by Grant Allen
If he wrung the creature’s neck now a foolish prejudice would hang him for it, under all the forms and pretenses of law. And that would be inconvenient for then he could never marry Elsie!
How inconsistent! that one should be permitted to crush underfoot a lizard or an adder, but be hanged, by a wretched travesty of justice, for wringing the neck of that noxious vermin! He stamped with all his might upon the bolster (vice Warren Relf, not then produceable) and gnashed his teeth in the fury of his hatred. ‘Some day, my fine fellow, it’ll be your own turn,” he muttered to himself, “to get really danced upon. And when your turn comes, you shall find no mercy.”
Curses, says the proverb, come home to roost.
Again he sobered himself with a violent effort. It was hard to be calm with Elsie alive, and Warren Relf, as yet unchoked, separated from him perhaps by no more than a thin lath-and-plaster partition. But the circumstances absolutely demanded calmness. He would restrain himself; he would be judicial. What ought he to do in re this letter? Destroy it at once, or serve it upon the person for whom it was intended?
Happy thought! If he let things take their own course, Relf would probably never go down to the station at all, waiting like a fool to hear from Elsie; and then why then, he might go himself and well why not? run away with hef himself offhand to England!
There, now, would be a dramatic triumph indeed for you! At the very moment when the reptile was waiting in his lair for the heroine, to snatch her by one bold stroke from his slimy grasp, and leave him, disconsolate, to seek her in vain in an empty waiting-room! It was splendid! it was magnificent! The humor of it made his mouth water.
But no! The scandal the gossip the indecency! With Winifred dead in the room below! He must shield Elsie from so grave an imputation. He must bide his time. He must simulate grief. He must let a proper conventional interval elapse. Elsie was his, and he must guard her from evil tongues and eyes. He must do nothing to compromise Elsie.
Still, he might just go to the station to meet her. To satisfy his eyes. No harm in that. Why give the note at all to the reptile?
But looking at it impartially, the straight road is always the safest. The proverb is right. Honesty appears to be on the whole the best policy. He had tried the crooked path already, and found it wanting. Lying too often incurs failure. Henceforth, he would be reasonably and moderately honest.
Excess is bad in any direction. The wise man will therefore avoid excess, be it either on the side of vice or of virtue. A middle course of external decorum will be found by average minds the most prudent. On this, O British ratepayer, address yourself!
Hugh took from his portmanteau an envelope and his writing-case. With Elsie’s torn envelope laid before him for a model, he exercised yet once more his accustomed skill in imitating to the letter to the very stroke, even the turns and twists of that sacred handwriting. But oh, with what different feelings now! No longer dead Elsie’s, but his living love’s. She wrote it herself, that very morning. Addressed as it was to Warren Relf, he pressed it to his lips in a fervor of delight, and kissed it tenderly for was it not Elsie’s?
His beautiful, pure, noble-hearted Elsie! To write to that reptile! And “Dearest Warren,” too! What madness! What desecration! Pah! It sickened him.
But it was not for long. The sun had risen. Before its rays the lesser Lucifers would soon efface themselves.
He rang the bell, and after the usual aristocratic Italian interval, a servant presented himself. Your Italian never shows a vulgar haste in answering bells. Hugh handed him the letter, readdressed to Warren in a forged imitation of Elsie’s handwriting, and asked simply: “This gentleman is in the pension, is he?”
Luigi bowed and smiled profusely. “On the same floor; next door, signer,” he answered, indicating the room with a jerk of his elbow. The Italian waiter lacks polish. Hugh noted the gesture with British disapproval. His tastes were fine: he disliked familiarity.
On the same floor as yet unchoked! And he couldn’t get at him. Horrible! horrible!
Hugh dared not stop at the pension for breakfast. He was afraid of meeting Relf face to face, and till his plan was carried into execution for he had indeed once more a plan he thought it wisest and safest for the present to avoid him studiously. He wanted to make sure with his own two eyes that Elsie was in very truth alive. The legal side of him craved evidence. When a woman has been dead, undoubtedly dead, for three long years, only ocular demonstration in propria persona can fully convince a reasonable man she is quite resuscitated. The age of miracles is now past: the age of scepticism is here upon us. Hugh knew too well, from his own private experience, that documentary evidence may be but a fallible guide to the facts of history. Some brute might perhaps have meanly stooped to the caddish device of forgery to confound him. He wouldn’t have forged for such a purpose himself: he would use that doubtful weapon in selfdefense only. Let Relf go down to the station by all means: he would follow after, at a safe distance, or go before, if that seemed better, and on the unimpeachable authority of his own retina and his own discriminative optic nerves make perfectly certain he saw Elsie. Unseen, of course; for at present he meant to keep quite dark. Elsie perhaps would hardly like to know he had stolen away at such a moment even to see her, from dead Winifred.
For Elsie’s sake he must assume some regret for dead Winifred.
So he told the landlady with a sigh of sensibility he had no heart that morning to taste his breakfast. He would go and stroll by the sea-shore alone. Everything had been arranged about the poor signora.”
“What grief?” said the landlady. “Look you, Luigi, he can eat nothing.”
At a shabby trattoria in the main street, he took his breakfast a sloppy breakfast; but the coffee was good, with the exquisite aroma of the newly roasted berry, and the fresh fruit was really delicious. On the Mediterranean slope, coffee and fresh fruit cover a multitude of sins. What could you have nicer, now, than these green figs, so daintily purpled on the sunny side, and these small white grapes from the local vineyards with their faint undertone of musky flavor? The olives, too, smack of the basking soil; “the luscious glebe of vine-clad lands,” he had called it himself in that pretty song in “A Life’s Philosophy.” He repeated the lines for his own pleasure, rolling them on his palate with vast satisfaction, as a connoisseur rolls good old Maderia:
“My thirsty bosom pants for sunlit waters, And luscious glebe of vine-clad lands, And chanted psalms of freedom’s bronze-cheeked daughters, And sacred grasp of brotherly hands.”
That was written before he knew Winifred! His spirits were high. He enjoyed his breakfast. A quarter to nine by the big church clock; and Elsie goes at 9:40.
He strolled down at his leisure to the station with his hands in his pockets. Fresh air and sunshine smiled at his humor. He would have liked to hide himself somewhere, and “see unseen,” like Paris with the goddesses in the dells of Ida; but stern fact intervened, in the shape of that rigid continental red-tape railway system which admits nobody to the waiting-rooms without the passport of a ticket. He must buy a ticket for form’s sake, then, and go a little way on the same line with them; just for a station or two say to Monte Carlo. He presented himself at the wicket accordingly, and took a first single as far as the Casino.
In the waiting-room he lurked in a dark corner, behind the bookstall with the paper-covered novels. Elsie and Relf would have plenty to do, he shrewdly suspected, in looking after their own luggage without troubling their heads about casual strangers. So he lurked and waited. The situation was a strange one. Would Elsie turn up? His heart stood still. After so many years, after so much misery, to think he was waiting again for Elsie!
As each new-corner entered the waiting-room his pulse leaped again with a burst of expectation. The time went slowly: 9:30, 9:35, 9:36, 9:37 would Elsie come in time for the 9:40?
A throb! a jump! alive! alive! It was Elsie, Elsie, Elsie, Elsie!
She never turned; she never saw. She walked on hastily, side by
side with Warren, the serpent, the reptile. Hugh let her pass out onto the platform and choose her carriage. His flood of emotion fairly overpowered him. Then he sneaked out with a hangdog air, and selected another compartment for himself, a long way behind ] sie’s. But when once he was seated in his place, at his ease, he let his pent-up feelings have free play. He sat in his corner, and cried for joy. The tears followed one another unchecked down his cheeks. Elsie was alive! He had seen Elsie!
The train rattled on upon its way to the frontier, dighera, Ventimiglia, the Roya, the Nervia, were soon passed. They entered France at the Pont St. Louis.
Elsie was crying in her carriage too crying for poor tortured, heart-broken Winifred. And not without certain pangs of regret for Hugh as well. She had loved him once, and he was her own cousin. “Oh, Warren,” she cried, for they had no others with them in their through-carriage it was the season when hardly anybody travels northward “how terribly he must feel it, all alone by himself in a strange land, with that poor dead girl that he hounded to death for his only company! I can’t bear to think how much he must be suffering. Perhaps at Marseilles you’d better telegraph to him your profound sympathy, and tell him that Winifred said before she died said earnestly she loved him and forgave him.”
“I will,” Warren answered. “I thought of him myself not without some qualms at the pension this morning. Perhaps at times, for your sake, knowing what you’ve suffered, I’ve been too harsh toward him. Elsie, he’s a very heartless man, we both know; but even he must surely feel this last blow, and his own guilt for it. We’ve never spoken of him together before; let’s never speak of him together again. This word’s enough. The telegram shall be sent, and I hope and trust it will save him something of his self-imposed misery.”
And all the time Hugh Massinger, in his own carriage, was thinking not of poor dead Winifred; not of remorse, or regret, or penitence; not of his sin and the mis chief it had wrought but of Elsie. The bay of Menton smiled lovely to his eyes. The crags of the steep seaward scarp on the Cap Martin side glistened and shone in the morning sunlight. The rock of Monaco rose sheer like a painter’s dream from the sea in front of him. And as he stepped from the carriage at Monte Carlo station, with the mountains above and the gardens below, flooded by the rich Mediterranean sunlight, he looked about him at the scene in pure aesthetic delight, saying to himself in his throbbing heart that the world after all was very beautiful, and that he might still be happy at last with Elsie.
CHAPTER XLIII.
AT MONTE CARLO.
Hugh had not had the carriage entirely to himself all the way; a stranger got in with him at Mentone station. But so absorbed was Hugh in his own thoughts that he hardly noticed the newcomer’s presence. Full of Elsie and drunk with joy, he had utterly forgotten the man’s very existence more than once. Crying and laughing by turns as he went, he must have impressed the stranger almost like a madman. He had smiled and frowned and chuckled to himself, exactly as if he had been quite alone; and though he saw occasionally, with a careless glee, that the stranger leaned back nervously in his seat and seemed to shrink away from him, as if in bodily fear, he scarcely troubled his head at all about so insignificant and unimportant a person. His soul was all engrossed with Elsie. What was a casual foreigner to him, with Elsie, Elsie, Elsie, recovered?
The Casino grounds were already filled with loungers and children gamblers’ children, in gay Parisian dresses — but the gaming-rooms themselves were not yet open. Hugh, who had come there half by accident, for want of somewhere better to go, and who meant to return to Sa n Remo by the first train, strolled casually without any thought to a seat on the terrace. Preoccupied as he was, ihe loveliness of the place nevertheless took him fairly by surprise. His poet’s soul lay open to its beauty. He had never visited Monte Carlo before; and even now he had merely mentioned the name at random as the first that occurred to him when he went to take his ticket at the San Remo booking-office. He had stumbled upon it wholly by chance. But he was glad he had come; it was all so lovely. The smiling aspect of the spot took his breath away with wonder. And the peaceful air of all that blue bay soothed somewhat his feverish excitement at the momentous discovery that Elsie, his Elsie, was still living.
He gazed around him with serene delight. Tin’s was indeed a day of joyful surprises. The whole place looked more like a scene in fairyland in full pantomime time than like a prosaic bit of this workaday world of ours. In front lay the cobalt-blue Mediterranean, broken on every side into a hundred tiny sapphire inlets. Behind him in serried rank rose tier after tier of Maritime Alps, their solemn summits mysteriously clouded in a fleecy haze. To the left, on the white rock that stretched upon the bay as some vast Miltonic monster suns his huge length on the broad Atlantic, How like a gem the sea-girt city Of little Monaco basking glowed!
He had never before fully understood the depth and beauty of those lines of Tennyson’s: he repeated them over now musingly to himself, and drank in their truthfulness with a poet’s appreciation. To the right, the green Italian shore faded away by degrees into the purple mountains which guard like sentinels the open mouth of the Gulf of Genoa. Lovely by nature, that exquisite spot the fairest, perhaps, in all Europe has been made still lovelier by all the resources of human art. From the water’s edge, terraces of luscious tropical vegetation rise one after another in successive steps toward the grand facade of the gleaming Casino, divided from one another by parapets of marble balustrades, and connected together from place to place by broad flights of Florentine staircases. Fantastic clusters of palms and aloes, their base girt round with rare exotic flowers, thrust themselves cunningly into the foreground of every beautiful view, so that the visitor looks out upon the bay and the mountains through artistic vistas deftly arranged in the very spot where a Tuscan painter’s exuberant fancy would have wished to set them for scenic effect. To Warren Relf, to be sure, Monte Carlo seemed always too meretriciously obtrusive to deserve his pencil; but to Hugh Massinger’s more gorgeous oriental taste it revealed itself at once in brilliant colors as a dream of beauty and a glimpse of Paradise.
From the bench where he sat, he gazed across to Monaco past a feathery knot of drooping date branches: he caught a glimpse of Bordighera on the other side through a graceful framework of spreading dracaenas and quaint symmetrical rosettes of fan-palms. The rock itself delighted and rejoiced his poet’s soul: his fancy, quickened by that day’s adventures, saw in it a thousand strange similitudes. Now it was a huge petrified whale, his back rising two hundred feet or more above the water’s edge: and now it was some gigantic extinct saurian, his head turned toward the open sea, and his tail just lashing the last swell of the mainland at the narrow isthmus where it joined the mountains. Perched on its summit stood the tiny town, with its red-tiled houses and clambering streets, and the mediaeval bastions of its petty Prince’s disproportioned palace. Through that clear Italian air he could see it all with the utmost distinctness the tall gray tower with its Mauresque battlements, the long white facade with its marble pillars, the tiny Place d’Armes with its rows of plane-trees, its dozen brass cannon, and its military forces engaged that moment before his very eyes in duly performing their autumn maneuvers. For the entire strength of the Monegasque army was deploying just then before his languidly attentive vision: anything more grotesque than its petty evolutions he had never before beheld outside an opera bouffe of Offenbach’s. Twenty fantastically dressed soldiers, of various sizes, about onehalf of whom were apparently officers, composed the entire princely service; and they went through their mockdrill with a mixture of gravity and casual nonchalance which made Hugh, who observed them from a distance through his pocket field-glass, smile in spite of himself at the ridiculous ceremonial it recalled so absurdly the “Grand Duchess of Gerolstein.” He laughed a soft little laugh below his breath: he was blithe to-day, for Winifred was dead, and he had seen Elsie.
He looked away next to the nearer foreground. The dreamland of Monte Carlo floated in morning lights
before his enchanted eyes. The great and splendid turreted Casino, the exquisite green lawns and gardens, the brilliant rows of shops and cafes, the picturesque villas dotted up and down the smooth and English-looking sward, the Italian terraces with their marble steps, the glorious lux uriance and waving palm-trees, massive agaves, thick cmstaring yucca blossoms, and heavy breadths of tropical foliage all alike fired and delighted his poetical nature. The bright blue of Mediterranean seas, the dazzling white of Mediterranean sunshine, the brilliant russet of Mediterranean roofs, soothed and charmed his too exalted mood. He needed repose, beauty, and nature. He looked at his watch and consulted the little local time-table he had bought at San Remo. After all, why return to that lonely pension and to dead Winifred so very soon? It was better to be here here, where all was bright and gay and lively. He might sit in the gardens all day long and return by the last train to-night to Winifred. No need to report himself now any longer. He was free, free: he would stop at Monte Carlo.
Why leave, indeed, that glorious spot, the loveliest and deadliest siren of our civilization? He felt his spirit easier here, with those great gray crags frowning down upon him from above, and those exquisite bays smiling up at him from below. Nature and art had here combined to woo and charm him. It seemed like a poet’s midsummer dream, crystallized into lasting and solid reality by some gracious wave of Titania’s wand.
He murmured to himself those lines from the “Daisy”
Nor knew we well what pleased us most; Not the dipt palm of which they boast; But distant color, happy hamlet, A molder’d citadel on the coast; Or tower, or high hill-convent, seen Alight amid its olives green; Or olive-hoary cape in ocean, Or rosy blossom in hot ravine.
