only.”

  Winifred rose, and faced him now like an angry tigress. Her sunken white cheeks were flushed and fiery indeed with suppressed wrath, and a bright light blazed in her dilated pupils. The full force of a burning indignation possessed her soul. “Hugh Massinger,” she said, repelling him haughtily with her thin left hand, “you’ve lied to me for years, and you’re lying to me now as you’ve always lied to me. You know you’ve lied to me, and you know you’re lying to me. This pretense about my health’s a transparent falsehood. These prevarications about the gambling tables are a tissue of fictions. You can’t deceive me. I know why you want to go to San Remo!” And she pushed him away in disgust with her angry fingers.

  The action and the insult were too much for Hugh. He could no longer restrain himself. Sir Anthony’s letter trembled in his hands; he was clutching it tight in his waistcoat pocket. To show it to Winifred would have been cruel, perhaps, under any other circumstances; but in face of such an accusation as that, yet wholly misunderstood, flesh and blood at least Hugh Massinger’s could not further resist the temptation of producing it. “Read that,” he cried, handing her over the letter coldly; “you’ll see from it why it is I want to go; why, in spite of all we’ve lost and are losing, I’m still prepared to submit to this extra expenditure.”

  “Out of my money,” Winifred answered scornfully, as she took the paper with an inclination of mock-courtesy from his tremulous hands. “How very generous! And how very kind of you!”

  She read the letter through without a single word; then she yielded at last, in spite of herself, to her womanly tears. “I see it all, Hugh,” she cried, flinging herself down once more in despair upon the sofa. “You fancy I’m going to die now; and it will be so convenient, so very convenient for you, to be near her there, next door at San Remo!”

  Hugh gazed at her again in mute surprise. At last he saw it he saw it in all its naked hideousness. A light began gradually to dawn upon his mind. It was awful it was horrible in its cruel Nemesis upon his unspoken crime. To think she should be jealous of his murdered Elsie! He could hardly speak of it; but he must, he must. “Winnie,” he cried, almost softened by his pity for what he took to be her deadly and terrible mistake, “I understand you, I think, after all. I know what you mean. You believe that Elsie is at San Remo.”

  Winifred looked up at him through her tears with a withering glance. “You have said it!” she cried in a haughty voice, and relapsed into a silent fit of sobbing and suppressed cough, with her poor wan face buried deep once more like a wounded child’s in the cushions of the sofa.

  What would Hugh not have given if only he could have explained to her there that moment that Elsie was lying dead, for three years past and more, in her nameless grave at Orfordness! But he could not. He dared not. His own past lies rose up in judgment at last against him. He bowed his head, unable even to weep. Jealous of Elsie! of poor dead Elsie! That was what she meant, then, by the talk about his balcony scene! But Elsie would never play Juliet to his Romeo again. Elsie was dead, and Winifred, alas, would never now believe it. Truly, his punishment was greater than he could bear. He bowed his head in silent shame. The penalty of his sin was bitter upon him.

  One only way now lay open before him. He would take her to San Remo, and let her see for herself how utterly groundless, and futile, and unjust were her base suspicions. He would show her that Elsie was not at San Remo.

  CHAPTER XXXV.

  RETRIBUTION.

  Oh the horror and drudgery of those next few weeks, while Hugh, in a fever of shame and disgust, was anxiously and wearily making difficult arrangements, financial or otherwise,’ for that hopeless flitting to the sunny South, that loomed ahead so full of gloom and wretchedness for himself and Winifred! The speechless agony of running about, with a smile on his lips and that nameless weight on his crushed heart, driving horrid, sordid, cheese-paring bargains with the family attorney and the London moneylenders for still further advances on those squalid worthless pieces of stamped paper! The ignominious discussions of percentage and discount, the undignified surrender of documents and title-deeds, the disgusting counter-checks and collateral securities, the insulting whispers of doubt and uncertainty as to his own final financial solvency!’ All these indignities would in themselves have been quite excruciating enough to torture a proud man of Hugh Massinger’s haughty and sensitive temperament. But to suffer all these, with the superadded wretchedness of Winifred’s growing illness and Winifred’s gathering cloud of suspicion about his own conduct, was simply unendurable. Above all, to know in his own soul that Winifred was jealous of poor dead Elsie! If only he could have made a clean breast of it all! If only he could have said to her in one single outburst, “Elsie is dead!” it might perhaps have been easier. But after all his own clever machinations and deceptions, after all his long course of confirmatory circumstantial evidence the letters, the ring, the messages, the details how on earth could Winifred ever believe him? His cunning recoiled with fatal precision upon his own head. The bolt he had shot turned back upon his breast. The pit that he digged he himself had fallen therein.

  So there was nothing for it left now but to face the unspeakable, to endure the unendurable. He must go through with it all, let it cost what it might. For at least in the end he had one comfort. At San Remo, Winifred would find out she was mistaken; there was no Elsie at all, there or elsewhere.

  What had led her astray into this serious and singular error, he wondered. That problem exercised his weary mind not a little in the night-watches. Morning after morning, as the small hours clanged solemnly from the Whitestrand church tower, Hugh lay awake and turned it over in anxious debate with his own wild thoughts. Could somebody have told her they had met some Miss Challoner or other accidentally at San Remo? Could Warren Relf, vile wretch that he was, industriously have circulated some baseless rumor as to Elsie’s whereabouts on purpose to entrap him? Or could Winifred herself intuitively have arrived at her own idea, woman-like, by some false interference some stupid mistake as to postmark or envelope or name or handwriting? It was all an insoluble mystery to him; and Winifred would do nothing toward clearing it up. Whenever he tried by devious routes to approach the subject from a fresh side, Winifred turned round upon him at once with fierce indignation in her pale blue eyes and answered always: “You know it all. Don’t try to deceive me. It’s no good any longer. I see through you at last. Why go on lying to me?”

  The more he protested the more scornful and caustic Winifred grew. The more genuinely and sincerely he declared his bewilderment, the more convinced she felt in her own mind that he acted a part with
marvelous skill and with consummate heartlessness.

  It was terrible not to be trusted when he told the plain truth; but it was his own fault. He could not deny it. And that it was his own fault made it all the bitterer for him. He hadn’t even the solace of a righteous indignation to comfort his soul in the last depth of contumely.

  When you know that troubles come undeserved, you have the easy resource of conscious rectitude at any rate to support you. The just man in adversity is least to be pitied. It is the sinner who feels the whip smart. Hugh had to swallow it all manfully, and to eat humble-pie at his private table into the bargain. It was his own fault; he had unhappily no one but himself to blame for it.

  Meanwhile Winifred grew rapidly worse, so ill, that even Hugh began to perceive it, and despaired of being able to carry her in safety to San Remo. The shock at the Relfs’ had told seriously upon her weak and shattered constitution: the constant friction of her relations with Hugh continued to tell upon it every day that passed over her. The motherless girl and childless mother brooded in secret over her great grief; she had no one, absolutely no one on earth who could sympathize with her in her terrible trouble. She longed to fling herself upon Elsie’s bosom the dear old Elsie that had once been, the Elsie that perhaps could still understand her and to cry aloud to her for pity, for sympathy. When she got to San Remo, she sometimes thought, she would tell all every word to Elsie; and Elsie at least must be very much changed if in spite of all she could not feel for her.

  Proud as she was, she would throw herself on Elsie’s mercy. Elsie had wronged her, and she would tell all to Elsie. But not to Hugh. Hugh was hard and cold and unyielding as steel. It would not be for long. She would soon be released. And then Hugh She shrank from thinking it.

  Money was cheap, the lawyers said; but Hugh found he had to pay dear for it. Money was plentiful, the newspapers reported; but Hugh found it as scarce as charity. He took a long time to conclude his arrangements; and when he concluded them, the terms were ruinous. Never mind; Winifred wouldn’t last long; he had only himself to think about in future.

  At last the day came for their journey South. They were going alone, without even a maid; glad to have paid the servants their arrears and escape alive from the clutches of the butchers and bakers. November fogs shrouded the world. Hugh had completed those vile transactions of his with the attorneys and the money-lenders, and felt faintly cheered by the actual metallic chink of gold for the journey rattling and jingling in his trousers’ pocket. But Winifred sat very weak and ill in the far corner of the first-class carriage that bore them away from Charing Cross Station. They had come up the day before from Almundham to town, and spent the night luxuriously in the rooms of the Metropole. You must make a dying woman comfortable. And Hugh had dropped round with defiant pride into the Cheyne Row Club, assuming in vain the old jaunty languid poetical air “of the days before he had degenerated into landowning,” Hatherley said afterward just to let recalcitrant Bohemia see for itself it hadn’t entirely crushed him by its jingling jibes and its scathing critics of “A Life’s Philosophy.” But the protest fell flat; it was indeed a feeble one: heedless Bohemia, engrossed after its wont with its last new favorite, the rising author of “Lays of the African Lakeland,” held out to Hugh Massinger of Whitestrand Hall its flabbiest right hand of lukewarm welcome. And this was the Bohemia that once had grasped his landless fingers with fraternal fervor of sympathetic devotion! The chilliness of his reception in the scene of his ancient popularity stung the Bard to the quick. No more for him the tabor, the cymbals, and the oaten pipe; no more the blushful Cheyne Row Hippocrene. He felt himself demode. The rapid stream of London society and London thought had swept eddying past and left him stranded. As the train rolled on upon its way to Dover, Hugh Massfnger of Whitestrand Hall and its adjacent sandhills leaned back disconsolate upon the padded cushions of his leatherlined carriage and thought with a sigh to himself of the days without name, without number, when, proud as a lord, he had traveled third in a bare pen on the honest earnings of his own right hand, and had heard of mortgages, in some dim remote impersonal way, only as a foolish and expensive aristocratic indulgence. A mortgage was nowadays a too palpable reality, with the glamor of romance well worn off it. He wished its too, too solid sheepskin would melt, and reduce him once more to wooden seats and happiness. Oh, for some enchanted carpet of the Arabian Nights, to transport him back with a bound from his present self to those good old days of Thirds and Elsie!

  But enchanted carpets are now unhappily out of date, and Channel steamers have quite superseded the magical shallops of good Haroun-al-Raschid. In plain prose, the Straits were rough, and Winifred suffered severely from the tossing. At Calais, they took the through train for Marseilles, having secured a coupe-lit at Charing Cross beforehand.

  That was a terrible night, that night spent in the coupelit with Winifred: the most terrible Hugh had ever endured since the memorable evening when Elsie drowned herself.

  They had passed round Paris at gray dusk, in their comfortable through-carriage, by the Chemin de Per de Ceinture to the Gare de Lyon, and were whirling along on their way to Fontainebleau through the shades of evening, when Winifred first broke the ominous silence she had preserved ever since they stopped at St. Denis. “It won’t be for long now,” she said dryly, “and it will be so convenient for you to be at San Remo.”

  Hugh’s heart sank once more within him. It was quite clear that Winifred thought Elsie was there. He wished to heaven she was, and that he was no murderer. Oh, the weight that would have been lifted off his weary soul if only he could think it so! The three years’ misery that would rise like a mist from his uncertain path, if only he did not know to a certainty that Elsie lay buried at Orfordness in the shipwrecked sailors’ graveyard by the Low Lighthouse. He looked across at Winifred as she sat in her place. She was pale and frail; her wasted cheeks showed white and hollow. As she leaned back there, with a cold light gleaming hard and chilly from her sunken blue eyes those light blue eyes that he had never loved those cruel blue eyes that he had learned at last to avoid with an instinctive shrinking, as they gazed through and through him with their flabby persistence he said to himself with a sigh of relief: “She can’t last long. Better tell her all, and let her know the truth. It could do no harm. She might die the happier. Dare I risk it, I wonder? Or is it too dangerous?”

  “Well?” Winifred asked in an icy tone, interpreting aright a little click in his throat and the doubtful gleam in his shifty eyes as implying some hesitating desire to speak to her. “What are you going to tell me next? Speak it out boldly! don’t be afraid. It’s no novelty. You know I’m not easily disconcerted.”

  He looked back at her nervously with bent brows. That fragile small creature! He positively feared her. Dare he tell her the truth? And would she believe it? Those blue eyes were so coldly glassy. Yet, with a sudden impulse, he resolved to be frank; he resolved to unburden his guilty soul of all its weight of care to Winifred.

  “No lie, Winifred, but the solemn truth,” he blurted out slowly, in a voice that of itself might have well produced complete conviction on any one less incredulous than the wife he had cajoled and deceived so often. “You think Elsie’s at San Remo, I know. You’re wrong there; you’re quite mistaken. She’s not in San Remo, nor in Australia either. That was a lie. Elsie’s dead dead three years ago before we were married. Dead and buried at Orfordness. And I’ve seen her grave, and cried over it like a child, too.”

  He spoke with solemn intensity of earnestness; but he spoke in vain. Winifred thought, herself, till that very moment, she had long since reached the lowest possible depth of contempt and scorn for the husband on whom she had thrown herself away; but as he met her then with that incredible falsehood as she must needs think it on his lying lips, with so grave a face and so profound an air of frank confession, her lofty disdain rose at once to a yet sublimer height of disgust and loathing of which till that night she could never even have conceived herself capable. �
��You hateful Thing!” she cried, rising from her seat to the center of the carriage, and looking down upon him physically from her point of vantage as he cowered and slank like a cur in his corner. “Don’t dare to address me again, I say, with lies like that. If you can’t find one word of truth to tell me, have the goodness at least, since I don’t desire your further conversation, to leave we the repose of your polite silence.”

  “But Winifred,” Hugh cried, clasping his hands together in impotent despair, “this is the truth, the very, very truth, the whole truth, that I’m now telling you. I’ve hidden it from you so long by deceit and treachery. I acknowledge all that: I admit I deceived you. But I want to tell you the whole truth now; and you won’t listen to me! Oh, heaven, Winifred, you won’t listen to me!”

  On any one else, his agonized voice and pleading face would have produced their just and due effect; but on Winifred impossible. She knew he was lying to her even when he spoke the truth; and the very intensity and fervor of his horror only added to her sense of utter repulsion from his ingrained falseness and his native duplicity. To pretend to her face, with agonies of mock remorse, that Elsie was dead, when she knew he was going to San Remo to see her! And taking his own wedded wife to die there! The man who could act so realistically as that, and tell lies so glibly at such a moment, must be falser to the core than her heart had ever dreamed or conceived of.

  “Go on,” she murmured, relapsing into her corner. “Continue your monologue. It’s supreme in ks way no actor could beat it. But be so good as to consider my part in the piece left out altogether. I shall answer you no more. I should be sorry to interrupt so finished an artist!”

  Her scathing contempt wrought up in Hugh a perfect fury of helpless indignation. That he should wish to confess, to humble himself before her, to make reparation! and that Winifred should spurn his best attempt, should refuse so much as to listen to his avowal! It was too ignominious. “For heaven’s sake,” he cried, with his hands clasped hard, “at least let me speak. Let me have my say out. You’re all wrong. You’re wronging me utterly. I’ve behaved most wickedly, most cruelly, I know: I confess it all. I abase myself at your feet. If you want me to be abject, I’ll grovel before you! I admit my crime, my sin, my transgression. I won’t pretend to justify myself at all. I’ve lied to you, forged to you, deceived you, misled you!” (At each clause and phrase of passionate self-condemnation, Winifred nodded a separate sardonic acquiescence.) “But you’re wrong about this. You mistake me wholly. I swear to you, my child, Elsie’s not alive. You’re jealous of a woman who’s been dead for years. For my sin and shame I say it, she’s dead long ago!”