by Grant Allen
And still the clock ticked and ticked on: and still it cried in the silence of the night: “Elsie, Elsie, Elsie, Elsie!”
At last day dawned, and the morning broke. Pale sunlight streamed in at the one south window. The room was bare a mere servant’s attic. Hugh lay still and looked at the gaping cracks that diversified the gaudily painted Italian ceiling. All night through, he had fervently longed for the morning, and thought when it came he would seize the first chance to rise and dress himself. Now it had really come, he lay there unmoved, too tired and too feeble to think of stirring.
Five six half-past six seven. He almost dozed out of pure weariness.
Suddenly, he woke with a quick start. A knock at the door! a timid knock. Somebody come with a message, apparently. Hugh rose in haste, and held the door just a little ajar to ask in his bad Italian, “What is it?”
A boy’s hand thrust a letter sideways through the narrow opening. “Is it for you, signer?” he asked, peering with black eyes through the chink at the Englishman.
Hugh glanced at the letter in profound astonishment-Oh, Heavens, what is this? How incredible how mysterious! For a moment the room swam wildly around him; he hardly knew how to believe his eyes. Was it part of the general bewilderment of things that seemed to conspire by constant shocks against his perfect sanity? Was he going mad, or was some enemy trying to confuse and confound him? Had some wretch been dabbling in hideous forgeries? For the envelope was addressed Oh, horror of horrors! in dead Elsie’s hand; and it bore in those well-known angular characters the simple inscription, “Warren Relf, Esq., Villa della Fontana (Piano 3), Avenue Vittorio Emmanuele, San Remo.”
He recognized this voice from the grave at once. Dead Elsie! To Warren Relf! His fingers clutched it with a fierce mad grip. He could never give it up. To Warren Relf! And from dead Elsie!
“Is it for you, signer?” the boy asked once more, as he let it go with reluctance from his olive-brown fingers.
“For me? Yes,” Hugh answered, still clutching it eagerly. “For me! Who sends it?”
“The signorina at the Villa Rossa Signorina Cialoner,” the boy replied, getting as near as his Italian lips could manage to the sound of Challoner. “She told me most stringently to deliver it up to yourself, signor, into your proper ringers, and on no account to let it fall into the hands of the English gentleman on the second story.”
“Good,” Hugh answered, closing the door softly. “That’s quite right. Tell her you gave it me.” Then he added in English with a cry of triumph: “Good morning, jackanapes!” After which he flung himself down on the bed once more in a perfect frenzy of indecision and astonishment.
For two minutes he couldn’t make up his mind to break open that mysterious missive from the world of the dead, so strangely delivered by an unknown hand at his own door on the very morrow of Winifred’s sudden death, and addressed in buried Elsie’s hand, as clear as of old, to his dearest enemy. What a horrible concatenation of significant circumstances! He turned it over and over again, unopened, in his awe; and all the time that morose clock outside still ticked in his ear, less loudly than before. At last making up his mind with a start, he opened it half overcome with a pervading sense of mystery. And this was what he read in it, beyond shadow of doubt, in dead Elsie’s very own handwriting:
“Villa Rossa, Thursday, 7:30, morning. “Dearest Warren, “I will be ready, as you suggest, by the 9:40. But you musn’t go with me farther than Paris. That will allow you to get back to Edie and the Motherkin by the 6:39 on Saturday evening. I wish I could have waited here in San Remo till after dear Winifred’s funeral was over; but I quite see with you how dangerous such a course might prove. Every moment I stop exposes me to the chance of an unexpected meeting. You must call on Hugh when you get back from Paris, and give him poor Winifred’s last forgiving message. Some day you know when, dearest I may face seeing him myself, perhaps; and then I can fulfill my promise to her in person. But not till then. And that may be never. I hardly know what I’m writing, I feel so dazed; but I’ll meet you at the station at the hour you mention. No time for more. In great haste my hand shakes with the shock still “Yours, ever lovingly and devotedly, “Elsie.”
The revulsion was awful. For a minute or two Hugh failed to take it all in. You cannot unthink past years at a jump. The belief that Elsie was dead and buried at Orfordness had grown so ingrained in the fabric of his brain that at first he suspected deliberate treachery. Such things have been. He had forged himself: might not Warren Relf, that incarnate fiend, be turning his own weapon meanly against him?
But as he gazed and gazed at dead Elsie’s hand dead Elsie’s own hand unmistakably hers no forger on earth (not even himself) was ever half so clever the truth grew gradually clearer and clearer. Dead Elsie was Elsie dead no longer; she had escaped on that awful evening at Whitestrand. It wasn’t Elsie at all that was buried in the nameless grave at Orfordness. The past was a lie. The present alone the present was true. Elsie was here, today, at San Remo!
With a great thrill of joy, that fact at last came clearly home to him. The world whirled back through the ages again. Then Elsie, his Elsie, was still living! He hadn’t killed her. He was no murderer. It was all a hideous, hideous mistake. The weight, the weight was lifted from his soul. A mad delight usurped its place. His heart throbbed with a wild pulsation. The clock on the staircase ticked loud for joy: “Elsie, Elsie, Elsie, Elsie!”
He buried his face in his hands and wept wept as he never had wept for Winifred wept as he never had wept in his life before wept with frantic gladness for Elsie recovered.
Slowly his conceptions framed themselves anew. His mind could only take it all in piecemeal. Bit by bit he set himself to the task no less a task than to reconstruct the universe. Winifred must have known Elsie was here. It was Elsie herself that Winifred and he had seen yesterday.
Fresh thoughts poured in upon him in a bewildering flood. He was dazzled, dazed, dumbfounded with their number. Elsie was alive, and he had something left, therefore, to live for. Yesterday morning that knowledge would have been less than nothing worth to him while Winifred lived. To-day, thank Heaven for Winifred was dead it meant more to him than all the wealth of Croesus.
He saw through that miserable money-grubbing now. Gold, indeed! what better was gold than any other chemical element? Next time next time, he would choose more wisely. Wisdom in life, he thought to himself with a flash of philosophy, means just this to know what things will bring you most happiness.
How opportunely Winifred had disappeared from the scene! In the nick of time on the very stroke and crisis of his fate! At the turn of the tide that leads on to fortune! Felix opportunitate mortis, indeed! He had no regret, no remorse now, for poor betrayed and martyred Winifred.
Winifred! What was Winifred to him, or he to Winifred, in a world that still held his own beloved Elsie?
How vividly those words came back to him now: “Don’t I know how you’ve brought me to San Remo, dying as I am, to be near her and to see her when I’m dead and buried! You’ve tried tc murder me by slow degrees, to marry Elsie! Well, you’ve carried your point: you’ve killed me at last; and when I’m dead and gone, you can marry Elsie.”
He hadn’t meant it; he had never dreamed of it. But how neat and exact it had all come out! How fortune, whom he reviled, had been playing his game! His sorrow was turned at once into wild rejoicing. Winifred dead and Elsie living! What fairy tale ever ended so pat? He repeated it over and over again to himself: “They were both married and lived happily ever after.”
All’s well that ends well. The Winifred episode had come and gone. But Elsie remained as permanent background.
And how strangely Winifred herself, in her mad desire, had contributed to this very denouement of his troubles. “I shall go to San Remo, if I go at all, and to nowhere else on the whole Riviera. I prefer to face the worst, thank you!” The words flashed back with fresh meaning on his soul. If she hadn’t so set her whole heart on San Remo, he himself
would never have thought of going there. And then he would never have known about Elsie. For that, at least, he had to thank Winifred.
“When I’m dead and gone, you can marry Elsie!”
But what was this discordant note in the letter Elsie’s letter to Warren Relf Warren Relf, his dearest enemy? Was Warren Relf at the pension, then? Had Warren Relf been conspiring against him? In another flash, it all came back to him the two scenes at the Cheyne Row Club Warren’s conversation with his friend Potts the mistakes and errors of his hasty preconceptions. How one fundamental primordial blunder had colored and distorted all his views of the case! He felt sure now, morally sure, that Warren Relf had rescued Elsie the sneak, the eavesdropper, in his miserable mud-boat! And yet if Warren Relf hadn’t done so, there would be no Elsie at all for him now to live for. He recognized the fact; and he hated him for it. That he should own his Elsie to that cur, that serpent!
And all these years Warren Relf insidious creature had kept her in hiding, for his own base objects, and had tried to wriggle himself, with snake-like and lizardlike contortions and twistings, into Hugh’s own rightful place in Elsie’s affections! The mean, mean reptile! to worm his way in secret into the sacred love of another man’s maiden! Hugh loathed and hated him!
Discordant note! Why, yes see this: “Some day you know when, dearest I may face seeing him myself, perhaps.” Then surely Elsie must, have consented to fling herself away upon Relf, as he, Hugh, had flung himself away upon Winifred. But that was before Winifred died. He was free now free, free as the wind, to marry Elsie. And Elsie would marry him: he was sure of that. Elsie’s heart would come back to roost like his own, on the old perch. Elsie would never belie her love! Elsie would love him; Elsie would marry him.
What! Accept that creature Relf in his own place? Hyperion to a Satyr! Impossible! Incredible! Past all conception! No Eve would listen to such a serpent nowadays. Especially not when he, Hugh Massinger, was eager and keen to woo and wed her. “The crane,” he thought, with his old knack of seeing everything through a haze of poetry “the crane may chatter idly of the crane, the dove may murmur of the dove, but I an eagle clang an eagle to the sphere.” When once he appeared in his panoply before her eyes as Elsie’s suitor, your Warren Relfs and’ your lesser creatures would be forgotten and forsaken, and he would say to Elsie, like the Prince to Ida: “Lay thy sweet hands in mine and trust to me.”
And Elsie, Elsie herself felt it; felt it already of that he was certain. Felt this Relf creature was not worthy of her; felt she must answer to her truer instincts; felt her old love must soon return. For did she not say in this very letter, “But not till then. And that may be never?
That may be never! Oh, precious words! She was leaving the door half-open, then, for her poet.
Poet! His heart leaped up at the thought. New vistas old vistas long since closed opened out afresh in long perspective before him. Ay, with such a fount of inspiration as that, to what heights of poetry might he not yet attain! What peaks of Parnassus might he not yet On what pinnacles of glory might he not yet poise himself!
Elsie, Elsie, Elsie, Elsie! That was a talisman to crush all opposition, an “Open Sesame” to prize all doors. With Elsie’s love, what would be impossible to him?
Life floated in new colors before his eager eyes. He dreamed dreams and saw visions, as he lay on his bed in those golden moments. Earth was dearer, fairer, than he ever deemed it. The fever of love and ambition and hate was upon him now in full force. He reeled and reveled in the plentitude of his own wild and hectic imagination. He could do anything, everything, anything. He could move mountains in his fervent access of faith; he could win worlds in his mad delight; he could fight wild beasts in his sudden glory of heroic temper.
And all the while, poor dead Winifred lay cold and white in the bedroom below. And Elsie was off off to England with Warren Relf that wretch! that serpent! by the 9:40.
CHAPTER XLII.
FACE TO FACE.
That hint sobered him. He roused himself to actual action at last. It was now eight, and Elsie was off by the 9:40! Too many thoughts had crowded him too fast. That single hour inclosed for Hugh Massinger a whole eternity. Earth had become another world for him since the stroke of seven. The sun had gone back upon the dial of his life, and left him once more at the same point where he had stood before he ever met Winifred. At the same point, but oh, how differently circumstanced! He had gained experience and wisdom since then: he had learned the lessons of A Life’s Philosophy. All was not gold that glittered, he knew nowadays. The life was more than food, the body than raiment, love than Whitestrand, Elsie than Winifred. He would never go astray after the root of all evil, as long as he lived and loved, again He would be the Demas of no delusive silver mine. On his voyage of discovery, he had found out his own soul for he had a soul, a soul capable of appreciating Elsie; and he would not fling it away a second time for filthy lucre, common dross, the deceitfulness of riches, the mammon of unrighteousness. He had a soul capable of appreciating Elsie: he repeated to himself with the minor poet’s intense delight in the ring and flow of his own verses, those two lines, the refrain of a villanelle he had once years and years ago sent her: “So low! ‘She loves me! Can I be so low? So base! I love her! Can I be so base?” He loved Elsie. And Elsie was off by the 9:40.
There was the key to the immediate future. He rose and dressed himself with all expedition, remembering though by an afterthought for decency’s sake to put on his black cutaway coat and his darkest trousers he had with him none black save those of his evening suit and to approach as near to a mourning tie as the narrow resources of his wardrobe permitted. But it was all a hollow, hollow mockery, a transparent farce, a mere outer semblance: his coat might be black, but his heart was blithe as a lark’s on a bright May morning.
He drew up the blind: the sun was flooding the bay and the -hillsides with Italian lavishness. Flowers were gay on the parterres of the public garden. Who could pretend to be sad at soul on a day like this, worthy of whitest chalk, when the sun shone and flowers bloomed and Elsie was alive again? Let the dead bury their dead. For him, Elsie! for Elsie was alive again.
He lived once more a fresh life. What need to play the hypocrite, here, alone, in his own hired house, in the privacy of his lonely widowed bedchamber? He smiled to himself in the narrow looking-glass fastened against the wall. He laughed hilariously. He showed his even white teeth in his joy: they shone like pearl. He trimmed his beard with unwonted care; for now he must make himself worthy of Elsie. “If I be dear to some one else,” he murmured, with the lover in “Maud,”
“then I should be to myself more dear.” And that he was dear to Elsie, he was quite certain. Her love had suffered eclipse, no doubt: Warren Relf, like a shadow, had flitted for a n ment in between them; but when once he, Hugh, burst forth like the sun upon her eyes once more, Warren Relf, paled and ineffectual, would hide his diminished head and vanish into vacancy.
“Warren Relf! That reptile that vermin! Ha, ha! I have you now at my feet my heel on your neck, you sneaking traitor. Hiding my Elsie so long from my sight! But I nick you now, on the eve of your victory. You think you have her safe in the hollow of your hand. You’ll carry her off away from me to England! Fool! Idiot! Imbecile! Fatuous! You reckon this time without your host There’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip. I’ll dash away this cup, my fine fellow, from yours. Your lip shall never touch my Elsie’s. Nectar is for gods, and not for mudlarks. I’ll bring you down on your marrow-bones before me. You tried to outwit me. Two can play at that game, my friend.” He seized the bolster from the bed, and flinging it with a dash on the carpetless floor, trampled it in an access of frenzy underfoot, for Warren in effigy. The relief from his strain had come too quick. He was beside himself now with love and rage, mad with excitement, drunk with hatred and joy and jealousy. That creature marry his Elsie, forsooth! He danced in a fever of prospective triumph over the prostrate body of his fallen enemy.
Warren Relf,
meanwhile, by himself next door, was saying to himself, as he dressed and packed, in sober sincerity: “Poor Massinger! What a terrible time he must be having, down there alone with his dead wife and his accusing conscience! Ought I to go down and lighten his burden for him, I wonder? Such remorse as his must be too heavy to bear. Ought I to tell him that Elsie’s alive? that that death at least doesn’t lie at his door? that he has only to answer for poor Mrs. Massinger? No. It would be useless for me to tell him. He hates me too much. He wouldn’t listen to me. Elsie shall break it to him in her own good time. But my heart aches for him, for all that, in spite of his cruelty. His worst enemy could wish him no harm now. He must be suffering agonies of regret and repentance. Perhaps at such a moment he might accept consolation even from me. But probably not. I wish I could do anything to lessen this misery for him.”
Why did no answer come from Elsie? That puzzled and surprised Warren not a little. He had begged her to let him know first thing in the morning whether she could get away by the 9:40. He wondered Elsie could be so neglectful she, who was generally so thoughtful and so trustworthy. Moment after moment he watched and waited: a letter must surely come from Elsie.
After a while, Hugh’s access of mania for it was little less cooled down somewhat. He began to face the position like a man. He must be calm; he must be sane; he must deliberate sensibly.
Elsie was going by the 9:40; and Warren Relf would be there to join her. “I’ll meet you at the station at the hour you mention.” But not unless Relf received that letter. Should he ever receive it? That was the question.
He glanced once more at the envelope torn hastily open: “Warren Relf, Esq., Villa della Fontana (Piano 3).” Then Warren Relf was here, in this selfsame house on this very floor next door, possibly! He would like to go in and wring the creature’s neck for him! But that would be rash, unadvisable premature, at any rate. The wise man dissembles his hate for a while till occasion offers. Some other time. With better means and more premeditation.
