Delphi collected works o.., p.133
Delphi Collected Works of Grant Allen, page 133
Elsie bore the news with far greater fortitude than Edie in her most sanguine mood could have expected. Winifred’s death had sunk so deep into the fibres of her soul that Hugh’s seemed to affect her far less by comparison. She had learned to know him now in all his baseness, was the recognition of the man’s own inmost nature that had cost her dearest. “Let us never speak of him again, dear Warren,” she wrote to her betrothed, a few days later. “Let him be to us as though he had never existed. Let his name be not so much as mentioned between us-. It pains and grieves me ten thousand times more, Warren, to think that for such a man’s sake as he was, I should so long have refused to accept the love of such a man as I now know you to be.”
Those are the hardest words a woman can utter. To unsay their love is to women unendurable. But Elsie no longer shrank from unsaying it. Shame and remorse for her shattered ideal possessed her soul. She knew she had done the true man wrong by so long rejecting him for the sake of the false one.
At sand-girt Whitestrand, meanwhile, all was turmoil and confusion. The news of the young Squire’s tragic death, following so close at the heel of his frail little wife’s, spread horror and shame through the whole community. The vicar’s wife was all agog with excitement. The reticule trembled on her palpitating wrist as she went the round of her neighbors with the surprising intelligence. Nobody knew what might happen next, now the last of the Meyseys was dead and gone, while the sandbanks were spreading half a mile to seaward, and the very river was turned from its course by encroaching hummocks into a new-cut channel. The mortgages, to be sure, were safe with their money. Not only was the property now worth on a rough computation almost as much as it had ever been, but Winifred’s life had been heavily insured, and the late Mr. Massinger’s estate, the family attorney remarked with a cheerful smile, was far more than solvent in fact, it would prove a capital inheritance for some person or persons unknown, the heirs-at-law and nextof-kin of the last possessor. But good business lay in store, no doubt, for the profession still. Deceased had probably died intestate. Endless questions would thus be opened out in delicious vistas before the entranced legal vision. The marriage being subsequent to the late Married Woman’s Property Act, Mrs. Massinger’s will, if any, must be found and proved. The next-of-kin and heir-atlaw must be hunted up. Protracted litigation would probably ensue; rewards would be offered for certificates of birth; records of impossible marriages would be freely advertised for, with tempting suggestions of pecuniary recompense to the lucky discoverer. Research would be stimulated in parish clerks; affidavits would be sworn to with charming recklessness; rival claimants would commit unblushing alternative perjuries on their own account with frank disregard of common probability. It would rain fees. The estate would dissolve itself bodily by slow degrees in a quagmire of expenses. And all for the benefit of the good attorneys! The family lawyer, in the character of Danae for this occasion only, and without prejudicewould hold out his hands to catch the golden shower. A learned profession would no doubt profit in the end to a distinct amount by the late Mr. Massinger’s touching disregard of testamentary provision for his unknown relations.
Alas for the prospects of the learned gentlemen! The question of inheritance proved itself in the end far easier and less complex than the family attorney in his professional zeal had at first anticipated. Everything unraveled itself with disgusting simplicity. The estate might almost as well have been unencumbered. The late Mrs. Massinger had left no will, and the property had therefore devolved direct by common law upon her surviving husband. This was awkward. If only now, any grain of doubt had existed in any way as to the fact that the late Mrs. Massinger had predeceased her unfortunate husband, legal acumen might doubtless have suggested innumerable grounds of action for impossible claimants on either side of the two families. But unhappily for the exercise of legal acumen, the case as it stood was all most horribly plain sailing. Hugh Massinger, Esquire, having inherited in due course from his deceased wife, the estate must go in the first place to Hugh Massinger himself, in person. And Hugh Massinger himself having died intestate, it must go in the next place to Hugh Massinger’s nearest representative. True, there still remained the agreeable and exciting research for the missing heir-at-law; but the pursuit of hunting up the heir-at-law to a given known indisputable possessor is as nothing in the eyes of a keen sportsman compared with the Homeric joy of battle involved in the act of setting the representatives of two rival and uncertain claims to fight it out, tooth and nail together, on the free and open arena of the Court of Probate. It was with a sigh of regret, therefore, that the family attorney, good easy man, drew up the advertisement which closed forever his vain hopes of a disputed succession between the moribund houses of Massinger and Meysey, and confined his possibilities of lucrative litigation to exploiting the house of Massinger alone, for his own use, enjoyment, and fruition.
It was some two or three weeks after Hugh Massinger’s tragic death that Edie Relf chanced to observe in the Agony Column of that morning’s “Times,” a notice couched in the following precise and poetical language:
“Hugh Massinger, Esquire, deceased, late of Whitestrand Hall, in the County of Suffolk. Any person or persons claiming to represent the heir or heirs-at-law and next of kin of the above-named gentleman (who died at Mentone, in the Department of the Alpes Maritimes, in the French Republic, on or about the I7th day of November last past) are hereby requested to apply immediately to Alfred Heberden, Esq., Whitestrand, Suffolk, solicitor to the said Hugh Massinger.”
Edie mentioned the matter at once to Warren, who had come over from France as soon as he had completed the necessary arrangements at San Remo and Mentone; but Warren heard it all with extreme disinclination. He couldn’t bear even to allude to the fact in speaking to Elsie. Directly or indirectly, he could never inherit the estate of the man whose life he had been so nearly instrumental in shortening. And if Elsie was soon, as he hoped, to become his wife, he would necessarily participate in whatever benefit Elsie might derive from inheriting the relics of Hugh Massinger’s ill-won Whitestrand property.
“No, no,” he said. “The estate was simply the price of blood. He married that poor little woman for nothing else but for the sake of Whitestrand. He killed her by slow degrees through his neglect and cruelty. If he hadn’t married her, he would never have been master of that wretched place: if he hadn’t married her, he would have had nothing of his own to leave to Elsie. I can’t touch it, and I won’t touch it So that’s flat, Edie. It’s the price of blood. Let it, too, perish with him.”
“But oughtn’t you at least to mention it to Elsie?” Edie asked, with her plain straightforward English commonsense. “It’s her business more than it’s yours, you know, Warren. Oughtn’t you at least to give her the option of accepting or refusing her own property? It’s very kind of you, of course, to decide for her beforehand so cavalierly. Perhaps, you see, when she learns she’s an heiress, she may be inclined to transfer her affections elsewhere.”
Warren smiled. That was a point of view that had never occurred to him. Your male lover makes so sure of his prey: he hardly allows in his own mind the possibility of rejection. But still he prevaricated. “I wouldn’t tell her about it, just yet at least,” he answered hesitatingly. “We don’t know, after ail, that Elsie’s really the heirat-law at all, if it comes to that. Let’s wait and see. Perhaps some other claimant may turn up for the property.”
“Perhaps,” Edie replied, with her oracular brevity. “And perhaps not. There’s nothing on earth more elastic in its own way than a good perhaps. India-rubber bands are just mere child’s play to it. Suppose, then, we pin it down to a precise limit of time, so as to know exactly where we stand, and say that if the estate isn’t otherwise claimed within six weeks, we’ll break it to Elsie, and allow her to decide for herself in the matter?”
“But how shall we know whether it’s claimed or not?’ Warren asked dubiously.
“My dear, there exists in this realm of England a useful institution known to science as a penny post, by means of which a letter may be safely and inexpensively conveyed even to so remote and undistinguished a personage as Alfred Heberden, Esquire, solicitor to the deceased, Whitestrand, Suffolk. I propose, in fact, to write and ask him.”
Warren groaned. It was an awkward fix he could shirk the whole horrid business. To be saddled against vour will with a landed estate that you don t want is a predicament that seldom disturbs a modest gei man’s peace of mind anywhere. But he saw no pos way out of the odd dilemma. Edie was right, after all, no doubt. As yet, at least, he had no authority to answer in any way for Elsie’s wishes. If she wanted Whitestrand, it was hers to take or reject as she wished, and hers only. Still, he salved his conscience with the consolatory idea that it was not actually compulsory upon him to show Elsie any legal advertisement, inquiry, or suggestion which might happen to emanate from the solicitors to the estate of the late Hugh Massinger. So far as he had any official cognizance of the facts, indeed, the heirs, executors and assigns of the deceased had nothing on earth to do in any way with Elsie Challoner, of San Remo, Italy. Second cousinhood is at best a very vague and uncertain form of relationship. He decided, therefore, not without some internal qualms, to accept Edie’s suggested compromise for the present, and to wait patiently for the matter in hand to settle itself by spontaneous arrangement.
But Alfred Heberden, Esquire, solicitor to the deceased, acted otherwise. He had failed to draw any satisfactory communications in answer to his advertisement save one from a bogus firm of so-called Property Agents, the proprietors of a fallacious list of Next of Kin Wanted, and one from a third-rate pawnbroker in the Borough Road, whose wife’s aunt had once married a broken-down railway porter of the name of Messenger, from Weem in Shropshire, and who considered himself, accordingly, the obvious representative and heir-at-law of the late Hugh Massinger of the Utter Bar, and of Whitestrand Hall, in Suffolk, Esquire, deceased without issue. Neither of these applications, however, proving of sufficient importance to engage the attention of Mr. Alfred Heberden’s legal mind, that astute gentleman proceeded entirely on his own account to investigate the genealogy and other antecedents of Hugh Massinger, with a single eye to the discovery of the missing inheritor of the estate, envisaged as a person from whom natural gratitude would probably wring a substantial solatium to the good attorney who had proved his title. And the result of his inquiries into the Massinger pedigree took tangible shape at last, a week or two later, in a second advertisement of a more exact sort, which Edie Relf, that diligent and careful student of the second column, the most interesting portion of the whole newspaper to Eve’s like-minded daughters, discovered and pondered over one foggy morning in the blissful repose of 128, Bletchingley Road, South Kensington.
“Challoner: Heir-at-law and Next of Kin Wanted. Estate of Hugh Massinger, Esquire, deceased, intestate. If this should meet the eye of Elsie, daughter of the late Rev. H. Challoner, and Eleanor Jane, his wife, formerly Eleanor Jane Massinger, of Chudleigh, Devonshire, she is requested to put herself into communication with Alfred Heberden, Esq., Whitestrand, Suffolk, when she may hear of something greatly to her advantage.”
Edie took the paper up at once to Warren. “For ‘may’ read ‘will,’ “ she said pointedly. “Lawyers don’t advertise unless they know. I always understood Mr. Massinger had no living relations except Elsie. This question has reached boiling-point now. You’ll have to speak to her after that about the matter.”
CHAPTER LII.
THE TANGLE RESOLVES ITSELF.
“You must never, never take it, Elsie,” Warren said earnestly, as Elsie laid down the paper once more and wiped a tear from her eye nervously. “It came to him through that poor broken-hearted little woman, you know. He should never have married her; he should never have o wned it. It was never truly or honestly his, and therefore it isn’t yours by right. I couldn’t bear, myself, to touch a single penny of it.”
Elsie looked up at him with a twitching face. “Do you niake that a condition, Warren?” she asked, all tremulous.
Warren paused and hesitated, irresolute, for a moment. “Do I make it a condition?” he answered slowly. “My darling, how can I possibly talk of making conditions or bargains with you? But I could never bear to think that wife of mine would touch one penny of that ill-gotten money.”
“Warren,” Elsie said, in a very soft voice they were alone in the room and they talked like lovers “I said to myself more than once in the old, old days after all that was past and done forever, you know, dear I said to myself: ‘I would never marry any man now, not even if I loved him loved him truly unless I had money of my own to bring him.’ And when I began to know I was getting to love you when I couldn’t any longer conceal from myself the truth that your tenderness and your devotion had made me love you against my will I said to myself again, more firmly than ever: ‘I will never let him take me thus penniless. I will never burden him with one more mouth to feed, one more person to house and clothe and supply, one more life to toil and moil and slave for. Even as it is, he can’t pursue his art as he ought to pursue it; he can’t give free play to his genius as his genius demands, because he has to turn aside from his own noble and exquisite ideals to suit the market and to earn money. I won’t any further shackle his arm. I won’t any further cramp his hand his hand that should be as free as the air to pursue unhampered his own grand and beautiful calling. I will never marry him unless I can bring him at least enough to support myself upon.’ And just the other day, you remember, Warren that day at San Remo when I admitted at last what I had known so long without ever admitting it, that I loved you better than life itself I said to you still: ‘I am yours, at heart. But I can’t be yours really for a long time yet. No matter why. I shall be yours still in myself, for all that.’ Well, I’ll tell you now why I said those words. Even then, darling, I felt I could never marry you penniless.”
She paused, and looked up at him with an earnest look in her true gray eyes, those exquisite eyes of hers that no lover could see without an intense thrill through his inmost being. Warren thrilled in response, and wondered what could next be coming. “And you’re going to tell me, Elsie,” he said, with a sigh, “that you can’t marry me unless you feel free to accept Whitestrand?”
Elsie laid her head with womanly confidence on his strong shoulder. “I’m going to tell you, darling,” she answered, with a sudden outburst of unchecked emotion, “that I’ll marry you now, Whitestrand or no Whitestrand. I’ll do as you wish in this and in everything. I love you so dearly to-day, Warren, that I can even burden you with myself, if you wish it: I can throw myself upon you without reserve: I can take back all I ever thought or said, and be happy anywhere, if only you’ll have me, and make me your wife, and love me always as I myself love you. I want nothing that ever was his; I only want to be yours, Warren.”
Nevertheless, Mr. Alfred Heberden did within one week of that date duly proceed in proper form to prove the claim of Elsie Challoner, of 128, Bletchingley Road, in the parish of Kensington, spinster, of no occupation, to the intestate estate of Hugh Massinger, Esquire, deceased, of Whiteslrand Hall, in the county of Suffolk.
The fact is, an estate, however acquired, must needs belong to somebody somewhere; and since either Elsie must take it herself, or let some other person with a worse claim endeavor to obtain it, Warren and she decided, upon further consideration, that it would be better for her to dispense the revenues of Whitestrand for the public good, than to let them fall by default into the greedy clutches of the enterprising pawnbroker in the Borough Road, or be swallowed up for his own advantage by any similar absorbent medium elsewhere. From the very first, indeed, they were both firmly determined never to spend one shilling of the estate upon their own pleasures or their own necessities. But if wealth is to be dispensed in doing good at all, it is best that intelligent and single-hearted people should so dispense it, rather than leave it to the tender mercies of that amiable but somewhat indefinite institution, the Court of Chancery. Warren and Elsie decided, therefore, at last to prosecute their legal claim, regarding themselves as trustees for the needy or helpless of Great Britain generally, and to sell the estate when once obtained, for the first cash price offered, investing the sum in consols in their own names, as a virtual trust-fund, to be employed by themselves for such special purposes as seemed best to both in the free exercise of their own full and unfettered discretion. So Mr. Alfred Heberden’s advertisement bore good fruit in due season; and Elsie did at last, in name at least, inherit the manor and estate of Whitestrand.
But neither of them touched one penny of the bloodmoney. They kept it all apart as a sacred fund, to be used only in the best way they knew for the objects that Winifred in her highest moods might most have approved of.
And this, as Elsie justly remarked was really the very best possible arrangement. To be sure, she no longer felt that shy old feeling against coming to Warren unprovided and penniless. She was content now, as a wife should be, to trust herself implicitly and entirely to her husband’s hands. Warren’s art of late had every day been more sought after by those who hold in their laps the absolute disposal of the world’s wealth, and there was far less fear than formerly that the cares of a household would entail on him the miserable and degrading necessity for lowering his own artistic standard to meet the inferior wishes and tastes of possible purchasers, with their vulgar ideals. But it was also something for each of them to feel that the other had thus been seriously tried by the final test of this world’s gold tried in actual practice and not found wanting. Few pass through that sordid crucible unscathed: those that do are of the purest metal.
