Delphi collected works o.., p.97
Delphi Collected Works of Grant Allen, page 97
“Why, William,” he heard her say when she went out, in a hushed voice to her husband in the taproom, “Mr. Massinger hev bin in his own room the whool time while them chaps hev bin a-shoutin’ an’ swearin’ suffin frightful out here, more like heathen than human critters.”
Then, they hadn’t noticed his absence, at any rate! That was well. He was so far safe. If the rest of his plan held water equally, all might yet come right and he might yet succeed in marrying Winifred.
To save appearances and marry Winifred! With Elsie still tossing on the breakers of the bar, he had it in his mind to marry Winifred!
When Mrs. Stannaway brought the seltzer, Hugh Massinger merely looked up from the book he was reading with a pleasant nod and a murmured “Thank you.” ’Twas the most he dared. His teeth chattered so he could hardly trust himself to speak any farther; but he tried with an agonized effort within to look as comfortable under the circumstances as possible. As soon as she was gone, however, he opened the seltzer, and pouring himself out a second strong dose of brandy, tossed it off at a gulp, almost neat, to steady his nerves for serious business. Then he opened his blotting-book, with a furtive glance to right and left, and took out a few stray sheets of paper to write a letter. The first sheet had some stanzas of verse scribbled loosely upon it, with many corrections. Hugh’s eyes unconsciously fell upon one of them. It read to him just then like an act of accusation. They were some simple lines describing some ideal Utopian world a dream of the future and the stanza on which his glance had lighted so carelessly ran thus “But fairer and purer still, True love is there to behold; And none may fetter his will With law or with gold:
And none may sully his wings With the deadly taint of lust; But freest of all free things He soars from the dust.”
“With law or with’ gold,” indeed! Fool! Idiot! Jackanapes! He crumpled the verses angrily in his hand as he looked, and flung them with clenched teeth into the empty fireplace. His own words rose up in solemn judgment against him, and condemned him remorselessly by anticipation. He had sold Elsie for Winifred’s gold, and the Nemesis of his crime was already pursuing him like a deadly phantom through all his waking moments.
With a set cold look on his handsome dark face, he selected another sheet of clean white notepaper from the morocco-covered blotting-book, and then pulled a bundle of letters in a girl’s handwriting, secured by an elastic india-rubber band, and carefully numbered with red ink from one to seventy, in the order they had been received. Hugh was nothing, indeed, if not methodical. In his own way, he had loved Elsie, as well as he was capable of loving anybody: he had kept every word she ever wrote to him; and now that she was gone dead and gone forever her letters were all he had left that belonged to her. He laid one down on the table before him, and yielding to a momentary impulse of ecstasy, he kissed it first with reverent tenderness. It was Elsie’s letter poor dead Elsie’s. Elsie dead! He could hardly realize it. His brain whirled and swam with the manifold emotions of that eventful evening. But he must brace himself up for his part like a man. Re must not be weak. There was work to do; he must make haste to do it.
He took a broad-nibbed pen carefully from his desk the broadest he could find and fitted it with pains to his ivory holder. Elsie always used a broad nib poor drowned Elsie dear, martyred Elsie! Then, glancing sideways at her last letter, he wrote on the sheet, in a large flowing angular hand, deep and black, most unlike his own, which was neal! and small and cramped and rounded, the two solitary words, “My darling.” He gazed at them when done with evident complacency. They would do very well: an excellent imitation!
Was he going, then, to copy Elsie’s letter? No; for its first words read plainly, “My own darling Hugh.” He had allowed her to address him in such terms as that; but still, he muttered to himself even now, he was never engaged to her never engaged to her. In copying, he omitted the word “own.” That, he thought, would probably be considered quite too affectionate for any reasonable probability. Even in emergencies he was cool and collected. But “My darling,” was just about the proper mean. Girls are always stupidly gushing in their expression of feeling to one another. No doubt Elsie herself would have begun, “My darling.”
After that, he turned over the letters with careful scrutiny, as if looking down the pages one by one for some particular phrase or word he wanted. At last he came upon the exact thing, “Mrs. Meysey and Winifred are going out to-morrow.”
“That’ll do,” he said in his soul to himself: “a curl to the w” and laying the blank sheet once more before him, he wrote down boldly, in the same free hand, with thick black down-strokes, “My darling Winifred.”
The Plan was shaping itself clearly in his mind now. Word by word he fitted in so, copying each direct from Elsie’s letters, and dovetailing the whole with skilled literary craftsmanship into a curious cento of her pet phrases, till at last, after an hour’s hard and anxious work, round drops of sweat standing meanwhile cold and clammy upon his hot forehead, he read it over with unmixed approbation to himself an excellent letter both in design ‘and execution.
“Whitestrand Hall, September 17.
“My darling Winifred:
“I can hardly make up my mind to write you this letter; and yet I must: I can no longer avoid it. I know you will think me so wicked, so ungrateful: I know Mrs. Meysey will never forgive me; but I can’t help it. Circumstances are too strong for me. By the time this reaches you, I shall have left Whitestrand, I fear forever. Why I am leaving, I can never, never tell you. If you try to find out, you won’t succeed in discovering it. I know what you’ll think; but you’re quite mistaken. It’s something about which you have never heard; something that I’ve told to nobody anywhere; something I can never, never tell, even to you, darling. I’ve written a line to explain to Hugh; but it’s no use either of you trying to trace me. I shall write to you some day again to let you know how I’m getting on but never my whereabouts. Darling, for heaven’s sake, do try to hush this up as much as you can. To have myself discussed by half the country would drive me mad with despair and shame. Get Mrs. Meysey to say I’ve been called away suddenly by private business, and will not return. If only you knew all, you would forgive me everything. Good-bye, darling. Don’t think too harshly of me.
“Ever your affectionate, but heart-broken
“Elsie.”
His soul approved the style and the matter. Would it answer his purpose? he wondered, half tremulously. Would they really believe Elsie had written it, and Elsie was gone? How account for her never having been seen to quit the grounds of the Hall? For her not having been observed at Almundham Station? For no trace being left of her by rail or road, or sea or river? It was a desperate card to play, he knew, but he held no other; and fortune often favors the brave. How often at loo had he stood against all precedent upon a hopeless hand, and swept the board in the end by some audacious stroke of inspired good play, or some strange turn of the favoring chances! He would stand to win now in the same spirit on the forged letter. It was his one good card. Nobody could ever prove he wrote it. And perhaps, with the unthinking readiness of the world at large, they would accept it without further question.
If ever Elsie’s body were recovered! Ah, yes, true: that would indeed be fatal. But then, the chances were enormously against it. The deep sea holds its own: it yields up its dead only to patient and careful search; and who would ever dream of searching for Elsie? Except himself, she has no one to search for her. The letter was vague and uncertain, to be sure; but its very vagueness was infinitely better than the most definite lie: it left open the door to so much width of conjecture. Every man could invent his own solution. If he had tried to tell a plausible story, it might have broken down when confronted with the inconvenient detail of stern reality: but he had trusted everything to imagination. And imagination is such a charmingly elastic faculty! The Meyseys might put their own construction upon it. Each, no doubt, would put a different one; and each would be convinced that his own was the truest.
He folded it up and thrust it into an envelope. Then he addressed the face boldly, in the same free black hand as the letter itself, to “Miss Meysey, The Hall, Whitestrand.” In the corner he stuck the identical monogram, E. C., written with the strokes crossing each other, that Elsie put on all her letters. His power of imitating the minutest details of any autograph stood him in good stead. It was a perfect facsimile, letter and address: and tortured as he was in his own mind by remorse and fear, he still smiled to himself an approving smile as he gazed at the absolutely undetectable forgery. No expert on earth could ever detect it. “That’ll clinch all,” he thought serenely. “They’ll never for a moment doubt that it comes from Elsie.”
He knew the Meyseys had gone out to dinner at the vicarage that evening, and would not return until after the hour at which Elsie usually retired. As soon as they got back, they would take it for granted she had gone to bed, as she always did, and would in all probability never inquire for her. If so, nothing would be known till to-morrow at breakfast. He must drop the letter into the box unperceived to-night, and then it would be delivered at Whitestrand Hall in due course by the first post to-morrow.
He shut the front window, put out the lamp, and stole quietly into the bedroom behind. That done, he opened the little lattice into the back garden, and slipped out, closing the window closely after him, and blowing out the candle. The post office lay just beyond the church. He walked there fast, dropped his letter in safety into the box, and turned, unseen, into the high-road once more in the dusky moonlight.
Wearied and faint and half delirious as he was after his long immersion, he couldn’t even now go back to the inn to rest quietly. Elsie’s image haunted him still. A strange fascination led him across the fields and through the lane to the Hall to Elsie’s last dwelling-place. He walked in by the little side-gate, the way he usually came to visit Elsie, and prowled guiltily to the back of the house. The family had evidently returned, and suspected nothing: no sign of bustle or commotion or disturbance betrayed itself anywhere: not a light showed from a single window: all was dark and still from end to end, as if poor dead Elsie were sleeping calmly in her own little bedroom in the main building. It was close on one in the morning now. Hugh skulked and prowled around the east wing on cautious tiptoe, like a convicted burglar.
As he passed Elsie’s room, all dark and empty, a mad desire seized upon him all at once to look in at the window and see how everything lay within there. At first, he had no more reason for the act in his head than that: the Plan only developed itself further as he thought of it. It wouldn’t be difficult to climb to the sill by the aid of the porch and the clambering wisteria. He hesitated a moment; then remorse and curiosity finally conquered. The romantic suggestion came to him, like a dream, in his fevered and almost delirious condition: like a dream, he carried it at once into effect. Groping and feeling his way with numb fingers, dim eyes, and head that still reeled and swam in terrible giddiness from his long spell of continued asphyxia, he raised himself cautiously to the level of the sill, and prised the window open with his dead white hand. The lamp on the table, though turned down so low that he hadn’t observed its glimmer from outside, was still alight and burning faintly. He turned it up just far enough to see through the gloom his way about the bedroom. The door was closed, but not locked. He twisted the key noiselessly with dextrous pressure, so as to leave it fastened from the inside. That was a clever touch! They would think Elsie had climbed out of the window.
A few letters and things lay loose about the room. The devil within him was revelling now r in hideous suggestions. Why not make everything clear behind him? He gathered them up and stuck them in his pocket. Elsie’s small black leather bag stood on a wooden frame in the far corner. He pushed into it hastily the nightdress on the bed, the brush and comb, and a few selected articles of underclothing from the chest of drawers by the tiled fireplace. The drawers themselves he left sedulously open. It argued haste. If you choose to play for a high stake, you must play boldly, but you must “play well. Hugh never for a moment concealed from himself the fact that the adversary against whom he was playing now was the public hangman, and that his own neck was the stake at issue.
If ever it was discovered that Elsie was drowned, all the world, including the enlightened British jury twelve butchers and bakers and candlestick-makers, selected at random from the Whitestrand rabble, he said to himself angrily would draw the inevitable inference for themselves that Hugh had murdered her. His own neck was the stake at issue his own neck, and honor, and honesty.
He glanced around the room with an approving eye once more. It was capital! Splendid! Everything was indeed in most admired disorder. The very spot it looked, in truth, from which a girl had escaped in a breathless hurry. He left the lamp still burning at half-height: that fitted well; lowered the bag by a piece of tape to the garden below; littered a few stray handkerchiefs and lace bodices loosely on the floor; and crawling out of the window with anxious care, tried to let himself down hand over hand by a branch of the wisteria.
The branch snapped short with an ugly crack; and Hugh found himself one second later on the shrubbery below, bruised and shaken.
CHAPTER XIII
WHAT SUCCESS?
At the Meyseys’ next morning, all was turmoil and surprise. The servants’ hall fluttered with unwonted excitement. No less an event than an elopement was suspected. Miss Elsie had not come down to breakfast; and when Miss Winifred went up, on the lady’s maid’s report, to ask what was the matter, she had found the door securely locked on the inside and received no answer to her repeated questions. The butler, hastily summoned to the rescue, broke open the lock; and Winifred entered, to find the lamp still feebly burning at half-height, and a huddled confusion everywhere pervading the disordered room. Clearly, some strange thing had occurred. Elsie’s drawers had been opened and searched: the black bag was gone from the stand in the corner; and the little jewel-case with the silver shield on the top was missing from its accustomed place on the dressing-table.
With a sudden cry, Winifred rushed forward, terrified. Her first idea was the usual feminine one of robbery and murder. Elsie was killed by a burglar. But one glance at the bed dispelled that illusion; it had never been slept in. The nightdress and the little embroidered nightdress bag in red silk were neither of them there in their familiar fashion. The brush and comb had disappeared from the base of the looking-glass. The hairpins even had been removed from the glass hairpin box. These indications seemed frankly inconsistent with the theory of mere intrusive burglary. The enterprising burglar doesn’t make up the beds of the robbed and murdered, after pocketing their watches; nor does he walk off, as a rule, with ordinary hairbrushes and embroidered nightdress-bags. Surprised and alarmed, Winifred rushed to the window: it was open still: a branch of the wisteria. lay broken on the ground, and the mark of a falling body might be easily observed among the plants and soil in the shrubbery border.
By this time, the -Squire had appeared upon the scene, bringing in his hand a letter for Winifred. With the cool common sense of advancing years, he surveyed the room in its littery condition, and gazed over his daughter’s shoulder as she read the shadowy and incoherent jumble of phrases Hugh Massinger had strung together so carefully in Elsie’s name last night at the Fisherman’s Rest. “Whew!” he whistled to himself in sharp surprise as the state of the case dawned slowly upon him. “Depend upon it, there’s a young man at the bottom of this. ‘Cherchez la femme,’ says the French proverb. When a young woman’s in question, ‘Cherchez l’homme’ comes very much nearer it. The girl’s run off with somebody, you may be sure. I only hope she’s run off all straight and above-board, and not gone away with a groom or a gamekeeper or a married clergyman.”
“Papa!” Winifred cried, laying down the letter in haste and bursting into tears, “do you think Mr. Massinger can have anything to do with it?”
The Squire had been duly apprised last night by Mrs. Meysey in successive installments as to the state of relations between Hugh and Winifred; but his blunt English nature cavalierly rejected the suggested explanation of Elsie’s departure, and he brushed it aside at once after the fashion of his kind with an easy “Bless my soul! no, child. The girl’s run off with some fool somewhere. It’s always fools who run off with women. Do you think a man would be idiot enough to” he was just going to say, “propose to one woman in the morning, and elope with another the evening after!” but he checked himself in time, before the faces of the servants, and finished his sentence lamely by saying instead, “commit himself so with a girl of that sort?”
“That wasn’t what I meant, papa,” Winifred whispered low. “I meant, could she have fancied? You understand me.”
The Squire gave a snort in place of No Impossible, impossible; the young man was so well connected. She could never have thought he meant to make up to her. Much more likely, if it came to that, the girl would run away -with him than from him. Young women don’t really run away from a man because their hearts are broken. They go up to their own bedrooms instead, and muse and mope over it, and cry their eyes red.
And indeed, the Squire remarked to himself inwardly on the other hand, that if Hugh were minded to elope with any one, he would be far more likely to elope with the heiress of Whitestrand than with a penniless governess like Elsie Challoner. Elopement implies parental opposition. Why the deuce should a man take the trouble to run away with an undowered orphan, whom nobody on earth desires to prevent him from marrying any day, in the strictly correctest manner, by bans or license, at the parish church of her own domicile? The suggestion was clearly quite quixotic. If Elsie had run away with any one, it was neither from nor with this young man of Winifred’s, the Squire felt sure, but with the gardener’s son or with the under-gamekeeper.
