by Grant Allen
Warren hadn’t meant to let Elsie know that Hugh and Winifred had come to San Remo; or, at any rate, not immediately. He wished rather to break it by gradual stages, and to prepare her mind as quietly as possible for a hasty return home to England. But the sight of poor Winifred’s dying misery and distress had put all that on a different footing. Even though it cost Elsie a bitter wrench, he must take her round at all costs to see Winifred. He kissed his sister, a mechanical kiss; then he turned round, and, half by accident, half by design, for the first time in his life he kissed Elsie too, like one who hardly knows he does it. Elsie drew back, a trifle surprised, but did not resent, the unexpected freedom. After all, one may always kiss one’s brother; and she and Warren were brother and sister. Did it run in the family, peradventure, that false logic of love? Was Elsie now deceiving herself with the self-same plea as that with which Hugh had once in his turn deceived her?
Warren drew her aside gently into the tiny salon, and motioned to Edie not to follow them. Elsie’s heart beat high with wonder. She was aware how much it made her pulse quicken to see Warren again with something more than the mere fraternal greeting she pretended. Her little self-deception broke down at last: she knew she loved him in an unpractical way; and she was almost sorry she could never, never make him happy.
But Warren’s grave face bade her heart stand still for a beat or two next moment. He had clearly something most serious to communicate something that he knew would profoundly distress her. A womanly alarm came over her with a vague surmise. Could Warren be going to tell her? Oh, no! Impossible. She knew dear Warren too well for that! he at least could never be cruel.
If W’arren was going to tell her that, her faith in her kind would die out forever. And then, she almost smiled to herself at her own frank and feminine inconsistency. She, who could never love again! she, who had always scrupulously told him she cared for him only as a sister for a brother! she, who wanted him to marry “some nice girl, who would make him happy.” She recognized now that if that “nice girl” had in reality floated across Warren Relf’s spiritual horizon, her life would again be left unto her desolate. It flashed across her mind with vivid distinctness, in that moment of painful doubt and uncertainty, that after all she really loved him! beyond shadow of question, she really loved him!
“Well, Warren?” she asked with tremulous eagerness, drawing closer up to him in her sweet womanly confidence, and gazing into his eyes, half afraid, half affectionate. How could she ever have doubted him, were it only fora second?
“Elsie,” Warren cried, laying his hand with unspoken tenderness on her shapely shoulder, “I want you to come round at once to the pension on the piazza. It’s better to tell it all out at once. Winifred Massinger’s come to San Remo, very ill dying, I fear. She knows you’re here, and she’s asked to see you.”
Elsie’s face grew red and then white for a moment, and she trembled visibly. “Is he there?” she asked, after a short pause. Then, with a sudden burst of uncontrollable tears, she buried her face in her hands on the table.
Warren soothed her with his hand tenderly, and, leaning over her, told her, in haste and in a very low voice, the whole sad story. “I don’t think he’ll be there,” he added at the end. “Mrs. Massinger said she wouldn’t allow him to enter the room. But in any case for that poor girl’s sake you won’t refuse to go to her now, will you, Elsie?”
“No,” Elsie answered, rising calmly with womanly dignity, to face it all out “I must go. It would be cruel and wicked of course to shirk it. For Winifred’s sake, I’ll go in any case. But, Warren, before I dare to go “ She broke off suddenly, and with a woman’s impulse held up her pale face to him in mute submission.
A thrill coursed down through Warren Relf’s nerves; he stooped down and pressed his lips fervently to hers. “Before you go, you are mine then, Elsie!” he cried eagerly.
Elsie pressed his hand faintly in reply. “I am yours, Warren,” she answered at last very low, after a short pause. “But I can’t be yours as you wish it for a long time yet. No matter why. I shall be yours in heart. I couldn’t have gone on any other terms. And with that, I think, I can go and face it.”
At the pension, Hugh had already brought the English doctor, who went in alone to look after Winifred. Hugh had tried to accompany him into the bedroom! but Winifred, true to her terrible threat, lifted one stern forefinger before his swimming eyes and cried out “Never!” in a voice so doggedly determined that Hugh slank away abashed into the anteroom.
The English doctor stopped for several minutes in consultation, and Winifred spoke to him, simply and unreservedly, about her husband. “Send that man away!” she cried, pointing to Hugh, as he stood still peering across from the gloom of the doorway. “I won’t have him in here to see me die! I won’t have him in here! It makes me worse to see him about the place. I hate him! I hate him!”
“You’d better go,” the doctor whispered softly, looking him hard in the face with his inquiring eyes. “She’s in a very excited hysterical condition. She’s best alone, with only the women. A husband’s presence often does more harm than good in such nervous crises. Nobody should be near to increase her excitement. Have the kindness to shut the door, if you please. You needn’t come back for the present, thank you.”
And then Winifred unburdened once more her poor laden soul in convulsive sobs. “I ‘want to see Elsie! I want to see Elsie!”
“Miss Challoner?” the doctor asked suggestively. He knew her well as the tenderest and best of amateur nurses.
Winifred explained to him with broken little cries and eager words that she wished to see Elsie in Hugh’s absence.
At the end of five minutes’ soothing talk, the doctor read it all to the very bottom with professional acuteness. The poor girl was dying. Her husband and she had never got on. She hungered and thirsted for human sympathy. Why not gratify her yearning little soul? He stepped back into the bare and dingily lighted sitting-room. “I think,” he said persuasively to Hugh, with authoritative suggestion, “your wife would be all the better in the end if she were left entirely alone with the womenkind for a little. Your presence here evidently disturbs and excites her. Her condition’s critical, distinctly critical. I won’t conceal it from you. She’s overfatigued with the journey and with mental exhaustion. The slightest aggravation of the hysterical symptoms might carry her off at any moment. If I were you, I’d stroll out for an hour. Lounge along by the shore or up the hills a bit. I’ll stop and look after her. She’s quieter now. You needn’t come back for at least an hour.”
Hugh knew in his heart it was best so. Winifred hated him, not without cause. He took up his hat, crushed it fiercely on his head, and, strolling down by himself to the water’s edge, sat in the listless calm of utter despair on a bare bench in the cool fresh air of an Italian evening. He thought in a hopeless, helpless, irresponsible way about poor dead Elsie and poor dying Winifred.
Five minutes after Hugh had left the pension, Warren Relf and Elsie mounted the big center staircase and knocked at the door of Winifred’s bare and dingy salon. The patron had already informed them that the signor was gone out, and that the signora was up in her room alone with the women of the hotel and the English doctor.
Warren Relf remained by himself in the ante-room. Elsie went in unannounced to Winifred.
Oh, the joy and relief of that final meeting! The poor dying girl rose up on the bed with a bound to greet her. A sudden flush crimsoned her sunken cheeks. As her eyes rested once more upon Elsie’s face that earnest, serious, beautiful face she had loved and trusted every shadow of fear and misery faded from her look, and she cried aloud in a fever of delight: “Oh, Elsie, Elsie, I’m glad you’ve come. I’m glad to hold your hand in mine again; now I can die happy!”
Elsie saw at a glance that she spoke the truth. That bright red spot in the center of each wan and pallid cheek told its own sad tale with unmistakable eloquence. She flung her arms fervently round her feeble little friend. “Winnie, Winn
ie!” she cried “my own sweet Winnie! Why didn’t you let me know before? If I’d thought you were like this, I’d have come to you long ago!”
“Then you love me still?” Winifred murmured low, clinging tight and hard to her recovered friend with a feverish longing.
“I’ve always loved you; I shall always love you,” Elsie answered softly. “My love doesn’t come and go, Winnie. If I hadn’t loved you more than I can say, I’d have come long since. It was for your own sake I kept so long away from you.”
The English doctor rose with a sign from the chair by the bedside and motioned the women out of the room. “We’ll leave you alone,” he said in a quiet voice to Elsie. “Don’t excite her too much, if you please, Miss Challoner. But I know I can trust you. I leave her in the very best of hands. You can only be soothing and restful anywhere.”
The doctor’s confidence was perhaps ill-advised. As soon as those two were left by themselves the two women who had loved Hugh Massinger best in the world, and whom Hugh Massinger had so deeply wronged and so cruelly injured they fell upon one another’s necks with a great cry, and wept, and caressed one another long in silence. Then Winifred, leaning back in fatigue, said with a sudden burst: “Oh, Elsie, Elsie! I can’t die now without confessing it, all, every word to you: once, do you know more than once I distrusted you!”
“I know, my darling,” Elsie answered with a tearful imile, kissing her pale white fingers many times tenderly. “I know, I understand. You couldn’t help it. You needn’t explain. It was no wonder.”
Winifred gazed at her transparent eyes and truthful face. No one who saw them could ever distrust them, at least while he looked at them. “Elsie,” she said, gripping her tight in her grasp the one being on earth who could tiuly sympathize with her “I’ll tell you why: he kept your letters all in a box your letters and the little gold watch he gave you.”
“No, not the watch, darling,” Elsie answered, starting back. “Winnie, I’ll tell you what I did with that watch: I threw it into the sea off the pier at Lowestoft.”
A light broke suddenly over Winifred’s mind; she knew now Hugh had told her the truth for once. “He picked it up at Orfordness,” she mused simply. “It was carried there by the tide with a woman’s body a body that he took for yours, Elsie.”
“He doesn’t know I’m alive even now, dearest,” Elsie whispered by her side. “I hope while I live he may never know it; though I don’t know now how we’re to keep it from him, I confess, much longer.”
Then Winifred, emboldened by Elsie’s hand, poured out her full grief in her friend’s ear, and told Elsie the tale of her long, long sorrow. Elsie listened with a burning cheek. “If only I’d known!” she cried at last. “If only I’d known all this ever so much sooner! But I didn’t want to come between you two. I thought perhaps I would spoil all: I fancied you were happy with one another.”
“And after I’m dead, Elsie, will you see him?”
Elsie started. “Never, darling,” she cried. “Never, never:
“Then you don’t love him any longer, dear?”
“Love him? Oh, no! That’s all dead and buried long ago. I mourned too many months for my dead love, Winifred; but after the way Hugh’s treated you how could I love him? how could I help feeling harshly toward him?”
Winifred pressed her friend in her arms harder than ever. “Oh, Elsie!” she cried, “I love you better than anybody else in the whole world. I wish I’d had you always with me. If you’d been near, I might have been happier. How on earth could I ever have ventured to mistrust you!”
They talked long and low in their confidences to one another, each pouring out her whole arrears of time, and each understanding for the first moment many things that had long been strangely obscure to them. At last Winifred repeated the tale of her two or three late stormy interviews with her husband. She told them truthfully, just as they occurred extenuating nothing on either side down to the very words she had used to Hugh: “You’ve tried to murder me by slow torture, that you might marry Elsie:” and that other terrible sentence she had spoken out that very evening to Warren: “He shall not enter this room again till he enters it to see me laid out for burial.”
Elsie shuddered with unspeakable awe and horror when that frail young girl, so delicate of mold and so graceful of feature even still, uttered those awful words of vindictive rancor against the man she had pledged her troth to love and to honor. “Oh, Winifred!” she cried, looking down at her with mingled pity and terror traced in every line of her compassionate face, “you didn’t say that! You could never have meant it!”
Winifred clenched her white hands yet harder once more. “Yes, I did,” she cried. “I meant it, and I mean it. He’s hounded me to death; and now that I’m dying, he shan’t gloat over me!”
“Winnie, Winnie, he’s your husband, your husband! Remember what you promised to do when you married him.”
“That’s just what Mr. Relf said to me this afternoon,” Winifred cried excitedly. “And I answered him back: ‘He never was a husband of mine at all. He was Elsie’s husband. He loved Elsie. He never married me: he only married the manor of Whitestrand. He shan’t come near me again while I live. I only want to know before I die that Elsie never helped that wretch to deceive me!’”
“And you know that now, darling!”
“Elsie, Elsie, I know it! Forgive me.” She stretched out her arms with an appealing glance.
Elsie stooped down and kissed her once more. “Winnie,” she pleaded in a low soft voice, “he’s your husband, after all. Don’t feel so bitterly to him. I know he’s wronged you; I know he’s blighted your dear life for you; I can see how he’s crushed your very soul out by his coldness and his cruelty, and his pride and his sternness. But for all that, I can’t bear to hear you say you’ll die in anger die, and leave him behind unforgiven. Oh, for my sake, and for your own sake, Winnie, if not for his do see him and speak to him, just once, forgivingly.”
“Never!” Winifred answered, starting up on the bed once more with a ghastly energy. “He’s driven me to the grave: let him have his punishment!”
Elsie drew back, more horrified than ever. Her face spoke better than her words to Winifred. “My darling,” she cried, “you must see him. You must never die and leave him so.” Then in a gentler voice she added imploringly: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us.”
Winifred buried her face wildly in her bloodless hands. “I can’t,” she moaned out; “I haven’t the power. It’s too late now. He’s been too cruel to me.”
For many minutes together Elsie bent tenderly over her, whispering words of consolation and comfort in her ears, while Winifred listened and cried silently. At last, after Elsie had soothed her long, and wept over her much with soft loving touches, Winifred looked up in her face with a wistful gaze. “I think, Elsie,” she said slowly, “I could bear to see him, if you would stop with me here and help me.”
Elsie shrank into herself with a sudden horror. That would be a crucial trial, indeed, of her own forgiveness for the man who had wronged her, and her own affection for poor dying Winifred. Meet Hugh again, so painfully, so unexpectedly! Come back to him at once, from the tomb, as it were, to remind him of his crime, and before Winifred’s eyes poor dying Winifred’s! The very idea made her shudder with alarm. “Oh, Winnie,” she cried, looking down upon her friend with her great gray eyes, “I couldn’t face him. I thought I should never see him again. I daren’t do it. You mustn’t ask me.”
“Then you haven’t forgiven him yourself!” Winifred burst out eagerly. “You love him still! You love him and you hate him! Elsie, that’s just the same as me. I hate him but I love him; oh! how I do love him!”
She spoke no more than the simple truth. She was judging Elsie by her own heart. With that strange womanly paradox we so often see, she loved her husband even now, much as she hated him. It was that indeed that made her hate him so much; her love gave point to her hatred and her jealousy.
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br /> “No, darling,” Elsie answered, bending over her closer and speaking lower in her ear than she had yet spoken. “I don’t love him; and I don’t hate him. I forgive him all! I’ve forgiven him long ago. Winnie, I love some one else now. I’ve given my heart away at last, and I’ve given it to a better man than Hugh Massinger.”
‘Then why won’t you wait and help me to see him?” Winifred cried once more in her fiery energy.
“Because I’m ashamed. I can’t look him in the face; that’s all, Winnie.”
Winifred clung to her like a frightened child to its mother’s skirts. “Elsie,” she burst out, with childish vehemence, “stop with me now to the end! Don’t ever leave me!”
Elsie’s heart sank deep into her bosom. A horrible dread possessed her soul. She saw one ghastly possibility looming before them that Winifred never seemed to recognize. Hugh kept her letters, her watch, her relics. Suppose he should come and recognizing her at once, betray his surviving passion for herself before poor dying Winifred! She dared hardly face so hideous a chance. And yet, she couldn’t bear to untwine herself from Winifred’s arms, that clung so tight and so tenderly around her. There was no time to lose, however: she must make up her mind. “Winifred,” she murmured, laying her head close down by the dying girl’s, “I’ll do as you say. I’ll stop here still. I’ll see Hugh. As long as you live, I’ll never leave you!”
Winifred loosed her arms one moment again, and then flung them in a fresh access of feverish fervor round her recovered friend her dear beautiful Elsie. “You’ll stop here,” she cried through her sobs and tears; “you’ll help me to tell Hugh I forgive him.”
“I’ll stop here,” Elsie answered low, “and I’ll help you to forgive him.”
CHAPTER XL.
AT REST AT LAST.
Winifred fell back on the pillows wearily. “I love him,” she whispered once more. “He hates me, Elsie; but in spite of all, I love him, I love him.”
