by Grant Allen
For years she had locked up that secret in her own soul. She had told it to no one, least of all to her husband. But, confined to the narrow space of her poor small heart, and battlirfg there with her contempt and scorn, it had slowly eaten her very life out. Hating and despising him for his crooked ways, she loved him still, for her old love’s sake: with a woman’s singleness of heart and purpose, she throned him in her love, supreme and solitary. And the secret at last had framed itself into words and confided itself almost against her will to Elsie.
Her face was growing very pale now. After all this excitement, she needed rest. The inevitable reaction was beginning to set in. She fumbled with her fingers on the bedclothes nervously; her face twitched with a painful twitching. The symptoms alarmed and frightened Elsie; she opened the door of the little salon and signaled to the English doctor to return to the bedroom. He came in, and cast a keen glance at the bed. Elsie looked up at him with inquiring eyes. The doctor nodded gravely and drew his long beard through his closed hand. “A mere question of hours,” he whispered in her ear. “It may be delayed; it may come at any time. She’s overtaxed her strength. Hysteria, followed by proportionate prostration. Her heart may fail from moment to moment.”
“Where’s her husband?” Elsie cried in a fever of dismay. Her one wish now was for Hugh to present himself. She forgot at once her own terror and false shame; she remembered no more her feminine shrinking; self had vanished from her mind altogether; she thought only of, poor dying Winifred. And of Hugh too. For she couldn’t bear to believe, even after all she had heard and known of his life, that the Hugh she had once loved and trusted could let his wife thus die in his absence could let her die, himself unforgiven.
“I’ve sent him off about his business for an hour’s stroll,” the doctor answered with professional calmness. “She’s evidently in a highly hysterical condition, and the sight of him only increases her excitement. It’s a sad case, but a painfully common one. A husband’s presence is often the very worst thing on earth for a patient so affected. I thought it would do her far more good to have you alone with her you’re always so gentle and so soothing, Miss Challoner.”
Elsie glanced back at him with swimming eyes.’ “But suppose she were to die while he’s gone,” she murmured low with profound emotion.
The doctor pursed up his lips philosophically. “It can’t be helped,” he answered with a faint shrug. “That’s just what’ll happen, I’m very much afraid. We can only do the best we can. This crisis has evidently been too severe for her.”
As he spoke, Winifred turned up from the bed an appealing face, and beckoned Elsie to bend down closer to her. “Elsie,” she whispered, in a low hoarse voice, “send out for Hugh. I want him now. I should like to kiss him before I die. I think I’m going. I won’t last much longer.”
Elsie hurried out to Warren in the anteroom. “Go,” she cried eagerly, through her blinding tears “go and find Hugh. Winifred wants him; she wants to kiss him before she dies. Look for him through all the streets till you find him, and send him home. She wants to forgive him.”
Warren gazed close at her with reverent eyes. “She wants to forgive him, Elsie?” he cried half incredulous. “She wants to forgive him, that hard little woman! You’ve brought her round to that already?”
“Yes,” Elsie answered. “Go quick and find him. She isn’t hard; she’s tender as a child. She’s dying now dying of cramped and thwarted affection. In another half-hour, it may be too late. Go at once, I beg of you.”
Warren answered her never a single word, but, nodding acquiescence, rushed down by himself to the esplanade and the shore in search of his enemy. Poor baffled enemy, how his heart ached for him! At such a moment, who could help pitying him?
“Is he coming?” Winifred asked from the bed feebly.
“Not yet, darling,” Elsie answered in a hushed voice; “but Warren’s gone out to try and find him. He’ll be here soon. Lie still and wait for him.”
Winifred lay quite still for some minutes ‘more, breathing hard and loud on the bed where they had laid her. The moments appeared to spread themselves over hours. But no Hugh came. At last she beckoned Elsie nearer again, with a frail hand that seemed almost to have lost all power of motion. Elsie leaned over her with her ear laid close to Winifred’s lips. The poor girl’s voice sounded very weak and all but inaudible now. “I can’t last till he comes, Elsie,” she murmured low. “But tell him I forgave him. Tell him I asked him to forgive me in turn. Tell him I wanted to kiss him good-bye. But even that last wish was denied me. And Elsie” her fingers clutched her friend’s convulsively “tell him all along I’ve always loved him. I loved him from the very depths of my soul. I never loved any one as I loved that man. When I hated him most, I loved him dearly. It was my very love that made me so hate him. He starved my heart; and now it’s broken.”
Elsie stooped down and kissed her forehead. A smile played lambent over Winifred’s face at the gentle kiss. The doctor lifted his open hand in warning. Elsie bent over her with gathered brows and strained eyes for a sign of breath for a moment. “Gone?” she asked at last with mute lips of the doctor.
“Gone,” the calmer observer answered with a grave inclination of his head toward Elsie. “Rapid collapse. A singular case. She suffered no pain at the last, poor lady.”
Elsie flung herself wildly into an easy-chair and burst into tears more burning than ever.
A touch on her shoulder. She looked up with a start. Could this be Hugh? Thank Heaven, no! It was Warren who touched her shoulder lightly. Half an hour had passed, and he had now come back again. But, alas, too late. “No need to stop here any longer,” he said reverently. “Hugh’s downstairs, and they’re breaking the news to him. He doesn’t know yet you’re here at all. I didn’t speak to him. I thought some other person would move him more. I saw him on the quay, and I sent an Italian I met on the beach to tell him he was wanted, and his wife was dying. Come up to my room on the floor above. Hugh needn’t know? even now, perhaps, that you’re here at San Remo.”
Too full to speak, Elsie followed him blindly from the chamber of death, and stumbled somehow up the broad flight of stairs to Warren’s apartments on the next story. As she reached the top of the open flight, she heard a voice a familiar voice, that would once have thrilled her to the very heart on the landing below, by Winifred’s bedroom. Shame and fascination drew her different ways. Fascination won. She couldn’t resist the dangerous temptation to look over the edge of the banisters for a second. Hugh had just mounted the stairs from the big entrance hall, and was talking by the door in measured tones with the English doctor.
“Very well,” he said in his cold stern voice, the voice he had always used to Winifred a little lowered by conventional respect, indeed, but scarcely so subdued as the doctor’s own. “I’m prepared for the worst. If she’s dead, say so. You needn’t be afraid of shocking my feelings; I expected it shortly.”
She could see his face distinctly from the spot where she stood, and she shrank back aghast at once from the sight with surprise and horror. It was Hugh to be sure, but oh, what a Hugh! How changed and altered from that light and bright young dilettante poet she had loved and worshiped in the old days at Whitestrand. His very form and features, and limbs and figure were no longer the same; all were unlike, and the difference was all to their disadvantage. The man had not only grown sterner and harder; he was coarser and commoner and less striking than formerly. His very style had suffered visible degeneration. No more of the jaunty old poetical air; turnips and foot-and-mouth disease, the arrears of rent and the struggle against reduction, the shifting sands and the weight of the riparian proprietors’ question, had all left their mark stamped deep in ugly lines upon his face and figure. He was handsome still, but in a less refined and delicate type of manly beauty. The long smoldering war between himself and Winifred had changed his expression to a dogged ill-humor. His eyes had grown dull and sordid and selfish, his lips had assumed a sullen set, and a ragg
ed beard with unkempt ends had disfigured that clear-cut and dainty chin that was once so eloquent of poetry and culture. Altogether, it was but a pale and flabby version of the old, old Hugh — a replica from whose head the halo had faded. Elsie looked down on him from her height of vantage with a thrill of utter and hopeless disillusionment Then she turned with a pang of remorse to Warren. Was it really possible? Was there once a time when she thought in her heart that self-centered, hard-hearted, cold-featured creature more than a match for such a man as Warren?
“She is dead,” the doctor answered with professional respect. “She died half an hour ago, quite happy. Her one regret seemed to be for your absence. She was anxiously expecting you to come back and see her.”
Hugh only answered: “I thought so. Poor child.” But the very way he said it the half-unconcerned tone, the lack of any real depth of emotion, nay, even of the decent pretense of tears, shocked and appalled Elsie beyond measure. She rushed away into Warren’s room, and gave vent once more to her torrent of emotion. The painter laid his hand gently on her beautiful hair. “Oh, Warren,” she cried, looking up at him half doubtful, “it makes me ashamed” And she checked herself suddenly.
“Ashamed of what?” Warren asked her low.
In the fever of her overwrought feelings, she flung herself passionately into his circling arms. “Ashamed to think,” she answered with a sob of distress, “that I once loved him!”
CHAPTER XLI.
REDIVIVA!
Hugh sat that evening, that crowded evening, alone in his dingy, stingy rooms with his dead Winifred. Alone with his weary, dreary thoughts his thoughts, and a corpse, and a ghostly presence! Two women had loved him dearly in their time, and he had killed them both Elsie and Winifred. That was the burden of his moody brooding. What curse, he asked himself, lay upon his head? And his own heart told him, in fitful moments of remorse, the curse of utter and ingrained selfishness. He pretended not to listen to it or to believe its witness; but he knew it spoke true, true and clear in spite of itself.
He sat there bitterly, late into the night, with two candles burning dim on the bare table by his side, and his head buried between his feverish hands in gloomy misery. It was a hateful night hateful and ghastly; for in the bedroom at the side, the attendants of death, dispatched by the doctor, were already busy at their gruesome work, performing the last duties for poor martyred Winifred.
He had offered her up on the altar of his selfish remorse and regret for poor martyred Elsie. The last victim had fallen on the grave of the first. She, too, was dead. And now his house was indeed left unto him desolate.
Somehow, as he sat there, with whirling brain and heated brow, on fire in soul, he thought of Elsie far more than of Winifred. The new bereavement, such as it was, seemed to quicken and accentuate the sense of the old one. Was it that Winifred’s wild belief in her recognition of Elsie that day in the street had roused once more the picture of his lost love’s face and form so vividly in his mind? Or was it that the girl whom Winifred had pointed out to him did really to some slight extent resemble Elsie, and so recall her more definitely before him? He hardly knew; but of one thing he was certain Elsie that night monopolized his consciousness. His threeyear-old grief was still fresh and green. He thought much of Elsie, and little of Winifred.
It was a fixed idea with poor Winifred, he knew, that Elsie was alive and settled at San Remo. How the idea first came into her poor little head, he really knew not. He thought now the story about Warren Relf having given her the notion was itself a mere piece of her dying hysterical delirium. So was her confident immediate identification of the girl in the street as the actual Elsie. No trusting, of course, to a dying woman’s impressions. Still, it was strange that Winifred should have died with Elsie, Elsie, Elsie, floating ever in her mind’s eye before her. Strange, too, that the second victim of his selfish love should have died with her soul so fiercely intent upon the fixed and permanent image of the first one. Strange, furthermore, that a girl seen casually in the street should as a matter of fact, even in his own unprejudiced eyes, have so closely and curiously resembled Elsie. It was all odd. It all fitted in to a nicety with the familiar patness of that curious fate that seemed through life to dog him so persistently. Coincidence jostled against coincidence to confound him: opportunity ran cheek by jowl with occasion to work him ill. And yet, had he but known the whole truth as it really was, he would have seen there was never a genuine coincidence anywhere in it all that everything had come pat by deliberate design: that Winifred had fixed upon San Remo on purpose, because she actually knew Elsie to be living there: and that the girl they had seen in the street that afternoon was none other than Elsie herself his very Elsie in flesh and blood, not nny vain or deceptive delusion.
Late at night, the well-favored landlady came up, courteous and Italian, all respectful sympathy, in a black gown and a mourning head-dress, hastily donned, as becomes those who pay visits of condolence in whatever capacity to the recently bereaved. As for Hugh himself, he wore still his rough traveling suit of gray homespun, and the dust of his journey lay thick upon him. But he roused himself listlessly at the landlady’s approach. She was bland, but sympathetic. Where would Monsieur sleep? the amiable proprietress inquired in lisping French. Hugh started at the inquiry. He had never thought at all of that. Anywhere, he answered, in a careless voice: it was all the same to him: sous les toits, if necessary.
The landlady bowed a respectful deprecation. She could offer him a small room, a most diminutive room, unfit for Monsieur, in his present condition, but still a chambre de maitre, just above Madame. She regretted she was unable to afford a better; but the house was full, or, in a word, crowded. The world, you see, was beginning to arrive at San Remo for the season. Proprietors in a health-resort naturally resent a death on the premises, especially at the very outset of the winter: they regard it as a slight on the sanitary reputation of the place, and incline to be rude to the deceased and his family. Yet nothing could be more charming than the landlady’s manner; she swallowed her natural internal chagrin at so untoward an event in her own house and at such an untimely crisis, with commendable politeness. One would have said that a death rather advertised the condition of the house than otherwise. Hugh nodded his head in blind acquiescence. “Ou vous voulez, Madame,” he answered wearily. “Upstairs, if you wish. I’ll go now. I’m sorry to have caused you so much inconvenience; but we never know when these unfortunate affairs are likely to happen.”
The landlady considered in her own mind that the gentleman’s tone was of the most distinguished. Such sweet manners! So thoughtful so considerate so kindly respectful for the house’s injured feelings! She was conscious that his courtesy called for some slight return. “You have eaten nothing, Monsieur,” she went on, compassionately. “In effect, our sorrow makes us forget these details of everyday life. You do not derange us at all; but you must let me send you up some little refreshment.”
Hugh nodded again.
She sent him up some cake and red wine of the country by the Swiss waiter, and Hugh ate it mechanically, for he was not hungry. Excitement and fatigue had worn him out His game was played. He followed the waiter up to the floor above, and was shown into the next room to Warren’s.
He undressed in a stupid, half dead-alive way, and lay down on the bed with his candle still burning. But he didn’t sleep. Weariness and remorse kept him wide awake, worn out as he was, tossing and turning through the long slow hours in silent agony. He had time to sound the whole gamut of possible human passion. He thought of Elsie, the weary night through: of dead Elsie, and at times, more rarely, of dead Winifred too, alone in the chamber of death beneath him. Elsie, in her nameless grave away at Orfordness: Winifred, unburied below, here at San Remo. A wild unrest possessed his fevered limbs. He murmured Elsie’s name to himself, in audible tones, a hundred times over.
Strange to say, the sense of freedom was the strongest of all the feelings that crowded in upon him. Now that Winifred was dead, he
could do as he chose with his own. He was no longer tied to her will and her criticisms. When he got back to England, as he would get back, of course, the moment he had decently buried Winifred he meant to put up a fitting gravestone at Orfordness, if he sold the wretched remainder of Whitestrand to do it. A granite cross should mark that sacred spot. Dead Elsie’s grave should no longer be nameless. So much, at least, his remorse could effect for him.
For Winifred was dead, and Whitestrand was his own. At the price of that miserable manor of blown sand he had sold his own soul and Elsie’s life; and now he would gladly get rid of it all, if only he could raise out of its shrunken relics a monument at Orfordness to Elsie. For three long years that untended grave had silently accused the remnants of his conscience: he determined it should accuse his soul no longer.
He would have to begin life all over again, of course. This first throw had turned out a fatal error. He had staked everything upon winning Whitestrand; and with what result? Elsie lost, and Whitestrand, and Winifred! Loss all round: loss and confusion. In the end, he found himself far worse off than he had ever been at the very outset, when the world was still before him where to choose. No new career now opened its doors to him. The bar was closed: he had had his chance there, and missed it squarely. Bohemia was estranged; small room for him now in literature or journalism. Whitestrand had spoilt his whole scheme of life for him. He was wrecked in port. And he could never meet with another Elsie.
The big clock on the landing ticked monotonously. Each swing of the pendulum tortured him afresh; for it called aloud to his heart in measured tones. It cried as plain as words could say: “Elsie, Elsie, Elsie, Elsie!”
Ah, yes. He was young enough to begin life afresh, if that were all. To begin all over again is less than nothing to a brave man. But for whom or for what? Selfish as he was, Hugh Massinger couldn’t stand up and face the horrid idea of beginning afresh for himself alone. He must have some’ one to love, or go under forever.
