Delphi collected works o.., p.120
Delphi Collected Works of Grant Allen, page 120
He might as well have tried to convince the door-handle. Winifred’s loathing found no overt vent in angry words; she repressed her speech, her very breath almost, with a spasmodic effort. But she stretched out both her hands, the palms turned outward, with a gesture of horror, contempt, and repulsion; and she averted her face with a little cry of supreme disgust, checked down deep in her rising throat, as one averts one’s face instinctively from a loathsome sore or a venomous reptile. Such hideous duplicity to a dying woman was more than she could brook without some outer expression of her outraged sense of social decency.
But Hugh could no longer restrain himself now; he had begun his tale, and he must run right through with it. The fever of the confessional had seized upon his soul; remorse and despair were goading him on. He must have relief for his pent-up feelings. Three years of silence were more than enough. Winifred’s very incredulity compelled him to continue. He must tell her all all, all, utterly. He must make her understand to the uttermost jot, willy, nilly, that he was not deceiving her!
He opened the floodgates of his speech at once, and flowed on in a headlong torrent of confession. Winifred sat there, cowering and crouching as far from him as possible in the opposite corner, drinking in his strange tale with an evident interest and a horrible placidity. Not that she ever moved or stirred a muscle; she heard it all out with a cold set smile playing around the corners of her wasted mouth, that was more exasperating by far to behold than any amount of contradiction would have been to listen to. It goaded Hugh into a perfect delirium of feverish self-revelation. He would not submit to be thus openly defied; he must tell her all all all, till she believed him.
With eager lips, he began his story from the very beginning, recapitulating point by point his interview with Elsie in the Hall grounds, her rushing away from him to the roots of the poplar, her mad leap into the swirling black water, his attempt to rescue her, his unconsciousness, and his failure. He told it all with dramatic completeness. Winifred saw and heard every scene and tone and emotion as he reproduced it. Then he went on to tell her how he came to himself again on the bank of the dike, and how in cold and darkness he formed his Plan, that fatal, horrible, successful Plan, which he had ever since been engaged in carrying out and in detesting. He described how he returned to the inn, unobserved and untracked; how he forged the first compromising letter from Elsie; and how, once embarked upon that career of deceit, there was no drawing back for him in crime after crime till the present moment He despised himself for it; but still he told it. Next came the episode of Elsie’s bedroom; the theft of the ring and the other belongings; the hasty flight, the fall from the creeper; and his subsequent horror of the physical surroundings connected with that hateful night adventure. In his agony of self-accusation he spared her no circumstance, no petty detail: bit by bit he retold the whole story in all its hideous inhuman ghastliness the walk to Orfordness, the finding of the watch, the furtive visit to Elsie’s grave, his horror of Winifred’s proposed picnic ‘to that very spot a year later. He ran, unabashed, in an ecstacy of humiliation, through the entire tale of his forgeries and his deceptions: the sending of the ring; the audacious fiction of Elsie’s departure to a new home in Australia: the long sequence of occasional letters; the living lie he had daily and hourly acted before her. And all the while, as he truly said, with slow tears rolling one by one down his dark cheeks, he knew himself a murderer: he felt himself a murderer; and all the while, poor Elsie was lying, dishonored and unknown, a nameless corpse, in her pauper grave upon that stormy sand-pit.
Oh, the joy and relief of that tardy confession! the gush and flow of those pent-up feelings! For three long years and more, he had locked it all up in his inmost soul, chafing and seething with the awful secret; and now at last he had let it all out, in one burst of confidence, to the uttermost item.
As for Winifred, she heard him out in solemn silence to the bitter end, with ever growing contempt and shame and hatred. She could not lift her eyes to his face, so much his very earnestness horrified and appalled her. The man’s aptitude for lying struck her positively dumb. The hideous ingenuity with which he accounted for everything the diabolically clever way in which he had woven in, one after the other, the ring, the watch, the letters, the picnic, the lonely tramp to Orfordness smote her to the heart with a horrible loathing for the vile wretch she had consented to marry. That she had endured so long such a miserable creature’s bought caresses filled her inmost soul with a sickening sense of disgust and horror. She cowered and crouched closer and closer in her remote corner; she felt that his presence there actually polluted the carriage she occupied; she longed for Marseilles, for San Remo, for release, that she might get at least farther and farther away from him. She could almost have opened the door in her access of horror and jumped from the train while still in motion, so intense was her burning and goading desire to escape forever from his poisonous neighborhood.
At last, as Hugh with flushed face and eager eyes calmed down a little from his paroxysm of self-abasement and self-revelation, Winifred raised her eyes once more from the ground and met her husband’s ah, heaven! that she should have to call that thing her husband! His acting chilled her; his pretended tears turned her cold with scorn. “Is that all?” she asked in an icy voice. “Is your romance finished?”
“That’s all!” Hugh cried, burying his face in his hands and bending down his body to the level of his knees in utter and abject self-humiliation. “Winifred! Winifred! it’s no romance. W’on’t you, even now, even now, believe me?”
“It’s clever clever extremely clever!” Winifred answered in a tone of unnatural calmness. “I don’t deny it shows great talent. If you’d turned your attention seriously to novel-writing, which is your proper metier, instead of to the law, for which you’ve too exuberant an imagination, you’d have succeeded ten thousand times better there than you could ever do at what you’re pleased to consider your divine poetry. Your story, I allow, hangs together in every part with remarkable skill. It’s a pity I should happen to know it all from beginning to end for a tissue of falsehoods. Hugh, you’re the profoundest and most eminent of liars. I’ve known people before who would tell a lie to serve their own ends, when there was anything to gain by it. I’ve known people before who, when a lie or the truth would either of them suit their purposes equally, told the lie by preference out of pure love of it But I’ve never till to-night met anybody on earth who would tell a lie for the mere lie’s sake, to make himself look even more utterly mean and despicable and small than he is by nature. You’ve done that. You’ve reached that unsurpassed depth of duplicity. You’ve deliberately invented a clever tissue of concerted lies even you yourself couldn’t fit them all in so neat and pat on the spur of the moment you must have worked your romance up by careful stages in your own mind beforehand and all for what? To prove yourself innocent? Oh no; not at all! but to make yourself out even worse than you are a liar, a forger, and all but a murderer. I loathe you; I despise you. For all your acting you know you’re lying to me even now, this minute. You know that Elsie Challoner, whom you pretend to be dead, is awaiting your own arrival to-night by arrangement at San Remo.”
Hugh flung himself back in the final extremity of utter despair on the padded cushions. He had played his last card with Winifred, and lost. His very remorse availed him nothing. His very confession was held to increase his sin. What could he do? Whither turn? He knew no answer. He rocked himself up and down on his seat in hopeless misery. The worst had come. He had blurted out all. And Winifred, Winifred would not believe him.
“I wish it was true!” he cried; “I wish it was true, Winnie! I wish she was there. But it isn’t; it isn’t! She’s dead! I killed her! and her blood has weighed upon my head ever since! I pay for it now! I killed her! I killed her!”
“Listen!”
Winifred had risen to her full height in the coupe once more, and was standing, gaunt and haggard and deadly wan like a shrunken little tragedy queen above him. Her pale white face showed paler and whiter and more deathlike still by the feeble light of the struggling oil-lamp; and her bloodless lips trembled and quivered visibly with inner passion as she tried to repress her overpowering indignation with one masterful effort. “Listen!” she said, with fierce intensity. “What you say is false. I know you’re lying to me. Warren Relf told me himself the other day in London that Elsie Challoner was still alive, and living, where you know she lives, over there at San Remo.”
Warren Relf! That serpent! That reptile! That eavesdropper! Then this was the creature’s mean revenge! He had lied that despicable lie to Winifred! Hugh hated him in his soul more fiercely than ever. He was baffled once more; and always by that same malignant intriguer!
“Where did you see Relf?” he burst out angrily. His indignation, flaring up to white-heat afresh at this latest machination of his ancient enemy, gave new strength to his words and new point to his hatred. “I thought I told you long since at Whitestrand to hold no further communication with that wretched being!”
But Winifred by this time, worn out with excitement, had fallen back speechless and helpless on the cushions. Her feeble strength was fairly exhausted. The fatigue of the preparations, the stormy passage, the long spell of traveling, the night journey, and, added to it all, this terrible interview with the man she had once loved, but now despised and hated, had proved too much in the end for her weakened constitution. A fit of wild incoherence had overtaken her; she babbled idly on her seat in broken sentences. Her muttered words were full of “mother” and “home” and “Elsie.” Hugh felt her pulse. He knew it was delirium. His one thought now was to reach San Remo as quickly as possible. If only she could live to know Warren Relf had told her a lie, and that Elsie was dead dead dead and buried!
Perhaps even this story about Warren Relf and what he had told her was itself but a product of the fever and delirium! But more probably not. The man who could open other people’s letters, the man who could plot and plan and intrigue in secret to set another man’s wife against uppermost to hurt his enemy and to serve his purpose. He knew that lie would distress and torture Winifred, and he had struck at Hugh, like a coward that he was, through a weak, hysterical, dying woman! He had played on the mean chord of feminine jealousy. Hugh hated him as he had never hated him before. He should pay for this soundly the cur, the scoundrel!
CHAPTER XXXVI.
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SHIELD.
That self-same night, another English passenger of our acquaintance was speeding in hot haste due southward to San Remo, not indeed by the Calais and Marseilles express, but by the rival route via Boulogne, the Mont Cenis, Turin, and Savona. Warren Relf had chosen the alternative road by deliberate design, lest Hugh Massinger and he should happen to clash by the way, and a needless and unseemly scene should perhaps take place before Winifred’s very eyes at some intermediate station.
It was by the merest accident in the world, indeed, that Warren had heard, in the nick of opportunity, of the Massingers’ projected visit to San Remo. For some weeks before, busy with the “boom,” he had hardly ever dropped in for a gossip at his club in Piccadilly. Already he had sent off his mother and sister to the Riviera this time, too, much to his pride and delight, minus the wonted dead-weight cargo of consumptive pupils and being thus left entirely to his own devices at 128 Bletchingley Road, he had occupied every moment of his crowded day with some good hard work in finishing sketches and touching up pictures commissioned in advance from his summer studies, before setting out himself for winter quarters. But on the particular night when Hugh Massinger came up to town en route for the sunny South with Winifred, Warren Relf, having completed a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage in his own studio he was fulfilling an engagement to enlarge a sketch of the Martellos at Aideburgh for some Sheffield cutlery-duke or some Manchester cotton-marquis strolled round in the evening for a cigar and a chat on the comfortable lounges of the Mother of Genius.
In the cosy smoking-room at the Cheyne Row Club, he found Hatherley already installed in a big armchair, discussing coffee and the last new number of the “Nineteenth Century.”
“Hullo, Relf! The remains of the Bard were in here just now,” Hatherley exclaimed as he entered. “You’ve barely missed him. If you’d dropped in only ten minutes earlier, you might have inspected the interesting relics. But he’s gone back to his hotel by this time, I fancy. The atmosphere of Cheyne Row seems somewhat too redolent of vulgar Cavendish for his refined taste. He smokes nothing nowadays himself but the best regalias!”
“What, Massinger?” Relf cried in some slight surprise. “How was he, Hatherley, and what was he doing in town at this time of year? All good squires ought surely to be down in the country now at their hereditary work of supplying the market with a due proportion of hares and partridges.”
“Oh, he’s a poor wreck,” Hatherley answered lightly. “You’ve hit it off exactly sunk to the level of the landed aristocracy. He exhales an aroma of vested interests. Real estate’s his Moloch at present, and he bows the knee to solidified sea-mud in the temple of Rimmon. He has no views on anything in particular, I believe, but riparian proprietorship: complains still of the German Ocean for disregarding the sacred rights of property; and holds that the sole business of an enlightened British legislature is to keep the sand from blowing in at his own inviolable dining-room windows. Poor company, in fact, since he descended to the Squirearchy. He’s never forgiven me that playful little bantering ballade of mine, either, that I sent to the ‘Charing Cross Review,’ you remember, chaffing him about his ‘Life’s Tomfoolery,’ or whatever else he called the precious nonsense. For my part, I hate such vapid narrowness. A man should be able to bear chaff with good-humor. Talk about the genus irritabile, indeed: your poet should feel himself superior to vindictiveness ‘Dowered with the love of love, the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,’ as a distinguished peer admirably words it.”
“How long’s he going to stop in town do you know?” Relf asked curiously.
“Thank goodness, he’s not going to stop at all, my dear fellow. If he were, I’d run down to Brighton for the interval. A month of Massinger at the Cheyne Row would be a perfect harvest for the seaside lodgings. But I’m happy to tell you he’s going to remove his mortal remains for the soul of him’s dead dead and buried long ago in the Whitestrand sandhills to San Remo to morrow. Poor little Mrs. Massinger’s seriously ill, I’m sorry to say. Too much Bard has told at last upon her. Bard for breakfast, Bard for lunch, and Bard for dinner would undermine in time the soundest constitution. Sir Anthony finds it’s produced in her case suppressed gout, or tubercular diathesis, or softening of the brain, or something lingering and humorous of that sort; and he’s ordered her off, post haste, by the first express, to the Mediterranean. Massinger objected at first to San Remo, he tells me, probably because, with his usual bad taste, he didn’t desire to enjoy your agreeable society; but that skimpy little woman, gout or no gout, has a ‘will of her own, I can tell you; San Remo she insists upon, and to San Remo the Bard must go accordingly. You should have seen him chafing with an internal fire as he let it all out to us, hint by hint, in the billiard-room this evening. Poor skimpy little woman, though, I’m awfully sorry for her. It’s hard lines on her. She had the makings of a nice small hostess in her once; but the Bard’s ruined her sucked her dry and chucked her away and she’s dying of him now, from what he tells me.”
Warren Relf looked back with a start of astonishment “To San Remo?” he cried. “You’re sure, Hatherley, he said to San Remo?”
“Perfectly certain. San Remo it is. Observe, hi presto, there’s no deception. He gave me this card in case of error: ‘Hug-h Massinger, for the present, Poste Restante, San Remo.’ No other address forthcoming as yet. He expects to settle down at a villa when he gets there.”
Relf made up his mind with a single plunge as he knocked his ash off. “I shall go by to-morrow’s express to the Riviera,” he said shortly.
“To pursue the Bard? I wouldn’t, if I were you. To tell you the truth, I know he doesn’t love you.”
“He has reason, I believe. The feeling is to some extent mutual. No, not to pursue him to prevent mischief. Hand me over the Continental Bradshaw, will you? Thanks. That’ll do. Do you know whidi line? Marseilles, I suppose? Did he happen to mention it?”
“He told me he was going by Dijon and Lyons.”
“All right. That’s it. The Marseilles route. Arrive at San Remo at 4:30. I’ll go round the other way by Turin and intercept him. Trains arrive within five minutes of one another, I see. That’ll be just in time to prevent any contretemps.”
“Your people are at San Remo already, I believe?”
“My people yes. But how did’ you know? They were at Mentone for a while, and they only went on home to the Villa Rossa the day before yesterday.”
“So I heard from Miss Relf,” Hatherley answered with a slight cough. “She happened to be writing to me about a literary matter a mere question of current artcriticism on Wednesday morning.”
