by Grant Allen
So Warren hurried off by himself at all speed to San Remo, and reached it at almost the same moment as Massinger. If Hugh and Elsie were to meet unexpectedly, Warren felt the shock might be positively dangerous.
As he emerged from the station, he hired a close carriage, and ordered the vetturino to draw up on the far side of the road and wait a few minutes till he was prepared for starting. Then he leaned back in his seat in the shade of the hood, and held himself in readiness for the arrival of the Paris train from Ventimiglia.
He had waited only a quarter of an hour when Hugh Massinger came out hastily and called a cab. Two porters helped him to carry out Winifred, now seriously ill, and muttering inarticulately as they placed her in the carriage. Hugh gave an inaudible order to the driver, who drove off at once with a nod and a smile and a cheery “Si, signer.”
“Follow that carriage!” Warren said in Italian to his own cabman. The driver nodded and followed closely. They drove up through the narrow crowded little streets of the old quarter, and stopped at last opposite a large and dingy yellow-washed pension, in the modern part of the town, about the middle of the Avenue Vittorio-Emmanuele. The house was new, but congenitally shabby. Hugh’s carriage blocked the way already. Warren waite’d outside for some ten minutes without showing his face, till he thought the Massingers would have engaged rooms: then he entered the hall boldly and inquired if he could have lodgings.
“On what floor has the gentleman who has just arrived placed himself?” he asked of the landlord, a portly Piedmontese, of august dimensions.
“On the second story, signer.”
“Then I will go on the third,” Warren Relf answered with short decision. And they found him a room forthwith without further parley.
The pension was one of those large and massive solid buildings, so common on the Riviera, let out in flats or in single apartments, and with a deep well of a square staircase occupying the entire center of the block like a covered courtyard. As Warren Relf mounted to his room on the third floor, with the chatty Swiss waiter from the canton Ticino, who carried his bag, he asked quietly if the lady on the segondo who seemed so ill was in any immediate or pressing danger.
“Danger, signer? She is ill, certainly; they carried her upstairs: she couldn’t have walked it. Ill but ill.” He expanded his hands and pursed his lips up. “But what of that? The house expects it. They come here to die, many of these English. The signora no doubt will die soon. She’s a very bad case. She has hardly any life in her.”
Little reassured by this cold comfort, Warren sat down at the table at once, as soon as he had washed away the dust of travel, and scribbled off a hasty note to Edie “Dearest E., “Just arrived. Hope you received my telegram from Paris. For heaven’s sake, don’t let Elsie stir out of the house till I have seen you. This is most imperative. Massinger and Mrs. Massinger are here at this pension. He has brought her South for her health’s sake. She’s dying rapidly. I wouldn’t for worlds let Elsie see either of them in their present condition: above all, she mustn’t run up against them unexpectedly. I may not be able to sneak around to-night, but at “all hazards keep Elsie in till I can get to the Villa Rossa to consult with you.
Elsie must of course return to England at once, now Massinger’s come here. We have to face a very serious crisis. I won’t write further, preferring to come and arrange in person. Meanwhile, say nothing to Elsie just yet; I’ll break it to her myself.
“In breathless haste, “Yours ever, very affectionately, “Warren.”
He sent the note round with many warnings by the Swiss waiter to his mother’s house. When Edie got it, she could have cried with chagrin. Could anything on earth have been more unfortunate? To think that Elsie should just have gone out shopping before the note arrived and should be going to call at the Grand Hotel Royal in that very Avenue Vittorio-Emmanuele!
If Warren had only known that fact, he would have gone out at all risks to intercept and prevent her. But as things stood, he preferred to lurk unseen on his third floor till night came on. He wanted to keep as quiet as possible. He didn’t wish Massinger to know, for the present at least, of his arrival in San Remo. Later on, perhaps, when Elsie had safely started for England, he might see whether he could be of any service to Winifred.
And to Hugh, too; for in spite of all, though he had told Hatherley their dislike was mutual, he pitied Massinger too profoundly now not to forget his righteous resentment at such a moment. If Warren’s experience and connection at San Remo were of any avail, he would gladly place them at Massinger’s disposal. Too manly himself to harbor a grudge, he scarcely recognized the existence of vindictive feeling in others.
Warren Relf! That serpent! That reptile! That eavesdropper! How strangely each of us looks to each! How grotesquely our perverted inner mirror, with its twists and curves, distorts and warps the lineaments of our fellows! Warren Relf! That implacable malignant enemy, forever plotting and planning and caballing against him! Why, Warren Relf, whom Hugh so imaged himself in his angry mind, was sitting that moment with his head bent down to the bare table, and muttering half aloud through his teeth to himself: “Poor, poor Massinger! How hard for him to bear! Alone with that unhappy little dying soul! Without one friend to share his trouble! I wish I could do anything on earth to help him!”
CHAPTER XXXVII.
PROVING HIS CASE.
At the pension, Hugh had engaged in haste a dull private sitting-room on the second floor, with bedroom and dressing-room adjoining at the side; and here he laid Winifred down on the horse-hair sofa, wearied out with her long journey and her fit of delirium, but now restored for the time being by rest and food, in one of those marvelous momentary rallies which so often tempt consumptive patients to use up in a single dying flicker their small remaining reserve of vital energy. The house itself was dingy, stingy, bare, and second-rate; but the soft Italian air and the full sunshine that flooded the room through the open windows had a certain false exhilarating effect, like a glass of champagne; and under their stimulating influence Winifred felt a temporary strength to which she had long been quite unaccustomed. The waiter had brought her up refreshments on a tray, soup and sweetbreads and country wine the plain sound generous Ligurian claret and she had eaten and drunk with an apparent avidity which fairly took her husband’s breath away. The food supplied her with a sudden access of hectic energy. “Wheel me over to the window,” she cried in a stronger voice to Hugh. And Hugh wheeled the sofa over as he was bid to a point where she could see the town and the hills and the villas and the lemongardens, and the tall date-palms with their feathery foliage on the piazza opposite, to the cobalt-blue sea, and the gracious bays, and the endless ranges of the Maritime Alps on either side, toward Bordighera one way and Taggia the other.
It was beautiful, beautiful, very beautiful. For the moment the sight soothed Winifred. She was content now to die where she lay. Her wounded heart asked nothing further from unkind fortune. She looked up at her husband with a stony gaze. “Hugh,” she said, in firm but grimly resolute tones, with no trace of tenderness or softening in her voice, “bury me here. I like the place. Don’t try to take me home in a box to Whitestrand.”
Her very callousness, if callousness it were, cut him to the heart. That so young and frail and delicate a girl should talk of her own death with such seeming insensibility was indeed terrible. The proud hard man was broken at last. Shame and remorse touched his soul. He burst into tears, and kneeling by her side, tried to take her hand with some passing show of affection in his. Winifred withdrew it, coldly and silently, as his own approached it. “Winnie,” he cried, bending over her face, “I don’t ask you to forgive me. You can’t forgive me. You could never forgive me for the wrong I’ve done you. But I do ask you, from my soul do I ask you, in this last extremity, to believe me and listen to me. I did not lie to you last night. It was all true, what I told you in the coupe. I’ve never intrigued against you in the way you believe. I’ve never deceived you for the purpose you suppose.
I’ve treated you cruelly, heartlessly, wickedly I acknowledge that; but oh, Winnie, Winnie, I can’t bear you to die as you will, believing what you do believe about me. This is the hardest part of all my punishment. Don’t leave me so! My wife, my wife, don’t kill me with this coldness!”
Winifred looked over at him more stonily than ever. “Hugh,” she said with a very slow and distinct utterance, “even-word you say to me in this hateful strain only increases and deepens my loathing and contempt for you. You see I’m dying you know I’m dying. In your way, I really and truly believe you feel some tiny twinge of compunction, some faint soft of pity and regret and sympathy for me. You know you’ve ‘killed me, broken my heart; and in a careless fashion, you’re rather sorry for it. If you knew how, you’d like, without bothering yourself much, to console me. And yet, to lie is so ingrained in the very warp and woof of your nature, that even so, you can’t help lying to me! You can’t help lying to your own wife, at death’s door, in her last extremity your own wife, whom you’ve slowly ground down and worn out with your treachery your own wife, whom you’ve betrayed and tortured and killed at last for that other woman! Don’t I know it all, so that you can’t deceive me? Don’t I know every thought and wish of your heart? Don’t I know how you’ve kept her letters and her watch? Don’t I know ho’w you’ve brooded and moaned and whispered about her? Don’t I know how you’ve brought me to San Remo to-day, dying as I am, to be near her and to caress her when I’m dead and buried? You’ve tried to hound me and drive me to my grave, that you might marry Elsie. You’ve tried to murder me by slow degrees, that you might marry Elsie. Well, you’ve carried your point: you’ve succeeded at last. You’ve killed me now, or as good as killed me; and when I’m dead and gone, you can marry Elsie. I don’t mind that. Marry her and be done with it. But if ever you dare to tell me again tfiat lying story you concocted last night so glibly in the coupe, Hugh Massinger, I’ll tell you in earnest what I’ll do: I’ll jump out of that window before your very face and dash myself to pieces on the ground in front of you.”
She spoke with feverish and lurid energy. Hugh Massinger bent his head to his knees in abject wretchedness as she flung that threat from her clenched teeth at him. His very remorse availed him nothing. The girl was adamantine, inexorable, impervious to evidence. Nothing on earth that he could say or do would possibly move her. He felt himself unjustly treated now; and he pitied Winifred.
“Winifred, Winifred, my poor wronged and injured Winifred,” he cried at last’, in another wild outburst, “I can do or say nothing, I know, to convince you. But one thing perhaps will make you hesitate to disbelieve me. Look here, Winifred; watch me closely!”
A happy inspiration had come to his aid. He brought over the little round table from the corner of the room and planted it full in front of the sofa where Winifred was lying. Then he set a chair close by the side, and selecting a pen from his writing-case, began to produce on a sheet of note-paper, under Winifred’s very eyes, some lines of manuscript in Elsie’s handwriting. Slowly and carefully he framed each letter in poor dead Elsie’s bold and large-limbed angular character. He didn’t need now any copy to go by; long practice had taught him to absolute perfection each twist and curl and flourish of her pen the very tails of her gs, the backward downstroke of her fs, the peculiar unsteadiness of her ss and her ws. Winifred, sitting by in haughty disdain, pretended not even to notice his strange proceeding. But as the tell-tale letter grew on apace beneath his practised pen Elsie all over, past human conceiving she condescended at last, by an occasional hasty glimpse or side-glance, to manifest her interest in this singular pantomime. Hugh persevered to the end in solemn silence, and when he had finished the whole short letter, he handed it to her in a sort of subdued triumph. She took it with a gesture of supreme unconcern. “Did any man ever take such pains before,” she cried ironically, as she glanced at it with an assumption of profound indifference, “to make himself out to his wife a liar, a forger, and perhaps a murderer!”
Hugh bit his lip with mortification, and watched her closely. The tables were turned. How strange that he should now be all eager anxiety for her to learn the truth he had tried so long and so successfully with all his might to conceal from her keenest and most prying scrutiny!
Winifred scanned the forged letter for a minute with apparent carelessness. But as she read and re-read it, in a mere haze of perception, some shadow of doubt for the first time obtruded itself faintly one moment upon her uncertain soul. For Hugh had indeed chosen his specimen letter cleverly ah, that hateful cleverness of his! how even now it told with full force against him! When you have to deal with so cunning a rogue, you can never be sure. The more certain things seem, the more cause for distrusting them. He had written over again from memory the single note of Elsie’s or rather of his own in Elsie’s hand that Winifred had never happened at all to show him the second note of the series, the one he dispatched on the day of her father’s death. It had reached her at Invertanar Castle, redirected from Whitestrand, two mornings later. Winifred had read the few lines as soon as they arrived, and then ‘burned the page in haste, in the heat and flurry of that tearful time. But now, as the letter lay before her in fac-simile once more, the very words and phrases came back to her memory, as they had come back to Hugh’s, with all the abnormal vividness and distinctness of such morbid moments. Ill as she was nay, rather dying he had fairly aroused her feminine curiosity. “How did you ever come to know what Elsie wrote me that day?” she asked coldly.
“Because I wrote it myself,” Hugh answered with an eager forward movement.
For half a minute, Winifred’s soul was staggered. It looked plausible enough; he might have forged it. He could forge anything. Then with a sudden deep-drawn “Ah!” a fresh solution forced itself upon her mind. “You wretch!” she cried, holding her head with her hands; “I see it all now! How dare you lie to me? This is worse than I ever dreamed or conceived. Elsie spent that week with you in London!”
With a loud groan, Hugh flung himself back on his vacant chair. His very cleverness had recoiled upon him with deadly force again. The inference was obvious! too, too, too obvious! What other interpretation could Winifred possibly put upon the facts? He wondered in his heart he could have missed that easy solution himself. “She wasn’t I” he cried out with an agonized cry. “She was dead dead dead, I tell you drowned and buried at Orfordness!”
Winifred looked hard at him, half doubtful still. Could any man be quite so false and heartless? Admirably as he acted, could he act like this? What tragedian had ever such command of his countenance? Might not that strange story of his, so pat and straight, so consonant with the facts, so neatly adapted in every detail to the known circumstances, perhaps after all be actually true? Could Elsie be really and truly dead? Could ring and letters and circumstantial evidence have fallen out, not as she conceived, but as Hugh pretended?
She hardly knew which thing would make her hate and, despise him most the forgery or the lie: that long deception, or that secret intrigue: his silent mourning over a dead love, or his clandestine correspondence with a living lover. Whichever was worst, she would choose to believe; for the wickedest course was likeliest to be the true one. It was a question merely when he had lied the most now or then? to his dying wife or to his betrothed lover? Winifred gazed on at him, scorning and loathing him. “I can’t make my mind up,” she muttered slowly. “It’s hard to believe that Elsie’s dead. But for Elsie’s sake, I hope so! I hope so! That you have deceived me, I know and am sure. That Elsie’s deceived me, I should be sorry to think, though I’ve often thought it. Your story, incredible as it may be, brings home all the baseness and cruelty to yourself. It exculpates Elsie. And I wish I could believe Elsie was innocent. I could endure your wickedness if only I knew Elsie didn’t share it!”
Hugh leaped from his chair with his hands clasped. “Believe what you will about me,” he cried. “I deserve it all. I deserve everything. But not of her not of her, I beg of you. Believe n
o ill of poor dead Elsie!”
Winifred smiled a coldly satirical smile. “So much devotion does you honor indeed,” she said in a scathing voice. “Your consideration for dead Elsie’s reputation is truly touching. I only see one flaw in the case. If Elsie’s dead, how did Mr. Relf come to tell me, I should like to know, she was living at San Remo?”
“Relf!” Hugh cried, taken aback once more. “Relf! Always that serpent! That wriggling, insinuating, backstairs intriguer! I hate the wretch. If I had him here now, I’d wring his wry neck for him with the greatest pleasure. He’s at the bottom of everything that turns up against me. He told you a lie, that’s the plain explanation, and he told it to baffle me. He hates me, the cur, and he wanted to make my game harder. He knew it would sow distrust between you and me if he told you that lie; and he had no pity, like an unmanly sneak that he is, even on a poor weak helpless woman.”’
“I see,” Winifred murmured with exasperating calmness. “He told me the truth. It’s his habit to tell it. And the truth happens to be very disconcerting to you, by making what you’re frank en’ough to describe as your game a little harder. The word’s sufficient. You can never do anything but play a game. That’s very clear. I understand now. I prefer Mr. Relf’s assurance to yours, thank you!”
“Winifred,” Hugh cried in agony of despair, “let me tell you the whole story again, bit by bit, act by act, scene by scene” Winifred smiled derisively at the theatrical phrase “and you may question me out on every part of it. Cross-examine me, please, like a hostile lawyer, to the minutest detail. Oh, Winnie, I want you to know the truth now. I wish you’d believe me. I can’t endure to think you should die mistaking me.”
