THIS MORTAL COIL A NOVEL BY GRANT ALLEN CHICAGO THE HENNEBERRY COMPANY 554 WABASH AVENUE CONTENTS. Page Chapter I. Bohemia * 1 Chapter II. Down Stream 12 Chapter III. Arcadia 21 Chapter IV. Buridan's Ass 31 Chapter V. Elective Affinities \ 40 Chapter VI. Which Lady? 52 Chapter VII. Friends in Council 65 Chapter VIII. The Roads Divide 70 Chapter IX. High- water 80 Chapter X. Shuffling It Off 87 Chapter XL Sink or Swim? 99 Chapter XII. The Plan in Execution 107 Chapter XIII. What Success? 115 Chapter XIV. Live or Die? 124 Chapter XV. The Plan Extends Itself 133 Chapter XVI. From Information Received 139 Chapter XVII. Breaking a Heart 145 Chapter XVIII. Complications 154 Chapter XIX. Au Rendezvous des Bons Camarades 166 Chapter XX. Events March 176 Chapter XXL Clearing the Decks 184 Chapter XXII. Holy Matrimony 194 Chapter XXIII. Under the Palm-trees 201 Chapter XXIV. The Balance Quivers 211 Chapter XXV. Clouds on the Horizon 218 Chapter XXVI. Reporting Progress 228 Chapter XXVII. Art at Home. . . . : 235 Chapter XXVIII. Rehearsal 245 Chapter XXIX. Accidents Will Happen 254 Chapter XXX. Thfe Bard in Harness* - 263 Chapter XXXL Coming Round 2Y Chapter XXXII. On Trial 27V Chapter XXXIII. An Artistic Event 2fc Chapter XXXIV. The Strands Draw Closer 303 Chapter XXXV. Retribution 310 Page Chapter XXXVI. The Other Side of the Shield 322 Chapter XXXVII. Proving His Case 329 Chapter XXXVIII. Ghost or Woman? 337 Chapter XXXIX. After Long Grief and Pain 344 Chapter XL. At Rest at Last 353 Chapter XLL Rediviva! 358 Chapter XLII. Face to Face 36S- Chapter XLIII. At Monte Carlo 377 Chapter XLIV. "Ladies and Gentlemen, Make Your Game!" 385 Chapter XLV. Pactolus Indeed! 394 Chapter XLVL The Turn of the Tide 400 Chapter XLVII. Fortune of War 408 Chapter XLVIII. At Bay 415 Chapter XLIX. The Unforeseen 422 Chapter L. The Cap Martin Catastrophe 428 Chapter LI. Next of Kin Wanted 434 Chapter LII. The Tangle Resolves Itself 441 THIS MORTAL COIL CHAPTER I. BOHEMIA. Whoever knows Bohemian London, knows the smoking- room of the Cheyne Row Club. No more comfortable or congenial divan exists anywhere between Regent Circus and Hyde Park Corner than that chosen paradise of unrec- ognized genius. The Cheyne Row Club is not large, indeed, but it prides itself upon being extremely select too select to admit upon its list of members peers, politi- cians, country gentlemen, or inhabitants of eligible family residences in Mayfair or Belgravia. Two qualifications are understood to be indispensable in candidates for mem- bership: they must be truly great, and they must be unsuccessful. Possession of a commodious suburban villa excludes ipso facto. The Club is emphatically the headquarters of the great Bohemian clan: the gathering- place of unhung artists, unread novelists, unpaid poets, and unheeded social and political reformers generally. Hither flock all the choicest spirits of the age during that probationary period when society, in its slow and lumber- ing fashion, is spending twenty years in discovering for itself the bare fact of their distinguished existence. Here Maudle displays his latest designs to Postlethwaite's critical and admiring eye; here Postlethwaite pours his honeyed sonnets into Maudle's receptive and sympathetic tympanum. Everybody who is anybody has once been a member of the "dear old Cheyne Row:" Royal Aca- demicians and Cabinet Ministers and Society Journalists and successful poets still speak with lingering pride and affection of the days when they lunched there, as yet undiscovered, on a single chop and a glass of draught claret by no means of the daintiest. 2 THIS MORTAL COIL. Not that the Club can number any of them now on its existing roll-call: the Cheyne Row is for prospective celebrity only; accomplished facts transfer themselves at once to a statelier site in Pall Mall near the Duke of York's Column. Rising merit frequents the Tavern, as scoffers profanely term it: risen greatness basks en the lordly stuffed couches of Waterloo Place. No matt, it has been acutely observed, remains a Bohemian when he has daughters to marry. The pure and blameless ratepayer avoids Prague. As soon as Smith becomes Chancellor of the Exchequer, as soon as Brown takes silk, as soon as Robinson is elected an Associate, as soon as Tompkins publishes his popular novel, they all incontinently with one accord desert the lesser institution in the Piccadilly byway, and pass on their names, their honors, their hats, and their subscriptions to the dignified repose of the Athenaeum. For them, the favorite haunt of judge and bishop: for the young, the active, the struggling, and the incipient, the chop and claret of the less distinguished but more lively caravanserai by the Green Park purlieus. In the smoking-room of this eminent and unsuccessful Bohemian society, at the tag-end of a London season, one warm evening in a hot July, Hugh Massinger, of the Utter Bar, sat lazily by the big bow window, turning over the pages of the last number of the "Charing Cross Review." That he was truly great, nobody could deny. He was in very fact a divine bard, or, to be more strictly accurate, the author of a pleasing and melodious volume of minor poetry. Even away from the Cheyne Row Club, none but the most remote of country-cousinssay from the vilder parts of Cornwall or the crofter-clad recesses of the Isle of Skye could have doubted for a moment the patent fact that Hugh Massinger was a distinguished (though unknown) poet of the antique school, so admir- bly did he fit his part in life as to features, dress and neral appearance Indeed, malicious persons were times unkindly to insinuate that Hugh was a poet, because he found in himself any special aptitude for LTif 5 ?I " buildin S. the 'of* rhyme, but because and bearing imperatively compelled him to adopt BOHEMIA. 3 the thankless profession of bard in self-justification and self-defense. This was ill-natured, and it was also untrue ; for Hugh Massinger had lisped in numbers at least iu penny ones ever since he v. - as able to lisp in print at all. Elizabethan or nothing, he had taken to poetry almost from his very cradle; and had astonished his father at sixteen by a rhymed version of an ode of Horace, worthy the inspiration of the great Dr. Watts himself, and not, perhaps, far below the poetic standard of Mr. Martin Farquhar Tupper. At Oxford he had perpetrated a cap- ital Xewdigate ; and two years after gaining his fellowship at Oriel, he had published anonymously, in parchment covers, "Echoes from Callimachus, and other Poems" in the style of the early romantic school which had fairly succeeded by careful nursing in attaining the dignity of a second edition under his own name. So that Massin- ger's claim to the sodality of the craft whose workmen are "born not made" might perhaps be considered as of the genuine order, and not entirely dependent, as cynics averred, upon his long hair, his pensive eyes, his dark- brown cheek, or the careless twist of his necktie and his shirt-collar. Nevertheless, even in these minor details of the poetical character, it must candidly be confessed that Hugh Mas- singer outstripped by several points many of the more recognized bards whose popular works are published in regulation green-cloth octavos, and whose hats and cloaks, of unique build, adorn with their presence the vestibule pegs of the Athenaeum itself. He went back to the tradi- tions of the youth of our century. The undistinguished author of "Echoes from Callimachus" was tall and pale, and a trifle Byronic. That his face was beautiful, extremely beautiful, even a hostile reviewer in the organ of another clique could hardly venture seriously to deny: those large gray eyes, that long black hair, that exquisitely chiseled and delicate mouth, would alone have sufficed to attract attention and extort admiration anywhere in the universe, or at the very least in the solar system. Hugh Massinger, in short, was (like Coleridge) a notice- able man. It would have been impossible to pass him by, even in a crowded street, without a hurried glance of 4 THIS MORTAL COIL. observation and pleasure at his singularly graceful and noble face. He looked and moved every inch a poet; delicate, refined, cultivated, expressive, and sicklied o'er with that pale cast of thought which modern aestheticism so cruelly demands as a proof of attachment from her highest votaries. Yet at the same time, in spite of decep- tive appearances to the contrary, he was strong in muscular strength: a wiry man, thin, but well knit: one of those fallacious, uncanny, long-limbed creatures, who can scale an Alp or tramp a score or so of miles before breakfast, while looking as if a short stroll through the Park would kill them outright with sheer exhaustion. Altogether, a typical poet of the old-fashioned school, that -dark and handsome Italianesque man: and as he sat there care- lessly, with the paper held before him, in an unstudied atti- tude of natural grace, many a painter might have done worse than choose the author of "Echoes from Calli- machus" for the subject of a pretty Academy pot-boiler. So Warren Relf, the unknown marine artist, thought to himself in his armchair opposite, as he raised his eyes by chance from the etchings in the "Portfolio,'' and glanced across casually with a hasty look at the undis- covered poet. 'Has the 'Charing Cross' reviewed your new volume yet?" he asked politely, his glance meeting Massinger's while he flung down the paper on the table beside him. The poet rose and stood with his hands behind his back in an easy posture before the empty fireplace. "I believe it has deigned to assign me half a column of judi- cious abuse," he answered, half yawning, with an assump- tion of profound indifference" and contempt for the Charing Cross Review" and all its ideas or opinions collectively. "To tell you the truth, the subject's one that doesn't interest me. In the first place, I care very little for my own verses. And in the second place, I don't care at all for reviewers generally, or for the 'Charing Cross Snarler and its kind in particular. I disbelieve altogether n reviews, in fact. Familiarity breeds contempt. To be quite candid, I've written too many of them." f criticism in literature's like 'criticism in art," the young painter rejoined, smiling, "why, with the one usual BOHEMIA. 5 polite exception of yourself, Massinger, I can't say 1 think very much of the critics. But what do you mean, I should like to know, by saying you don't care for 'your own verses? Surely no man can do anything great, in literature or art or in shoe-blacking or pig-sticking, if it comes to that unless he thoroughly believes in his own vocation." Massinger laughed a musical laugh. "In shoe-blacking or pig-sticking,*' he said, with a delicate curl of his thin lip?, "that's no doubt true; but in verse-making, query? Who on earth at the present day could even pretend to himself to believe in poetry? Time was, I dare say though Fm by no means sure of it when the bard, hoary old impostor, was a sort of prophet, and went about the world with a harp in his hand, and a profound conviction in his innocent old heart that when he made 'Sapphic' rhyme to 'traffic,' or produced a sonnet on the theme of 'Catullus,' 'lull us," and 'cull us,' he was really and truly enriching humanity with a noble gift of divine poesy. If the amiable old humbug could actually bring himself to believe in his soul that stringing together fourteen lines into an indifferent piece, or balancing 'mighty' to chime with 'Aphrodite,' in best Swinburnian style, was fulfilling his appointed function in the scheme of the universe, I'm sure I should be the last to interfere with the agreeable delusion under which (like the gentlemen from Argos in Horace) he must have been laboring. It's so delightful to believe in anything, that for my own part, I wouldn't attempt to insinuate doubts into the mind of a contented Buddhist or a devout worshiper of Mumbo Jumbo." "But surely you look upon yourself as a reaction against this modern school of Swinburnians and ballad-mongers, don't you?" Relf said, with a shrug. "Of course I do. Byron's my man. I go back to the original inspiration of the romantic school. It's simpler, and it's easier. But what of that? Our method's all the same at bottom, after all. Who in London in this nine- teenth century can for a moment affect to believe in the efficacy of poetry? Look at this last new volume of my own, for example! You won't look at it, of course, I'm well aware, but that's no matter : nobody ever does look at my immortal works, I'm only too profoundly conscious. 6 THIS MORTAL COIL. I cut them myself in a dusty copy at all the libraries, in order to create a delusive impression on the mind of the public that I've had at least a solitary reader. But let that pass. Look, metaphorically, I mean, and not liter- ally, at this last new volume of mine! How do you think a divine bard does it? Simply by taking a series of rhymes 'able/ and 'stable/ and 'table/ and 'cable;' 'Mabel/ and 'Babel/ and 'fable/ and 'gable' and weaving them all together cunningly by a set form into a Procrustean mold to make up a poem. ' Perhaps 'gable/ which you've men- tally fixed upon for the fourth line, won't suit the sense. Very well, then; you must do your best to twist some- thing reasonable, or at least inoffensive, out of 'sable' or 'label/ or 'Cain and Abel/ or anything else that will make up the rhmye and complete the meter." "And that is your plan, Massinger?" "Yes, all this' last lot of mine are done like that: just bouts rimes I admit the fact; for what's all poetry but bouts rimes in the highest perfection? Mechanical, mechanical. I draw up a lot of lists of rhymes beforehand : 'kirtle/ and 'myrtle/ and 'hurtle/ and 'turtle' (those are all original); 'paean/ 'Aegan/ 'plebeian/ and 'Tean' (those are fairly new) ; 'battle/ and 'cattle/ and 'prattle/ and 'rat- tle' (those are all commonplace); and then, when the divine afflatus seizes me, I take out the -lists and con them over, and weave them up into an undying song for future generations to go wild about and comment upon. 'What profound thought/ my unborn Malones and Furnivalls and Leos will ask confidingly in their learned editions, 'did the immortal bard mean to convey by this obscure couplet?' I'll tell you in confidence. He meant to con- vey the abstruse idea that 'passenger' was the only English word he could find in the dictionary at all like a rhyme lo the name of 'Massinger/ " Warren Relf looked up at him a little uneasily. "I don't like to hear you run down poetry like that," he said, with an evident tinge of disapprobation. "I'm not a poet myself, of course; but still I'm sure it isn't all a mere matter of rhymes and refrains, of epithets and prettinesses. \Vhat touches our hearts lies deeper than mere expres- sion, I'm certain. It lies in the very core and fiber of the BOHEMIA 7 man. There are passages even in your own poems though you're a great deal too cynical to admit it now that came straight out of the depths of your own heart, I venture to conjecture those 'Lines on a Lock of Hair/ for example. Aha, cynic! there I touched you on the raw. But if you think so lightly of poetry as a pursuit, as you say, I wonder why you ever came to take to it." "Take to it, my dear fellow! What an Arcadian idea! As if men nowadays chose their sphere in life deliberately. Why, what on earth makes any of us ever take to anything, I should like to know, in this miserable workaday modern world of ours? Because we're simply pitchforked into it by circumstances. Does the crossing-sweeper sweep crossings, do you suppose, for example, by pure prefer- ence for the profession of a sweep? Does the milkman get up at five in the morning because he sees in the pur- veying of skim-milk to babes and sucklings a useful, important, and even necessary industry to the rising gen- eration of this great Metropolis? Does the dustman empty the domestic bin out of disinterested regard for public sanitation? or the engine-driver dash through rain and snow in a drear-nighted December like a Comtist prophet, out of high and noble enthusiasm of humanity?" He snapped his fingers with an emphatic negative. "We don't choose our places in life at all, my dear boy," he went on after a pause: "we get tumbled into them by pure caprice of circumstances. If I'd chosen mine, instead of strictly meditating the thankless Muse, I'd certainly have adopted the exalted profession of a landed proprietor, with the pleasing duty of receiving my rents (by proxy) once every quarter, and spending them royally with becoming mag- nificence, in noble ways, like the Greek gentleman one reads about in Aristotle. I always admired that amiable Greek gentleman the ' megaloprepcs, I think Aristotle calls him. His berth would suit me down to the ground. He had nothing at all of any sort to do, and he did it most gracefully with princely generosity on a sufficient income." "But you must write poetry for something or other, Massinger; for if it isn't rude to make the suggestion, you can hardly write it, you know, for a livelihood." Massinger's dark face flushed visibly. "I write for g THIS MORTAL COIL. fame," he answered majestically, with a lordly wave of his long thin hand. "For glory for honor for time for eternity. Or, to be more precisely definite, if you prefer the phrase, for filthy lucre. In the coarse and crude phraseology of political economists, poetry takes rank nowadays, I humbly perceive, as a long investment. I'm a journalist by trade a mere journeyman journalist; the gushing penny-a-liner of a futile and demoralized London press. But I have a soul within me above penny-a-lining; I aspire ultimately to a pound a word. I don't mean to live and die in Grub Street. My soul looks forward to immortality, and a footman in livery. Xow, when once a man has got pitchforked by fate into the rank and file of contemporary journalism, there are only two ways pos- sible for him to extricate himself with peace and honor from his unfortunate position. One way is to write a suc- cessful novel. That's the easiest, quickest, and most immediate short-cut from Grub Street to Eaton Place and affluence that I know of anywhere. But unhappily it's crowded, immensely overcrowded vehicular traffic for the present entirely suspended. Therefore, the only pos- sible alternative is to take up poetry. The Muse must descend to feel the pulse of the market. I'm conscious of the soul of song within me; that is to say, I can put 'Myrrha' to rhyme with 'Pyrrha,' and alliterate ps and qs and ws with any man living (bar Algernon) in all England. Now, poetry's a very long road round, I admit like going from Kensington to the City by Willesden Junc- tion; but in the end, if properly worked, it lands you at last by a circuitous route in fame and respectability. To be Poet Laureate is eminently respectable. A rnl-.n can live on journalism meanwhile; but if he keep.3 pegging away at his Pegasus in his spare moments, without inter- mission, like a costermonger at his' donkey, Pegasus will raise himself after many days to the top of Parnassus, where he can build himself a commodious family resi- dence, lighted throughout with electric lights, and com- manding a magnificent view in every direction over the Yale of Tempe and the surrounding country. Tennyson's done it already at Aid worth; why shouldn't I. too, do it in time on Parnassus?" BOHEMIA. 9 Relf smiled dubiously, and knocked the ashes off his cigar into a Japanese tray that stood by his side. "Then you look upon poetry merely as an ultimate means of making money?" he suggested, with a deprecatory look. "Money! Not money only, my dear fellow, but posi- tion, reputation, recognition, honor. Does any man work for anything else? Any man, I mean, but cobblers and enthusiasts?" "Well, I don't know. I may be an enthusiast myself," Relf answered slowly; "but I certainly do work at art to a great extent for art's sake, because I really love and admire and delight in it. Of course I should like to make money too, within reasonable limits enough to keep myself and my people in a modest sort of way, without the footman or the eligible family residence. Not that I want to be successful, either: from what I've seen of successful men, I incline to believe that success as a rule has a very degen- erating effect upon character. Literature, science, and art thrive best in a breezy, bracing air. I never aim at being a successful man myself; and! if I go on as I'm doing now, I shall no doubt succeed in not succeeding. But apart from the money and the livelihood altogether, I love my work as an occupation. I like doing it; and I like to see myself growing stronger and freer at it every day." "That's all very well for you," Massinger replied, with another expansive wave of his graceful hand. "You're doing work you care for, as I play lawn-tennis, for a per- sonal amusement. I can sympathize with you there. I once felt the same about poetry myself. But that w r as a long time ago: those days are dead hopelessly dead, as dead as Mad Margaret's affidavit. I'm a skeptic now: my faith in verse has evaporated utterly. Have I not seen the public devour ten successive editions of the 'Epic of Washerwomen,' or something of the sort? Have I not seen them reject the good and cleave unto the evil, like the children of Israel wandering in the Wilderness? I know now that the world is hollow, and that my doll is stuffed with sawdust. Let's quit the subject. It turns me always into a gloomy pessimist. What are you going to do with yourself this summer?" "Me? Oh, just the usual thing, I suppose. Going 10 THIS MORTAL COIL. down in my tub to paint sweet mudbanks off the coast of. Suffolk." "Suffolk to wit! I see the finger of fate in that! Why, that's where I'm going too. I mean to take six or eight weeks' holiday, if a poor drudge of a journalist can ever be said to indulge in holidays at all with books for review, and proofs for correction, and editorial communi- cations for consideration, always weighing like a ton of lead upon this unhappy breast: and I promise to bury myself alive up to the chin in some obscure, out-of-the- way Suffolk village they call Whitestrand. Have you ever heard of it?" "Oh, I know it well," Relf answered, with a smile of delightful reminiscence. ''It's grand for mud. I go there painting again and again. You'd call it the funniest little stranded old-world village you ever came across anywhere in England. Nothing could be uglier, quainter, or more perfectly charming. It lies at the mouth of a dear little muddy creek, with a funny old mill for pumping the water off the sunken meadows; and all around for miles and miles is one great flat of sedge and seapink, alive with water-birds and intersected with dikes, where the herons fish all day long, poised on one leg in the middle of the stream as still as mice, exactly as if they were sitting to Marks for their portraits." "Ah, delightful for a painter, I've no doubt," Hugh Massinger replied, half yawning to himself, "especially for a painter to whom mud and herons are bread and butter, and brackish water is Eiass and Allsopp; but scarce- ly, you'll admit, an attractive picture to the inartistic pub- lic, among whom I take the liberty, for this occasion only, humbly to rank myself. I go there, in fact, as a martyr to principle. I live for others. A member of my family- - not to put too fine a point upon it, a lady abides for the present moment at Whitestrand, and believes herself to be seized or possessed by prescriptive right of a lien or claim to a certain fixed aliquot portion of my time and attention. I've never admitted the claim myself (being a legally minded soul) ; but just out of the natural sweetness )f my disposition, I go down occasionally (without preju- dice) to whatever part of England she may chance to be BOHEMIA. 11 inhabiting, for the sake of not disappointing her foregone expectations, however ill-founded, and be the same more or less. You observe, I speak with the charming preci- sion of the English statute-book." "But how do you mean to get to Whitestrand ?" Relf asked suddenly, after a short pause. "It's a difficult place to reach, you know. There's no station nearer than ten miles off, and that a country one, so that when you arrive there, you can get no conveyance to take you over." "So my cousin gave me to understand. She \vas kind enough to provide me with minute instructions for her bookless wilds. I believe I'm to hire a costermonger's cart or something of the sort to convey my portmanteau ; and I'm to get across myself by the aid of the natural means of locomotion with which a generous providence or survival of the fittest has been good enough to endow me by hereditary transmission. At least, so my cousin Elsie instructs me." "\Yhv not come round with me in the tub?" Relf sug- gested good-humoredly. "What? your yacht? Hatherley was telling me you were the proud possessor of a ship. Are you going round that way any time shortly ?" "\Yell, she's not exactly what you call a yacht," Relf replied, with an apologetic tinge in his tone of voice. "She's only a tub, you know, an open boat almost, with a covered well and just room for three to sleep and feed in. 'A poor thing, but my own/ as Touchstone says; as broad as she's long, and as shallow as she's broad, and quite flat-bottomed, drawing so little water at a pinch that you can sail her across an open meadow when there's a heavy dew on. And if you come, you'll have to work your passage, of course. I navigate her myself, as captain, crew, cabin-boy, and passenger, with one other painter fellow to share watches with me. The fact is, I got her built as a substitute for rooms, because I found it cheaper than taking lodgings at a seaside place and hiring a rowboat whenever one wanted one. I cruise about the English coast with her in summer; and in the cold months, I run her round to the Mediterranean. And, besides, one can get into such lovely little side-creeks and neglected chan- 12 THIS MORTAL, COIL. nels, all full of curious objects of interest, which nobody can ever see in anything else. She's a perfect treasure to a marine painter in the mud-and-buoy business. But I won't for a moment pretend to say she's comfortable for a landsman. If you come with me, in fact, you'll have to rough it." "I love roughing it. How long 1 will it take us to cruise round to Whitestrand?" "Oh, the voyage depends entirely upon the wind and tide. Sailing-boats take their own time. The 'Mud- Turtle' that's what I call her doesn't hurry. She's lying now off the Pool at the Tower, taking care of her- self in the absence of all her regular crew; and Potts, my mate, he's away in the north, intending to meet me next week at Lowestoft, where my mother and sister are stop- ping in lodgings. We can start on our cruise whenever you like say, if you choose, to-morrow morning." 'Thanks, awfully," Hugh answered, with a nod of assent "To tell you the truth, I should like nothing better. It'll be an experience, and the wise man lives upon new experiences. Pallas, you remember, in Tennyson's 'Oenone,' recommended to Paris the deliberate cultiva- tion of experiences as such. I'll certainly go. For my o\yn part, like Saint Simon, I mean in my time to have tried everything. Though Saint Simon, to be sure, went rather far, for I believe he even took a turn for a while at picking pockets." CHAPTER II. DOWN STREAM. Tide served next morning at eleven ; and punctual to the minute for, besides being a poet, he prided himself on his qualities as a man of business Hugh Massinger sur- rendered himself in due course by previous appointment on board the "Mud-Turtle" at the Pool by the Tower But his eyes were heavier and redder than they had seemed DOWN STREAM. 13 last night; and his wearied manner showed at once, by a hundred little signs, that he had devoted but small time since Relf left him to what Mr. Herbert Spencer peri- phrastically describes as "reparative processes." The painter, attired for the sea like a common sailor in jersey and trousers and knitted woolen cap, rose up from the deck to greet him hospitably. His whole appearance betokened serious business. It was evident that Warren Relf did not mean to play at yachting. "You've been making a night of it, I'm afraid, Mas- singer," he said, as their eyes met. "Bad preparation, you know, for a day down the river. We shall have a loppy sea, if this wind holds, when we pass the Nore. You ought to have gone straight to bed when you left the club with me fast evening." "I know I ought," the poet responded with affected cheerfulness. "The path of duty's as plain as a pikestaff. But the things I ought to do I mostly leave undone; and the things I ought not to do I find, on the contrary, vastly attractive. I may as well make a clean breast of it. I strolled round to Pallavicini's after you vacated the Row last night, and found them having a turn or two at lans- quenet. Now, lansquenet's an amusement I never can re- sist. The consequence was, in three hours I was pretty well cleaned out of ready cash, and shall have to keep my nose to the grindstone accordingly all through what ought by rights to have been my summer holiday. This conclu- sively shows the evils of high play, and the moral supe- riority of the wise man who goes home to bed and is sound asleep when the clock strikes eleven." Relfs face fell several tones. "I wish, Massinger," he said very gravely, "you'd make up your mind never to touch those hateful cards again. You'll ruin your health, your mind, and your pocket with them. If you spent the time you spend upon play in writing some really great book now, you'd make in the end ten times as much by it." The poet smiled a calm smile of superior wisdom. "Good boy!" he cried, patting Relf on the back in mock approbation of his moral advice. "You talk for all the world like a Sunday-school prize-book. Honest industry has its due reward; while pitch-and-toss and wicked im- 14 THIS MORTAL COIL. proper games land one at last in prison or the workhouse. The industrious apprentice rises in time to be Lord Mayor (and to appropriate the public funds ad libitum'); whereas, the idle apprentice, degraded by the evil influences of ha'penny loo, ends his days with a collar of hemp round his naughty neck in an equally exalted but perhaps less dignified position in life on a platform at Newgate. My dear Relf, how on earth can you, who are a sensible man, believe all that antiquated nursery rubbish? Cast your eyes for a moment on the world around you, here in the central hub of London, within sight of all the wealth and squalor of England, and ask yourself candidly whether what you see in it at all corresponds with the idyllic picture of the little-Jack-Horner school of moralists. As a matter of fact, is it always the good boys who pull the plums with self-appreciated smile out of the world's pudding? Far from it: quite the other way. I have seen the wicked flourishing in my time like a green bay-tree. Honest industry breaks stones on the road, while suc- cessful robbery or successful gambling rolls by at its ease, cigar in mouth, lolling on the cushions of its luxurious carriage. If you stick to honest industry all your life long, you may go on breaking stones contentedly for the whole term of your natural existence. But if you speculate boldly with your week's earnings and land a haul, you may set another fellow to break stones for you in time, and then you become at once a respectable man, a capital- ist, and a baronet. All the great fortunes we see in the world have been piled up in the last resort, if you'll only believe it, by successful gambling." Every man has a right to his own opinion," Warren Relf answered with a more serious air, as he turned aside to look after the rigging. "I admit there's a great deal >t gambling m business; but anyhow, honest industry's a simple necessary on board the 'Mud-Turtle.' Come ' j u" 11 , 1 y U> from y ur to P s y-turvy moral philoso- >nv, and help me out with this sheet and the mainsail. ore we reach the German Ocean, you'll have the whole of navigation at your finger's ends for I mean to i while YOU manage the ship and be in a position 3 write an ode m a Catalonian metre on the Pleasures DOWN STREAM. 15 of Luffing, and the True Delight of the Thames Water- way." Massinger turned to do as he was directed, and to in- spect the temporary floating hotel in which he was to make his way contentedly down to the coast of Suffolk. The "Mud-Turtle" was indeed as odd-looking and original a little craft as her owner and skipper had proclaimed her to be. A center-board yawl, of seventeen tons registered burden, she ranked as a yacht only by courtesy, on the general principle of what the logicians call excluded mid- dle. If she wasn't that, why, then, pray what in the world was she? The "Mud-Turtle" measured almost as broad across the beam as she reckoned -feet in length from stem to stern ; and her skipper maintained with profound pride that she couldn't capsize in the worst storm that ever blew out of an English sky, even if she tried to. She drew no more than three feet of water at a pinch; and though it was scarcely true, as Relf had averred, that a heavy dew was sufficient to float her, she could at least go anywhere that a man could wade up to his knees without fear of wetting his tucked-up breeches. This made her a capital boat for a marine artist to go about sketching in; for Relf could lay her alongside a wreck on shallow sands, or run her up a narrow creek after picturesque waterfowl, or approach the riskiest shore to the very edge of the cliffs, without any reference to the state of the tide, or the probable depth of the surrounding channel. "If she grounds," the artist said enthusiastically, expa- tiating on her merits to his new passenger, "you see it doesn't really matter twopence; for the next high tide'll set her afloat again within six hours. She's a great oppor- tunist: she knows well that all things come to him who can wait. The 'Mud-Turtle' positively revels in mud; she lies flat on it as on her native, heath, and stays patiently without one word of reproach for the moon's attraction to come in its round to her ultimate rescue." The yawl's accommodation was opportunist too: though excellent in kind, it was limited in quantity, and by no means unduly luxurious in quality. Her deck was calculated on the most utilitarian principles just big enough for two persons to sketch abreast; her cabin 16 THIS MORTAL COIL. contained three wooden bunks, with their appropriate complement of rugs and blankets; and a small and prim- itive open stove devoted to the service of the ship's cook- ery, took up almost all the vacant space in the center of the well, leaving hardly room for the self-sacrificing vol- unteer who undertook the functions of purveyor and bot- tle-washer to turn about in. But the lockers were amply stored with fresh bread, tinned meats, and other simple necessaries for a week's cruise; while food for the mind existed on a small shelf at the stern in the crude shape of the "Coaster's Companion," the Sailing Directions issued by Authority of the Honorable Brethren of the Trinity House, and the charts of the Thames, constructed from the latest official surveys of her Majesty's Board of Ad- miralty. Thus equipped and accoutered Warren Relf was accustomed to live an outdoor life for weeks together with his one like-minded chum and Companion; and if the spray was sometimes rather moist, and the yellow fog rather thick and slabby, and the early mornings rather chill and raw, and the German Ocean rather loppy and aggressive on the digestive faculties, yet the good dose of fresh air, the delicious salty feeling of the free breeze, and the perpetual sense of ease and lightness that comes with yachting, were more than enough fully to atone to an enthusiastic marine artist for all these petty passing inconveniences. As for Hugh Massinger, a confirmed landsman, the first few hours' sail down the crowded Thames appeared to him at the outset a perfect phantasmagoria of ever- varying perils and assorted terrors. He composed his soul to instant death from the very beginning. Not, indeed, that he minded one bit for that: the poet dearly loved danger, as he loved all other forms of sensation and excite- ment: they were food for the Muse; and the Muse, like Blanche Amory, is apt to exclaim, "II me faut des emo- But the manifold novel forms of enterprise as the lumbering little yawl made her way clumsily among the great East-Indiamen and big ocean-going steamers, darting boldly now athwart the very bows of a huge Monarch-hner, insinuating herself now with delicate pre- cision between the broadsides of two heavy Rochestei DOWN Sf REAM. 17 barges, and just escaping collision now with some laden collier from Cardiff or Newcastle, were too complicated and too ever-pressing at the first blush for Massinger fully to take in their meaning at a single glance. The tidal Thames is the Cheapside of the ocean, a mart of many nations, resorting to it by sea and by land. It's all very well going down the river on the Antwerp packet or the outward-bound Xew-Zealander ; you steam then at your ease along the broad unencumbered central channel, with serene confidence that a duly qualified pilot stands at your helm, and that everybody else will gladly give way to you, for the sake of saving their own bacon. But it's quite another matter to thread your way tortuously through that thronged and bustling highway of the shipping inter- est in a center-board yawl of seventeen tons registered bur- den, manned by a single marine artist and an amateur passenger of uncertain seamanship. Hugh Massinger was at once amused and bewildered by the careless con- fidence with which his seafaring friend dashed boldly in and out among brigs and schooners, smacks and steam- ships, on port or starboard tack, in endless confusion, backing the little "Mud-Turtle" to hold her own in the unequal contest against the biggest and swiftest craft that sailed the river. His opinion of Relf rose rapidly many degrees in mental register as he watched him tacking and luffing and scudding and darting with cool unconcern in his toy tub among so many huge and swiftly moving monsters. "Port your helm!" Relf cried to him hastily once, as they crossed the channel just abreast of Greenwich Hos- pital. "Here's another sudden death down upon us round the Reach yonder!" And even as he spoke, a big coal- steamer, with a black diamond painted allusively on her bulky funnel, turning the low point of land that closed their view, bore hastily down upon them from the oppo- site direction with menacing swiftness. Massinger, doing his best to obey orders, grew bewildered after a time by the glib rapidity of his friend's commands. He was per- fectly ready to act as he was bid when once he understood his instructions; but the seafaring mind seems unable to comprehend that landsmen do not possess an intuitive 18 THIS MORTAL COIL. knowledge of the strange names bestowed by technical souls upon ropes, booms, gaffs, and mizzen-masts ; so that. Massinger's attempts to carry out his orders in a prodi- gious hurry proved productive for the most part rather of blank confusion than of the effect intended by the master skipper. After passing Greenhithe, however, they began to find the channel somewhat clearer, and Relf ceased for a while to skip about the deck like the little hills of the Psalmist, while Massinger felt his life comparatively safe at times for three minutes together, without a single danger menacing him ahead in the immediate future from port or starboard, from bow or stern, from brig or steam- er, from grounding or collision. About two o'clock, after a hot run, they cast anchor awhile out of the main channel, where traders ply their flow of intercourse, and stood by to eat their lunch in peace and quietness under the lee of a projecting point near Gravesend. "If wind and tide serves like this," Relf observed philo- sophically, as he poured out a glassful of beer into a tin mug the "Mud-Turtle's" appointments were all of the homeliest "we ought to get down to Whitestrand before an easy breeze with two days' sail, sleeping the nights in the quiet creeks at Leigh and Orfordness." "That would exactly suit me," Massinger answered, draining off the mugful at a gulp after his unusual exer- tion. "I wrote a hasty line to my cousin in Suffolk this morning telling her I should probably reach Whitestrand the day after to-morrow, wind and weather permitting. I approve of your ship, Relf, and of your tinned lobster too. It's fun coming down to the great deep in this uncon- ventional way. The regulation yacht, with sailors and a cook and a floating drawing-room, my soul wouldn't care for. You can get drawing-rooms galore any day in Bel- gravia; but picnicking like this, with a spice of adventure m it, falls in precisely with my view of the ends of exist- ence. "It's a cousin you're going down to Suffolk to see. then? "Well, yes; a cousin a sort of cousin; a Girton girl- the newest thing out in women. I call her a cousin for r>owN STREAM. 19 Convenience sake. Not too nearly related, if it comes to that; a surfeit of family's a thing to be avoided.' But we're a decadent tribe, the tribe of Massinger; hardly any others of us left; when I put on my hat, I cover all that remains of us; and cousinhood's a capital thing in its way to keep up under certain conditions. It enables a man to pay a pretty girl a great deal of respectful atten- tion, without necessarily binding himself down to anything definite in the matrimonial direction." "That's rather a cruel way of regarding it, isn't it?" "Well, my dear boy, what's a man to do in these jammed and crushed and overcrowded days of ours? Nature demands the safety-valve of a harmless flirtation. If one can't afford to marry, the natural affections will find an outlet, on a cousin or somebody. But it's quite impossi- ble, as things go nowadays, for a penniless man to dream of taking to wife a penniless woman and living on the sum of their joint properties. According to Cocker, nought and nought make nothing. So one must just wait till one's chance in life turns up, one way or the other. If you make a fluke some day, and paint a successful picture, or write a successful book, or get off a hopeless murderer at the Old Bailey, or invent a new nervous dis- ease for women, or otherwise rise to a sudden fortune by any one of the usual absurd roads, then you can marry your pretty cousin or other little girl in a lordly way out of your own resources. If not, you must just put up with the plain daughter of an eminent alderman in the wine and spirit business, or connected with tallow, or doing a good thing in hides, and let her hard cash atone vicari- ously for your own want of tender affection. When a man has no patrimony, he must obviously make it up in mat- rimony. Only, the great point to avoid is letting the penniless girl meanwhile get too deep a hold upon your personal feelings. The wisest men like me, for example are downright fools when it comes to high play on the domestic instincts. Even Achilles had a vulnerable point, >ou know. So has every wise man. With Achilles, it vas the heel ; with us, it's' the heart. The heart will wreck the profoundest and most deliberate philosopher living. I acknowledge it myself. I ought to wait, of course, till SO THIS MORTAL COIL. I catch the eminent alderman's richly endowed daughter. Instead of that, I shall doubtless fling myself away like a born fool upon the pretty cousin or some other equally unprofitable investment/' "Well, I hope you will," Relf answered, cutting himself a huge chunk of bread with his pocket clasp-knife. "I am awfully glad to hear you say so. For your own sake, I hope you'll keep your word. I hope you won't stifle everything you've got that's best within you for the sake of money and position and success. Have a bit of this corned beef, will you? A woman who sells herself for money is bad enough, though it's woman's way they've all been trained to it for generations. But a man who sells himself for money who takes himself to market for the highest bidder who makes capital out of his face and his manners and his conversation is absolutely contemptible, and nothing short of it. I could never go on knowing you, if I thought you capable of it. But I don't think you so. I'm sure you do yourself a gross injustice. You're a great deal better than you pretend yourself. If this occasion ever actually arose, you'd follow your better and not your worse nature. I'll trouble you for the mustard." Massinger passed it, and pretended to feel awfully bored. "I'm sure I don't know," he answered; "I shall wait and see. I don't undertake either to read or to guide my own character. According to the fashionable modern doctrine, it was all settled for me irrevocably beforehand by my parents and grandparents in past generations. I merely stand by and watch where it leads me, with passive resignation and silent curiosity. The attitude's not entirely devoid of plot-interest. It's amusing to sit, like the gods of Epicurus, enthroned on high, and look down from without with critical eyes upon the gradual development on the stage of life of one's own history and one's own idiosyncrasy." ARCADIA. 21 CHAPTER III ARCADIA. The village of Whitestrand, on the Suffolk coast an oasis in a stretch of treeless desert was, and is, one of the remotest and most primitive spots to be found anywhere on the shores of England. The railways, running inland away to the west, have left it for ages far in the lurch; and even the two or three belated roads that converge upon it from surrounding villages lead nowhere. It is, so to speak, an absolute terminus. The World's End is the whimsical title of the last house at Whitestrand. The little river Char that debouches into the sea just below the church, with its scattered group of thatched cottages, cuts off the hamlet effectually with its broad estuary from the low stretch of reclaimed and sluice-drained pasture- land of win r grass that rolls r.wav to southward. On the north, a rank salt marsh hems it in with its broad flats of sedge and thrift and wan sea-lavender; and eastward, the low line of the German Ocean spreads dimly in front its shallow horizon on the very level of the beach and the village. Only to the west is there any dry land, a sandy heath across whose barren surface the three roads from the neighboring hamlets meander meaninglessly by tortu- ous curves toward the steeple of Whitestrand. All around, the country lies flat, and singularly unprofitable. The village, in fact, occupies a tiny triangular peninsula of level ground, whose isthmus is formed by the narrow belt of heath-clad waste which alone connects it with the outer universe. The very name Whitestrand, as old as the days of the Danish invasion of the East Anglian plain, at once de- scribes the one striking and noteworthy feature of the entire district. It has absolutely no salient point of its own of any sort, except the hard and firm floor of pure white sand that extends for miles and miles on either side of the village. The sands begin at the diked land south of the river rescued from the tide by Oliver's Dutch engineers and narrowing gradually as they pass northward, disappear altogether into low muddy cliffs M THIS MORTAL COIL. some four or five miles beyond the church of White- strand. No strip of coast anywhere in England can boast such a splendid beach of uniform whiteness, firmness, and solidity. At Whitestrand itself, the sands extend for three-quarters of a mile seaward at low tide, and are'so smooth and compact in their consistent level, that a horse can gallop over them at full speed without leaving so much as the mark of a hoof upon the even surface of that natural arena. Whitestranders are enormously proud of their beach; the people of Walberswick, a rival village some miles off, with a local reputation for what passes in Suffolk as rural picturesqueness, maliciously declare this is be- cause the poor Whitestranders heaven help them! have nothing else on earth to be proud of. Such remarks, however, savor no doubt of mere neighborly jealousy: the Walberswick folk, having no beach at all of their own to brag about, are therefore naturally intolerant of beaches in other places. All Whitestrand what there was left of it belonged to Mr. Wyville Meysey. His family had bought the manor and estate a hundred years before, from their elder repre- sentatives, when the banking firm of Mersey's in the Strand was in the first heydey of its financial glory. Unhappily for him, his particular ancestor, a collateral member of the great house, had preferred the respectable position of a country gentleman to an active share in the big concern in London. From that day forth the sea had been steadily eating away the Meysey estate, till very little was left of it now but salt marsh and sandhills and swampy pasture-lands. It was Tuesday when Hugh Massinger and Warren Relf set sail from the Tower on their voyage in the "Mud- Turtle" down the crowded tidal Thames; on Thursday morning, two pretty girls sat together on the roots of ail old gnarled poplar that overhung the exact point where the Char empties itself into the German Ocean. The Whitestrand poplar, indeed, had formed for three cen- turies a famous landmark to seafaring men who coast round the inlets of the Eastern Counties. In the quaint words of the old conuty historian, it rose "from the manor of Whitestrand straight up toward the kingdom of ARCADIA. 23 heaven;" and round its knotted roots and hollow trunk the current ran fierce at the turn of the tides, for it formed the one frail barrier to the encroachment of the sea on that portion of the low and decaying Suffolk coast-line. Every- body had known the Whitestrand poplar as a point to sail by ever since the spacious days of great Elizabeth. When you get in a line -with the steeple of VValberswick, with the windmill on Snade Hill opening to the right, you can run straight up the mouth of Char toward the tiny inland port of Woodford. Vessels of small burden in distress off the coast in easterly gales often take shelter in this little creek as a harbor of refuge from heavy weather on the German Ocean. The elder of the two girls who sat together picturesquely on this natural rustic seat was dark and handsome, and so like Hugh Massinger himself in face and feature, that no one would have much difficulty in recognizing her for the second cousin of whom he had spoken, Elsie Challoner. Her expression was more earnest and serious, to be sure, than the London poet's; her type of beauty was more tender and true; but she had the same large melting pathetic eyes, the same melancholy and chiseled mouth, the same long black wiry hair, and the same innate grace of bearing and manner in every movement as her Byronic relative. The younger girl, her pupil, was fairer and shorter, a pretty and delicate blonde of eighteen, with clear blue eyes and wistful' mouth, and a slender but dainty girlish figure. They sat hand in hand on the roots of the tree, half overarched by its hollow funnel, looking out together over the low flat sea, whose fresh breeze blew hard in their faces, with the delicious bracing coolness and airiness peculiar to the shore of the German Ocean. There is no other air in all England to equal that strong air of Suffolk ; it seems to blow right through and through one, and to brush away the dust and smoke of town from all one's pores with a single whiff of its clear bright pur- ity. "How do you think your cousin'll come, Elsie?" the younger girl asked, twisting her big straw hat by its strings carelessly in her hands. "I expect he'll drive over in a carriage from Daw's from the Almundham Station," 24 THIS MORTAL, COIL. "I'm sure I don't know, dear," the elder and darker answered with a smile. "But how awfully interested you seem to be, Winifred, in this celebrated cousin of mine! What a thing it is for a man to be a poet! You've talked of nothing else the whole morning." Winifred laughed. "Cousins are so very rare in this part of the country, you see," she said apologetically. "We don't get sight of a cousin, you know or, for the matter of that, of any other male human being, erect upon two legs, and with a beard on his face twice in a twelvemonth. The live young man is rapidly becoming an extinct animal in these parts, I believe. He exists only in the form of a photograph. We shall soon have him stuffed, whenever we catch him, or exhibit a pair of his boots, with a label attached, in a glass case at all the museums, side by side with the dodo, and the something-or-other-osaurian. A live young man in a tourist suit is quite a rarity, I declare, nowadays. And then a poet too! I never in my life set eyes yet upon a genuine all-wool unadulterated poet. And you say he's handsome, extremely handsome! Hand- some, and a poet, and a live young man, all at once, like three gentlemen rolled into one, as Mrs. Malaprop says: that's really something to make one's self excited about." "Winifred! Winifred! you naughty bad girl!" Elsie laughed out, half in jest and half in earnest, "moderate your transports. You've got no sense of propriety in you, I do believe and no respect for your instructress' dignity either. I oughn't to let you talk on like that. It isn't becoming in the guardian of youth. The guardian of youth ought sternly to insist on due reticence in speak- ing of strangers, especially when they belong to the male persuasion. But as it's only Hugh, after all, I suppose it really doesn't matter. I look upon Hugh, W r inifred, like my own brother." "What a jolly name, Hugh!" Winifred cried, enthusi- astically. "It goes so awfully well together, too, Hugh Massinger. There's a great deal in names going well together. I wouldn't marry a man called Adair, now, Elsie, or O'Dowd, either, not if you were to pay me for it (though why you should pay me, I'm sure I do'n't know), for Winifred Adair doesn't sound a bit nice; and vet ARCADIA. 25 Elsie Adair goes just beautifully. Winifred Challoner that's not bad, either. Three syllables, with the accent on the first. Winifred Massinger that sounds very well too; best of all, perhaps. I shouldn't mind marrying a man named Massinger." "Other things equal," Elsie put in, laughing. "Oh, of course he must have a mustache," Winifred went on in quite a serious voice. "Even if a man was a poet, and was called Massinger, and had lovely eyes, and could sing like a nightingale, but hadn't a mustache a beautiful, long, wiry, black mustache, like the curate's at Snade I wouldn't for the world so much as look at him. No close-shaven young man need apply. I insist upon a mustache as absolutely indispensable. Not red: red is quite inadmissible. If ever I marry and I suppose I shall have to, some day, to please papa I shall lay it down as a fixed point in the settlements, or whatever you call them, that my husband must have a black mustache, and must bind himself down by contract beforehand as long as I live never to shave it." Elsie shaded her eyes with her hand and looked out seaward. "I shan't let you talk so any more, Winnie," she said, with a vigorous effort to be sternly authoritative. "It isn't right; and you know it isn't. The instructress of youth must exert her authority. We ought to be as grave as a couple of church owls. What a funny small sailing boat that is on the sea out yonder! A regular little tub! So flat and broad! She's the roundest boat I ever saw in my life. How she dances about like a walnut-shell on the top of the water!" "Oh, that's the 'Mud-Turtle!'" Winifred cried eagerly, anxious to display her nautical knowledge to the full extent before Elsie, the town-bred governess. "She's a painter's yawl, you know. I've seen her often. She belongs to an artist, a marine artist, who comes this way every summer to sketch and paint mud-banks. He lies by up here in the shallows of the creek, and does, oh, the funniest little pictures you ever saw, all full of nothing just mud and water and weeds and herons or else a great flat stretch of calm sea, with a couple of gulls and a buoy in the foreground. They're very clever, I suppose, for people 26 THIS MORTAL COIL. who understand those things; but, like the crater of Vesu- vius, there's nothing in them. She can go anywhere, though, even in a ditch the 'Mud-Turtle' can; and she sails like a bird, when she's got all her canvas on. You should just see her in a good breeze, putting out to sea before a fresh sou'-wester!" "She's coming in here now, I think," Elsie murmured, half aloud. "Oh, no, she's not; she's gone beyond it, toward the point at Walberswick." "That's only to tack," Winifred answered, with con- scious pride in her superior knowledge. ''She's got to tack because of the wind, you know. She'll come up the creek as soon as she catches the breeze. She'll luff soon. Look there, now; they're luffing her. Then in a minute they'll put her about a bit, and tack again for the creek's mouth. There you are, you see: she's tacking, as I told you. That's the artist, the shorter man in the sailor's jersey. He looks like a common A. B. when he's got up so in his seafaring clothes; but when you hear him speak, you can tell at once by his voice he's really a gentleman. I don't know who the second man is, though, the tall man in the tweed suit: he's not the one that generally comes that's Mr. Potts. But, oh, isn't he handsome! I wonder if they're going to sail close alongside? I do hope they are. The water's awfully deep right in by the poplar here. If they turn up the creek, they'll run under the roots just below us. They seem to be making signs to us now. Why, Elsie, the man in the tweed suit's waving his hand to you!" Elsie's face was crimson to look upon. As the instruct- ress of youth, she felt herself distinctly discomposed. "It's my cousin," she cried, jumping up in a tremor of excite- ment, and waving back to him eagerly \vith her tiny hand- kerchief. "It's Hugh Massinger! How very delightful! He must have come down by sea with the painter." "They're going to run in just close by the tree," Wini- fred exclaimed, quite excited also at the sudden apparition of the real live poet. "Oh, Elsie, doesn't he just look poetical! A man with a face and eyes like that couldn't help writing poetry, even if he didn't want to. He must be a friend of Mr. Relf's, I suppose. What a lovely, ARCADIA. 27 romantic, poetical way to come down from London toss- ing about at sea in a glorious breeze on a wee bit of a tub like that funny little 'Mud-Turtle!' " By this time, the yawl, with the breeze in her sails, had run rapidly up before the wind for the mouth of the river, and was close upon them by the roots of the poplar. As it neared the tree, Hugh stood up on the deck, bronzed and ruddy with his three days' yachting, and called out cheer- ily in a loud voice, "Hullo, Elsie, this is something like a welcome! We arrive at the port, after a stormy passage on the high seas, and are met at its mouth by a deputation of the leading inhabitants. Shall we take you on board with your friend at once, and carry you up the rest of the way to Whitestrand?" Elsie's heart came up into her mouth. She would have given the world to be able to cry out cordially, "Oh, Hugh, that'd be just lovely;" but propriety and a sense of the duties of her position compelled her instead to answer in a set voice, "Well, thank you ; it's ever so kind of you, Hugh; but we're here in our own grounds, you know, already. This is Miss Meysey, Winifred Meysey: Winnie, this is my cousin Hugh, dear. Now you know one another. Hugh, I'm so awfully glad to see you!" \Varren Relf turned the bow toward the tree, and ran the yawl close alongside till her tiny taftrail almost touched the roots of the big- poplar. "That's better," he said. "Now, Massinger, introduce us. You do it like a Lord Chamberlain, I know. You won't come up with us, then, Miss Challoner?" Elsie bent her head. "We musn't," she said candidly, "though I own I should like it. It's so very long since I've seen you, Hugh. Where are you going to stop at in the village? You must come up this very afternoon to see me." , Hugh bowed a bow of profound acquiescence. "If you say so," he answered with less languor than his wont, "your will is law. We shall certainly come up. I suppose I may bring my friend Relf with me the owner and skipper of this magnificent and luxurious vessel? We've had the most delightful passage down, Elsie. In future, in fact, I mean to live permanently upon a yawl. It's 28 THIS MORTAL COIL. glorious fun. You sail all day before the free, free breeze ; and you dodge the steamers that try to run you down; and you put up at night in a convenient creek; and you sleep like a top on the bare boards; and you live upon sea-biscuit and bottled beer and the fresh sea-air; and you feel like a king or a Berserker or a street arab ; and you wonder why the dickens you were ever such a stupid fool before as to wear black clothes, and lie on a feather- bed, and use a knife and fork, and eat olives and pateds foie gras, and otherwise give way to the ridiculous foibles of an effete and superannuated western civilization. I never in my life felt anything like it. The blood of the old Sea- kings comes up in my veins, and I've been rhyming 'vik- ing' and 'liking,' and 'striking' and 'diking,' ever since we got well clear of London Bridge, till this present moment. I shall write a volume of Sonnets of the Sea, and dedicate them duly to you and Miss Meysey." As for Winifred, with a red rose spreading over all her face, she said nothing; but twirling her hat still in her hand, she gazed and gazed open-eyed, and almost open- mouthed except that an open mouth is so very unbecom- ing upon the wonderful stranger with the big dark eyes, who had thus dropped down from the clouds upon the manor of Whitestrand. He was handsome, indeed as handsome as her dearest dreams ; he had a black mus- tache, strictly according to contract; and he talked with an easy offhand airy grace the easy grace of the Cheyne Row Club that was wholly foreign to all her previous experience of the live young'men of the county of Suffolk. His tongue was the pen of a ready writer. ' He poured forth his language with the full and regular river-like flow of a practiced London journalist and 'first-leader hand. Crisp adjectives to him came easy as Yes or Xo, and epigram flowed from his lips like water. "I'll put her in nearer," Warren Relf said quietly, after a few minutes, glancing with mute admiration at' Elsie's beautiful face and slim figure. "We're in no hurry to go, Df course, Massinger; we've got the whole day "all free us That's the best of navigating your own craft ou see, Miss Challoner; it makes you ind'ependent of all the outer world beside. Bradshaw ceases to exercise ARCADIA. 29 over you his iron tyranny. You've never to catch the four- twenty. You go where you like; you stop when you please; you start when you choose; and if, when you get there, you don't like it, why you simply go on again till you reach elsewhere. It's the freest life, this life on the ocean wave, that ever was imagined; though I believe Byron has said the same thing already. We'll lie by here for half an hour, Hugh, and if you prefer it, I'll put you ashore, and you can walk up through the grounds of the Hall, while I navigate the ship to the Fisherman's Rest, up yonder at Whitestrand." As he spoke, he put over the boom for a moment, to lay her in nearer to the roots of the tree. It was an unlucky movement. Winifred was sitting close to the water's edge, with her hat in her hand, dangling over the side. The boom, flapping suddenly in the wind with an unexpected twirl, struck her wrist a smart blow, and made her drop the hat with a cry of pain into the current of the river. Tide was on the ebb; and almost before they had time to see what had happened, the hat had floated on the swift stream far out of reach, and was careering hastily in circling eddies on its way seaward. Hugh Massinger was too good an actor, and too good a swimmer into the bargain, to let slip such a splendid opportunity for a bit of cheap and effective theatrical display. The eyes of Europe and Elsie were upon him not to mention the unknown young lady, who, for aught he knew to the contrary, might perhaps turn out to be a veritable heiress to the manor of Whitestrand. He had on his old gray tourist knickerbocker suit, which had seen service, and would be none the worse, if it came to that, for one more wetting. In a second, he had pulled off his coat and boots, sprung lightly to the farther deck of the "Mud-Turtle," and taken a header in his knicker- bockers and stockings and flannel shirt into the muddy water. In nothing does a handsome man look handsomer than in knickerbockers and flannels. The tide was setting strong in a fierce stream round the corner of the tree, and a few stout strokes, made all the stouter by the con- sciousness of an admiring trio of spectators, brought the eager swimmer fairly abreast of the truant hat in mid- 30 THIS MORTAL COIL. current. He grasped it hastily in his outstretched hand, waved it with a flourish high above his head, and gave it a twist or two of playful triumph, all wet and dripping, in his graceful fingers, before he turned. An act of daring is nothing if not gracefully or masterfully performed. And then he wheeled round to swim back to the yawl again. In that, however, he had reckoned clearly without his host. The water proved in fact a most inhospitable enter- tainer. Hand over hand, he battled hard against the rapid current, tying the recovered hat loosely around his neck by its ribbon strings, and striking out vigorously with his cramped and trammeled legs in the vain effort to stem and breast the rushing water. For a minute or so he struggled manfully with the tide, putting all his energy into each stroke of his thighs, and making his muscles ache with the violence of his efforts. But it was all to no purpose. The stream w r as too strong for him. Human thews could never bear it down. After thirty or forty strokes he looked in front of him casually, and saw, to his surprise, not to say discomfiture, that he was farther away from the yawl than ever. This was distressing this was even ignominious ; to any other man than Hugh Massinger, it would indeed have been actually alarming. But to Hugh the ignominy was far more than the peril: he was so filled with the sentimental and personal side of the difficulty the consciousness that he was showing himself off to bad advantage before the eyes of two beau- tiful girls that he never even dreamt of the serious danger of being swept out to sea and there drowned hope- lessly. He only thought to himself how ridiculous and futile he must needs look to that pair of womankind in having attempted with so light a heart a feat that was utterly beyond his utmost powers. Vanity is a mighty ruler of men. If Hugh Massinger had stopped there till he died, he would never have called aloud for help. Better death with honor, on the damp bed of a muddy stream, than the shame and sin of con- fessing one's self openly beaten in a fair fight by a mere insignificant tidal river. It was Elsie who first recognized the straits he was in for though love is blind, yet love BURIDAN'S ASS. SI is sharp-eyed and cried out to Warren Relf in an agony of fear: "He can't get back! The stream's too much for him! Quick, quick! You've not a moment to lose! Put about the boat at once and save him!" With a hasty glance, Relf saw that she was right, and that Hugh was unable to battle successfully with the rapid current. He turned the yawl's head with all speed out- ward, and took a quick tack to get behind the baffled swimmer and intercept him, if possible, on his way toward the sea, whither he was now so quickly and helplessly drifting. CHAPTER IV. BURIDAN'S ASS. For a minute the two girls stood in breathless suspense: then Warren Relf, cutting in behind with the yawl, flung out a coil of rope in a ring toward Hugh with true sea- faring dexterity, so that it struck the water straight in front of his face flat like a quoit, enabling him to grasp it and haul himself in without the slightest difficulty. The help came in the nick of time, yet most inopportunely. Hugh would have given worlds just then to be able to disregard his proffered aid, and to swim ashore by the tree in lordly independence without extraneous assistance. It is grotesque to throw yourself wildly in, like a hero or a Leander, and then have to be tamely pulled out again by another fellow. But he recognized the fact that the strug- gle was all in vain, and that the interests of English litera- ture and of a well-known insurance office in which he held a small life policy, imperatively demanded acquiesc- ence on his part in the friendly rescue. He grasped the rope with a very bad grace indeed, and permitted Relf to haul him in, hand over hand, to the side of the "Mud- Turtle." Yet, as soon as he stood once more on the yawl's deck, dripping and unpicturesque in his clinging clothes, but with honor safe, and the lost hat now clasped tight in his 32 THIS MORTAL COIL. triumphant right hand, it began to occur to him that, after all, the little adventure had turned out in its way quite as romantic, not to say effective, as could have been reasonably expected. He did not know the current ran so fast, or perhaps he would never have attempted the Quixotic task of recovering that plain straw hat with the blue ribbon worth at best half a crown net from its angry eddies; yet the very fact that he had exposed him- self to danger, real danger, however unwittingly, on a lady's behalf, for so small a cause, threw a not unpleasing dash of romance and sentiment into his foolish and fool- hardy bit of theatrical gallantry. To risk your life for a plain straw hat and for a lady's sake smacks, when one comes to think of it, of antique chivalry. He forgave himself his wet and unbecoming attire, as he handed the hat, with as graceful a bow as circumstances permitted, from the yawl's side to Winifred Meysey, who stretched out her hands, all blushes and thanks and apologetic regrets, from the roots of the poplar by the edge, to receive it. "And now, Elsie," Hugh cried, with such virile cheer- fulness as a man can assume who stands shivering in wet clothes before a keen east wind, "perhaps we'd better make our- way at once up to Whitestrand without further delay to change our garments. Hood makes garments rhyme under similar conditions to 'clinging like cere- ments/ and I begin to perceive now the wisdom of his allusion. A very bad rhyme, but very good reason. They do cling, if you'll permit me to say so they cling, indeed, a trifle unpleasantly. Good-bye for the present. I'll see you again this afternoon in a drier and, I hope, a more becoming costume. Miss Meysey, I'm afraid your hat's spoiled. Put her about now, Relf. Let's run up quick. I don't mind how soon I get to Whitestrand." Warren Relf headed the yawl round with the wind, and they ran merrily before the stiff breeze up stream toward the village. Meanwhile, Hugh stood still on the deck in his dripping clothes, smiling as benignly as if nothing had happened, and waving farewell with one airy hand in spite of chattering teeth to Elsie and Winifred. The two girls, taken aback by the incident, looked after BURIDAN'S ASS. 33 them with arms clasped round one another's waists. Wini- fred was the first to break abruptly the Hushed silence of their joint admiration. "Oh, Elsie," she cried, "it was so grand! Wasn't it just magnificent of him to jump in like that after my poor old straw hat? I never saw anything so lovely in my life. Exactly like the sort of things one reads about in novels!" Elsie smiled a more sober smile of maturer appreciation.. "Hugh's always so," she answered, with proprietary pride in her manly and handsome and chivalrous cousin. "He invariable does just the right thing at just the right moment ; it's a way he has. Nobody else has such splendid manners. He's the dearest, nicest, kindest-hearted fel- low " She checked herself suddenly, with a flushed face, for she felt her own transports needed moderating now, and her praise was getting perhaps somewhat be- yond the limits of due laudation as expected from cousins. A governess, even when she comes from Girton, must rise, like Caesar's wife, above suspicion. It must be gen- erally understood in her employer's family, that, though apparently possessed of a circulating fluid like other people's, she carries no such compromising and damaging an article as a heart about with her. And yet, if, as some- body once observed, there's "a deal of human nature in man," is it not perhaps just equally true that there's a deal of the self-same perilous commodity in woman also? The men made their way ipstream to Whitestrand, and landed at last, with an easy run, beside the little hithe. At the village inn the Fisherman's Rest, by W. Stanna- way Hugh Massinger, in spite of his disreputable damp- ness, soon obtained comfortable board and lodging, on Warren Relf's recommendation. Relf was in the habit of coming to Whitestrand frequently, and was "well- beknown," as the landlord remarked, to the entire village, children included, so that any of his friends were imme- diately welcome at the quaint old public-house by the water's edge. For his own part the painter preferred the freedom of the yawl, where he paid of course neither rent nor taxes, and came and went at his own free-will ; but as Massinger, not being a "vagrom man," meant to spend his entire summer holiday in harness at Whitestrand, he 34 THIS MORTAL COIL. desired to have some more settled pied-a-terre for his literary labors than the errant "Mud-Turtle." "I'll change my clothes in a jiffy," the poet cried to his friend as he leapt ashore, "and be back with you at once, a new creature. Relf, you'll stop and have some lunch, of course. Landlord, we'd like a nice tender steak you can raise a steak at Whitestrand, I suppose? That's well. Underdone, if you please. Just hand me out my port- manteau there. Thank you, thank you." And with a graceful bound, lie was off to his room a low-roofed old chamber on the ground-floor as airy and easy as if noth- ing had ever occurred at all to ruffle his temper or disturb the affectedly careless set of his immaculate collar and his loosely knotted necktie. In ten minutes he emerged again, as he had predicted, in the front room, another man an avatar of glory resplendent in a light-brown velveteen coat and Rem- brandt cap, that served still more obviously than ever to emphasize the full nature and extent of his poetical pre- tensions. It was a coat that a laureate might have envied and dreamt about. The man who could carry such a coat as that could surely have written the whole of the "Divina Commedia" before breakfast, and tossed off a book or two of "Paradise Lost" in a brief interval of morning leisure. "Awfully pretty girl that!" he said as he entered, and drummed on the table with impatient forefinger for the expected steak; "the little one, I mean, of course not my cousin. Fair, too. In some ways I prefer them fair. Though dark girls have more go in them, after all, I fancy; for dark and true and tender is the North, accord- ing to Tennyson. But fair or dark, North or South, like Horniman's teas, they're 'all good alike/ if you take them as assorted. And she's charmingly fresh and youth- ful and naive." "She's pretty, certainly," Warren Relf replied, with a certain amount of unusual stiffness apparent in his manner; "but not anything like so pretty, to my mind, or so grace- ful, either, as your cousin, Miss Challoner." "Oh, Elsie's well enough in hef own way, no doubt," Hugh went on, with a smile of expansive admiration. BURIDAN'S ASS. 35 "I like them all in their own way. I'm nothing, indeed, if not catholic and eclectic. On the whole, one girl's much the same as another, if only she gives you the true poetic thrill. As Alfred de Musset calmly puts it, with delicious French bluntness, 'Qu'importe le goblet pourvu qu'on a 1'ivresse?' Do you remember that delightful student song of Blackie's? " 'I can like a hundred women; I can love a score; Only one with heart's devotion Worship and adore.' I subscribe to that: all but the last two verses; about those I'm not quite so certain. As to loving a score, I've tried it experimentally, and I know I can manage it. But anyway, Elsie's extremely pretty. I've always allowed she's extremely pretty. The trouble of it is that she hasn't, unfortunately, got a brass farthing. Not a sou, not a cent, not a dot, not a stiver. I don't myself know the precise exchange value of doits and stivers, but I take them to be something exceptionally fractional. I could rhyme away (without prejudice) to Elsie an Chelsea and braes of Kelsie, or even at a pinch could bring in Selsey you must know Selsey Bill, as you go in for yachting if it weren't that I feel how utterly futile and purposeless it all is when a girl's fortune consists altogether of a negative quantity in doits and stivers. But the other Miss Meysey, now who's she, I wonder? Good name, Meysey. It sounds like money, and it suggests daisy. There was a Meysey a banker in the Strand, you know not very daisy-like, that, is it? and another who did something big in a legal way a judge, I fancy. He doubtless sat on the royal bench of British Themis with immense applause (which was instantly suppressed), and left his family a pot of money. Meysey lazy crazy hazy. None of them'll do, you see, for a sonnet but daisy. How many more Miss Meysey s are there, if any? I wonder. And if not, has she got a brother? So pretty a girl deserves to have tin. If I were a childless, rich old man, I think I'd incon- tinently establish and endow her, just to improve the beauty and future of the race, on the strictest evolutionary and Darwinian principles." 36 THIS MORTAL COIL. "Her father's the Squire here," Warren Relf replied, with a somewhat uneasy glance at Hugh, shot sideways. "He lords the manor and a great part of the parish. Wyville Meysey's his full name. He's rich, they say, tolerably rich still; though a big slice of the estate south of the river has been swallowed up by the sea, or buried in the sand, or otherwise disposed of. The sea's encroach - ing greatly on this coast, you know; some places, like Dunwich, have almost all toppled over bodily into the water, churches included; while in others the shifting sand of the country has just marched over the ground like a con- quering army, pitching its tent and taking up its quarters, to stay, in the meadows. Old Meysey's lost a 'lot of land that way, I believe, on the south side; it's covered by those pretty little wave-like sandhills you see over yonder. But north of the river they say he's all right. That's his place, the house in the fields, just up beyond the poplar. I dare say you didn't notice it as we passed, for it's built low Elizabethan, half hidden in the trees. All the big houses along the East coast are always planned rather squat and flat, to escape the wind, which runs riot here in the winter, the natives say, as if it blew out of the devil's bellows! But it's a fine place, the Hall, for all that, as places go, down here in Suffolk. The old gentleman's connected with the bankers in the Strand some sort of a cousin or other, more or less distantly removed, I fancy." "And the sons?" Hugh asked, with evident interest, tracking the subject to its solid kernel. "The sons? There are none. They had one once, I believe a dragoon or hussar but he was shot, out sol- diering in Zulu-land or somewhere; and this daughter's now the sole living representative of the entire family." "So she's an heiress?" Hugh inquired, getting warmer at last, as children say at Hide-and-seek. "Ye-es. In her way no doubt, an heiress. Not a very big one, I suppose, but still what one might fairly call an heiress. She'll have whatever's left to inherit. You seern very anxious to know all about her." "Oh, one naturally likes to know where one stands before committing one's self to anything foolish," Hugh murmured placidly. "And in this wicked world of oum, BURIDAN'S ASS. 87 where heiresses are scarce and actions for breach of promise painfully common one never knows before- hand where a single false step may happen to land one. I've made mistakes before now in my life; I don't mean to make another one through insufficient knowledge, if I can help it." He took up a pen that lay upon the table of the little sitting-room before him, and began drawing idly with it some curious characters on the back of an envelope he pulled from his pocket. Relf sat and watched him in silence. Presently, Massinger began again. "You're very much shocked at my sentiments, I can see," he said quietly, as he glanced with approval at his careless hieroglyphics. Relf drew his hand over his beard twice. "Not so much shocked as grieved, I think," he replied after a moment's pause. "Why grieved?" "Well, because, Massinger, it was impossible for any cne who saw her this morning to doubt that Miss Chal- loner is really in love with you." Hugh went on fiddling with the pen and ink and the envelope nervously. "You think so?" he asked, with some eagerness in his voice, after another short pause. "You think she really likes me?" "I don't merely think so," Relf answered with con- fidence; "I'm absolutely certain of it as sure as 1 ever was of anything. Remember, I'm a painter, and I have a quick eye. She was deeply moved when she saw you come. It meant a great deal to her. I should be sorry to think you would play fast and loose with any girl's affections." "It's not the girl's affections I play fast and loose with," Massinger retorted lazily. "I deeply regret to say it's very much more my own I trifle with. I'm not a fool; but my one weak point is a too susceptible disposition. I can't help falling in love really in love not merely flirting with any nice girl I happen to be thrown in with. I write her a great many pretty verses; I send her a great many charming notes; I say a great many foolish things to her; and at the time I really mean them all. My 88 THIS MORTAL COIL. heart is just at that precise moment the theater of a most agreeable and unaffected flutter. I think to myself, This time it's serious.' I look .at the moon, and feel sentimen- tal. I apostrophize the fountains, meadows, valleys, hills, and groves to forebode not any severing of our loves. And then I go away and reflect calmly, in the solitude of my own chamber, what a precious fool I've been for, of course, the girl's always a penniless one I've never had the luck or the art yet to captivate an heiress; and when it comes to breaking it all off, I assure you it costs me a severe wrench, a wrench that I wish I was sensible enough to foresee or adequately to guard against, on the preven- tion-better-than-cure principle." "And the girl?" Relf asked, with a growing sense of profound discomfort, for Elsie's face and manner had instantly touched him. "The girl," Massinger replied, putting a finishing stroke or two to the queer formless sketch he had scrawled upon the envelope, and fixing it up on the frame of a cheap lithograph that hung from a nail upon the wall opposite ; "well, the girl probably regrets it also, though not, I sincerely trust, so profoundly as I do. In this case, how- ever, it's a comfort to think Elsie's only a cousin. Between cousins there can be no harm, you will readily admit, in a little innocent flirtation." "It's more than a flirtation to her, I'm sure," Relf answered, with a dubious shake of the head. "She takes it all au grand scrieux. I hope you don't mean to give her one of these horrid wrenches you talk so lightly about? Why, Massinger, what on earth is this? I I didn't know you could do this sort of thing!" He had walked across carelessly, as he paced the room, to the lithograph in whose frame the poet had slipped the back of his envelope, and he was regarding the little addition now with eyes of profound astonishment and The picture was a coarsely executed portrait of a distinguished statesman, reduced to his shirt-sleeves, and caught in the very act of felling a tree; and on the scrap of envelope, in exact imitation of the right honor- able gentleman's own familiar signature, Hugh had writ- BURIDAN'S ASS. 39 ten in bold free letters the striking inscription, "W. E. Gladstone." The poet laughed. "Yes, it's not so bad," he said, regarding it from one side with parental fondness. "I thought they'd probably like to have the Grand Old Man's own genuine autograph; so I've turned one out for them offhand, as good as real, and twice as legible. I flatter myself it's a decent copy. I can imitate anybody's hand at sight. Look here, for example; here's your own." And taking another scrap of paper from a bundle in his pocket, he wrote with rapid and practiced mastery, "Warren H. Relf," on a corner of the sheet in the precise likeness of the painter's own large and flowing hand- writing. Relf gazed over his shoulder in some surprise, not wholly unmingled with a faint touch of alarm. "I'm an artist, Massinger," he said slowly, as he scanned it close; "but I couldn't do that, no, not if you were to pay me for it. I could paint anything you chose to set me, in heaven above, or earth beneath, or the waters that are under the earth; but I couldn't make a decent facsimile of another man's autograph. And, do you know, on the whole, I'm awfully glad that I could never possibly learn to do it." Massinger smiled a languid smile. "In the hands of the foolish," he said, addressing his soul to the beefsteak which had at last arrived, "no doubt such abilities are liable to serious abuse. But the wise man is an exception to all rules of life: he can safely be trusted with edge-tools. We do well in refusing firearms to children : grown people can employ them properly. I'm never afraid of any fac- ulty or knowledge on earth I possess. I know seventeen distinct ways of cheating at loo, without the possibilty of a moment's detection, and yet that doesn't prevent me, whenever I play, from being most confoundedly out of pocket by it. The man who distrusts himself must be conscious of weakness. Depend upon it, no amount of knowledge ever hurts those who repose implicit confi- dence in their own prudence and their own sagacity." 40 CHAPTER V. ELECTIVE AFFINITIES. The Girton governess of these latter days stands on a very different footing indeed in the family from the forty- pound-a-year-and-all-found young person who instructed youth as a final bid for life in the last generation. She ranks, in fact, in the unwritten table of precedence with the tutor who has been a university man ; and, as the outward and visible sign of her superior position, she dines with the rest of the household at seven-thirty, instead of taking an early dinner in the schoolroom with her junior pupils off hashed mutton and rice-pudding at half-past one. Elsie Challoner had been a Girton girl. She was an orphan, left with little in the world but her brains and her good- looks to found her fortune upon; and she had wisely invested her whole capital in getting herself an education which would enable her to earn herself in after life a moderate livelihood. In the family at Whitestrand, where she had lately come, she lived far more like a friend than a governess; the difference in years between herself and Winifred was not extreme; and the two girls, taking a fancy to one another from the very first, became com- panions at once, so intimate together that Elsie could hardly with an effort now and again bring herself to exert a little brief authority over the minor details of Winifred's conduct. And, indeed, the modern governess, though still debarred the possession of a heart, is now no longer exactly expected to prove herself in everything a moral dragon: she is permitted to recognize the existence of human instincts in the world we inhabit, and not even forbidden to concede at times the abstract possibility that either she or her pupils might conceivably get married to an eligible person, should the eligible person at the right moment chance to present himself, with the customary credentials as to position and prospects. "I wonder, Elsie," Winifred said, after lunch, "whether yojur cousin will really come up this afternoon? Perhaps he won't now, after that dreadful wetting. I dare say, as he only came down in the yawl, he hasn't got another suit ELECTIVE AFFINITIES. 41 of clothes with him. I shouldn't be surprised if he had to go to bed at the inn, as Mr. Relf does, while they dry his things for him by the kitchen fire ! Mr. Relf never brings more, they say, than his one blue jersey." "That's not like Hugh," Elsie answered confidently. ''Hugh wouldn't go anywhere, by sea or land, without proper clothes for every possible civilized contingency. He's not a fop, you know he's a man all over but he dresses nicely and appropriately always. You should just see him in evening clothes; he's simply beautiful then. They suit him splendidly." "So I should think, dear," Winifred answered with warmth. "I wonder, Elsie, whether papa and mamma will like your cousin?" "It's awfully good of you, darling, to think so much of what sort of reception my cousin gets," Elsie replied, with a kiss, in perfect innocence. (Winifred blushed faintly.) "But, of course, your papa and mamma are sure to like him. Everybody always does like Hugh. There's some- thing about him that insures success. He's a universal favorite, wherever he goes. He's so clever and so nice, and* so kind and so sympathetic. I never met anybody else so sympathetic as Hugh. He knows exactly beforehand how one feels about everything, and makes allowances so cordially for all one's little private sentiments. I suppose that's the poetic temperament in him. Poetry must mean at bottom, I should think, keen insight into the emotions of others." "But not always power of responding sympathetically to those emotions. Look, for example, at such a case as Goethe's," a clear voice said from the other side of the hedge. They were walking along, as they often walked, with arms clasped round one another's waists, just inside the grounds, close to the footpath that led across the fields; and only a high fence of privet and dog-rose sepa- rated their confidences from the ear of the fortuitous public on the adjoining footpath. So Hugh had come up, una- wares from behind, and overheard their confidential chit- chat! How far back had he overheard? Elsie wondered to herself. If he had caught it all, she would be so ashamed of herself! 42 THIS MORTAL COIL. . ' "Hugh!" she cried, running on to the little wicket gate to meet him. "I'm so glad you've come. It*s delightful to see you. But oh, you must have thought us two dread- ful little sillies. How much of our conversation did you catch, 'I wonder?" "Only the last sentence," Hugh answered lightly, taking both her hands in his and kissing her a quiet cousinly kiss on her smooth broad forehead. "Just that about poetry meaning keen insight into the emotions of others; so, if you were saying any ill about me, my child, or bearing false witness against your neighbor, you may rest assured at any rate that I didn't hear it. Good-morning, Miss Meysey. I'm recovered, you see: dried and clothed in my right mind at least, I hope so. I trust the hat is the same also." \Yinifred held out a tiny small hand. "It's all right, thank you," she said, with a sudden flush: "but I shall never, never wear it again, for all that. I couldn't bear to. I don't think you ought to have risked your life for so very little." "A life's worth nothing where a lady's concerned," Hugh answered airily, with a mock bow. "But indeed you give me credit for too much gallantry. My life was not in the question at all; I only risked a delightful bath, which was somewhat impeded by an unnecessarily heavy and awkward bathing-dress. What a sweet place this is, Elsie; so flowery and bowery, when you get inside it. The little lane with the roses overhead seems created after designs by Birket Foster. From outside, I confess, to a casual observer the first glimpse of East Anglian scenery is by no means reassuring." They strolled up slowly together to the Hall door, where the senior branches were seated on the lawn, under the shade of the one big spreading lime-tree, enjoying the delicious coolness of the breeze as it blew in fresh from the open ocean. Elsie wondered how Hugh and the Squire would get on together; but her wonder indeed was little needed ; for Hugh, as she had said, always got on admir- ably with everybody everywhere. He had a way of attack- ing people instinctively on their strong point; and in ten minutes, he and the Squire were fast friends, united by ELECTIVE AFFINITIES. 43 firm ties of common loves and common animosities. They were both Oxford men at whatever yawning interval of time, that friendly link forms always a solid bond of union between youth and age; and both had been at the same college, Oriel. "I dare say you know my old rooms," the Squire observed, with a meditative sigh. "They looked out over Fellows' Quad, and had a rhyming Latin hexam- eter on a pane of stained glass in one of the bay windows." "I know them well," Hugh answered, with a rising smile of genuine pleasure for he loved Oxford with a love passing the love of her ordinary children. "A friend of mine had them in my time. And I remember the line: 'Oxoniam quare venisti premeditare.' An excellent leo- nine, as leonines go, though limp in its quantity. Do you know, I fell in love with that pane so greatly, that I had a wire framework made to put over it, for fear some fellows should smash it some night, flinging about oranges at a noisy wine-party." From Oxford, they soon got off upon Suffolk, and the encroachment of the sea, and the blown sands; and then the Squire insisted upon taking Hugh for a tour du proprietarie round the whole estate, with running com- ments upon the wasting of the foreshore and the abomin- able remissness of the Board of Admiralty in not erecting proper groins to protect the interests of coastwise pro- prietors. Hugh listened to it all with his grave face of profound sympathy and lively interest, putting in from time to time an acquiescent remark confirmatory of the wickedness of government officials in general, and of the delinquent Board of Admiralty in particular. "Eolian sands!" he said once, with a lingering cadence, rolling the words on his tongue, as the Squire paused by the big poplar of that morning's adventure to point him out the blown dunes on the opposite shore "Eolian sands! Is that what they call them? How very poetical! What a lovely word to put in a sonnet! Eolian just the very thing of all others to go on all-fours with an adjective like Tmolian? So it swallowed up forty acres of prime salt-marsh pasture did it really? That must have been a very serious loss indeed. Forty acres of prime salt-marsh! I suppose it was a sort of land covered with tall rank reedy 44 THIS MORTAL COIL. grasses, where you feed those magnificent rough-coated, long-horned, Highland-looking cattle we saw this morn- ing? Splendid beasts: most picturesque and regal. 'Bulls that walk the pastures in kingly flashing coats,' George Meredith would call them. We passed a lot of them as we cruised upstream to-day to Whitestrand. And the sand has absolutely overwhelmed and wasted it all? Dear me! dear me! What a terrible calamity! It was the Admir- alty's fault! Might make a capital article out of that to bully the government in the 'Morning Telephone.' " "If you did, my dear sir," the Squire said warmly, with an appreciative nod, "you'd earn the deepest gratitude of every owner of property in the county of Suffolk, and indeed along the whole neglected East coast. The way we've been treated and abused, I assure you, has been just scandalous simply scandalous. Governments, buff or blue, have all alike behaved to us with incredible levity. When the present disgraceful administration, for example, came into power " Hugh never heard the remainder of that impassioned harangue, long since delivered with profound gusto on a dozen distinct election platforms. He was dimly aware of the Squire's voice, pouring forth denunciation of the powers that be in strident tones and measured sentences ; but he didn't listen; his soul was occupied in two other far more congenial pursuits : one of them, watching Elsie and Winifred with Mrs. Meysey; the other, trying to find a practical use for Eolian sands in connection with his latest projected heroic poem on the Burial of Alaric. Eolian; dashes: Tmolian; abashes: not a bad sub- stratum, that, he flattered himself, for the thunderous lilt of his opening stanza. It was not till the close of the afternoon, however, that he could snatch a few seconds alone with Elsie. They wandered off by themselves then, near the water's edge, among the thick shrubbery ; and Hugh, sitting down in a retired spot under the lee of a sheltering group of guelder- roses, took his pretty cousin's hands for a moment in his own, and looking down into her great dark eyes with a fond look, cried laughingly, "Oh, Elsie, Elsie, this is just what I've been longing for all day long. I thought I ELECTIVE AFFINITIES. 45 should never manage to get away from that amiable old bore, with his encroachments, and his mandamuses, and his groins, and his interlocutors. As far as I could understand him, he wants to get the Board of Admiralty, or the Court of Chancery, or somebody else high up in station, to issue instructions to the east wind not to blow Eolian sands in future over his sacred property. It's too grotesque: quite, quite too laughable. He's trying to bring an action for trespass against the German Ocean. 'Will ye bridle the deep sea with reins? will ye chasten the high sea with rods? Will ye take her to chain her with chains who is older than all ye gods?' Or will you get an injunction against her in due form on stamped paper from the Lord Chief Justice of England? Canute tried it on, and found it a failure. And all the time, while the good old soul was moaning and droning about his drowned land, there was I, just sighing and groaning to get away to a convenient corner with a pretty little cousin of mine with whom I had urgent private affairs of my own to settle. My dear Elsie, Suffolk agrees with you. You're looking this moment simply charming." "It's your own fault, Hugh," Elsie answered, with a blush, never heeding overtly his last strictly personal observation. "You shouldn't make yourself so universally delightful. I'm sure I thought, by the way you talked with him, you were absolutely absorbed in the wasting of the cliff, and personally affronted by the aggressive east wind. I was just beginning to get quite jealous of the encroach- ments. For you know, Hugh, it's such a real pleasure to me always to see you." She spoke tenderly, with the innocent openness of an old acquaintance; and Hugh, still holding her hand in his own, leaned forward with admiration in his sad dark eyes, and put out his face close to hers, as he had always done since they were children together. "One kiss, Elsie," he said persuasively. "Quick, my child; we may have no other chance. Those dreadful old bores will stick to us like leeches. 'Gather ye roses while you may: Old Time is still a-flying.' " 46 THIS MORTAL COIL. Elsie drew back her face half in alarm. "No, no, Hugh," she cried, struggling with him for a second. "We're both growing too old for such nonsense now. Remember, we've ceased long ago to be children." "But as a cousin, Elsie," Hugh said, with a wistful look that belied his words. Elsie preferred in her own heart to be kissed by Hugh on different grounds; but she did not say so. She held up her face, however, with a rather bad grace, and Hugh pressed it to his own tenderly. "That's paradise, my houri,'' he murmured low, looking deep into her beautiful liquid eyes. "O son of my uncle, that was paradise indeed; but that was not like a cousin," she answered, with a faint attempt to echo his playfulness, as she withdrew, blushing. Hugh laughed, and glanced idly round him with a merry look at the dancing water. "You may call it what you like," he whispered, with a deep gaze into her big dark pupils. "I don't care in what capacity on earth you con- sider yourself kissed, so long as you still permit me to kiss you." For ten minutes they sat there talking saying those thousand-and-one sweet empty things that young people say to one another under such circumstances have not we all been young, and do not we all well know them? and then Elsie rose with a sigh of regret. "I think," she said, li we mustn't stop here alone any longer; perhaps Mrs. Meysey wouldn't like it." "Oh bother Mrs. Meysey!" Hugh cried, with an angry sideward toss of his head. "These old people are a terrible nuisance in the world. I wish we could get a law passed by a triumphant majority that at forty everybody was to be promptly throttled, or at least transported. ^There'd be some hope of a little peace and enjoyment in the world then." "Oh, but, Hugh, Mrs. Meysey's just kindness itself, and I know she'll let you come and see me ever so often. She said at lunch I might go out on the water or any- where I liked, whenever I choose, at any time with my cousin." "A very sensible, reasonable, intelligent old lady," Hugh ELECTIVE AFFINITIES. 47 answered approvingly, with a mollified nod. "I wish they were all as wise in their generation. The profession of chaperon, like most others, has been overdone, and would be all the better now for a short turn of judicious thinning. But, Elsie, you've told them I was a cousin, I see. That's quite right Have you explained to them in detail the precise remoteness of our actual relationship?" Elsie's lip quivered visibly. "No, Hugh," she answered. "But why? Does it matter?" "Not at all not at all. Very much the contrary. I'm glad you didn't. It's better so. If I were you, my child, I think, do you know, I'd allow them to believe, in a quiet sort of w r ay unless, of course, they ask you point-blank, that you and I are first cousins. It facilitates social inter- course considerably. Cousinhood's such a jolly indefinite thing, one may as well enjoy as long as possible the full benefit of its charming vagueness." "But, Hugh, is it right? Do you think I ought to? I mean, oughtn't I to let them know at once, just for that very reason, how slight the relationship really is between us?" "The relationship is not slight," Hugh answered with warmth, darting an eloquent glance deep down into her eyes. "The relationship's a great deal closer, indeed, than if it were a much nearer one. That may be par- adox, but its none the less true, for all that. Still, it's no use arguing a point of casuistry with a real live Girton girl. You know as much about ethics as I do, and a great deal more into the bargain. Only, a cousin's a cousin anyhow; and I for my part wouldn't go out of my way to descend gratuitously into minute genealogical particulars of once, twice, thrice, or ten times removed, out of pure puritanism. These questions of pedigree are always tedious. What subsists all through is the individual fact that I'm Hugh, and you're Elsie, and that I love you dearly of course \vith a purely cousinly degree of devo- tion." "Hugh, you needn't always flourish that limitation in my face, like a broomstick." "Caution, my dear child mere ingrained caution the solitary resource of poverty and wisdom. What's the 48 THIS MORTAL COIL* good of loving you dearly on any other grounds, I should like to know, as long as poetry, divine poetry, remains a perfect drug in the publishing market? A man and a girl can't live on bread and cheese and the domestic affections, can they, Elsie? Very well, then, for the present we are both free. If ever circumstances should turn out differently " The remainder of that sentence assumed a form inexpressible by the resources of printer's ink, even with the aid of a phonetic spelling. When they turned aside from the guelder-roses at last with crimson faces, they strolled side by side up to the ^ house once more, talking about the weather or some' equally commonplace and uninteresting subject, and joined the Meyseys under the big tree. The Squire had disappeared, and Winifred came out to meet them on the path. "Mamma says, Mr. Massinger," she began timidly, "we're going a little picknicking all by ourselves on the river to-morrow up among the sandhills papa was show- ing you. They're a delicious place to picnic in, the sand- hills; and mamma thinks perhaps you wouldn't mind ccming to join us, and bringing your friend the artist with you. But I dare say you won't care to come : there'll be only ourselves just a family party." "My tastes are catholic," Hugh answered jauntily. "I love all innocent amusements and most wicked ones. There's nothing on earth I should enjoy as much as a picnic in the sandhills. You'll be coming too, of course, won't you, Elsie? Very well, then. I'll bring Relf, and the 'Mud-Turtle' to boot. I know he wants to go mud- painting himself. He may as well take us all up in a body.'" "We shall do nothing, you know," Winifred cried apol- ogetically. "We shall only just sit on the sandhills and talk, or pick yellow horned-poppies, and throw stones into the sea, and behave ourselves generallv like a pack of idlers." "That'll exactly suit me," Hugh replied with a smile. "My most marked characteristics are indolence and the practice of the Christian virtues. I hate the idea that when people invite their friends to a feast they're bound to do something or other definite to amuse them. It's an ELECTIVE AFFINITIES. 49 insult to one's intelligence ; it's degrading one to the level of innocent childhood, which has to be kept engaged with Blindman's Buff and an unlimited supply of Everton toffee, for fear it should bore itself with its own inanity. On that ground, I consider music and games at suburban parties the resource of incompetence. Sensible people find enough to amuse them in one another's society, without playing dumb crambo or asking riddles. Relf and I will more than enough, I'm sure, to-morrow in yours and Elsie's." He shook hands with them all round and raised his hat in farewell with that inimitable grace which was Hugh Massinger's peculiar property. When he left the Hall that afternoon, he left four separate conquests behind him. The Squire thought this London newspaper fellow was a most sensible, right-minded, intelligent young man, with a head on his shoulders, and a complete comprehen- sion of the rights and wrongs of the intricate riparian proprietors' question. Mrs. Meysey though Elsie's cousin was most polite and attentive, as well as an extremely high-principled and excellent person. (Ladies of a cer- tain age are always strong on the matter of principles, which they discuss as though they were a definitely meas- urable quantity, like money or weight or degrees Fahren- heit.) Winifred thought Mr. Massinger was a born poet, and oh, so nice and kind and appreciative. Elsie thought her darling Hugh was just the same good, sweet, sympa- thetic old friend and ally and comforter as ever. And they all four united in thinking he was very handsome, very clever, very brilliant, and very delightful. As for Hugh, he thought to himself as he sauntered back by the rose-bordered lane to the village inn, that the Squire was a most portentous and heavy old nuisance ; that Mrs. Wyville Meysey was a comic old creature; that Elsie was really a most charming girl ; and that Winifred, in spite of her bread-and-butter blushes, wasn't half bad, after all for an heiress. The heiress is apt to be plain and forbidding. She is not fair to outward view, as many maidens be. Her beauty has solid, not to say strictly metallic qualities, and resides 80 THIS MORTAL COIL. principally in a safe at her banker's. To have tracked down an heiress who was also pretty was indeed, Hugh felt, a valuable discovery. When he reached the inn, he found Warren Relf just returned from a sketching expedition up the tidal flats. "Well, Relf," he cried, "you see me triumphant I've been reconnoiteringf Miss Meysey's outposts, with an ultimate view to possible siege operations. To judge by the first results of my reconnoissance, she seems a very decent sort of little girl in her own way. If sonnets will carry her by storm, I don't mind discharging a few cartloads of them from a hundred-ton gun point-blank at her outworks. Most of them can be used again, of course, in case of need, in another campaign, if occasion offers." "And Miss Challoner?" Relf suggested, with some re- proof in his tone. "Was she there too? Have you seen her also?" "Yes, Elsie was there," the poet answered unconcern- edly, as he rang the bell for a glass of soda-water. "Elsie was there, looking as charming and as piquant and as pretty as ever; and, by Jove! she's the cleverest and bright- est and most amusing girl I ever met anywhere up and down in England. Though she's my own cousin, and it's me that says it, as oughtn't to say it, she's a credit to the family. I like Elsie. At times, I've almost half a mind, upon my soul, to fling prudence to the winds, and ask her to come and accept a share of my poor crust in my humble garret. But it won't do, you know it won't do. Sine Cerere et Baccho, friget Venus. Either I must make a fortune at a stroke, or I must marry a girl with a fortune ready made to my hand already. Love in a cottage is all very well in its way, no doubt, with roses and eglantine whatever eglantine may be climbing round the windows; but love in a hovel which is the plain prose of it in these hard times can't be considered either pretty or poetical. Unless some Columbus of a critic, cruising through reams of minor verse, discovers my priceless worth some day, and divulges me to the world, there's no chance of my ever being able to afford anything so good and sweet as Elsie. But the other one's a nice small girl of her sort too. ELECTIVE AFFINITIES. 61 I think for my part I shall alter and amend those quaint little verses of Blagkie's a bit make 'em run : 'I can like a hundred women; I can love a score; Only with a heart's devotion Worship three or four.' " Relf laughed merrily in spite of himself. Massinger went on musing in an undertone : "Not that I like the first and third lines as they stand, at all : a careful versifier would have insisted upon rhyming them. I should have made 'devotion' chime in with 'ocean,' or 'lotion/ or 'Goshen,' or 'emotion,' or something of that sort, to polish it up a bit. There's very good business to be got out of 'emotion,' if you work it properly; but 'ocean' comes in handy, too, down here at Whitestrand. I'll dress it up into a bit of verse this evening, I think, for Elsie or the other girl Winifred's her Christian name. Hard case, Winifred. 'Been afraid' is only worthy of Browning, who'd perpetrate anything in the way of a rhyme to save himself trouble. Has a false Ingoldsby gallop of verse about it that I don't quite like. Winnie's comparatively easy, of course : you've got 'skinny' and 'finny,' and 'Min- nie' and spinny/ But Winifred's a very hard case indeed. 'Winnie' and 'guinea' are good enough rhymes; but not quite new : they've been virtually done before by Rossetti, you know: 'Lazy, laughing, languid Jenny, Fond of a kiss and fond of a guinea.' But I doubt if I could ever consent to make love to a girl whose name's so utterly and atrociously unmanageable as plain Winifred. Now, Mary there's a name for you, if you like: with 'fairy' and 'airy,' and 'chary' and 'vagary,' and all sorts of other jolly old-world rhymes to go with it. Or, if you want to be rural, you can bring in 'dairy' do the pretty milkmaid business to perfection. But 'Wini- fred' 'bin afraid' the thing's impossible. It compels you to murder the English language. Lwouldn't demean myself or I think it ought to be by rights bemean myself 62 THIS MORTAL COIL. by vvriting verses to her with such a name as that. I shall send them to Elsie, who, after all, deserves them more, and will be flattered with the attention into the bargain." At ten o'clock, he came out once more from his own room to the little parlor, where Warren Relf was seated ''cooking" a sky in one of his hasty seaside sketches. He had an envelope in his hand, and a hat on his head. "Where are you off?" Relf asked carelessly. "Oh, just to the post," Hugh Massinger answered, with a gay nod. "I've finished my new batch of verses on the ocean emotion potion devotion theme, and I'm send- ing them off, all hot from the oven, to my cousin Elsie. They're not bad in their way. I like them myself. I shall print them, I think, in next week's 'Athenaeum.' " CHAPTER VI. WHICH LADY? Hugh found the day among the sandhills simply delight- ful. He had said with truth he loved all innocent pleas- ures, for his was one of those sunny, many-sided, aesthetic natures, in spite of its underlying tinge of pessimism and sadness, that throw themselves with ardor into every simple country delight, and find deep enjoyment in trees and flowers and waves and scenery, in the scent of new- mown hay and the song of birds, and in social intercourse with beautiful women. Warren Relf had readily enough fallen in with Hugh's plan for their day's outing; for Warren Relf in his turn was human too, and at a first glance he had been greatly taken with Hugh's pretty cousin, the dark-eyed Girton girl. His possession of the "Mud-Turtle" gave him for the moment a title to respect, for a yacht's a yacht, however tiny. So he took them all up together in the yawl to the foot of the sandhills ; and while Mrs. Meysey and the girls were unpacking the hampers and getting lunch ready on the white slopes of the drifted dunes, he sat down by the shore and sketched WHICH LADY. 53 a little bit of the river foreground that exactly suited his own peculiar style an islet of mud, rising low from the bed of the sluggish stream, crowned with purple sea-aster and white-flowered scurvy-grass, and backed by a slimy bed of tidal ooze, that shone with glancing rays of gold and crimson in the broad flood of the reflected sunlight. Elsie was very happy, too, in her way; for had she not Hugh all the time by her side, and was she not wearing the ardent verses she had received from him by post that very morning, inside her dress, pressed close against her heart, and rising and falling with every pulse and flutter of her bosom? To him, the handicraftsman, they were a mere matter of ocean, and potion, and lotion, and devotion, strung together on a slender thread of pretty conceit ; but to her, in the innocent ecstacy of a first great love, they meant more than words could possibly utter. She could not thank him for them; her pride and de- light went too deep for that; and even were it otherwise, she had no opportunity. But once, while they stood to- gether by the sounding sea, with Winifred by their side, looking critically at the picture Warren Relf had sketched in hasty outline, and began to color, she found an occasion to let the poet know, by a graceful allusion, she had re- ceived his little tribute of verse in safety. As the painter with a few dainty strokes filled in the floating iridescent tints upon the sunlit ooze, she murmured aloud, as if quoting from some well-known poem "Red strands that faintly fleck and spot The tawny flood thy banks enfold; A woof of Tyrian purple, shot Through cloth of gold." Hugh looked up at her appreciatively with a smile of recognition. They were his own verses, out of the Song of Char he had written and posted to her the night before. "Mere faint Swinburnian echoes, nothing worth," he mur- mured low in a deprecating aside; but he was none the less flattered at the delicate attention, for all that. "And how clever of her, too," he thought to himself with a faint thrill, "to have pieced them in so deftly with the subject of the picture! After all, she's a very intelligent 54 THIS MORTAL COIL. girl, Elsie! A man might go further and fair worse if it were not for that negative quantity in doits and stivers." Warren Relf looked up also with a quick glance at the dark-eyed girl. "You're right, Miss Challoner," he said, stealing a lover's sidelook at the iridescent peacock hues upon the gleaming mud. "It shines like opal. No precious stone on earth could be lovelier than that. Few people have the eye to see beauty in a flat of tidal mud like the one I'm painting; but cloth of gold and Tynan purple are the only words one could possibly find to ex- press in fit language the glow and glory of its exquisite coloring. If only I could put it on canvas now, as you've put it in words, even the Hanging Committee of the Academy, I believe hard-hearted monsters would scarcely be stony enough to dream of rejecting it." Elsie smiled. How every man reads things his own way, by the light of his own personal interests! Hugh had seen she was trying to thank him unobtrusively for his copy of verses; Warren Relf had only found in her apt quotation a passing criticism on his own little water- color. After lunch, the two seniors, the Squire and Mrs. Mey- sey, manifested the distinct desire of middle age for a quiet digestion in the shade of the sandhills ; and the four younger folks, nothing loth to be free, wandered off in pairs at their own sweet will along the bank of the river. Hugh took Elsie for his companion at first, while \Varren Relf had to put himself off for the time being with the blue- eyed Winifred. Now Relf hated blue eyes. "But we must arrange it like a set of Lancers," Hugh cried with an easy flourish of his graceful hand; "at the end of the figure, set to corner and change partners." Elsie might have felt half jealous for a moment at this equitable suggestion, if Hugh hadn't added to her in a lower tone, and with his sweetest smile: "I mustn't monopolize you all the after- noon, you know, Elsie; Relf must have his innings too; I can see by his face he's just dying to talk to you." "I'd rather a great deal talk with you. Hugh," Elsie murmured gently, looking down at the sands with an apparently sudden geological interest in their minute com potion. WHICH LADY. 55 "I'm proud to hear it; so would I," Hugh answered gallantly. "But we mustn't be selfish. I hate selfishness. I'll sacrifice myself by-and-by ort the altar of fraternity to give Relf a turn in due season. Meanwhile, Elsie, let's be happy together while we can. Moments like these don't come to one often in the course of a lifetime. They're as rare as rubies and as all good things. When they do come, I prize them far too much to think of wasting them in petty altercation." They strolled about among the undulating dunes for an hour or more, talking in that vague emotional way that young men and maidens naturally fall into when they walk together by the shore of the great deep, and each very much pleased with the other's society, as usually happens under similar circumstances. The dunes were indeed a lovely place for flirting in, as if made for the purpose high billowy hillocks of blown sand, all white and firm, and rolling like chalk downs, but matted together under- foot with a tussocky network of spurges and campions and soldanella convolvulus. In the tiny combes and valleys in between, where tall reed-like grasses made a sort of petty imitation jungle, you could sit down unob- served under the lee of some mimic range of mountains, and take your ease in an enchanted garden, like sultans and sultanas of the "Arabian Nights," without risk of intrusion. The sea tumbled in gently on one side upon the long white beach; the river ran on the other just within the belt of blown sandhills; and wedged between the two, in a long line, the barrier ridge of miniature wolds stretched away for miles and miles in long perspective toward the southern horizon. It was a lotus-eating place, to lie down and dream and make love forever. As Hugh sat there idly with Elsie by his side under the lee of the dunes, he wondered the Squire could ever have had the bad taste to object to the generous east wind which was overwhelming his miserable utilitarian salt-marsh pastures with this quaint little fairyland of tiny knolls and Lilipu- tian valleys. For his own part, Hugh was duly grateful to that unconscious atmospheric landscape gardener for his admirable additions to the flat Suffolk scenery; he wanted nothing better or sweeter in life than to lie here for 56 THIS MORTAL COIL,. ever stretched at his ease in the sun, and talk of poetry and love with Elsie. At the end of an hour, however, he roused himself sturdily. Life, says the philosopher, is not all beer and skittles; nor is it all poetry and dalliance either. "Stern duty sways our lives against our will," say the "Echoes from Callimachus." It's all very well, at odd moments, to sport with Amaryllis in the shade, or with the tangles of Neaera's hair, for a reasonable period. But if Amaryllis has no money of her own, or if Neaera is a penniless gov- erness in a country-house, the wise man must sacrifice sentiment at last to solid advantages; he must quit Amaryllis in search of Phyllis, or reject Neaera in favir of Vera, that opulent virgin, who has lands and houses, mes- suages and tenements, stocks and shares, and is a ward in Chancery. Face to face with such a sad necessity, Hugh now found himself. He was really grieved that the cir- cumstances of the case compelled him to tear himself unwillingly away from Elsie; he was so thoroughly enjoy- ing himself in his own pet way; but duty, duty duty before everything! The slave of duty jumped up with a start. "My dear child," he exclaimed, glancing hastily at his watch, "Relf will really never forgive me. I'm sure it's time for us to set to corners and change partners. Not, of course, that I want to do it myself. For two people who are not engaged, I think we've had a very snug little time of it here together, Elsie. But a bargain's a bargain, and Relf must be inwardly grinding his teeth at me. Let's go and meet them." Elsie rose more slowly and wistfully. "I'm never so happy anywhere, Hugh,'"' she said with a lingering ca- dence, "as when you're with me." "And yet we are not engaged," Hugh went on in a meditative murmur "we're not engaged. We're only cousins! For mere cousins, our cousinly solicitude for one another's welfare is truly touching. If all families were only as united as ours, now! interpreters of prophecy would not have far to seek for the date of the millennium. Well, well, instructress of youth, we must look out fa" these other young people ; and if I were you, experience WHICH LADY. 67 would suggest to me the desirability of not coming upon them from behind too unexpectedly or abruptly. A fel- low-feeling makes us wondrous kind. Relf is young, and the pretty pupil is by no means unattractive." "I'd trust Winifred as implicitly " Elsie began, and broke off suddenly. "As you'd trust yourself," Hugh put in, with a little quiet irony, completing her sentence. "No doubt, no doubt; I can readily believe it. But even you and I who are staider and older, and merely cousins wouldn't have cared to be disturbed too abruptly just now, you know, when we were pulling soldanellas to pieces in concert in the hollow down yonder. I shall climb to the top of the big sandhill there, and from that specular mount as Satan remarks in 'Paradise Regained' I shall spy from afar where Relf has wandered off to with the immac- ulate Winifred. Ah, there they they are, over yonder by the beach, looking for pebbles or something I suppose amber. Let's go over to them, Elsie, and change partners. Common politeness compels one, of course, to pay some attention to one's host's daughter." As they strolled away again, with a change of partners, back toward the spot where Mrs. Meysey was somewhat anxiously awaiting them, Hugh and Winifred turned their talk casually on Elsie's manifold charms and excel- lences. ''She's a sweet, isn't she?" Winifred cried to her new acquaintance in enthusiastic appreciation. "Did you ever in your life meet anybody like her?" "No, never," Hugh answered with candid praise. Can- dor was always Hugh's special cue. "She's a dear, good girl, and I like her immensely. I'm proud of her too. The only inheritance I ever received from my family is my cousinship to Elsie; and I duly prize it as my sole heirloom from fifty generations of penniless Massingers." "Then you're very fond of her, Mr. Massinger?" "Yes, very fond of her. When a man's only got one rel- ative in the world, he naturally values that unique pos- session far more than those who have a couple of dozen or so of all sexes and ages, assorted. Some people suffer from too much family; my misfortune is that, being a naturally affectionate man, I suffer from too little. It's 58 THIS MORTAL COIL. the old case of the one ewe lamb; Elsie is to me my brothers and my sisters, and my cousins and my aunts, all rolled into one, like the supers at the theater." "And are you and she " Winifred began timidly. All girls are naturally inquisitive on that important ques- tion. Hugh broke her off with a quick, little laugh. "Oh dear no, nothing of the sort," he answered hastily, in his jaunty way. "We're not engaged, if that's what you mean, Miss^Meysey; nor at all likely to be. Our affection, though profound, is of the brotherly and sisterly order only. It's much nicer so, of course. When people are engaged, they're always looking forward with yearning and longing and other unpleasant internal feelings, much enlarged upon in Miss Virginia Gabriel's songs, to a delusive future. When they're simply friends, or brothers and sisters, they can enjoy their friendship or their frater- nity in the present tense, without forever gazing ahead with wistful eyes toward a distant and ever-receding horizon." "But why need it recede?" Winifred asked innocently. "Why need it recede? Ah, there you pose me. Well, it needn't, of course, among the rich and the mighty. If people are swells, and amply provided for by their god- fathers and godmothers at their baptism, or otherwise, they can marry at once; but the poor and the struggling that's Elsie and me, you know, Miss Meysey the poor and the struggling get engaged foolishly, and hope and hope for a humble cottage the poetical cottage, all draped with roses and wild honeysuckle, and the well-attired woodbine and toil and moii and labor exceedingly, and find the cottage receding, receding, receding still, away off in the distance, while they plow their way through the hopeless years, just as the horizon recedes forever before you when you steer straight out for it in a boat at sea. The moral is poor folks should not indulge in the luxury of hearts, and should wrap themselves up severely in their own interests, till they're wholly and utterly and irretrievably selfish." "And are you selfish, I wonder, Mr. Massinger?" "I try to be, of course, from a sense of duty; though I'm afraid I make a very poor hand at it. I was born with WHICH LADY. 59 a heart, and do what I will, I can't quite stifle that irre- pressible natural organ. But I take it all out, I believe, in the end, in writing verses." "You sent Elsie some verses this morning," Winifred broke out in an artless way, as if she were merely stating a common fact of every day experience. Hugh had some difficulty in expressing a start, and in recovering his composure so as to answer unconcernedly: "Oh, she showed them to you, then, did she?" (How thoughtless of him to have posted those poor rhymes to Elsie, when he might have known beforehand she would confide them at once to Miss Meysey's sympathetic ear!) "No, she didn't show them to me," Winifred replied, in the same careless easy way as before. "I saw them drop out of the envelope, that's all ; and Elsie put them away as soon as she saw they were verses ; but I was sure they were yours because I know your handwriting Elsie's shown me bits of your letters sometimes." "I often send copies of my little pieces to Elsie before I print them," Hugh went on casually, in his most candid manner. "It may be vain of me, but I like her to see them. She's a capital critic, Elsie; women often are: she sometimes suggests to me most valuable alterations and modifications in some of my verses." "Tell me these ones," Winifred asked abruptly, with a little blush. It was a trying moment. What was Hugh to do? The verses he had actually sent to Elsie were all emotion and devotion, and hearts and darts, and fairest and thou wear- est, and charms and arms ; amorous and clamorous chimed together like old friends in one stanza, and sorrow dis- pelled itself to-morrow with its usual cheerful punctuality in the next. To recite them to Winifred as they stood would be to retire at once from his half-projected siege of the pretty little heiress' heart and hand. For that deci- sive step Hugh was not at present entirely prepared. He musn't allow himself to be beaten by such a scholars mate as this. He cleared his throat, and began boldly on another piece, ringing out his lines with a sonorous lilt a set of silly, garrulous, childish verses he had written 60 THIS MORTAL, COIL. long since, but never published, about some merry sea- elves in an enchanted submarine fairy country. A tiny fay At the bottom lay Of a purple bay Unruffled, On whose crystal floor The distant roar From the surf -bound shore Was muffled. With his fairy wife He passed his life Undimmed by strife Or quarrel; And the livelong day They would merrily play Through a labyrinth gay With coral. They loved to dwell In a pearly shell, And to deck their cell With amber; Or amid the caves That the riplet laves And the beryl paves To clamber. He went on so, with his jigging versicles, line after line, as they walked along the firm white sand together, through several foolish sing-song stanzas ; till at last, when he was more than half-way through the meaningless little piece, a sudden thought pulled him up abruptly. He had chosen, as he thought, the most innocent and non-committing bit of utter trash in all his private poetical repertory ; but now, as he repeated it over to Winifred with easy intona- tion, swinging his stick to keep time as he went on, he recollected all at once that the last rhymes flew off at a tangent to a very personal conclusion and what was WHICH LADY. 61 worse, were addressed, too, not to Elsie, but very obviously to another lady! The end was somewhat after this wise: On a darting shrimp Our quaint little imp With bridle of gimp Would gambol; Or across the back Of a sea-horse black As a gentleman's hack He'd amble. Of emerald green And sapphire's sheen He made his queen A tiar; And the merry two Their whole life through Were as happy as you And I are. And then came the seriously compromising bit: But if you say You think this lay Of the tiny fay Too silly, Let it have the praise My eye betrays To your own sweet gaze, My Lily. For a man he tries And he toils and sighs To be very wise And witty; But a dear little dame Has enough of fame If she wins the name Of pretty. Lily! Lily! Oh, that discomposing, unfortunate, compromising Lily ! He had met her down in Warwick- 62 THIS MORTAL COIL. shire two seasons since, at a country-house where they were both staying, and had fallen over head and ears in love with her then. Now, he only wished with all his heart and soul she and her fays were at the bottom of the sea in a body together. For of course she was penniless. If not, by this time she would no doubt have been Mrs. Massinger. Hugh Massinger was a capital actor; but even he could hardly have ventured to pretend with a grave face that those Lily verses had ever been addressed to Elsie Chal- loner. Everything depended on his presence of mind and a bold resolve. He hesitated for a moment at the "emerald green and sapphire's sheen," and seemed as though he couldn't recall the next line. After a minute or two's pre- tended searching he recovered it feebly, and then he stum- bled again over the end of the stanza. "It's no use," he cried at last, as if angry with himself. "I should only murder them if I were to go on now. I've forgotten the rest. The words escape me. And they're really not worth your seriously listening to." "I like them," Winifred said in her simple way. "They're so easy to understand; so melodious and meaningless. I love verse that you don't have to puzzle over. I can't bear Browning for that he's so impossible to make any- thing sensible out of. But I adore silly little things like these, that go in at one ear and out of the other, and really sound as if they meant something. I shall ask Elsie to tell me the end of them." Here was indeed a dilemma! Suppose she did, and suppose Elsie showed her the real verses! At all hazards, he must extricate himself somehow from this impossible situation. "I wish you wouldn't," he said gently, in his softest and most persuasive voice. "Elsie mightn't like you to know I sent her my verses though there's nothing in it girls are so sensitive sometimes about these matters. But I'll tell you what I'll do, if you'll kindly allow me ; I'll write you out the end of them when I get home to the inn, and bring them written out in full, a nice clear copy, the next time I have the pleasure of seeing you." ("I can alter the end somehow," he thought to himself with a sudden WHICH LADY. 63 inspiration, "and dress them up innocently one way or another with fresh rhymes, so as to have no special appli- cability of any sort to anybody or anything anywhere in particular.") "Thank you," Winifred replied, with evident pleasure. "I should like that ever so much better. It'll be so nice to have a poet's verses written out for one's self in his own handwriting." "You do me too much honor," Hugh answered, with his mock little bow. "I don't pretend to be a poet at all ; I'm only a versifier." They joined the old folks in time by the yawl. The Squire was getting anxious to go back to his garden now he foresaw rain in the sky to westward. Hugh glanced hastily at his watch with a sigh. "I must be going back, too," he cried. "It's nearly five now; we can't be up at the village till six. Post goes out at nine, they say, and I have a book to review before post-time. It must positively reach town not later than to-morrow morning. And what's worse, I haven't yet so much as begun to dip into it." "But you can never read it, and review it too, in three hours!" Winifred exclaimed, aghast. "Precisely so," Hugh answered in his jaunty way, with a stifled yawn ; "and therefore I propose to omit the read- ing as a very unnecessary and wasteful preliminary. It often prejudices one against a book to know what's in it. You approach a work you haven't read with a mind un- biased by preconceived impressions. Besides, this is only a three-volume novel ; they're all alike ; it doesn't matter. You can say the plot is crude and ill-constructed, the dialogue feeble, the descriptions vile, the situations bor- rowed, and the characters all mere conventional puppets. The same review will do equally well for the whole stupid lot of them. I usually follow Sydney Smith's method in that matter; I cut a few pages at random, here and there, and then smell the paper-knife." "But is that just?" Elsie asked quietly, a slight shade coming over her earnest face. "My dear Miss Challoner," Warren Relf put in hastily, "have you known Massinger so many years without find- 64 THIS MORTAL COIL. ing out that he's always a great deal better than he himself pretends to be? I know him well enough to feel quite confident he'll read every word of that novel through to-night, if he sits up till four o'clock in the morning to do it; and he'll let the London people have their review in time, if he telegraphs up every blessed word of it by special wire to-morrow morning. His wickedness is always only his brag; his goodness he hides carefully under his own extremely capacious bushel." Hugh 'laughed. "As you know me so much better than I know myself, my dear boy," he replied easily, ''there's nothing more to be said about it. I'm glad to receive so good a character from a connoisseur in human nature. I really never knew before what an amiable and estimable member of society hid himself under my rugged and unprepossessing exterior." And as he said it, he drew himself up, and darting a laugh from the corner of those sad black eyes, looked at the moment the handsomest and most utterly killing man in the county of Suffolk. When Elsie and Winifred went up to their own rooms that evening, the younger girl, slipping into Elsie's bed- room for a moment, took her friend's hands tenderly in her own, and looking long and eagerly into the other's eyes, said at last in a quick tone of unexpected discovery: "Elsie, he's awfully nice-looking and awfully clever, this Oxford cousin of yours. I like him immensely." Elsie brought back her eyes from infinity with a sudden start. "I'm glad you do, dear," she said, looking down at her kindly. "I wanted you to like him. I should have been dreadfully disappointed, in fact, if you didn't. I'm exceedingly fond of Hugh, Winnie." Winifred paused for a second significantly; then she asked point-blank: "Elsie, are you engaged to him?" "Engaged to him! My darling, what ever made you dream of such a thing? Engaged to Hugh! engaged to Hugh Massinger! Why, Winnie, you know, he's my own cousin." "But you don't answer my question plainly," Winifred persisted with girlish determination. "Are you engaged to him or are you not?" Elsie, mindful of Hugh's frequent declarations/answered FRIENDS IN COUNCIL.. 65 boldly (and not quite untruthfully) : "No, I'm not, Wini- fred." The heiress of Whitestrand stroked her friend's hair with a sigh of relief. That sigh was blind. Girl though she was, she might clearly have seen with a woman's instinct that Elsie's flushed cheek and downcast eyes belied to the utmost her spoken word. But she did not see it. All preoccupied as she was with her own thoughts and her own wishes, she never observed at all those mute witnesses to Elsie's love for her handsome cousin. She was satisfied in her heart with Hugh's and Elsie's double verbal denial. She said to herself with a thrill in her own soul, as a girl will do in the first full flush of her earliest passion: "Then I may love him if I like! I may make him love me! It won't be wrong to Elsie for me to love him!" CHAPTER VII. FRIENDS IN COUNCIL. That same night, as the Squire and Mrs. Meysey sat by themselves toward the small hours after the girls had unanimously evacuated the drawing-room discussing the affairs of the universe generally, as then and there envisaged, over a glass of claret-cup, the mother looked up at last with a sudden glance into the father's face, and said in a tone half-anxious, half-timid: "Tom, did it hap- pen to strike you this afternoon that that handsome cousin of Elsie Challoner's seemed to take a great fancy to our Winifred?" The Squire stirred his claret-cup idly with his spoon. "I suppose the fellow has eyes in his head," he answered bluntly. "No man in his senses could ever look at our little Winnie, I should think, Emily, and not fall over his ears in love with her." Mrs. Meysey waited a minute or two more in silent suspense before she spoke again; then she said once 66 THIS MORTAL, COIL. more, very tentatively: "He seems a tolerably nice young man, I think, Tom." "Oh, he's well enough, I dare say," the Squire admitted grudgingly. "A barrister, he says. That's a very good profession," Mrs. Meysey went on, still feeling her way by gradual stages. "Never heard so in my life before," the Squire grunted out. "There are barristers and barristers. He gets no briefs. Lives on literature, by what he tells me : the next door to living upon your wits, I call it." "But I mean, it's a gentleman's profession, anyhow, Tom, the bar." "Oh, the man's a gentleman, of course, if it comes to that a perfect gentleman; and an Oxford man, and a person of culture, and all that sort of thing I don't deny it He's a very presentable fellow, too,- in his own way ; and most intelligent: understands the riparian proprietors' question as easy as anything. You can ask him to dinner whenever you choose, if that's what you're driving at." Mrs. Meysey called another halt for a few seconds before she reopened fire, still more timidly than ever. "Tom, do you know I rather fancy he really likes our Winifred?'' she murmured, gasping. "Of course he likes our Winifred," the Squire repeated, with profound conviction in ever} 7 tone of his voice. "I should like to know who on earth there is that doesn't like our Winifred! Nothing new in that. I could have told you so myself. Go ahead with it, then. What next, now, Emily?" "Well, I think, Tom, if I'm not mistaken, Winifred seemed rather inclined to take a fancy to him too, some- how." Thomas Wyville Meysey laid down his glass incredu- lously on the small side-table. He didn't explode, but he hung fire for a moment. "You women are always fancy- ing things," he said at last, with a slight frown. "You think you're so precious quick, you do, at reading other people's faces. I don't deny you often succeed in reading them right. You read mine precious often, I know, when I don't want you to that I can swear to. But sometimes, FRIENDS IN COUNCIL. 67 Emily, you know you read what isn't in them. That's the way with all decipherers of hieroglyphics. They see a great deal more in things than ever was put there. You remember that time when I met old Hillier down by the copse yonder " "Yes, yes, I remember," Mrs. Meysey admitted, check- ing him at the outset with an astute concession. She had cause to remember the facts, indeed, for the Squire re- minded her of that one obvious and palpable mistake about the young fox-cubs at least three times a week, the year round, on an average. "I was wrong that time; I know I was, of course. You weren't in the least annoyed with Mr. Hillier. But I think I don't say I'm sure, ob- serve, dear but I think Winifred's likely to take a fancy in time to this young Mr. Massinger. Now, the question is, if she does take a fancy to him a serious fancy and he to her what are you and I to do about it?" As she spoke, Mrs. Meysey looked hard at the lamp, and then at her husband, wondering with what sort of grace he would receive this very revolutionary and upset- ting suggestion. For herself though mothers are hard to please it may as well be admitted offhand, she had fallen a ready victim at once to Hugh Massinger's charms and brilliancy and blandishments. Such a nice young man, so handsome and gentlemanly, so adroit in his talk, so admirable in his principles, and though far from rich, yet, in his way, distinguished! A better young man, dar- ling Winifred was hardly likely to meet with. But what would dear Tom think about him? she wondered. Dear Tom had such very expansive not to say Utopian ideas for Winifred thought nobody but a Duke or a Prince of the blood half good enough for her: though, to be sure, experience would seem to suggest that Dukes and Princes, after all, are only human, and not originally very much better than other people. Whatever superior moral excel- lence we usually detect in the finished product may no doubt be safely set down in ultimate analysis to the excep- tional pains bestowed by society upon their ethical educa- tion. The Squire looked into his claret-cup profoundly for a few seconds before answering, as if he expected to find it gg THIS MORTAL COIL. a perfect Dr. Dee's divining crystal, big with hints as to his daughter's future ; and then he burst out abruptly with a grunt : "I suppose we must leave the answering of that question entirely to Winnie." Mrs. Meysey did not dare to let her internal sigh of relief escape her throat; that would have been too com- promising, and would have alarmed dear Tom. So she stifled it quietly. Then dear Tom was not wholly averse, after all, to this young Mr. Massinger. He, too, had fallen a victim to the poet's wiles. That was well ; for Mrs. Meysey, with a mother's eye, had read Winifred's heart through and through. But we must not seem to give in too soon. A show of resistance runs in the grain with women. "He's got no money," she murmured suggest- ively. The Squire flared up. "Money!" he cried, with infinite contempt, "money! money! Who the dickens says any- thing to me about money? I believe that's all on earth you women think about. Money indeed! Much I care about money, Emily. I dare say the young fellow hasn't got money. What then? Who cares for that? He's got money's worth. He's got brains; he's got principles; he's got the will to work and to get on. He'll be a judge in time, I don't doubt If a man like that were to marry our Winifred, with the aid we could give him and the friends we could find him, he ought to rise by quick stages to be anything you like Lord Chancellor, or Postmaster- General, or Archbishop of Canterbury, for the matter of that, if your tastes happen to run in that direction." "He hasn't done much at the bar yet," Mrs. Meysey continued, playing her fish dexterously before landing it. "Hasn't done much! Of course he hasn't done much! How the dickens could he? Can a man make briefs for himself, do you suppose? He's given himself up, he tells me, to earning a livelihood by writing for the papers. Penny-a-lining; writing for the papers. He had to do it. It's a pity, upon my word, a clever young fellow like that he understands the riparian proprietors' question down to the very ground should be compelled to turn aside from his proper work at the bar to serve tables, so to speak to gain his daily bread by penny-a-lining. If Winifred FRIENDS IN COUNCIL. 89 were to take a fancy to a young man like that, now " The Squire paused, and eyed the light through his glass reflectively. "He's very presentable," Mrs. Meysey went on, rear- ranging her workbox, and still angling cleverly for dear Tom's indignation. "He's a man any woman might be perfectly proud of," the Squire retorted in a thunderous voice with a firm con- viction. Mrs. Meysey followed up her advantage persistently for twenty minutes, insinuating every possible hint against Hugh, and leading the Squire deeper and deeper into a hopeless slough of unqualified commendation. At the end of that time she said quietly: "Then I understand, Tom, that if Winifred and this young Massinger take a fancy to one another, you don't put an absolute veto on the idea of their getting engaged, do you?" "I only want Winnie to choose for herself," the Squire answered with prompt decision. "Not that I suppose for a moment there's anything in this young fellow's talking a bit to her. Men will flirt, and girls will let 'em. Getting engaged, indeed! You count your chickens before the eggs are laid. A man can't look at a girl nowadays, but you women must take it into your precious heads at once he wants to go straight off to church and marry her. However, for my part, I'm not going to interfere in the matter one way or the other. I'd rather she'd marry the man she loves, and the man who loves her, whenever he turns up, than marry fifty thousand pounds and the best estate in all Suffolk." Mrs. Meysey had carried her point with honors. "Per- haps you're right, my dear," she said diplomatically, as who should yield to superior wisdom. It was her policy not to appear too eager. "Perhaps, I'm right!" the Squire echoed, half in com- placency and half in anger. "Of course I'm right. I know I'm right, Emily. Why, I was reading in a book the other day a most splendid appeal from some philo- sophic writer or other about making fewer marriages in future to please Mamma, and more to suit the tastes of the parties concerned, and subserve the good of coming to THIS MORTAL C6IL. generations. I think it was an article in one of the maga- zines. It's the right way, I'm sure of that; and in Wini- fred's case I mean to stick to it." So, from that day forth, if it was Hugh Massinger's intention or desire to prosecute his projected military operations against Winifred Meysey's hand and heart, he found at least a benevolent neutral in the old Squire, and a secret, silent, but none the less powerful domestic ally in Mrs. Meysey. It is not often that a penniless suitor thus enlists the sympathies of the parental authorities, who ought by precedent to form the central portion of the defensive forces, on his own side in such an aggressive enterprise. But with Hugh Massinger, nobody ever even noticed it as a singular exception. He was so clever, so handsome, so full of promise, so courteous and courtly in his demeanor to young and old, so rich in future hopes and ambitions, that not the Squire alone, but everybody else who came in contact with his easy smile, accepted him beforehand as almost already a Lord Chancellor, or a Poet Laureate, or an Archbishop of Canterbury, according as he might choose to direct his talents into this channel or that; and failed to be surprised that the Meyseys or anybody else on earth should accept him with effusion as a favored postulant for the hand of their only daughter and heiress. There are a few such universal favorites here and there in the world : whenever you meet one, smile with the rest, but remember that his recipe is a simple one Humbug. CHAPTER VIII. THE ROADS DIVIDE. Hugh stopped for two months or more at Whitestrand, and during all that time he saw much both of Elsie and of Winifred. The Meyseys introduced him with cordial pleasure to all the melancholy gaities of the sleepy little peninsula. He duly attended with them the somnolent garden-parties on the smooth lawns of neighboring Squires: the monotonous picnics up the tidal stream of the meandering Char; the heavy dinners at every local ROADS DIVIDE. ft rector's and vicar's and resident baronets; with all the other dead-alive entertainments of the dullest and most stick-in-the-mud corner of all England. The London poet enlivened them all, however, with his never-failing flow of exotic humor, and his slow, drawled-out readiness of Pali-Mall repartee. It was a comfort to him, indeed, to get among these unspoiled and unsophisticated children or nature; he could palm off upon them as original the last good thing of that fellow Hatherley's from the smok- ing-room of the Cheyne Row Club, or fire back upon them, undetected, dim reminiscences of pungent chaff overheard in brilliant West-end drawing-rooms. And then, there were Elsie and Winifred to amuse him ; and Hugh, luxu- rious, easy-going, epicurean philosopher that he was, took no trouble to decide in his own mind even what might be his ultimate intentions toward either fair lady, satisfied only, as he phrased it to his inner self, to take the goods the gods provided for the passing moment, and to keep them both well in hand together. "How happy could I be with either," sings Captain Macheath in the oft-quoted couplet, "were t'other dear charmer away." Hugh took a still more lenient view of his personal respon- sibilities than the happy-go-lucky knight of the highway; he was quite content to be blest, while he could, with both at once, asking no questions, for conscience sake, of his own final disposition, marital or otherwise, toward one or the other, but leaving the problem of his matrimonial arrangements for fate, or chance, to settle in its own good' fashion. It was just a week after his arrival at Whitestrand that he went up one morning early to the Hall. Elsie and Winifred were seated together on a rug under the big tree, engaged in reading one novel between them. "You must wish Winifred many happy returns of the day," Elsie called out gaily, looking up from her book as Hugh approached them. "It's her birthday, Hugh; and just see what a lovely, delightful present Mr. Meysey's given her!" Winifred held out the present at arm's length for his admiration. It was a pretty little watch, in gold and enamel, with her initials engraved on the back on a broad 72 THIS MORTAL COIL. shield. "It's just a beauty! I should love one like it myself!" Elsie cried enthusiastically. "Did you ever see such a dear little thing? It's keyless too, and so exquisitely finished. It really makes me feel quite ashamed of my own poor old battered silver one." Hugh took the watch and examined it carefully. He noted the maker's name upon the dial, and, opening the back, made a rapid mental memorandum of the number. A sudden thought had flashed across him at the moment. He waited only a few minutes at the Hall, and then asked the two girls if they could walk down into the village with him. He had a telegram to send off, he said, which he had only just at that moment remembered. Would they mind stepping over with him as far as the postoflice? They strolled together into the sleepy High street. At the office, Hugh wrote and sent off his telegram. It was addressed to a well-known firm of watchmakers in Lud- gate Hill. "Could you send me by to-morrow evening's post, to address as below, a lady's gold and enamel watch, with initials 'E. C, from H. M.,' engraven on shield on back, but in every other respect precisely similar to Xo. 2479 just supplied to Mr. Meysey, of Whitestrand Hall? If so, telegraph back cash price at once, and check for amount shall be sent immediately. Reply paid. Hugh Massinger, Fisherman's Rest, Whitestrand, Suffolk." Before lunch-time the reply had duly arrived : "Watch shall be sent on receipt of check. Price twenty-five guin- eas." So far, so good. It was a fair amount for a journey- man journalist to pay for a present; but, as Hugh shrewdly reflected, it would kill two birds \vith one stone. Day after to-morrow was Elsie's birthday. The watch would give Elsie pleasure; and Hugh, to do him justice, thor- oughly loved giving pleasure to anybody, especially a pretty girl, and above all Elsie. But it could also do him no harm in the Meyseys' eyes to see that, journeyman journalist as he was, he was earning enough to afford to throw away twenty-five guineas on a mere present to a governess-cousin. There is a time for economy, and there is a time for lavishness. The present moment clearly came under the latter category. On the second morning, true to promise, the watch THE ROADS DIVIDE. 73 arrived by the early post ; and Hugh took it up with pride to the Hall, to bestow it in a casual way upon breathless and affectionate Elsie. He took it up for a set purpose. He would show these purse-proud landed aristocrats that his cousin could sport as good a watch any day as their own daughter. The Massingers themselves had been landed aristocrats not presumably purse-proud in their own day in dear old Devonshire ; but the estates had dis- appeared in hoiises and port and riotous living two gener- ations since; and Hugh was now proving in his own person the truth of the naif old English adage "When land is gone and money spent, then laming is most excel- lent." Journalism is a poor sort of trade in its way; but at any rate an able man can earn his bread and salt at it somehow. Hugh didn't grudge those twenty-five guineas ; he regarded them, as he regarded his poems, in the light of a valuable long investment. They were a sort of indi- rect double bid for the senior Meysey's respect, and for Winifred's fervent admiration. When a man is paying attentions to a pretty girl, there's nothing on earth he desires so much as to appear in her eyes lavishly generous. A less abstruse philosopher, however, might perhaps have bestowed his generosity direct upon Winifred in propria persona: Hugh, with his subtle calculation of long odds and remote chances, deemed it wiser to display it in the first instance obliquely upon Elsie. This was an acute little piece of psychological by-play. A man who can make a present like that to a poor cousin, with whom he stands upon a purely cousinly footing, must be, after all, not only generous, but a ripping good fellow into the bargain. How would he not comport himself under sim- ilar circumstances to the maiden of his choice, and to the wife of his bosom? Elsie took the watch, when Hugh produced it, with a little cry of delight and surprise; then, looking at the initials so hastily engraved in neat Lombardic letters on the back, the tears rose to her eyes irrepressibly as she said, with a gentle pressure of his hand in hers: "I know now, Hugh, what that telegram was about the other morn- ing. How very, very kind and good of you to think of it. But I almost wish you hadn't given it to me. I shall never 74 THIS MORTAL COIL. forgive myself for having said before you I should like one the same sort as Winifred's. I'm quite ashamed of your having thought I meant to hint at it." "Not at all," Hugh answered, with just the faintest pos- sible return of her gentle pressure. "I was twisting it over in my own mind what on earth I could ever find to give you. I thought first of a copy of my last little volume; but then that's nothing I'm only too sensible myself of its small worth. A book from an author is like spoiled peaches from a market-gardener: he gives them away only when he has a glut of them. So, when you said you'd like a watch of the same sort as Miss Meysey's, it seemed to me a perfect interposition of chance on my behalf. I knew what to get, and I got it at once. I'm only glad those London watch- maker fellows, whose respected name I've quite forgotten, had time to engrave your initials on it." "But, Hugh, it must have cost you such a mint of money." Hugh waved a deprecatory hand with airy magnificence over the broad shrubbery. "A mere trifle," he said, as who could command thousands. "It came to just the exact sum the 'Contemporary' paid me for that last article of mine on The Future of Marriage.' " (Which was quite true, the article in question having run to precisely twenty- five pages, at the usual honorarium of a guinea a page.) "It took me a few hours only to dash it off." (Which was scarcely so accurate, it not being usual for even the most abandoned or practiced of journalists to "dash off" articles for a leading review ; and the mere physical task of writing twenty-five pages of solid letterpress being considerably greater than most men, however rapid their pens, could venture to undertake in a few hours.) Winifred looked up at him with a timid glance. "It's a lovely watch," she said, taking it over with an admiring look from Elsie: "and the inscription makes it ever so much nicer. One would prize it, of course, for that alone. But if I'd been Elsie, I'd a thousand time rather have had a volume of poems, with the author's autograph dedication, than all the watches in England." "\Vould you?" Hugh answered, with an amused smile. "You rate the autographs of a living versifier immensely THE ROADS DIVIDE. 75 above their market value. Even Tennyson's may be bought at a shop in the Strand, you know, for a few shil- lings. I feel this indeed fame. I shall begin to grow con- ceited soon at this rate. And by the way, Elsie, I've brought you a little bit of verse too. Your Laureate has not forgotten or neglected his customary duty. I shall expect a butt of sack in return for these : or may I venture to take it out instead in nectar?" They stood all three behind a group of syringa bushes. He touched her lips with his own lightly as he spoke. "Many happy returns of the day as a cousin," he added, laughing. "And now, what's your programme for the day, Elsie?" "We want you to row us up the river to Snade, if it's not too hot, Hugh," his pretty cousin responded, all blushes. "Tuus, O Regina, quid optes, Explorare labor; mihi jussa capessere fas est," Hugh quoted merrily. "That's the best of talking to a Girton girl, you see. You can fire off your most epigrammatic Latin quotation at her, as it rises to your lips, and she understands it. How delightful that is, now. As a rule, my Latin quotations, which are frequent and free, as Truthful James says, besides being neat and appropriate, like after-dinner speeches, fall quite flat upon the stony ground of the feminine intelligence which last remark, I flatter myself, in the matter of mixed' metaphor, would do credit to Sir Boyle Roche in his wild- est flight of Hibernian eloquence. I made a lovely Latin pun at a picnic once. We had some chicken and ham sausage a great red German sausage of the polony order, in a sort of huge boiled-lobster-colored skin ; and toward the end of lunch, somebody asked me for another slice of it. 'There isn't any,' said I. 'It's all gone. Finis Poloniae!' Nobody laughed. They didn't know that 'Finis Poloniae' were the last words uttered by a distinguished patriot and soldier, 'when Freedom shrieked as Kosciusko fell.' That comes of firing off your remarks, you see, quite above the head of your respected audience." "But what does that mean that you just said this minute to Elsie?" Winifred asked doubtfully. "What! A lady in these latter days who doesn't talk Latin J" Hugh cried, with pretended rapture. "This is too 76 THIS MORTAL COIL. delicious! I hardly expected such good fortune. I shall have the well-known joy, then, of explaining my own feeble little joke, after all, and grimly translating my own poor quotation. It means, 'Thy task it is, O Queen, to state thy will : Mine, thy behests to serve for good or ill.' Rough translation, not necessarily intended for publication, but given merely as a guarantee of good faith, as the news- papers put it. Eolus makes the original remark to Juno in the first 'Enid,' when he's just about to raise the wind literally, not figuratively on her behalf, against the un- fortunate Trojans. He was then occupying the same post as clerk of the weather, that is now filled jointly by the correspondent of the 'New York Herald' and Mr. Robert Scott of the Meteorological Office. I hope they'll send us no squalls to-day, if you and Mrs. Meysey are going up the river with us." On their way to the boat, Hugh stopped a moment at the inn to write hastily another telegram. It was to his London publisher: "Please kindly send a copy of 'Echoes from Callimachus,' by first post to my address as under." And in five minutes more, the telegram dispatched, they were all rowing upstream in a merry party toward Snade meadows. Hugh's plan of campaign was now finally de- cided. He had nothing to do but to carry out in detail his siege operations. In the meadows he had ten minutes or so alone with Winifred. "Why, Mr. Massinger," she said, with a sur- prised look, "was it you, then, who wrote that lovely article, in the 'Contemporary,' on 'The Future of Mar- riage,' we've all been reading?" "I'm glad you liked it," Hugh answered, with evident pleasure ; "and I suppose it's no use now trying any longer to conceal the fact that I was indeed the culprit." " "But there's another name to it," Winifred murmured in reply. "And Mamma thought it must be Mr. Stone, the novelist." "Habitual criminals are often wrongly suspected," Hugh answered, with a languid laugh. "I didn't put my own name to it, however, because I was afraid it was a trifle sentimental, and I hate sentiment. Indeed, to say the truth it was a cruel trick, perhaps, but I imitated many THE ROADS DIVIDE. 77 of Stone's little mannerisms, because I wanted people to think it was really Stone himself who wrote it. But for all that, I believe it all every word of it, I assure you, Miss Meysey." "It was a lovely article," Winifred cried, enthusiastically. "Papa read it, and was quite enchanted with it. He said it was so sensible just what he'd always thought about marriage himself, though he never could get anybod) else to agree with him. And I liked it too, if you won't think it dreadfully presumptuous of a girl to say so. I thought it took such a grand, beautiful, etheral point of view, all up in the clouds, you know, with no horrid earthly mate- rialism or nonsense of any sort to clog and spoil it. I think it was splendid, all that you said about its being treason to the race to take account of wealth or position, or prospects or connections, or any other worldly consid- eration, in choosing a husband or wife for one's self and that one ought rather to be guided by instinct alone, because instinct or love, as we call it was the voice of nature speaking within us. Papa said that was beautifully put. And I thought it was really true as well. I thought it was just what a great prophet would have said if he were alive to say it; and that the man who wrote it " She paused, breathless, partly because she was quite abashed by this time at her own temerity, and partly because Hugh Massinger, wicked man! was actually smiling a covert, smile through the corners of his mouth at her youthful enthusiasm. The pause sobered him. "Miss Meysey," he broke in, with unwonted earnestness, and with a certain strange tinge of subdued melancholy in his tremulous voice, "I didn't mean to laugh at you. I really believe it. I believe in my heart every single word of what I said there. I believe a man or a woman either ought to choose in marriage just the one other special person toward whom their own hearts inevitably lead them. I believe it all I believe it without reserve. Money or rank, or connection or position, should be counted as nothing. We should go simply where nature leads us; and nature will never lead us astray. For nature is merely another name for the will of heaven made clear within us." 78 THIS MORTAL COIL. Ingenuous youth blushed itself crimson. "I believe so too," the timid girl answered in a very low voice and with a heaving bosom. He looked her through and through with his large dark eyes. She shrank and fluttered before his searching glance. Should he put out a velvet paw for his mouse now, or should he play with it artistically a little longer? Too much precipitancy spoils the fun. Better wait till the "Echoes from Callimachus'' had arrived. They were very /etching. And then, besides besides, he was not entirely \vithout a conscience. A man should think neither of ivealth nor of position, nor prospects nor connections, in choosing himself a partner for life. His own heart led him straight toward Elsie, not toward Winifred. Could he turn his back upon it, with those words on his lips, and trample poor Elsie's tender heart under foot ruthlessly? Principle demanded it; but he had not the strength of mind to follow principle at that precise moment. He looked long and deep into Winifred's eyes. They were pretty blue eyes, though pale and mawkish by the side of Elsie's. Then he said with a sudden downcast, half-awk- ward glance that consummate actor "I think we ought to go back to your mother now, Miss Meysey." Winifred sighed. Not yet! Not yet! But he had looked at her hard ! he had fluttered and trembled ! He was sum- moning up courage. She felt sure of that. He didn't venture as yet to assault her openly. Still, she was certain he did really like her; just a little bit, if only a little. Next morning, as she strolled along on the lawn, a village boy in a corduroy suit came lounging up from the inn, in rustic insouciance, with a small parcel dangling by a string from his little finger. She knew the boy, and called him quickly toward her. "Dick," she cried," what's that you've got there?" The boy handed it to her with a mysterious nod. "It's for you, miss," he said, in his native Suffolk, screwing up his face sideways into a most excruciating pantomimic expression of the profoundest secrecy. "The gentleman at our house him wooth the black moostash, ye know he towd me to give it to yow, into yar own hands, he say, if I could manage to ketch ye aloon anyhow. He fared THE ROADS DIVIDE. 79 partickler about yar own hands. I heen't got to wait, cos he say, there oon't be noo answer." Winifred tore the packet open with trembling hands. It was a neat little volume, in a dainty delicate sage-green cover "Echoes from Callimachus, and other Poems;" by Hugh Massinger, sometimes Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. She turned at once with a flutter from the title- page to the fly-leaf: "A Mile. Winifred Meysey; Hom- mage de 1'ateur." She only waited a moment to slip a shilling into Dick's hand, and then rushed up, all crimson with delight, into her own bedroom. Twice she pressed the flimsy little sage-green volume in an ecstasy to her lips; then she laid it hastily in the bottom of a drawer, under a careless pile of handkerchiefs and lace bodices. She wouldn't tell even Elsie of that tardy much-prized birthday gift. No one but herself must ever know Hugh Massinger had sent her his volume, of poems. When Dick returned to the inn, ten minutes later, en- vironed in a pervading odor of peppermint, the indirect result of Winifred Meysey's shilling, Hugh called him in lazily with his quiet authoritative air to the prim little parlor, and asked him in an undertone to whom he had given the precious parcel. "To the young lady herself," Dick answered confiden- tially, thrusting the bull's-eye with his tongue into his pouched cheek. "I give it to har behind the laylacs, too, where noo'one coon't see us." "Dick," Hugh Massinger said, in a profoundly persua- sive and sententious voice, laying his hand magisterially on the boy's shoulder, "you're a sharp lad; and if you develop your talents steadily in this direction, you may rise in time from the distinguished post of gentleman's gentleman to be a private detective or confidential agent, with an office of your own at the top of Regent Street. Dick, say nothing about this on any account, to anybody; and there, my boy there's half a crown for you." "The young lady ha' gin me one shillen a'ready," Dick replied with alacrity, pocketing the coin with a broad grin. Business was brisk indeed this morning. "The young lady was well advised," Hugh answered grimly. "They're cheap at the price dirt cheap, I call it, gO THIS MORTAL COIL. those immortal poems with an autograph inscription by the bard in person. And I've done a good stroke of busi- ness myself too. The 'Echoes from Callimachus' are a capital landing-net. If they don't succeed in bringing her out/ all napping, on the turf, gaffed and done for, a pretty speckled prey, why, no angler on earth that ever fished for women will get so much as a tiny rise out of her. It's a very fair estate still, is Whitestrand. Taris vaut bien une messe,' said Henri. I must make some little sacrifices myself if I want to conquer Whitestrand fair and even." "Paris vaut bien une messe," indeed. Was Whitestrand worth sacrificing Elsie Challoner's heart for? CHAPTER IX. HIGH-WATER. Meanwhile, Warren Relf, navigating the pervasive and ubiquitous little "Mud-Turtle," had spent his summer congenially in cruising in and out of Essex mud-flats and Norfolk broads, accompanied by his friend and chum Potts, the marine painter now lying high and dry with the ebbing tide on some broad bare bank of ribbed sand, just relieved by a battle-royal of gulls and rooks from the last reproach of utter monotony; now working hard at 'the counterfeit presentment of a green-grown wreck, all picturesque with waving tresses of weed and sea-wrack, in some stranded estuary of the Thames backwaters ; and now again tossing and lopping on the uneasy bosom of the German Ocean, whose rise and fall would seem to suggest to a casual observer's mind the physiological notion that its own included crabs and lobsters had given it a prolonged and serious fit of marine indigestion. For a couple of months at a stretch the two young artists had toiled away ceaselessly at their labor of love, painting the sea itself and all that therein is, with the eyots, creeks, rivers, sands, cliffs, banks, and inlets adjacent, in every variety of mood or feature, from its glassiest calm to its HIGH-WATER. 81 angriest tempest, with endless patience, delight, and sat- isfaction. They enjoyed their work, and their work repaid them. It was almost all the payment they ever got, indeed, for, like loyal sons of the Cheyne Row Club, the crew of the "Mud-Turtle" were not successful. And now, as Sep- tember was more than half through, Warren Relf began to bethink him at last of Hugh Massinger, whom he had left in rural ease on dry land at Whitestrand under a gen- eral promise to return for liim "in the month of the long decline of roses," some time between the I5th and the 2Oth. So, on a windy morning, about that precise period of the year, with a northeasterly breeze setting strong across the North Sea, and a falling barometer threatening squalls, according to the printed weather report, he made his way out of the mouth of the Yare, and turned south- ward before the flowing tide in the direction of White- strand. The sea was running high and splendid, and the two young painters, inured to toil and accustomed to danger, thoroughly enjoyed its wild magnificence. A storm to them was a study in action. They could take notes calmly of its fiercest moments. Almost every wave broke over the deck; and the patient little "Mud-Turtle," with her flat bottom and center-board keel, tossed about like a walnut shell on the surface of the water, or drove her nose madly from time to time into the crest of a billow, to emerge triumphantly one moment later, all shining and dripping with sticky brine, in the deep trough on the other side. Painting in such a sea was of course simply impossible; but Warren Relf, who loved his art with supreme devotion, and never missed an opportunity of catching a hint from his ever-changing model under the most unpromising circumstances, took out pencil ^nd paper a dozen times in the course of the day to preserve at least in black and white some passing aspect of her mutable features. Potts for the most part managed sheet and helm ; while Relf, in the intervals of luffing or tacking, holding hard to the mainmast with his left arm, and with the left hand just grasping his drawing-pad on the other side of the mast, jotted hastily down with his right what- ever peculiar form of spray or billow happened for the 82 *HIS MORTAL COIL. moment to catch and impress his artistic fancy. It was a glorious day for those who liked it: though a landlubber would no doubt have roundly called it a frightful voyage. They had meant to make Whitestrand before evening; but half-way down, an incident of a sort that Warren Relf could never bear to pass intervened to delay them. They fell in casually with a North Sea trawler, disabled and distressed by last night's gale, now scudding under bare poles before the free breeze, that churned and whitened the entire surface of the German Ocean. The men on board were in sore straits, though not as yet in immediate dan- ger; and the yawl gallantly stood in close by her, to pick up the swimmers in case of serious accident. The shrill wind tore at the mainmast; the waves charged her in vague ranks ; the gaff quivered and moaned at the shocks ; and ever and anon, with a bellowing rush, the resistless sea swept over her triumphantly from stem to stern. Mean- while, Warren Relf, eager to fix this stray episode on good white paper while it was still before his eyes, made wild and rapid dashes on his pad with a sprawling hand, which conveyed to his mind, in strange shorthand hieroglyphics, some faint idea of the scene as it passed before him. "She's a terrible bad sitter, this smack," he observed in a loud voice to Potts, with good-humored enthusiasm, as they held together with struggling hands on the deck of the "Mud-Turtle." "The moment you think you've just caught her against the skyline on the crest of a wave, she lurches again, and over she goes, plump down into the trough, before you've had a chance to make a single mark upon your sheet of paper. Ships are always precious bad sitters at the best of times; but when you and your model are both plunging and tossing together in dirty weather on a loppy channel, I don't believe even Turner himself could make much out of it in the way of a sketcll from nature Hold hard, there, Frank! Look out for your head! She's going to ship a thundering big sea across her bows this very minute. By jove! I wonder how the smack stood that last high wave! Is she gone? Did it break over her? Can you see her ahead there?" "She's all right still," Potts shouted from the bow, where he stood now in his oilskin suit, drenched from head to HIGH-WATER. 8S foot with the dashing spray, but cneery as ever, in true sailor fashion. "I can see her mast just showing above the crest. But it must have given her a jolly good wetting. Shall we signal the men to know if they'd like to come aboard here?" "Signal away," Warren Relf answered good-hum oredly above the noise of the wind. "No more sketching for me to-day, I take it. The last lot she shipped wet my pad through and through with the nasty damp brine. I'd better put my sketch, as far as it goes, down below in the locker. Wind's freshening. We'll have enough to do to keep her nose straight in half a gale like this. We're going within four or five points of the wind now, as it is. I wish we could run clear ahead at once for the poplar at Whitestrand. I would, too, if it weren't for the smack. This is getting every bit as hot as I like it. But we must keep an eye upon her, if we don't want her crew to be all dead men. She can't live six hours longer in a gale like to-day's, I'll bet you any money." They signaled the men, but found them unwilling still, with true seafaring devotion, to abandon their ship, which had yet some hours of life left in her. They'd stick to the smack, the skipper signaled back in mute pantomime, as long as her timbers held out the water. There was nothing for it, therefore, but to lie hard by her, for human- ity's sake, as close as possible, and to make as slowly as the strength of the wind would allow, by successive tacks, for the river-mouth at Whitestrand. All day long, they held up bravely, lurching and plung- ing on the angry waves; and only toward evening did they part company with the toiling smack, as it was grow- ing dusk along the low flat stretch of shore by Dunwich. There, a fish-carrier from the North Sea, one of those fast long steamers that plow the German Ocean on the lookout for the fishing fleet whose catches they take up with all speed to the London market, fell in with them in the very nick of time, and transferring the crew on board with some little difficulty, made fast the smack or rather her wreck with a towline behind, and started under all steam to save her life for the port of Harwich. Warren Relf and his companion, despising such aid, and prefer- 84 THIS MORTAL COIL. ring to live it out by themselves at all hazards, were left behind alone with the wild evening, and proceeded in the growing shades of twilight to find their way up the river at Whitestrand. "Can you make out the poplar, Frank?" Warren Relf shouted out, as he peered ahead into the deep gloom that enveloped the coast with its murky covering. "We've left it rather late, I'm afraid, for pushing up the creek with a sea like this! Unless we can spot the poplar distinctly, I should hardly like to risk entering it by the red light on the sandhills alone. Those must be the lamps at White- strand Hall, the three windows to starboard yonder. The poplar ought to show by rights a point or so west of them, with the striped buoy just a little this side of it." "I can make out the striped buoy by the white paint on it," his companion answered, gazing eagerly in front of him ; "but I fancy it's a shade too dark now to be sure of the poplar. The lights of the Hall don't seem quite reg- ular. Still, I should think we could make the creek by the red lantern and the beacon at the hithe, without minding the tree, if you care to risk it. You know your \vay up and down the river as well as any man living by this time ; and we've got a fair breeze at our backs, you see, for going up the mouth to the bend at Whitestrand." The wind moaned like a woman in agony. The timbers creaked and groaned and crackled. The black waves lashed savagely over the deck. The "Mud-Turtle" was almost on the shore before they knew it. "Luff, Luff!" Relf called out hastily, as he peered once more into the deepening gloom with all his eyes. "By George ! we're wrong. I can see the poplar over yonder; do you catch it? We're out of our bearings a quarter of a mile. We've gone too far now to make it this tack. We must try again, and get our points better by the high light. That was a narrow squeak of it, by Jove! Frank. I can twig where we've got to now, distinctly. It's the lights in the house that led us astray. That's not the Hall; it's the windows of the vicarage." They ran out to eastward again, for more sea-room, a couple of hundred yards, or farther, and tacked afresh for the entrance of the creek, this time adjusting their HIGH-WATER. 85 course better for the open mouth by the green lamp of the beacon on the sandhills. The light fixed on their own masthead threw a glimmering ray ahead from time to time upon the angry water. It was a hard fight for mastery with the wind. The waves were setting in fierce and strong toward the creek now; but the tide and stream on the other hand were ebbing rapidly and steadily outward. They always ebbed fast at the turn of the tide, as Relf knew well: a rushing current set in then round the corner by the poplar tree, the same current that had carried out Hugh Massinger so resistlessly seaward in that little ad- venture of his on the morning of their first arrival at Whitestrand. Only an experienced mariner dare face that bar. But Warren Relf was accustomed to the coast, and made light of the danger that other men would have trembled at. As they neared the poplar a second time, making straight for the mouth with nautical dexterity, a pale ob- ject on the port bow, rising and falling with each rise or fall of the waves on the bar, attracted Warren Relf's casual attention for a single moment by its strange weird likeness to a human figure. At first, he hardly regarded the thing seriously as anything more than a bit of floating wreckage ; but presently, the light from the masthead fell full upon it, and with a sudden flash he felt convinced at once it was something stranger than a mere plank or fragment of rigging. "Look yonder, Frank," he called out in echoing tones to his mate; "that can't be a buoy upon the port bow there!" The other man looked at it long and steadily. As he looked, the "Mud-Turtle" lurched once more, and cast a reflected pencil ray of light from the masthead lamp over the surface of the sea, away in the direction of the suspicious object. Both men caught sight at once of some floating white drapery, swayed by the waves, and a pale face upturned in ghastly silence to the uncertain starlight, "Port your helm hard;" Relf cried in haste. "It's a man overboard. Washed off the smack perhaps. He's drowned by this time, I expect, poor fellow." His companion ported the helm at the word with all his 86 THIS MORTAL, COIL. might The yawl answered well in spite of the breakers. With great difficulty, between wind and tide, they lay up toward the mysterious thing slowly in the very trough of the billows that roared and danced with hoarse joy over the shallow bar; and Relf, holding tight to the sheet with one hand, and balancing himself as well as he was able on the deck, reached out with the other a stout boathook to draw the tossing body alongside within hauling distance of the "Mud-Turtle." As he did so, the body, eluding his grasp, rose once more on the crest of the wave, and dis- played to their view an open bosom and a long white dress, with a floating scarf or shawl of some thin material still hanging loose around the neck and shoulders. The face itself they couldn't as yet distinguish ; it fell back languid beneath, the spray at the top, so that only the throat and chin were visible; but by the dress and the open bosom alone, it was clear at once that the object they saw was not the corpse of a sailor. Warren Relf almost let drop the boathook in horror and surprise. "Great heavens!" he exclaimed, turning round excited- ly, "it's a woman a lady dead in the water!'' The billow broke, and curled over majestically with resistless force into the trough below them. Its undertow sucked the "Mud-Turtle" after it fiercely toward the shore, away from the body. With a violent effort, Warren Relf, lunging forward eagerly at the lurch, seized hold of the corpse by the floating scarf. It turned of itself as the hook caught it, and displayed its face in the pale starlight. A great awe fell suddenly upon the astonished young paint- er's mind. It was indeed a woman that he held now by the dripping hair a beautiful young girl, in a white dress; and the wan face was one he had seen before. Even in that dim half-light he recognized her instantly. "Frank!" he cried out in a voice of hushed and reverent surprise "never mind the ship. Come forward and help me. We must take her on board. I know her! I know her! She's a friend of Massinger's." The corpse was one of the two young girls he had seen that day two months before sitting with their arms round one another's waists, close to the very spot where they now lay up, on the gnarled and naked roots of the famous old poplar. SHUFFLING IT OFF. 87 CHAPTER X. SHUFFLING IT OFF. The day had been an eventful one for Hugh Massinger: the most eventful and pregnant of his whole history. As long as he lived, he could never possibly forget it. It was indeed a critical turning-point for three separate lives his own, and Elsie's, and Winifred Meysey's. For, as Hugh had walked that morning, stick in hand and orchid in buttonhole, down the rose-embowered lane in the Squire's grounds with Winifred, he had asked the frightened, blushing girl, in simple and straight-forward language, without any preliminary, to become his wife. His shy fish was fairly hooked at last, he thought now: no need for daintily playing his catch any longer; it was but a question, as things stood, of reel and of landing-net. The father and mother, those important accessories, were pretty safe in their way too. He had sounded them both by unobtrusive methods, with dexterous plummets of oblique inquiry, and had gauged their profoundest depths of opinion with tolerable accuracy, as to settlements and other ante-nuptial precontracts of marriage. For what is the use of catching an heiress on your own rod, if your heiress' parents, upon whose testamentary disposition in the last resort her entire market value really depends, look askance with eyes of obvious disfavor upon your personal pretensions as their future son-in-law? Hugh Massinger was keen enough sportsman in his own line to make quite sure of his expected game before irrevocably committing himself to duck-shot cartridge. He was confident he knew his ground now ; so, with a bold face and a modest assurance, he ventured, in a few plain and well-chosen words, to commend his suit, his hand, and his heart to Winifred Meysey's favorable attention. It was a great sacrifice, and he felt it as such. He was positively throwing himself away upon Winifred. If he had followed his own crude inclinations alone, like a romantic schoolboy, he would have waited forever and 88 THIS MORTAL COIL. ever for his cousin Elsie. Elsie was indeed the one true love of his youth. He had always loved her and he would always love her. Twas foolish, perhaps, to indulge overmuch in these personal preferences, but after all it was very human; and Hugh acknowledged regretfully in his own heart that he was not entirely raised in that respect above the average level of human weaknesses. Still, a man, however humanesque, must not be governed by impulse alone. He must judge calmly, deliberately, impersonally, disinterestedly of his own future, and must act for the best in the long-run by the light of his own final and judicial opinion. Now, Winifred was without doubt a very exceptional and eligible chance for a briefless barrister; your sucking poet doesn't get such chances of an undisputed heiress every day of the week, you may take your affidavit. If he let her slip by on sentimental' grounds, and waited for Elsie poor, dear old Elsie heaven only knew how long they might both have to wait for one another and perhaps even then be finally disappointed. It was a foolish dream on Elsie's part; for, to say the truth, he himself had never seriously entertained it. The most merciful thing to Elsie herself would be to snap it short now, once for all, before things went farther, and let her stand face to face with naked facts: ah, how hideously naked! let her know she must either look out .another husband somewhere for herself, or go on earning her own livelihood in maiden meditation, fancy free, for the remaining term of her natural exist- ence. Hugh could never help ending up a subject, how- ever unpleasant, even in his own mind, with a poetical tag: it was a trick of manner his soul had caught from the wonted peroration of his political leaders in the first editorial column of that exalted print, the "Morning Tele- phone." So he made up his mind; and he proposed to Winifred. The girl's heart gave a sudden bound, and the red blood flushed her somewhat pallid cheeks with hasty roses as she . listened to Hugh's graceful and easy avowal of the pro- found and unfeigned love that he proffered her. She thought of the poem Hugh had read her aloud in his sonorous tones the evening before much virtue in a SHUFFLING IT OFF. 89 judiciously selected passage of poetry, well marked in delivery : " 'He does not love me for my birth, Nor for my lands so broad and fair: He loves me for my own true worth, And that is well,' said Lady Clare." That was how Hugh Massinger loved her, she was quite sure. Had he not trembled and hesitated to ask her? Her bosom fluttered with a delicious fluttering; but she cast her eyes down, and answered nothing for a brief space. Then her heart gave her courage to look up once more, and to murmur back, in answer to his pleading look: "Hugh, I love you." And Hugh, carried away not ungracefully by the impulse of the moment, felt his own heart thrill responsive to hers in real earnest, and in utter temporary forgetfulness of poor betrayed and abandoned Elsie. They walked back to the Hall together next minute, whispering low, in the fool's paradise of first young love a fool's paradise, indeed, for those two poor lovers, whose wooing set out under such evil auspices. But when Hugh had left his landed prey at the front door of the square-built manor-house, and strolled off by himself toward the village inn, the difficulty about Elsie for the first time began to stare him openly in the face in all its real and horrid magnitude. He would have to confess and to explain to Elsie. Worst still, for a man of his mettle and his sensitiveness, he would have to apologize for and excuse his own conduct. That was unendurable that was ignominious that was even ab- surd. His virility kicked at it. There is something essen- tially insulting and degrading to one's manhood in having to tell a girl you've pretended to love, that you really and truly don't love her that you only care for her in a sisterly fashion. It is practically to unsex one's self. A pretty girl appeals quite otherwise to the man that is in us. Hugh felt it bitterly and deeply for himself, not for Elsie. He pitied his own sad plight most sincerely. But then, there was poor Elsie to think of too. No use in the world in blinking that. Elsie loved him very, very dearly. True, they had never been engaged to one another so great is the love of consistency in man, that even alone in 90 THIS MORTAL COIL. his own mind Hugh continued to hug that translucent fiction ; but she had been very fond of him, undeniably fond of him, and he had perhaps from time to time, by overt acts, unduly encouraged the display of her fondness. It gratified his vanity and his sense of his own power over women to do so; he could make them love him few men more easily and he liked to exercise that dan- gerous faculty on every suitable subject that flitted across his changeful horizon. The man with a mere passion for making conquests affords no serious menace to the world's happiness; but the man with an innate gift for calling forth wherever he goes all the deepest and truest instincts of a woman's nature is when he abuses his power the most deadly, terrible, and cruel creature known in our age to civilized humanity. And yet he is not always deliberately cruel; sometimes, as in Hugh Massinger's case, he almost believes himself to be good and innocent. He had warned Winifred to whisper nothing for the present to Elsie about this engagement of theirs. Elsie was his cousin, he said his only relation and he would dearly like to tell her the secret of his heart himself in private. He would see her that evening and break the news to her. "Why break it?" Winifred had asked in doubt, all unconscious. And Hugh, a strange suppressed smile playing uneasily about the corners of his thin lips, had answered with guileless alacrity of speech: "Because Elsie's like a sister to me, you know, Winifred ; and sisters always to some extent resent the bare idea of their broth- ers marrying." For as yet Elsie herself suspected nothing. It was best, Hugh thought, she should suspect nothing. That was a cardinal point in his easy-going practical philosophy of life. He never went half-way to meet trouble. Till Winifred had accepted him, why worry poor dear Elsie's gentle little soul with what was, after 'all, a mere remote chance, a contingent possibility? He would first make quite sure, by actual trial, where he stood with Winifred ; and then and then, like a thunderbolt from a clear sky, he might let the whole truth burst in full force at once upon poor lonely Elsie's devoted head. Meanwhile, with extraordinary cleverness and care, he continued to dis- SHUFFLING IT OFF. 91 semble. He never made open love to Winifred before Elsie's face ; on the contrary, he kept the whole small com- edy of his relations with Winifred so skillfully concealed from her feminine eyes, that to the very last moment Elsie never even dreamt of her pretty pupil as a possible rival, or regarded her in any other conceivable light than as the nearest of friends and the dearest of sisters. Whenever Hugh spoke of Winifred to Elsie at all, he spoke of her lightly, almost slightingly, as a nice little girl, in her child- ish way though much too blue-eyed with a sort of distant bread-and-butterish schoolroom approbation, which wholly misled and hoodwinked Elsie as to his real intentions. And whenever he spoke of Elsie to Winifred, he spoke of her jestingly, with a good-humored, unmean- ing, brotherly affection that made the very notion of his ever contemplating marriage with her seem simply ridicu- lous. She was to him indeed as the deceased wife's sister is in the eye of the law to the British widower. With his easy, off-hand London cleverness, he had baffled and deceived both those innocent, simple-minded, trustful women; and he stood face to face now with a general eclaircissement which could no longer be delayed, but whose ultimate consequences might perhaps prove fatal to all his little domestic arrangements. Would Elsie in her anger set Winifred against him? Would Winifred, justly indignant at his conduct to Elsie, refuse, when she learned the whole truth to marry him? Nonsense nonsense. No cause for alarm. He had never really been engaged to Elsie he had said so to her face a thousand times. If Elsie chose to misinterpret his kind attentions, bestowed upon her solely as his one re- maining cousin and kinswoman, the only other channel for the blood of the Massingers, surely Winifred would never be so foolish as to fall blindly into Elsie's self-imposed error, and to hold him to a bargain he had over and over again expressly repudiated. He was a barrister, and he knew his ground in these matters. Chitty on Contract lays it down as an established principle of English law that free consent of both parties forms a condition pre- cedent and essential part of the very existence of a com- pact of marriage. 92 . THIS MORTAL COIL. With such transparent internal sophisms did Hugh Massinger strive all day to stifle and smother his own conscience; for every man always at least pretends to keep up appearances in his private relations with that inexorable domestic censor. But as evening came on, cigarette in mouth, he strolled round after dinner, by special appointment, to meet Elsie at the big poplar. They often met there, these warm summer nights ; and on this particular occasion, anticipating trouble, Hugh had defi- nitely arranged with Elsie beforehand to come to him by eight at the accustomed trysting-place. The Meyseys and Winifred had gone out to dinner at a neighboring vicar- age; but Elsie had stopped at home on purpose, on the hasty plea of some slight passing headache. Hugh had specially asked her to wait and meet him. Better get it all over at once, he thought to himself, in his shortsighted wisdom like the measles or the chicken-pox and know straight off exactly where he stood in his new position with these two women. Women were the greatest nuisances in life. For his own part, now he came to look the thing squarely in the face, he really wished he was well quit of them all for good and ever. He was early for his appointment; but by the tree he found Elsie, in her pretty white dress, already waiting for him. His heart gave a jump, a pleased jump, as he saw her sitting there before her time. Dear, dear Elsie; she was very, very fond of him! He would have given worlds to fling his arms tight around her then, and strain her to his bosom and kiss her tenderly. He would have given worlds, but not his reversionary chances in the Whitestrand property. Worlds don't count; the entire fee-simple of Mars and Jupiter would fetch nothing in the real-estate market. He was bound by contract to Winifred now, and he must do his best to break it gently to Elsie. He stepped up and kissed her quietly on the forehead, and took her hand in his like a brother. Elsie let it lie in her own without remonstrance. They rose and walked in lovers' guise along the bank together. His heart sank within him at the hideous task he had next to perform nothing less than to break poor Elsie's heart for her. If SHUFFLING IT OFF. 93 only he could have shuffled out of it sideways anyhow! But shuffling was impossible. He hated himself; and he loved Elsie. Never till that moment did he know how he loved her. This would never do ! He was feeling like a fool. He crushed down the love sternly in his heart, and began to talk about indifferent subjects the wind, the river, the rose-show at the vicarage. But his voice trembled, be- traying him still against his will; and he could not refrain from stealing sidelong looks at Elsie's dark eyes now and again, and observing how beautiful she was, after all, in a rare and exquisite type of beauty. Winifred's blue eyes and light-brown hair, Winifred's small mouth and molded nose, Winifred's insipid smile and bashful blush, were cheap as dirt in the matrimonial lottery. She had but a doll-like, Lowther Arcade style of prettiness. Maidenly as she looked, one twist more of her nose, one shade lighter in her hair, and she would become simply bar- maidenly. But Elsie's strong and powerful, earnest face, with its serious lips and its long black eyelashes, its pro- found pathos and its womanly dignity, its very irregularity and faultiness of outline, pleased him ten thousand times more than all your baby-faced beauties of the convention- al, stereotyped, ballroom pattern. He looked at her long and sighed often. Must he really break her heart for her? At last he could restrain that unruly member, his tongue, no longer. "Elsie," he cried, eying her full in a genuine outburst of spontaneous admiration, "I never in all my life saw any one anywhere one-half so beautiful and graceful as you are!" Elsie smiled a pleased smile. "And yet," she mur- mured, with a half malicious, teasing tone of irony, "we're not engaged, Hugh, after all, you remember." Her words came at the very wrong moment; they brought the hot blood at a rush into Hugh's cheek. "No," he answered coldly, with a sudden revulsion and a spasmodic effort ; "we're not engaged nor ever will be, Elsie!" Elsie turned round upon him with sudden abruptness in blank bewilderment. She was not angry ; she was not even astonished ; she simply failed altogether to take in his 94 THIS MORTAL COIL. meaning. It had always seemed to her so perfectly nat- ural, so simply obvious that she and Hugh were sooner or later to marry one another; she had always regarded Hugh's frequent reminder that they were not engaged as such a mere playful warning against too much precipitancy; she had always taken it for granted so fully and unre- servedly that whenever Hugh was rich enough to provide for a wife he would tell her so plainly, and carry out the implied engagement between them that this sudden announcement of the exact opposite meant to her ears less than nothing. And now, when Hugh uttered those cruel, crushing, annihilating words, "Nor ever will be, Elsie," she couldn't possibly take in their reality at the first blush, or believe in her own heart that he really intended any- thing so wicked, so merciless, so unnatural. "Nor ever will be!" she cried, incredulous. "Why, Hugh, Hugh, I I don't understand you." Hugh steeled his heart with a violent strain to answer back in one curt, killing sentence: "I mean it, Elsie; I'm going to marry Winifred." Elsie gazed back at him in speechless surprise. "Going to marry Winifred?" she echoed at last vaguely, after a long pause, as if the words conveyed no meaning to her mind. "Going to marry Winifred? To marry Winifred! Hugh, did you really and truly say you were going to marry Winifred?" "I proposed to her this morning," Hugh answered out- right, with a choking throat and a glassy eye; "and she accepted me, Elsie; so I mean to marry her." "Hugh!" She uttered only that one short word, in a tone of awful and unspeakable agony. But her bent brows, her pallid face, her husky voice, her startled attitude, said more than a thousand words, however wild, could possibly have said for her. She took it in dimly and imperfectly now; she began to grasp what Hugh was talking about; but as yet she could not understand to the full all the man's profound and unfathomed infamy. She looked at him feebly for some word of explanation. Surely he must have some deep and subtle reason of his own for this astonishing act and fact of furtive treachery. Some horrible combination SHUFFLING IT OFF. 95 of adverse circumstances, about which she knew and could know nothing, must have driven him against his will to this incredible solution of an insoluble problem. He could not of his own mere motion have proposed to Wini- fred. She looked at him hard: he quailed before her scrutiny. "I love you, Elsie," he burst out with an irresistible impulse at last, as she gazed through and through him from her long black lashes. Elsie laid her hand on his shoulder blindly. "You love me," she murmured. "Hugh, Hugh, you still love me?" "I always loved you, Elsie," Hugh answered bitterly with a sudden pang of abject remorse; "and as long as I live I shall always love you." "And yet you are going to marry Winifred!" "Elsie! We were never, never engaged." She turned round upon him fiercely with a burst of horror. He, to take refuge in that hollow excuse! "Never engaged!" she cried, aghast. "You mean it, Hugh? you mean that mockery? And I, who would have given up my life for love of you!" He tried to assume a calm judicial tone. "Let us be reasonable, Elsie," he said, with an attempt at ease, "and talk this matter over without sentiment or hysterics. You knew very well I was too poor to marry; you knew I always said we were only cousins; you knew I had my way in life to make. You could never have thought I really and seriously dreamt of marrying you!" Elsie looked up at him with a scared white face. That Hugh should descend to such transparent futilities! "This is all new to me," she moaned out in a dazed voice. "All, all quite, quite new to me." "But, Elsie, I have said it over and over a thousand times before." She gazed back at him like a stone. "Ah, yes; but till to-day," she murmured slowly, "you never, never, never meant it." He sat down, unmanned, on the grass by the bank. She seated herself by his side, mechanically as it were, with her hand on his arm, and looked straight in front of her with a vacant stare at the angry water. It was 96 THIS MORTAL COIL. growing dark. The shore was dark, and the sea, and the river. Everything was dark and black and gloomy around her. She laid his hand one moment in her own. "Hugh!" she cried, turning toward him with appealing pathos, "y u don't mean it now: you will never mean it. You're only saying it to try and prove me. Tell me it's that. You're yourself still. O Hugh, my darling, you can never mean it!'' Her words burnt into his brain like liquid fire; and the better self within him groaned and faltered; but he crushed it down with an iron heel. The demon of avarfce held his sordid soul. "My child," he said, with a tender inflection in his voice as he said it, "we must understand one another. I do seriously intend to marry Winifred Meysey." "Why?" There was a terrible depth of suppressed earnestness in that sharp short why, wrung out of her by anguish, as of a woman who asks the reason of her death-warrant. Hugh Massinger answered it slowly and awkwardly with cum- brous, round-about, self-exculpating verbosity. As for Elsie, she sat like a statue and listened: rigid and im- movable, she sat there still; while Hugh, for the very first time in her whole experience, revealed the actual man he really was before her appalled and horrified and speechless presence. He talked of his position, his pros- pects, his abilities. He talked of journalism, of the bar, of promotion. He talked of literature, of poetry, of fame. He talked of money, and its absolute need to man and woman in these latter days of ours. He talked of Wini- fred, of Whitestrand, and of the Meysey manor-house. "It'll be best in the end for us both, you know, Elsie," he said argumentatively, in his foolish rigmarole, mistaking her silence for something like unwilling acquiescence. "Of course I shall be very fond of you, as I've always been fond of you like a cousin only and I'll be a brother to you now as long as I live ; and when Winifred and I are really married, and I live here at Whitestrand, I shall be able to do a great deal more for you, and help you by every means in my power, and introduce you freely into our own circle, on different terms, you know, where you'll SHUFFLING IT OFF. 9? have chances of meeting well, suitable persons. You must see yourself it's the best thing for us both. The idea of two penniless people like you and me marrying one another in the present state of society is simply ridiculous." She heard him out to the bitter end, revealing the naked deformity of his inmost nature, though her brain reeled at it, without one passing word of reproach or dissent. Then she said in an icy tone of utter horror: "Hugh!" "Yes, Elsie." "Is that all?" "That is all." "And you mean it?" "I mean it." "Oh, for heaven's sake, before you kill me outright, Hugh, Hugh! is it really true? Are you realty like that? Do you really mean it?" "I really mean to marry Winifred." Elsie clasped her two hands on either side of her head, as if to hold it together from bursting with her agony. "Hugh," she cried, "it's foolish, I know, but I ask you once more, before it's too late, in sight of heaven, I ask you solemnly, are you seriously in earnest? Is that what you're made of? Are you going to desert me? To de- sert and betray me?" "I don't know what you mean," Hugh answered stonily, rising as if to go for he could stand it no longer. "I've never been engaged to you. I always told you so. I owe you nothing. And now I mean to marry Winifred." With a cry of agony, she burst wildly away from him. She saw it all now ; she understood to the full the cruelty and baseness of the man's innermost underlying nature. Fair outside; but false, false, false to the core! Yet even so, she could scarcely believe it. The faith of a lifetime fought hard for life in her. He, that Hugh she had so loved and trusted he, the one Hugh in all the universe he to cast her off with such callous selfishness! He to turn upon her now with his empty phrases! He to sell and betray her for a Winifred and a manor-house! Oh, the guilt and sin of it! Her head reeled and swam round deliriously. She hardly knew what she felt or did. Mad with agony, love, and terror, she rushed away headlong 98 THIS MORTAL COIL. from his polluted presence not from Hugh, but from this fallen idol. He saw her white dress disappearing fast through the deep gloom in the direction of the poplar- tree, and he groped his way after her, almost as mad as herself, struck dumb with remorse and awe and shame at the ruin he had visibly and instantly wrought in the fabric of that trustful girl's whole being. One moment she fled and stumbled in the dark along the grassy path toward the roots of the poplar. Then he caught a glimpse of her for a second, dimly silhouetted in the faint starlight, a wan white figure with outstretched arms against the black horizon. She was poising, irreso- lute, on the gnarled roots. It was but for the twinkling of an eye that he saw her; next instant, a splash, a gurgle, a shriek of terror, and he beheld her borne wildly away, a helpless burden, by that fierce current toward the break- ers that glistened whjte and roared hoarsely in their savage joy on the bar of the river. In her agony of disgrace, she had fallen, rather than thrown herself in. As she stood there, undecided, on the slippery roots, with all her soul burning within her, her head swimming and her eyes dim, a bruised, humil- iated, hopeless creature, she had missed her foothold on the smooth worn stump, slimy with lichens, and raising her hands as if to balance herself, had thrown herself for- ward half wittingly, half unconsciously, on the tender mercies of the rushing stream. When she returned for a moment, a little later, to life and thought, it was with a swirling sensation of many waters, eddying and seething in mad conflict round her faint numb form. Strange roaring noises thundered in her ear. A choking sensa- tion made her gasp for breath. What she drank in with her gasp was not air, but water salt, brackish water, an overwhelming flood of it. Then she sank again, and was dimly aware of the cold chill ocean floating around her on every side. She took a deep gulp, and with it sighed out her sense of life and action. Hugh was lost to her, and it was all over. She could die now. She had nothing to live for. There was no Hugh ; and she had not killed herself. Those two dim thoughts were the last she knew as her SINK OR SWIM. 99 eyes closed in the rushing current: there had never been a Hugh ; and she had fallen in by accident. CHAPTER XL SINK OR SWIM? Hugh was selfish, heartless, and unscrupulous; but he was not physically a coward, a cur, or a palterer. Without one second's thought, he rushed wildly down to the water's edge, and balancing himself for a plunge, with his hands above his head, on the roots of the big tree, he dived .boldly into that wild current, against whose terrific force he had once already struggled so vainly on the morn- ing of his first arrival at Whitestrand. Elsie had had but a few seconds' start of him; w r ith his powerful arms to aid him in the quest, he must surely overtake and save her before she could drown, even in that mad swirling tidal torrent. He flung himself on the water with all his force, and goaded by remorse, pity, and love for, after all, he loved her, he loved her he drew unwonted strength from the internal fires, as he pushed back the fierce flood on either side with arms and thews of feverish energy. At each strong push, he moved forward apace with the gliding current, and in the course of a few strokes he was already many yards on his way seaward from the point at which he had originally started. But his boots and clothes clogged his movements terribly, and his sleeves in particu- lar so impeded his arms that he could hardly use them to any sensible advantage. He felt conscious at once that, under such hampering conditions, it would be im- possible to swim for many minutes at a stretch. He must find Elsie and save her almost immediately, or both must go down and drown together. He wanted nothing more than to drown with her now. "Elsie, Elsie, my darling Elsie!" he cried aloud on the top of the wave. To lose Elsie was to lose everything. The sea was running high as he neared the bar, and Elsie had disappeared as if by magic. Even in that dark black water 100 THIS MORTAL COIL,. on that moonless night he wondered he couldn't catch a single glimpse of her white dress by the reflected star- light. But the truth was, the current had sucked her under sucked her under wildly with its irresistible force, only to fling her up again, a senseless burden, where sea and river met at last in fierce conflict among the roaring breakers that danced and shivered upon the shallow bar. He swam about blindly, looking round him on every side through the thick darkness with eager eyes for some glimpse of Elsie's white dress in a stray gleam of starlight ; but he saw not a trace of her presence anywhere. Groping and feeling his way still with numbed limbs, that grew weary and stiff with the frantic effort, he battled on through the gurgling eddy till he reached the breakers on the bar itself. There, his strength proved of no avail he might as well have tried to stem Niagara. The great waves, rolling their serried line against the stream from the land, caught him and twisted him about resistlessly, raising him now aloft on their foaming crest, dashing him now down deep in their hollow trough, and then fling- ing him back again over some great curling mountain of water far on to the current from which he had just emerged with his stout endeavor. For ten minutes or more he struggled madly against those titanic enemies; then his courage and his muscle failed together, and he gave up the unequal contest out of sheer fatigue and physical inability to continue it longer. It w r as indeed an awful and appalling situation. Alone there in the dark, whirled about by a current that no man could stem, and confronted with a rearing wall of water that no man could face, he threw himself wearily back for a moment at full length, and looked up in his anguish from his floating couch to the cold stars overhead, whose faint light the spray every instant hid from his sight as it showered over him from the curling crests of the great billows be- yond him. And it was to this that he had driven poor, innocent, trustful, wronged Elsie ! the one woman he had ever truly loved! the one woman who, with all the force of a profound nature profounder ten thousand times than his own had truly loved him ! Elsie was tossing up and down there just as hopelessly SINK OR SWIM. 101 now, no doubt. But Elsie had no pang of conscience added to torment her. She had only a broken heart to reckon with. He let himself float idly where wind and waves might happen to bear him. There was no help for it: he could swim no farther. It was all over, all over now. Elsie was lost, and for all the rest he cared that moment less than nothing. Winifred! He scorned and hated her very name. He might drown at his ease, for anything he would ever do himself to prevent it. The waves broke over him again and again. He let them burst across his face or limbs, and floated on, without endeavoring to swim or guide himself at all. Would he never sink? Was he to float and float and float like this to all eternity? Roar roar roar on the bar, each roar growing fainter and fainter in his ears. Clearly receding, receding still. The current was carrying him away from it now, and whirling him along in a black eddy, that set strongly southwestward toward the dike of the salt marshes. He let himself drift wherever it might take him. It took him back, back, back, steadily, till he saw the white crest of the breakers on the ridge extend like a long gray line in the dim distance upon the sea beyond him. He was well into safer water by this time: the estuary was only very rough here. He might swim if he chose. But he did not choose. He cared nothing for life, since Elsie was gone. In a sudden revulsion of wild despair, a frantic burst of hopeless yearning, he knew, for the first time in his whole life, now it was too late, how truly and deeply and intensely he had loved her. As truly and deeply as he was capable of loving anybody or anything on earth except himself. And that, after all, was nothing too much to boast of. Still, it was enough to overwhelm him for the moment with agonies of remorse and regret and pity, and to make him long just then and there for instant death, as the easiest escape from his own angry and accusing con- science. He wanted to die ; he yearned and prayed for it. But death obstinately refused to come to his aid. He turned himself round on his face now, and striking out just once with his wearied thighs, gazed away blankly 102 THIS MORTAL COIL. toward the foam on the bar, where Elsie's body must still be tossing in a horrible ghastly dance of death among the careering breakers. As he looked, a gleam of ruddy light showed for a second from a masthead just beyond the bar. A smack a smack! coming in to the river! The sight refilled him with a faint fresh hope. That hope was too like despair; but still it was something. He swam out once more with the spasmodic energy of utter despondency. The smack might still be in time to save Elsie ! He would make his way out to it, though it ran him down; if it ran him down, so much the better! he would shout aloud at the top of his voice, to outroar the breakers: "A lady is drowning! Save her! save her!" He struck out again with mad haste through the black current. This time, he had to fight against it with his wearied limbs, and to plough his way by prodigious efforts. The current was stronger, now 7 he came to face it, than he had at all imagined when he merely let himself drift on its surface. Battling with all his m'ight against the fierce swirls, he hardly seemed to make any headway at all through the angry water. His strength was almost all used up now; he could scarcely last till he reached the smack. Great heavens, what was this? She was turn- ing! she was turning! The surf was too much for her timbers to endure. She couldn't make the mouth of the creek. She was luffing seaward again, and it was all up, all up with Elsie. It was Warren Relf's yawl, bearing down from Lowes- toft, and trying for the first time to enter the river through the wall of breakers. Oh, if he had only lain right in her path just then, as she rode over the waves, that she might run him down and sink him forever, with his weight of infamy, beneath those curling billows! He could never endure to go ashore again and to feel that he had virtually murdered Elsie. Elsie, Elsie, poor murdered Elsie! He should hate to live, now he had murdered Elsie! And then, as he battled still fiercely with the tide, in a flash of his nerves, he felt suddenly a wild spasm of pain SINK OR SWIM. 103 seize on both his thighs, and an utter disablement affect his entire faculty of bodily motion. It was a paroxysm of cramp overwhelming inexpressible and it left him in one second powerless to move or think or act or plan, a mere dead log, incapable of anything but a cry of pain, and helpless as a baby in the midst of that cruel and un- heeding eddy. He flung himself back for dead on the water once more. A choking sensation seized hold of his senses. The sea was pouring in at his nostrils and his ears. He knew he was going, and he was glad to know it. He would rather die than live with that burden of guilt upon his black soul. The waves washed over his face in serried ranks. He didn't mind; he didn't struggle; he didn't try for one instant to save himself. He floated on, uncon- scious at last, back, slowly back, toward the bank of the salt marsh. When Hugh Massinger next knew anything, he was dimly conscious of lying at full length on a very cold bed, and fumbling with his fingers to pull the bed-clothes closer around him. But there was no bed-clothes, and every- thing about was soaking wet. He must be stretched in a pool of water, he thought so damp it was all round to the touch with a soft mattress or couch spread beneath him. He put out his hands to feel the mattress. He came upon mud, mud, deep layers of mud; all cold and slimy in the dusk of night. And then with a flash he remembered all Elsie dead! Elsie drowned! and knew he was stranded by the ebbing tide on the edge of the embankment. No hope of helping Elsie now. With a violent effort, he roused himself to consciousness, and crawled feebly on his knees to the firm ground. It was difficult work, floundering through the mud, with his numb limbs; but he floundered on, upon hands and feet, till he reached the shore, and stood at last, dripping with brine and crusted with soft slimy tidal ooze, on the broad bank of the moated dike that hemmed in the salt marshes from the mud-bank of the estuary. It was still dark night, but the moon had risen. He could hardly say what the time might be,- for his watch had stopped, of 104 THIS MORTAL, COIL. course, by immersion in the water; but he roughly guessed, by the look of the stars, it was somewhere about half-past ten. We have a vague sense of the lapse of time even during sleep or other unconscious states; and Hugh was certain he couldn't have been floating for much more than an hour or thereabouts. He gazed around him vaguely at the misty meadows. He was a mile or so from the village inn. The estuary, with its acrid flats of mud, lay between him and the hard at Whitestrand. Sheets of white surf still shimmered dimly on the bar far out to sea. And Elsie was lost lost to him irrevocably. He sat down and pondered on the bank for a while. Those five minutes were the turning-point of his life. What should he do and how comport himself under these sudden and awful and unexpected circumstances? Dazed as he was, he saw even then the full horror of the dilemma that hedged him in. Awe and shame brought him back with a rush to reason. If he went home and told the whole horrid truth, everybody would say he was Elsie's mur- derer. Perhaps they would even suggest that he pushed her in to get rid of her. He dared not tell it ; he dared not face it. Should he fly the village the county the country? That would be foolish and precipitate indeed, not to say wicked: a criminal surrender. All was not lost, though Elsie was lost to him. In his calmer mood, no longer heroic with the throes of despondency, sitting shivering there with cold in the keen breeze, between his dripping clothes, upon the bare swept bank, he said to himself many times over that all was not lost; he might still go back and marry Winifred. Hideous horrible ghastly inhuman : he reckoned even so his chances with Winifred. The shrewd wind blew chill upon his wet clothes. It bellowed and roared with hoarse groans round the stakes on the dike-sluices. His head was whirling still with asphyxia and numbness. He felt hardly in a condition to think or reason. But this was a crisis, a life-and-death crisis. He must pull himself together like a man, and work it all out, his doubtful course for the next three hours, or else sink for ever in a sea of obloquy, remem- SINK OR SWIM. 105 bered only as Elsie's murderer. Everything was at stake for him live or die. Should he jump once more into the cold wild stream or go home quietly like a sensible man, and play his hand out to marry Winifred? If he meant to go, he must go at once. It was no use to think of delaying or shilly-shallying. By eleven o'clock the inn would be closed. He must steal in, unperceived, by the open French window's before eleven, if he intended still to keep the game going. But he must have his plan of action definitely mapped out none the less beforehand; and to map it out, he must wait a moment still; he must sum up chances in this desperate emergency. Life is a calculus of varying probabilities. Was it likely he had been perceived at the Hall that evening? Did any- body know he had been walking with Elsie? He fancied not he believed not. He was certain not, now he came to think of it. Thank heaven, he had made the appointment verbally. If he'd written a note, that damning evidence might have been produced against him at the coroner's inquest. Inquest? Unless they found the body Elsie's body pah ! how horrible to think of but still, a man must steel himself to face facts, how- ever ghastly and however horrible. Unless they found the body, then, there would be no inquest; and if only things were managed well and cleverly, there needn't even be any inquiry. Unless they found the body Elsie's body poor Elsie's body, whirled about by the waves! But they would never find it they would never find it. The current had sucked it under at once, and carried it away careering madly to the sea. It would toss and whirl on the breakers for a while, and then sink unseen to the fathomless abysses of the German Ocean. He hated himself for thinking all this with Elsie drowned or not yet drowned even and yet he thought it, because he was not man enough to face the alternative. Had Elsie told any one she was going to meet him? No ; she wouldn't even tell Winifred of that, he was sure. She met him there often by appointment, it was true, but always quietly : they kept their meetings a profound secret between them. Had any one seen them that evening together? He 106 THIS MORTAL, COIL. couldn't remember noticing anybody. How shrill the wind blew through his dripping clothes. It cut him in two; and his head reeled still. No; nobody, nobody. He was quite safe upon that score at least Nobody knew he was out with Elsie. Could he go back, then, and keep it all quiet, saying nothing himself, but leaving the world to form its own conclusions? A sudden thought flashed in an intuitive moment across his brain. A Plan ! a Plan ! How hap- py! A Policy! He saw his way out of it all at once. He could set everything right by a simple method. Yes, that would do. It was bold, but not risky. He might go now : the scheme for the future was all matured. Nobody need ever suspect anything. A capital idea ! Honor was saved ; and he might still go back and marry Winifred. Elsie dead! Elsie drowned! The world lost, and his life a blank! But he might still go back and marry Winifred. He rose, and shook himself in the wind like a dog. The Plan was growing more definite and rounded in his mind each moment. He turned his face slowly toward the lights at Whitestrand. The estuary spread between him and them with its wide mud-flats. Cold and tired as he was, he must make at all speed for the point where it narrowed into the running stream near Snade meadows. He must swim the river there, with what legs he had left, and cross to the village. There was no time to be lost. It was neck or nothing. At all hazards, he must do his best to reach the inn before the doors were shut and locked at eleven. When he left the spot where he had been tossed ashore, his idea for the 'future was fully worked out. He ran along the bank with eager haste in the direction of White- strand. Once only did he turn and look behind him. A ship's light gleamed feebly in the offing across the angry sea. She was beating up against a head wind to catch the breeze outside toward Lowestoft or Yarmouth. THE PLAN IN EXECUTION. IK CHAPTER XII. THE PLAN IN EXECUTION. Hugh hurried along the dike that bounded the salt-marsh meadows seaward, till he reached the point in his march up where the river narrowed abruptly into a mere third- class upland stream. There he jumped in, and swam across, as well as he was able in the cold dark water, to the opposite bank. Once over, he had still to straggle as best he might through two or three swampy fields, and to climb a thickset hedge or two regular bullfinches before he fairly gained the belated little high-road. His head swam. Wet and cold and miserable without, he was torn within by conflicting passions; but he walked firm and erect now along the winding road in the deep gloom, fortunately never meeting a soul in the half-mile or so of way that lay between the point where he had crossed the stream and the Fisherman's Rest by the 'bank at White- strand. He was glad of that, for it was his cue now to escape observation. In his own mind, he felt himself a murderer; and every flicker of the wind among the honey-suckles in the hedge, every rustle of the leaves on the trees overhead, every splash of the waves upon the distant shore, made his heart flutter, and his breath stop short in response, though he gave no outer sign of fear or compunction in his even tread and erect bearing the even tread and erect bearing of a proud, self-confident, English gentleman. How lucky that his rooms at the inn happened to be placed on the ground-floor, and that they opened by French windows down to the ground on to the little garden! How luckily, too, that they lay on the hither side of the door and the taproom, where men were sitting late over their mug of beer, singing and rollicking in vul- gar mirth with their loud half-Danish, East-Anglian mer- riment! He stole through the garden on tiptoe, unper- ceived, and glided like a ghost into the tiny sitting-room. The lamp burned brightly on the parlor table, as it had burnt all evening, in readiness for his arrival. He slipped 108 THIS MORTAL COIL. quietly, on tiptoe still, into the bedroom behind, tossed off a stiff glassful of brandy-and-water cold, and changed his clothes from head to foot with as much speed and noiselessness as circumstances permitted. Then, tread- ing more easily, he went out once more with a bold front into the other room, flung himself down at his ease in the big armchair, took up a book, pretending to read, and rang the bell with ostentatious clamor for the good land- lady. His plan was mature; he would proceed to put it into execution. The landlady, a plentiful body of about fifty, came in with evident surprise and hesitation. "Lord a mussy, sar," she cried aloud in a slight flurry, "I thowt yow wor out; an' them min a-singin' and a-bellerin' like that cover there in the bar! Stannaway'll be some riled when he find yow're come in an' all that noise gooin' on in the house! 'Teen't respectable. But we din't hear ye. I hoop yow'll 'scuse 'em : they're oonly the fishermen from Snade, enjoyin' theirselves in the cool of the evenin'." Hugh made a manful effort to appear unconcerned. "I came in an hour ago or more," he replied, smiling a sugar-of-lead smile. "But, pray don't interfere with these good people's merriment for worlds, I beg of you. I should be sorry, indeed, if I thought I put a stopper upon anybody's innocent amusement anywhere. I don't want to be considered a regular kill-joy. I rang the bell, Mrs. Stannaway, for a bottle of seltzer." It was a simple way of letting them know he was really there; and though the lie about the length of time he had been home was a fairly audacious one for somebody might have come in meanwhile to trim the lamp, or look if he was about, and so detect the falsehood he saw at once, by Mrs. Stannaway's face, that it passed muster without rousing the slightest suspicion. "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 THE PLAN IN EXECUTION. 109 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 Mas- singer 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 sim- ple 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! Jacka- napes! 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 antici- pation. 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. 110 THIS MORTAL COIL. 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 for- ever 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 prob- ably be considered quite too affectionate for any reasonable probability. Even in emergencies he was cool and col- lected. But "My darling," was just about the proper mean. Girls are always stupidly gushing in their expres- sion of feeling to one another. No doubt Elsie herself would have begun, "My darling." THE PLAN IN EXECUTION. Ill After that, he turned over the letters with careful scru- tiny, 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 dar- ling 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 ap- probation 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; some- thing 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 where- abouts. 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 112 THIS MORTAL, COIL. 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 des- perate 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 con- fronted with the inconvenient detail of stern reality: but he had trusted everything to imagination. And imagi- nation 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 THE PLAN IN EXECUTION. 113 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 de- tect 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 in- quire for her. If so, nothing would be known till to-mor- row 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-mor- row. 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 postoffice 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 siign 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 114 THIS MORTAL COIL. 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 wistaria. He hesitated a mo- ment; then remorse and curiosity finally conquered. The romantic suggestion came to him, like a dream, in his fevered and almost delirous 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 con- tinued 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 sug- gestions. 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 fire- place. 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 WHAT SUCCESS. Ii5 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 them- selves that Hugh had murdered her. His own neck was the stke 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 gar- den 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 wistaria. 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 sur- prise. The servants' hall fluttered with unwonted excite- ment. 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 re- peated 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 116 THIS MORTAL COIL. 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 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 night- dress 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 night- dress-bags. Surprised and alarmed, Winifred rushed to the window: it was open still: a branch of the wistaria . 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 care- fully 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 1'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 game- keeper or a married clergyman." "Papa!" Winifred cried, laying down the letter in haste WHAT SUCCESS. 117 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 explana- tion 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 under- stand 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 oppo- sition. 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 Wini- fred's, the Squire felt sure, but with the gardener's son or with the under-gamekeeper. 118 THIS MORTAL COIL. Still, he felt distinctly relieved in his own mind when, at half-past ten, Hugh Massinger strolled idly in, a rose in his buttonhole and a smile on his face though a little lame of the left leg all unconscious, apparently, that anything out of the common had happened since last night at the great house. Hugh was one of the very finest and most finished actors then performing on the stage of social England; but even he had a difficult part to play that stormy morn- ing, and he went through his role, taking it altogether, with but indifferent success, though with sufficient candor to float him through unsuspected somehow. The cir- cumstances, indeed, were terribly against him. When he fell the night before from Elsie's window, he had bruised and shaken himself, already fatigued as he was by his desperate swim and his long unconsciousness; and it was with a violent effort, goaded on by the sense of absolute necessity alone, that he picked himself up, black bag and all, and staggered home, with one ankle strained, to his rooms at the Stannaways'. Once arrived there, after that night of terrors and manifold adventures, he locked away Elsie's belongings cautiously in a back cup- board incriminating evidence, indeed, if anything should ever happen to come out and flung himself half undressed at last in a fever of fatigue upon the bed in the corner. Strange to say he slept slept soundly. Worn out with overwork and exertion and faintness, he slept on peace- fully like a tired child, till at nine o'clock Mrs. Stannaway rapped hard at the door to rouse him. Then he woke with a start from a heavy sleep, his head aching, but drowsy still, and with feverish pains in all his limbs from his desperate swim and his long immersion. He was quite unfit to get up and dress; but he rose for all that, as if all was well, and even pretended to eat some breakfast, though a cup of tea was the only thing he could really gulp down his parched throat in his horror and excitement. Last night's events came clearly home to him now in their naked ghastliness, and with sinking heart and throbbing head, he realized the full extent of his guilt and his danger, the depth of his remorse, and the profundity of his foliy. Elsie was gone that was his first thought. There was WHAT SUCCESS. 119 no more an Elsie to reckon with in all this world. Her place was blank how blank he could never before have truly realized. The whole world itself was blank too. What he loved best in it all was gone clean out of it Elsie, Elsie, poor drowned, lost Elsie! His heart ached as he thought to himself of Elsie, gasping and struggling in that cold, cold sea, among those fierce wild breakers, for one last breath and knew it was he who had driven her, by his baseness and wickedness and cruelty, to that terrible end of a sweet young existence. He had darkened the sun in heaven for himself henceforth and forever. He had sown the wind, and he should reap the whirlwind. He hated himself; he hated Winifred; he hated everybody and everything but Elsie. Poor martyred Elsie! Beauti- ful Elsie! His own sweet, exquisite, noble Elsie! He would have given the whole world at that moment to bring her back again. But the past was irrevocable, quite irrevocable. There was nothing for a strong man now to do but to brace himself up and face the present. "If not, what resolution from despair?" That was all the comfort his philosophy could give him. Elsie's things were locked up in the cupboard. If sus- picion lighted upon him in any way now, it was all up with him. Elsie's bag and jewel-case and clothing in the cupboard would alone be more than enough to hang him. Hang him! What did he care any longer for hanging? They might hang him and welcome, if they chose to try. For sixpence he would save them the trouble, and drown himself. He wanted to die. It was fate that prevented him. Why hadn't he drowned when he might, last night? An ugly proverb that, about the man who is born to be hanged, etc., etc. Some of these proverbs are downright rude positively vulgar in the coarse simplicity and direct- ness of their language. He gulped down the tea with a terrible effort: it was scalding hot, and it burnt his mouth, but he scarcely noticed it. Then he pulled about the sole on his fork for a moment, to dirty the plate, and boning it roughly, gave the flesh to the cat, who ate it purring on the rug by the fireplace. He waited for a reasonable interval next before ringing the bell it takes a lone man ten minutes to break- 120 THIS MORTAL COIL. fast but as soon as that necessary time had passed, he put on his hat, crushing it down on his head, and with fiery sou! and bursting temples, strolled up, with the jauntiest air he could assume, to the Meyseys' after breakfast. Winifred met him at the front door. His new sweet- heart was pale and terrified, but not now crying. Hugh felt himself constrained to presume upon their novel rela- tions and insist upon a kiss she would expect it of him. It was the very first time he had ever kissed her, and, oh evil omen, it revolted him at last that he had now to do it with Elsie's body tossed about that very moment by the cruel waves upon that angry bar or on the cold sea-bottom. It was treason to Elsie to poor dead Elsie that he should ever kiss any other woman. His kisses were hers, his heart was hers, forever and ever. But what would you have? He looked on, as he had said, as if from above, at circumstances wafting his own character and their actions hither and thither wherever they willed and this was the pass to which they had now brought him. He must play out the game play it out to the end, whatever it might cost him. Winifred took the kiss mechanically and coldly, and handed him Elsie's letter his own forged letter without one word of preface or explanation. Hugh was glad she did so at the very first moment it allowed him to relieve himself at once from the terrible strain of the affected gaiety he w ? as keeping up just to save appearances. He couldn't have kept it up much longer. His countenance fell visibly as he read the note or pretended to read it, for he had no need really to glance at its words every word of them all now burnt into the very fibers and fabric of his being. "Why, what does this mean, Miss Meysey that is to say, Winifred?" he corrected himself hurriedly. "Elsie isn't gone? She's here this morning as usual, surely?'' As he said it he almost hoped it might be true. He could hardly believe the horrible, horrible reality. His face was pale enough in all conscience now a little too pale, per- haps, for the letter alone to justify. Winifred, eyeing him close, saw at a glance that he was deeply moved. "She's gone," she said, not too tenderly either. "She WHAT SUCCESS. 121 went away last night, taking her things with her at least some of them. Do you know where she's gone, Mr. Massinger? Has she written to you, as she promises?" "Not Mr. Massinger," Hugh corrected gravely, with a livid white face, yet affecting jauntiness. "It was agreed yesterday it should be 'Hugh' in future. No; I don't at all know where she is, Winifred; I wish I did." He said it seriously. "She hasn't written a single line to me." Hugh's answer had the very ring of truth in it for indeed it was true; and Winifred, watching him with a woman's closeness, felt certain in her own mind that in this at least he was not deceiving her. But he certainly grew unnecessarily pale. Cousinly affection would hardly account for so much disturbance of the vaso-motor system. She questioned him closely as to all that had passed or might have passed between them these weeks or earlier. Did he know anything of Elsie's movements or feelings? Hugh, holding the letter firmly in one hand, and playing with the key of that incriminating cupboard, in his waist- coat pocket, loosely with the other, passed with credit his examination. He had never, he said, with gay flippancy almost, been really intimate with Elsie, talked confidences with Elsie, or received any from Elsie in return. She did not know of his engagement to Winifred. Yet he feared, whatever her course might be, some man or other must be its leading motive. Perhaps but this with the utmost hesitation \Varren Relf and she might have struck up a love affair. He felt, of course, it was a serious ordeal. Apart from the profounder background of possible consequences the obvious charge of having got rid of Elsie two other unpleasant notions stared him full in the face. The first was, that the Meyseys might suspect him of having driven Elsie to run away by his proposal to Winifred. But sup- posing even then they never thought of that which was highly unlikely, considering the close sequence of the two events and the evident drift of Winifred's questions there still remained the second unpleasantness that his cousin, through whom alone he had been introduced to the familyy should have disappeared under such mys- terious circumstances. Was it likely they would wish 122 THIS MORTAL COIL. their daughter to marry a man among whose relations such odd and unaccountable things were likely to happen ? For, strangely enough, Hugh still wished to marry Winifred. Though he loathed her in his heart just then for not being Elsie, and even, by some illogical twist of thought, for having been the unconscious cause of Elsie's misfortunes; though he would have died himself far rather than lived without Elsie; yet, if he lived, he wished for all that to marry Winifred. For one thing, it was the programme; and because it was the programme, he wanted, with his strict business habits, to carry it out to the bitter end. For another thing, his future all depended upon it; and though he didn't care a straw at present for his future, he went on acting, by the pure force of habit in a prudent man, as deliberately and cautiously as if he had still the same serious stake in existence as ever. He wasn't going to chuck up everything all at once, just because life was now an utter blank to him. He would go on as usual in the regular groove, and pretend to the world he was still ever)' bit as interested and engaged in life as formerly. So he brazened things out with the Meyseys somehow, and to his immense astonishment, he soon discovered they were ready dupes, in no way set against him by this un- toward accident. On the contrary, instead of finding, as he had expected, that they considered this delinquency on the part of his cousin told against himself as a remote partner of her original sin, by right of heredity, he found the Squire and Mrs. Meysey nervously anxious for their part lest he, her nearest male relative, should suspect them of having inefficiently guarded his cousin's youth, inex- perience, and innocence. They were all apology, where he had looked for coldness; they were all on the defen- sive, where he had expected to see them vigorously carry- ing the war into Africa. One thing, above all others, he noted with profound satisfaction nobody seemed to doubt for one second the genuineness and authenticity of the forged letter. Whatever else they doubted, the letter was safe. They all took it fully for granted that Elsie had gone, of her own free-will, gone to the four winds, with no trace left of her; and that Hugh, in the perfect WHAT SUCCESS. 123 innocence of his heart, knew no more than they them- selves about it. Nothing else, of course, was talked of at Whitestrand that livelong day; and before night the gossips and quidnuncs of the village inn and the servants' hall had a complete theory of their own account for the episode. Their theory was simple, romantic, and improbable. It had the dearly beloved spice of mystery about it. The coastguard had noticed that a ship, name unknown, with a red light at the masthead and a green on the port bow, had put in hastily about nine o'clock the night before, near the big poplar. The Whitestrand cronies had mag- nified this fact before nightfall, through various additions of more or less fanciful observers or non-observers for fiction, too, counts for something into a consistent story of a most orthodox elopement. Miss Elsie had let herself down by a twisted sheet out of her own window, to escape observation some said a rope, but the majority voted for the twisted sheet, as more strictly in accordance with established precedent she had slipped away to the big tree, where a gentleman's yacht, from parts unknown, had put in cautiously, before a terrible gale, by previous ar- rangement, and had carried her over through a roaring sea across to the opposite coast of Flanders. Detail after detail grew apace ; and before long there were some who even admitted to having actually seen a foreign-looking gentleman in a dark cloak the cloak is a valuable ro- mantic property upon such occasions catch a white- robed lady in his stout arms as she leaped a wild leap into an open boat from the spray-covered platform of the gnarled poplar roots. Hugh smiled a grim and hideous smile of polite incredulity as he listened to these final imag- inative embellishments of the popular fancy; but he ac- cepted in outline the romantic tale as the best possible version of Elsie's disappearance for public acceptance. It kept the police at least from poking their noses too deep into this family affair, and it freed him from any possible tinge of blame in the eyes of the Meyseys. Nobody can be found fault with for somebody else's elopement. Two points at least seemed fairly certain to the Whitestrand intelligence: first, that Miss Elsie had run away of her 124 THIS MORTAL COIL. own accord,' in the absence of the family; and second, that she neither went by road nor rail, so that only the sea or river appeared to be left by way of a possible expla- nation. The Meyseys, of course, were less credulous as to detail ; but even the Meyseys suspected nothing serious in the matter. That Elsie had gone was all they knew; why she went, was a profound mystery to them. CHAPTER XIV. LIVE OR DIE? And all this time, what had become of Elsie and the men in the "Mud-Turtle?" Hugh Massinger, for his part, took it for granted, from the moment he came to himself again on the bank of the salt marshes, that Elsie's body was lying unseen full fathoms five beneath the German Ocean, and that no tangible evidence of his crime and his deceit would ever be forthcoming to prove the naked truth in all its native ugliness against him. From time to time, to be sure, one disquieting thought for a moment occurred to his uneasy mind: a back-current might perhaps cast up the corpse upon the long dike where he had himself been stranded, or the breakers on the bar might fling it ashore upon the great sands that stretched for miles on either side of the river mouth at Whitestrand. But to these terrible imaginings of the night-watches, the more judicial functions of his waking brain refused their assent on closer consideration. He himself had floated through that seething turmoil simply because he knew how to float. A woman, caught wildly by the careering current in its headlong course, would naturally give a few mad strug- gles for life, gasping and gulping and flinging up her hands, as those untaught to swim invariably do; but when once the stream had carried her under, she would never rise again from so profound and measureless a depth of water. He did not in any way doubt that the body had LIVE OR DIE? 125 been swept away seaward with irresistible might by the first force of the outward flow, and that it now lay huddled at the bottom of the German Ocean in some deep pool, whence dredge or diver could never by human means recover it. How differently would he have thought and acted all along had he only known that Warren Relf and his com- panion on the "Mud-Turtle" had found Elsie's body float- ing on the surface, a limp burden, not half an hour after its first immersion. That damning fact rendered all his bold precautions and daring plans for the future worse than useless. As things really stood, he was plotting and scheming for his own condemnation. Through the mere accident that Elsie's body had been recovered, he was heaping up sus- picious circumstantial evidence against himself by the forged letter, by the night escapade, by the wild design of entering Elsie's bedroom at the Hall, by the mad idea of concealing at his own lodgings her purloined clothes and jewelry and belongings. If ever an inquiry should come to be raised in the way that Elsie met her death, the very cunning with which Hugh had fabricated a false scent would recoil in the end most sternly against him- self. The spoor that he scattered would come home to track him. Could any one believe that an innocent man would so carefully surround himself with an enveloping atmosphere of suspicious circumstances out of pure wantonness? And yet, technically speaking, Hugh was in reality quite innocent. Murderer as he felt himself, he had done no murder. Morally guilty though he might be of the causes which led to Elsie's death, there was nothing of legal or formal crime to object against him in any court of so- called justice. Every man has a right to marry whom he will; and if a young woman with whom he has cau- tiously and scrupulously avoided contracting any definite engagement, chooses to consider herself aggrieved by his conduct, and to go incontinently, whether by accident or design, and drown herself in chagrin and despair and mis- ery, why, that is clearly no fault of his, however much she may regard herself as injured by him. The law has noth- 126 THIS MORTAL COIL. ing to do with sentiment. Judges quote no precedent from Shelley or Tennyson. If Hugh had told the whole truth, he would at least have been free from legal blame. By his extraordinary precautions against possible doubts, he had only succeeded in making himself seem guilty in the eyes even of the unromantic lawyers. When Warren Relf drew Elsie Challoner, a huddled mass, on board the "Mud-Turtle," the surf was rolling so high on the bar that, with one accord, he and Potts decided together it would be impossible for them, against such a sea, to run up the tidal mouth to Whitestrand. Their piteous little dot of a craft could never face it. Wind had veered to the southeast. The only way possible now was to head her round again, and make before the shifting breeze for Lowestoft, the nearest northward harbor of refuge. It was an awful moment. The sea roared onward through the black night; the cross-drift whirled and wreathed and eddied; the blinding foam lashed itself in volleys through the dusk and gloom against their quiver- ing broadside. And those two men, nothing daunted, drove the "Mud-Turtle" once more across the flank of the wind, and fronted her bows in a direct line for the port of Lowestoft, in spite of wind and sea and tempest. But how were they to manage meanwhile, in that toss- ing cockleshell of a boat, about the lady they had scarcely rescued? That Elsie was drowned, Warren Relf didn't for a moment doubt; still, in every case of apparent drowning it is the duty to make sure life is really extinct before one gives up all hope; and that duty was a dif- ficult one indeed to perform on board a tiny yawl, pitching and rolling before a violent gale, and manned against the manifold dangers of the sea by exactly two amateur sailors. But there was no help for it. The ship must drift with one mariner only. Potts did his best for the moment to navigate the dancing little yawl alone, now that they let her scud before the full force of the favoring wind, under little canvas; while Warren Relf, staggering and steady- ing himself in the cabin below, rolled the body round in nigs and blankets, and tried his utmost to pour a few drops LIVE OR DIE? 127 of brandy down the pale lips of the beautiful girl who lay listless and apparently lifeless before him. It was to him indeed a terrible task ; for from the first moment when the painter set eyes on Elsie Challoner, he had felt some nameless charm about her face and manner, some tender cadence in her musical voice, that affected him as no other face and no other voice had ever affected him or could ever affect him. He was not exactly in love with Elsie love with him was a plant of slower growth but he was fascinated, impressed, interested, charmed by her. And to sit there alone in that tossing cabin, with Elsie cold and stiff on the berth before him, was to him more utterly painful and unmanning than he could ever have imagined a week or two earlier. He did not doubt one instant the true story of the case. He felt instinctively in his heart that Hugh Massinger had shown her his inmost nature, and that this was the final and horrible result of Hugh's airy easy protestations. As he sat there, watching by the light of one oil lamp, and rubbing her hands and arms gently with his rough hard palms, he saw a sudden tumultuous movement of Elsie's bosom, a sort of gasp that convulsed her lungs a deep inspiration, with a gurgling noise; and then, like a flash, it was borne in upon him suddenly that all was not over that Elsie might yet be saved that she was still living. It was a terrible hour, a terrible position. If only they had had one more hand on board, one more person to help him with the task of recovering her! But how could he ever hope to revive that fainting girl, alone and un- aided, while the ship drifted on, single-handed, tossing and plunging before that stiffening breeze? He almost despaired of being able to effect anything. Yet life is life, and he would nerve himself up for it. He would try his best, and thank heaven this boisterous wind that roared through the rigging would carry them quick and safe to Lowestoft. His mother and sister were still there. If he once could get Miss Challoner safe to land, they might even now hope to recover her. Where there's life, there's hope. But what hope in the dimly lighted cabin of a toy yawl, 12 g THIS MORTAL, COIL. just fit for two hardy weather-beaten men to rough it hardly in, and pitching with wild plunges before as fierce a gale as ever ploughed the yeasty surface of the German Ocean? He rushed to the companion-ladder as well as he was able, steadying himself on his sea-legs by the rail as he went, and shouted aloud in breathless excitement: "Potts, she's alive! she's not drowned! Can you manage the ship anyhow still, while I try my best to bring her round again?" Potts answered back with a cheery: "All right. There's nothing much to do but to let her run. She's out of our hands, for good or evil. The admiral of the fleet could do no more for her. If we're swamped, we're swamped; and if we're not, we're running clear for Lowestoft har- bor. Give her sea-room enough, and she'll go anywhere. The storm don't live that'll founder the 'Mud-Turtle.' I'll land you or drown you, but anyhow I'll manage her." With that manful assurance satisfying his soul, Warren Relf turned back, his heart on fire, to the narrow cabin and flung himself once more on his knees before Elsie. A more terrible night was seldom remembered by the oldest sailors on the North Sea. Smacks were wrecked and colliers foundered, and a British gunboat, manned by the usual complement of scientific officers, dashed herself full tilt in mad fury against the very base of a first-class lighthouse; but the taut little "Mud-Turtle," true to her reputation as the stanchest craft that sailed the British channels, rode it bravely out, and battled her way tri- umphantly, about one in the morning, through the big waves that rolled up the mouth of Lowestoft harbor. Potts had navigated her single-handed amid storm and breakers, and \Varren Relf, in the cabin below, had almost succeeded in making Elsie Challoner open her eyes again. But as soon as the excitement of that wild race for life was fairly over, and the "Mud-Turtle" lay in calm water once more, with perfect safety, the embarrassing nature of the situation, from the conventional point of view, burst suddenly for the first time upon Warren Relf s astonished vision; and he began to reflect that for two young men to arrive in port about the small hours of the morning, LIVE OR DIE? 129 with a young lady very imperfectly known to either of them, lying in a dead faint on their cabin bunk, was, to say the least of it, a fact open to social and even to judicial misconstruction. It's all very well to say offhand, you picked the lady up in the German Ocean; but Society is apt to move the previous question, how did she get there? Still, something must be done with the uncovenanted passenger. There was nothing for it, Warren Relf felt, even at that late season of the night, but to carry the half- inanimate patient up to his mother's lodgings, and to send for a doctor to bring her round at the earliest possible opportunity. When Elsie was aware of herself once more, it was broad daylight; and she lay on a bed in a strange room, dimly conscious that two women whom she did not know were bending tenderly and lovingly over her. The elder, seen through a haze of half-closed eyelashes, was a sweet old lady with snow-white hair, and a gentle motherly ex- pression in her soft gray eyes: one of the few women who know how to age graciously "Whose fair old face grew more fair As Point and Flanders yellow." The younger girl was about Elsie's own time of life, who looked as sisterly as the other looked motherly; a pleas- ant-faced girl, not exactly pretty, but with a clear brown skin, a cheek like the sunny side of peaches, and a smile that showed a faultless row of teeth within, besides light- ing up and irradiating the whole countenance with a charming sense of kindliness and girlish innocence. In a single word it was a winning face. Elsie lay with her eyes half open, looking up at the face through her crossed eyelashes, for many minutes, not realizing in any way her present position, but conscious only, in a dimly pleased and dreamy fashion, that the face seemed to soothe and comfort and console her. Soothe and comfort and console her for what? She hardly knew. Some deep-seated pain in her inner na- ture some hurt she had had in her tenderest feelings a horrible aching blank and void. She remembered now 130 THIS MORTAL COIL. that something unspeakable and incredible had happened. The sun had grown suddenly dark iri heaven. She had been sitting by the waterside with dear Hugh as she thought of the name, that idolized name, a smile played for a moment faintly round the corners of her mouth ; and the older lady, still seen half unconsciously through the chink in the eyelids, whispered in an audible tone to the younger and nearer one: "She's coming round, Edie. She's wak- ing now. I hope, poor dear, she won't be dreadfully frightened, when she sees only two strangers by the bed beside her." "Frightened at you, mother," the other voice answered, soft and low, as in a pleasant dream. "Why, nobody on earth could ever be anything but delighted to w r ake up anywhere and find you, with your dear sweet old face, sitting by their bedside." Elsie, still peering with half her pupils only through the closed lids, smiled to herself once more at the gentle mur- mur of those pleasant voices, both of them tender and womanly and musical, and went on to herself placidly with her own imaginings. Sitting by the waterside with her dear Hugh dear, dear Hugh that prince of men. How handsome he was; and how clever, and how generous! And Hugh had begun to tell her something. Eh! but something! What was it? What was it? She couldn't remember; only she knew it was something terrible, something dis- astrous, something unutterable, something killing. And then she rushed away from him, mad with terror, toward the big tree, and Ah! It was an awful, heartbroken, heartrending cry. Com- ing to herself suddenly, as the whole truth flashed like lightning once more across her bewildered brain, the poor girl flung up her arms, raised herself wildly erect in the bed, and stared around her with a horrible vacant, mad- dened look, as if all her life were cut at once from under her. Both of the strangers recognized instinctively what that look meant. It was the look and the cry of a crushed life. If ever they had harbored a single thought of blame against that poor wounded, bleeding, torn heart for what LIVE OR DIE? 131 seemed like a hasty attempt at self-murder, it was dissi- pated in a moment by that terrible voice the voice of a goaded, distracted, irresponsible creature, from whom all- consciousness or thought of right and wrong, of life and death, of sense and movement, of motive and consequence, has been stunned at one blow by some deadly act of undeserved cruelty and unexpected wickedness. The tears ran unchecked in silent sympathy down the women's flushed cheeks. Mrs. Relf leaned over and caught her in her arms. "My poor child," she whispered, laying Elsie's head with moth- erly tenderness on her own soft shoulder, and soothing the girl's pallid white face with her gentle old hand, "cry cry, cry if you can! Don't hold back your tears; let them run, darling. It'll do you good. Cry, cry, my child we're all friends here. Don't be afraid of us." Elsie never knew, in the agony of the moment, where she was or how she came there; but nestling her head on Mrs. Relf's shoulder, and fain of the sympathy that gentle soul extended her so easily, she gave free vent to her pent-up passion, and let her bosom sob itself out in great bursts and throbs of choking grief; while the two women, who had never till that very morning seen her fair face, cried and sobbed silently in mute concert by her side for many, many minutes together. "Have you no mother, dear?" Mrs. Relf whispered through her tears at last; and Elsie, finding her voice with difficulty, murmured back in a choked and blinded tone: "I never knew my mother." "Then Edie and I will be mother and sister to you," the beautiful old lady answered, with a soft caress. "You mustn't talk any more now. The doctor would be very, very angry with me for letting you talk and cry even this little bit. But crying's good for one when one's heart's sore. I know, my child, your's is sore now. When you're a great deal better, you'll tell us all about it. Edie, some more beef-tea and brandy. We've been feeding you with it all night, dear, with a wet feather. You can drink a little, I hope, now. You must take a good drink, and lie back quietly." Elsie smiled a faint sad smile. The world was all lost 132 THIS MORTAL COIL. and gone for her now ; but still she liked these dear souls' sweet quiet sympathy. As Edie glided across the room noiselessly to fetch the cup, and brought it over and held it to her lips and made her drink, Elsie's eyes followed every motion gratefully. "Who are you?" she cried, clutching her new friend's plump soft hand eagerly. "Tell me where I am. Who brought me here? How did I get here?" "I'm Edie Relf," the girl answered in the same low sil- very voice as before, stooping down and kissing her. "You know my brother, Warren Relf, the artist whom you met at Whitestrand. You've had an accident you fell into the water from the shore at \Vhitestrand. And Warren, who was cruising about in his yawl, picked you up and brought you ashore here. You're at Lowestoft now. Mamma and I are here in lodgings. Nobody at Whitestrand knows anything about it yet, we believe. But, darling," and she held poor Elsie's hand tight at this, and whispered very low and close in her ear, "we think we guess all the rest too. We think we know how it all happened. Don't be afraid of us. You may tell it all to us by-and-by, when you're quite strong enough. Moth- er and I will do all we can to make you better. \Ve know we can never make you forget it." Elsie's head sank back on the pillow. It was all terri- ble terrible terrible. But one thought possessed her whole nature now. Hugh must think she was really drowned: that would grieve Hugh dear affectionate Hugh. He might be cruel enough to cast her off as he had done though she couldn't believe it it must surely be a hideous, hideous dream, from which sooner or later she would be certain to have a happy awakening but at any rate it must have driven him wild with grief and re- morse and horror to think he had killed her to think she was lost to him. Oughtn't she to telegraph at once to Hugh to dear, dear Hugh and tell him at least she was saved, she was still living? THE PLAN EXTENDS ITSELF. 133 CHAPTER XV. THE PLAN EXTENDS ITSELF. For three or four days Elsie lay at the Relfs' lodgings at Lowestoft, seriously ill, but slowly improving; and all the -time, Mrs. Relf and Edie watched over her tenderly with unceasing solicitude, as though she had been their own daughter and sister. Elsie's heart was torn every moment by a devouring desire to know what Hugh had done, what Hugh was doing, what they had all said and thought about her at Whitestrand. She never said so directly to the Relfs, of course ; she couldn't bring herself yet to speak of it to anybody; but Edie perceived it in- tuitively from her silence and her words; and after a time, she mentioned the matter in sisterly confidence to her brother Warren. They had both looked in the local papers for some account of the accident if accident it were and saw, to their surprise, that no note was taken anywhere of Elsie's sudden disappearance. This was curious, not to say ominous; for in most English country villages a young lady cannot vanish into space on a summer evening, especially by flinging herself bodily into the sea as Warren Relf did not doubt for a second Elsie had done in the momentary desperation of a terrible awakening without exciting some sort of local curiosity as to where she has gone or what has become of the body. We cannot emulate the calm social atmos- phere of the Bagdad of the Califs, where a mysterious dis- appearance on an enchanted carpet aroused but the faintest and most languid passing interest in the breasts of the bystanders. With us, the enchanted carpet explanation has fallen out of date, and mysterious disappearances, how- ever remarkable, form a subject rather of prosaic and pry- ing inquiry on the part of those commonplace and unro- mantic myrmidons, the county constabulary. So the strange absence of any allusion in the White- strand news to what must needs have formed a nine days' wonder in the quiet little village, quickened all Warren Relfs profoundest suspicions as to Hugh's procedure. 134 THIS MORTAL COIL. At Whitestrand, all they could possibly know was that Miss Challoner was missing perhaps even that Miss Challoner had drowned herself. Why should it all be so unaccountably burked, so strangely hushed up in the local newspapers? Why should no report be divulged anywhere? Why should nobody even hint in the "Lowes- toft Times" or the "Ipswich Chronicle" that a young lady, of considerable personal attractions, was unaccountably missing from the family of a well-known Suffolk land- owner? Already on the very day after his return to Lowestoft, W^arren Relf had hastily telegraphed to Hugh Massinger at Whitestrand that he was detained in the Broads, and would be unable to carry out his long-standing engage- ment to take him round in the "Mud-Turtle" to London. But as time went on, and no news came from Massinger, Warren Relf's suspicions deepened daily. It was clear that Elsie, too, was lingering in her convalescence from suspense and uncertainty. She couldn't make up her mind to write either to Hugh or Winifred, and yet she couldn't bear the long state of doubt which silence entailed upon her. So at last, to set to rest their joint fears, and to make sure what was really being said and done and thought at Whitestrand, Warren Relf determined to run over quietly for an afternoon's inquiry, and to hear with his own ears how people were talking about the topic of the hour in the little village. He never got there, however. At Almundham Station, to his great surprise, he ran suddenly against Mr. Wyville Meysey. The Squire recognized him at a glance as the young man who had taken them in his yawl to the sand- hills, and began to talk to him freely at once about all that had since happened in the family. But Relf was even more astonished when he found' that the subject which lay uppermost in Mr. Meysey's mind just then was not Elsie Challoner's mysterious disappearance at all, but his daughter Winifred's recent engagement to Hugh Massinger. The painter was still some years too young to have mastered the profound anthropological truth that, even with the best of us, man is always a self-centered being. THE PLAN EXTENDS ITSELF. 135 "Well, yes," the Squire said, after a few commonplaces of conversation had been interchanged between them. ''You .haven't heard, then, from your friend Massinger lately, haven't you? I'm surprised at that. He had some- thing out of the common to communicate. I should have thought he'd have been anxious to let you know at once that he and my girl Winifred had hit things off amicably together. Oh yes, it's announced, definitely announced: Society is aware of it. Mrs. Meysey made it known to the county, so to speak, at Sir Theodore Sheepshanks' on Wednesday evening. Your friend Massinger is not perhaps quite the precise man we might have selected ourselves for Winifred, if we'd taken the choice into our own hands: but what I say is, let the young people settle these things themselves let the young people settle them between them. It's they who've got to live with one another, after all, not we; and they're a great deal more interested in it at bottom, when one comes to think of it, than the whole of the rest of us put together." "And Miss Challoner?" Warren asked, as soon as he could edge in a word conveniently, after the Squire had dealt from many points of view all equally prosy with Hugh Massinger's position, character, and prospects "is she still with you? I'm greatly interested in her. She made an immense impression on me that dav in the sand- hills." The Squire's face fell somewhat. "Miss Challoner?" he echoed. "Ah, yes; our governess. Well, to tell you the truth if you ask me point-blank Miss Challoner's gone off a little suddenly. We've been disappointed in that girl, if you will have it. We don't want it talked about in the neighborhood more than we can help, on Hugh Massinger's account, more than anything else, be- cause, after all, she was a sort of a cousin of his a sort of a cousin, though a very remote one; as we learn now, an extremely remote one. We've asked the servants to hush it all up as much as they can, to prevent gossip ; for my daughter's sake, we'd like to avoid gossip ; but I don't mind telling you, in strict confidence, as you're a friend of Massinger's, that Miss Challoner left us, we all think, in a most unkind and ungrateful manner. It fell upon 136 THIS MORTAL COIL. us like a thunderbolt from a clear sky. She wrote a letter to Winifred the day before to say she was leaving for parts unknown, without grounds stated. She -slipped away, like a thief in the night, as the proverb says, taking just a small handbag with her, one dark evening; _and the only other communication we've since received is a telegram from London sent to Hugh Massinger asking us, in the most mysterious, romantic school-girlish style, to forward her luggage and belongings to an ad- dress given." "A telegram from London!" Warren Relf cried in blank surprise. "Do you think Miss Challoner's in London, then? That's very remarkable. A telegram to Mas- singer! asking you to send her luggage on to London! You're quite sure it came from London, are you?" "Quite sure! Why, I've got it in my pocket this very moment, my dear sir," the Squire replied somewhat test- ily. (W T hen an elder man says "My dear sir" to a very much younger one, you may take it for granted he always means to mark his strong disapprobation of the particular turn the talk has taken.) "Here it is look: To Hugh Massinger, Fisherman's Rest, \Vhitestrand, Suffolk. Ask Winifred to send the rest of my luggage and property to 27, Holmbury Place, Duke Street, St. James'. Expla- nations by post hereafter. Elsie Challoner.' And here's the letter she wrote to Winifred: a very disappointing, disheartening letter. .I'd like you to read it, as you seem interested in the girl. It's an immense mistake ever to be interested in anybody anywhere! A very bad lot, after all, I'm afraid; though she's clever, of course, undeniably clever. We had her with the best credentials, too, from Girton. We're only too thankful now to think she should have associated for so very short a time with my daughter Winifred." Warren Relf took the letter and telegram from the Squire's hand in speechless astonishment. This was evi- dently a plot a dark and extraordinary plot of Mas- singer's. Just at first he could hardly unravel its curious intricacies. He knew the address in Holmbury Place well; it was where the club porter of the Cheyne Row lived. But he read the letter with utter bewilderment. THE PLAN EXTENDS ITSELF. 137 Then the whole truth dawned piecemeal upon his aston- ished mind as he read it over and over slowly. It was all a lie a hideous, hateful lie. Hugh Massinger believed that Elsie was drowned. He had forged the letter to Winifred to cover the truth, and, incredible as it seemed to a straightforward, honest nature like Warren Relf's, he had managed to get the telegram sent from London by some other person, in Elsie's name, and to have Elsie's belongings forwarded direct to the club porter's, as if at her own request, by Miss Meysey. Warren Relf stood aghast with horror at this unexpected revelation of Mas- singer's utter baseness and extraordinary cunning. He had suspected the man of heartlessness and levity; he had never suspected him of anything like so profound a capacity for serious crime for forgery and theft and con- cealment of evidence. His fingers trembled as he held and examined the two documents. At all hazards, he must show them to Miss Challoner. It was right she should know herself for exactly what manner of man she had thrown herself away. He hesitated a moment, then he said boldly: "These papers are very important to me, as casting light on the whole matter. I'm an acquaintance of Massinger's, and I'm deeply interested in the young lady. It's highly de- sirable she should be traced and looked after. I have some reason to suspect where she is at present I want to ask a favor of you now. Will you lend me these docu- ments, for three days only, and will you kindly mention to nobody at present the fact of your having seen me or spoken to me here this morning?" To gain time at least was always something. The Squire was somewhat taken aback at first by this unexpected request; but Warren Relf looked so honest and true as he asked it, that, after a few words of hesita- tion and explanation, the Squire, convinced of his friendly intentions, acceded to both his propositions at once. It flashed across his mind as a possible solution that the painter had been pestering Elsie with too-pressing atten- tions, and that Elsie, with hysterical girlish haste, had run away from him to escape them or perhaps only to make him follow her. Anyhow, there would be no great 138 THIS MORTAL COIL. harm in his tracking her down. "If the girl's in trouble, and you think you can help her," he said good-naturedly, "I don't mind giving you what assistance I can in this matter. You can have the papers. Send them back next week or the week after. I'm going to Scotland for a fortnight's shooting now at Farquharson's of Invertanar and I shan't be back till the loth or i ith. But I'm glad somebody has some idea where the girl is. As it seems to be confidential, I'll ask no questions at present about her; but I do hope she hasn't got into any serious mis- chief." "She has got into no mischief at all of any sort," War- ren Relf answered slowly and seriously. "You are evi- dently laboring under a complete misapprehension, Mr. Meysey, as to her reasons for leaving you. I have no doubt that misapprehension will be cleared up in time. Miss Challoner's motives, I can assure you, were perfectly right and proper; only the action of another person has led you to mistake her conduct in the matter." This was mysterious, and the Squire hated mystery; but after all, it favored his theory and besides, the matter was to him a relatively unimportant one. It didn't concern his own private interest. He merely suspected Warren Relf of having got himself mixed up in some foolish love affair with Elsie Challoner, his daughter's governess, and he vaguely conceived that one or other of them had taken a very remarkable and romantic way of wriggling out of it. Moreover, at that precise moment his train came in; and since time and train wait for no man, the Squire, with a hasty farewell to the young painter, installed himself forthwith on the comfortable cushions of a first-class car- riage, and steamed unconcernedly out of Almundham Station. It was useless for Warren Relf now to go on to White- strand. To show himself there would be merely to display his hand openly before Hugh Massinger. The caprice of circumstances had settled everything for him exactly as he would have wished it. It was lucky indeed that' the Squire would be away for a whole fortnight; his absence would give them time to concert a connected plan of ac- tion, and to devise means for protecting Elsie. For to FROM INFORMATION RECEIVED. 139 Warren Relf that was now the one great problem in the case how to hush the whole matter up, without expos- ing Elsie's wounded heart to daws and jays without making her the matter of unnecessary suspicion, or the subject of common gossip and censorious chatter. At all costs, it must never be said that Miss Challoner had tried to drown herself in spite and jealousy at Whitestrand poplar, because Hugh Massinger had ventured to propose to Winifred Meysey. That was how the daws and jays would put it, after their odious kind, over the five o'clock tea, in their demure drawing-rooms. What Elsie herself would say to it all, or think of doing in these difficult circumstances, Warren Relf did not in the least know. As yet, he was only very imperfectly in- formed as to the real state of the case in all its minor details. But he knew this much that he must screen Elsie at all hazards from the slanderous tongues of five o'clock tea-tables, and that the story must be kept as quiet as possible, safeguarded by himself, his mother, and his sister. So he took the next train back to Lowestoft, to consult at leisure on these new proofs of Hugh Massinger's guilt with his domestic counselors. CHAPTER XVI. FROM INFORMATION RECEIVED. At Whitestrand itself, that same afternoon, Hugh Mas- singer sat in his own little parlor at the village inn, feverish and eager, as he had always been since that terrible night when "Elsie was drowned," as he firmly believed without doubt or question; and in the bar across the passage, a couple of new-comers, rough waterside characters, were talking loudly in the seafaring tongue about some matter of their own over a pint of beer and a pipe of tobacco. Hugh tried in vain for many minutes to inter- est himself in the concluding verses of his "Death of Alaric" anything for an escape from this gnawing re- 140 THIS MORTAL COIL. morse but his Hippocrene was dry, his Pegasus refused to budge a feather: he could find no rhymes and grind out no sentiments; till, angry with himself at last for his own unproductiveness, he leaned back in his chair with profound annoyance and listened listlessly to the strange disjointed echoes of gossip that came to him in fragments through the half-open door from the adjoining taproom. To his immense surprise, the talk was not now of top- sails or of spinnakers : conversation seemed to have taken a literary turn; he caught more than once through the haze of words the unexpected names of Charles Dickens and Rogue Riderhood. The oddity of their occurrence in such company made him prick up his ears. He strained his hearing to catch the context. "Yis," the voice was drawling out, in very pure Suffolk, just tinged with the more metropolitan Wapping accent; "I read that there book, 'Our Mutual Friend/ I think he call it. A mate o' mine, he say to me one day, 'Bill,' he say, 'he ha' bin a-takin' yow off, bor. He ha' showed yow up in print, under the naame o' Roogue Ridenhood,' he say, 'and yow owt to read it, if oonly for the likeness. Blow me if he heen't got yow what ye call proper.' 'Yow don't mean that?' I say, 'cos I thowt he was a- jookin', ye know. 'I dew, though,' he answer; 'and yow must look into it.' Well, I got howd o' the book, an' I read it right throu'; leastways, my missus, she read it out loud to me; she ha' got more larnin' than me, ye know; and the whool lot is what I call a bargain o' squit. It's noo more like me than chalk's like cheese." "The cap doon't fare to fit yow, then," the other voice retorted, with a gurgle of tobacco. "He heen't drew yow soo any one would know who it is?" "Know me? I should think not. What he say 's a parcel of rubbidge. This here Roogue Ridenhood, ac- cordin' to the tale, ye see, he used to row about Limehouse Reach, a-searchin' for bodies." "Searchin' for bodies!" the second man repeated, with an incredulous whiff. "Why, what, the deuce and turfy did he want to do that for?" "Well, that's jest where it is, doon't ye see? He done FROM INFORMATION RECEIVED. 141 it for a livin'. 'For a livin', I say, when my missus up an' read that part out to me ; 'why, what manner o' livin' could a poor beggar make out o' that?' I say. 'It een't as though a body was wuth anything nowadays, as a body/ I say, argifyin' like. 'A man what knew anything about the riverside wouldn't a wroot such rubbidge as that, an' put it into a printed book, what ought to be ackerate. My belief is,' I say, 'that that there Dickens is an overrated man. In fact, the man's a fule. A body nowadays, whether it be a drownded body or a nat'ral one, een't wuth nothin', not the clothes it stand upright in, as a body,' I put it. Times goon by,' I say to har, 'a body was actshally a body, an' wuth savin' for itself, afore body-snatchin' was done away wooth by that there 'Xatamony Act. But what is it now? Wuth half a crown for landin' it, paid by the parish, if it's landed in Essex, or five bob if yow tow it cover Surrey side of river. Not but what I grant yow there's bodies an' bodies. If a nob drownd hisself, why then, in course, there's sometimes as much as fifty pound, or maybe a hundred, set on the body. His friends are glad to get the corpse back, an' prove his death, an' hev it buried reglar in the family churchyard. Saves a deal in lawyer's expenses, that do. I doon't deny but what they offer free enough for a nob. But how many nobs goo and drownd theirselves in a season, do yow suppose? And w r ho that knew anything about the river would goo a-lookin' for nobs in Limehouse Reach or down about Bermondsey way?'" "It stand to reason they woon't, Bill," the other voice answered with a quiet chuckle. "In course it stand to reason," Bill replied warmly with an emphatic expletive. "When a nob drownd hisself, he doon't hull hisself off London Bridge ; no, nor off Black- friars nather, I warrant ye. He doon't put hisself out aforehand for nothin' like that, takin' a 'bus into the city out o' pure fulishness. He jest clap his hat on his hid an' stroll down to Westminster Bridge, or to Charen Cross or Waterloo a lot on 'em goo cover Waterloo, pleece or no pleece ; an' he jump in cloose an' handy to his own door, in a way of speakin', and a done wooth it. But what's the use of lookin' for him arter that below bridge, 142 THIS MORTAL COIL. down Limehouse way? Anybody what know the river know well enough that a body startin' from Waterloo, or maybe from Westminster, doon't goo down to Limehouse, ebb or flow, nor nothin' like it. It get into the whirlpool off Saunders' wharf, an' ketch the back-current, and turn round and round till it's flung up by the tide, as yow may say, upward, on the mud at Milbank, or by Lambeth Stangate. Soo there een't a livin' to be made anyhow by pickin' up bodies down about Limehouse; an' it's allus been my opinion ever since then that that there Dickens is a very much ooverrated pusson." "There een't the least doubt about that," the other an- swered. "If he said soo, yow can't be far wrong there nather." To Hugh Massinger, sitting apart in his own room, these strange scraps of an alien conversation had just then a ghastly and horrible fascination. These men were ac- customed, then, to drowned corpses! They were con- noisseurs in drowning. They knew the ways of bodies like regular experts. He listened, spellbound, to catch their next sentences. There was a short pause, during which as he judged by the way they breathed each took a long pull at the pewter mug, and then the last speaker began again. "Yow owt to know," he murmured mus- ingly, "for I s'pose there een't any man on the river any- where what 'a had to do wooth as many bodies as yow hev!" "Yow're right, bor," the first person assented emphatic- ally. "Thutty year I ha' sarved the Trinity House, sun- shine or rain, an' yow doon't pervision lightships that long woothout larnin' a thing or two on the way about corpsus. The current carry 'em all one way round. A body what start on its jarney at Westminster, as it may be here, goo ashore at Milbank. A body which begin at London Bridge, come out, as reglar as clockwuck, on the fuddcr ind o' the Isle o' Dogs. It's jest the same along this here east coost. I picked up that gal I ha' come about to-day on the north side o' the Orfordness Light, by tfie back o' the Trinity groin or cloose by. A body which come up on the north side of Orfordness has allus drifted down from the nor'-west'ard. Soo it stand to FROM INFORMATION RECEIVED. 143 reason this here gal I ha' got layin' up there in the dead- house must ha' come wooth the ebb from Walzerwig or Aldeburgh or maybe Whitestrand. There een't another way out of it anyhow. Well, they towd me at Walzerwig there was a young lady missin' cover here at Whitestrand a young lady from the Hall a nob, niver doubt: an' as there might be money in it, or agin there mightn't, why, in course, I come up here to make all proper inquiries." Hugh Massinger's heart gave a terrible bound. Oh, heavens! that things should have come to this pass. That wretch had found Elsie's body! In what a tangled maze of impossibilities had he en- meshed himself forever by that one false step of the forged letter. This wretch had found Elsie's body the body that he loved with all his soul and he could neither claim it himself nor look upon it, bury it nor show the faintest interest in it, without involving his case still further in endless complications, and rousing suspicions of fatal import against his own character. He waited breathlessly for the next sentence. The sec- ond speaker went on once more. "And it doon't fit?" he suggested inquiringly. "No, it doon't fit, drot it," the man called Bill answered in an impatient tone./'She een't drownded at all, wuss luck, the young lady what's missin' from the Hall. They ha' had letters an' talegraphs from har, dated later'n the day I found har. I ha' handed oover the body to the county pleece; it's in the dead-house at the Low Light: an' I shan't hev noo more than half a crown from the parish arter all for all my trouble. Suffolk an' Essex are half-a-crown counties; Surrey's more liberal; it goo to five bob on 'em. Why, I'm more'n eight shillin's out o' pocket by that there gal a'ready, what wooth loss o' time an' travelin' expenses an' soo on. Next time I ketch a body knockin' about on a lee shore, wooth the tide run- nin', an' the breakers poundin' it on its face on the shingle, they may whistle for it theirselves, that's what they may doo; I een't a-gooin' to trouble my hid about it. Make a livin' out on it, indeed! Why, it's all rubbidge, nothin' more or less. It's my opinion that there Dickens is a very much ooverrated pusson." 144 THIS MORTAL COIL. Hugh Massinger rose slowly, like one stunned, walked across the room, as in a dream, to the door, closed it noise- lessly, for he could contain himself no longer, and then, burying his face silently in his arms, cried to himself a long and bitter cry, the tears following one another hot and fast down his burning cheeks, while his throat was choked by a rising ball that seemed to check his breath and impede the utterance of his stifled sobs. Elsie was dead, dead for him as if he had actually seen her drowned body cast up, unknown, as the man so hideously and graphically de- scribed it in his callous brutality, upon the long spit of the Orfordness lighthouse. He didn't for one moment doubt that it was she indeed whom the fellow had found and placed in the mortuary. His own lie reacted fatally against himself. He had put others on a false track, arid now the false track misled his own spirit. From that d;iy forth, Elsie was indeed dead, dead, dead for him. Alive in reality, and for all else save him, she was dead for him as though he had seen her buried. And yet, most terrible irony of all, he must still pretend before all the world strenuously and ceaselessly to believe her living. He must never in a single forgetful moment display his grief and remorse for the past; his sorrow for the loss of the one woman he had really loved and basely betrayed; his profound affection for her now she was gone and lost to him forever. He dare not even inquire for the pres- ent at least where she would be laid, or what would be done with her poor dishonored and neglected corpse. It must be buried, unheeded, in a pauper's nameless grave, by creatures as base and cruel as the one who had discov- ered it tossing on the shore, and regarded it only as a lucky find to make half a crown out of. Hugh's inmost soul was revolted at the thought. And yet And yet, even so, he was not man enough to go boldly down to Orfordness and claim and rescue that sacred corpse, as he truly and firmly believed it to be, of Elsie Challoner's. He meant still in his craven soul to stand well with the world, and to crown his perfidy by marrying Winifred. BREAKING A HEART. 145 CHAPTER XVII. BREAKING A HEART. When Warren Relf returned to Lowestoft, burning with news and eager at his luck, his first act was to call his sister Edie hurriedly out of Elsie's room, and proceed to a consultation with her upon the strange evidence he had picked up so unexpectedly at Almundham Station. Should they show it to Elsie, or should they keep it from her? That was the question. Fortune had indeed fa- vored the brave ; but how now to utilize her curious infor- mation? Should they let that wronged and suffering girl see the utter abysses of human baseness yawning in the man she once loved and trusted, or should they sedulously and carefully hide it all from her, lest they break the bruised reed with their ungentle handling? Warren Relf himself, after thinking it over in his own soul all the way back to Lowestoft in his third-class carriage was almost in favor now of the specious and futile policy of conceal- ment. Why needlessly harrow the poor child's feelings? Why rake up the embers of her great grief? Surely she had been wounded and lacerated enough already. Let her rest content with what she knew so far of Massinger's cruel and treacherous selfishness. But Edie met this plausible reasoning, after a true woman's fashion, with an emphatic negative. She stood out for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, come what might of it. "Why?" Warren asked with a relenting eye. "Because," Edie answered, looking up at him reso- lutely, "it would be better she should get it all over at once. It's like pulling a tooth one wrench, and be done with it! What a pity she should spend her whole life long in mourning and wailing over this wicked man, who isn't and never was in any way worthy of her! Warren, she's a dear, sweet, gentle girl: She takes my heart. I love her dearly already. She'll mourn and wail for him enough anyhow. I want to disenchant her as much as 146 MIS MOftf AL COIL. I can before it's too late. The sooner she learns to hate and despise him as he deserves, the better for everybody." "Why?" Warren asked once more, with a curious side- glance. "Because," Edie went on, very earnestly, "she may some day meet some other better man, who could make her ten thousand times happier as his wife, than this wretched, sordid, money-hunting creature could ever make any one. If we disenchant her at once, without remorse, it'll help that better man's case forward whenever he presents him- self. If not She paused significantly. Their eyes met; Warren's fell. They understood one another. "But isn't it selfish?" Warren asked wistfully. Edie looked up at him with a profoundly meaningless expression on her soft round face. "Selfish!" she cried, making her mouth small. "I don't understand you. What on earth has selfishness to do with it any way? Nobody spoke about any particular truer and better man. You jump too quick. I merely laid on a young man in the abstract From the point of view of a young man in the abstract, I'm sure I'm right, absolutely right. I al- ways am. It's a way I have, and I can't help it." "Besides which," Warren Relf interposed suddenly, "if Massinger really did write that forged letter, she'll have to arrange something about it, you see, sooner or later. She'll want to set herself right with the Meyseys, of course, and she'll probably make some sort of represen- tation or proposition to Massinger." "She'll do nothing of the kind, my dear," Edie an- swered promptly with brisk .confidence. "You're a goose, Warren, and you don't one tiny little bit understand the in- ferior creatures. You men always think you know in- stinctively all about women, and can read us through and through at a single glance, as if we were large print on a street-poster; while, as a matter of fact, you never really see an inch deep below the surface. I'll tell you what she'll do, you great blind creature: she'll accept the forgery as if it were in actual fact her own letter; she'll never write a word, for good or for evil, to contradict it or confirm it, to any of these horrid Whitestrand people; shell allow this hateful wretch Massinger to go on be- BREAKING A HEART. 147 Having she's really dead ; and she'll cease to exist, as far as he's concerned, in a passive sort of way, henceforth and forever." "Will she?" Warren Relf asked dubiously. "How on earth do you know what she'll do, Edie?" "Why, what else on earth could she do, silly?" his sister answered, with the same perfect conviction in her own inbred sagacity and perspicacity as ever. "Could she go and say to him, with tears in her eyes and a becoming smile on her pretty little lips : 'My own heart's darling, I love you devotedly and I know you signed my name to that forged letter?' Could she fling herself on these Mox- ies, or Mumpsies, or Mixies, or Meyseys, or whatever else you call them, and say sweetly: 'I didn't run away from you; I wasn't in earnest? I only tried ineffectually to drown myself, for love of this dear, sweet, charming, poet- ical cousin of mine, who disgracefully jilted me in order to propose to your own daughter; and then, believing me to have killed myself for shame and sorrow, has trumped up letters and telegrams in my name, of malice prepense, on purpose to deceive you. He's a mean scoun- drel, and I hate his very name; and I want him for myself; so I won't allow him to marry your Winifred, or w r hat- ever else her precious new-fangled high-faluting name may be.' Could any woman on earth so utterly efface herself and her own womanliness as to go and say all that, do you suppose, to anybody anywhere? You may think so in your heart, I dare say, my dear boy; but you won't get a solitary woman in the world to agree with you on the point for one single minute." The painter drew his hand slowly across his cold brow. "I suppose you're right, Edie," he answered, bewildered. "But what'll she do with herself, then, I wonder?" "Do?" Edie echoed. "As if do were the word for it? Why, do nothing, of course be; suffer; exist; mourn over it. She'd like, if she could, poor, tender, bruised, broken-hearted thing, to creep into a hole, with her head hanging down, and die quietly, like a wounded creature, with no one on earth to worry or bother her. She musn't die; but she won't do anything. All we've got to do ourselves is just to comfort her: to be silent and comfort 148 THIS MORTAL COIL. her. She'll cease to live now; she'll annihilate herself; she'll retire from life; and that horrid nian'll think she's dead; and that'll be all. She'll accept the situation. She won't expose him; she loves him too much a great deal for that. She won't expose herself; she's a great deal too timid and shrinking and modest for that. She'll leave things alone; that's all she can do. And on the whole, my dear, if you only knew, it's really and truly the best thing possible." So Edie took the letter and telegram pitifully in her hand, and went with what boldness she could muster up into Elsie's bedroom. Elsie was lying on the sofa, propped up on pillows, in the white dress she had worn all along, and with her face and hands as white as the dress stuff; and as Edie held the incriminating documents, part hidden in her gown, to keep them from Elsie, she felt like the dentist who hides behind his back the cruel wrenching instrument with which he means next moment in one fierce tug to drag and tear your very nerves out. She stooped down and kissed Elsie tenderly. "Well, darling," she said for illness makes women wonderfully intimate "Warren's come back. Where do you think he's been? He's been over to-day as far as Almundham.'' "Almundham!" Elsie repeated, with a cheek more blanched and paler than ever. "Why, what was he doing over there to-day, dear? Did he hear anything about about Were they all inquiring after me, I wonder? \Vas there a great deal of talk and gossip abroad? Oh, Edie, tell me quick all about it!" "No, darling," Edie answered, pressing her hand tight, and signing to her mother, who sat by the bed, to clasp the other one; "nobody's talking. You shall not be dis- cussed. Warren met Mr. Meysey himself at the Almund- ham Station; and Mr. Meysey was going to Scotland; and he said they'd heard from you twice already, to explain it all; and nobody seemed to think that that anything serious in any way had happened." "Heard from me twice!" Elsie cried, puzzled. "Heard from me twice to explain it all! Why, what on earth did he mean, Edie? There must be some strange mistake somewhere." BREAKING A HEART. 149 Edie leant over her with tears in her eyes. It was a horrible wrench, but come it must, and the sooner the better. They should understand where they stood at once. "No, no mistake, darling," she answered distinctly. "Mr. Meysey gave Warren the letter to read. He's brought it back. I've got it here for you. It's in your own hand, he says. Would you like to see it this moment, darling?" Elsie's cheek showed pale as death now; but she sum- moned up courage to murmur "Yes." It seemed the mere unearthly ghost of &ycs, so hollow and empty was it; but she forced it out somehow, and took the letter. Edie watched her with bent brows and trembling lips. How would she take it? Would she see what it meant? Would she know who wrote it? Could she ever believe it? Elsie gazed at it in dumb astonishment. So admirable was the imitation, that for a moment's space she actually thought it was her own handwriting. She scanned it close. "My darling Winifred," it began as usual, and in her own hand too. Why, this must be just an old letter of her own to her friend and pupil ; what possible connec- tion could Mr. Meysey or Mr. Relf imagine it had with the present crisis? But then the date the date was so curious: "September 17" that fatal evening! She glanced through it all with a burning eye. Great heavens, what was this? "So wicked, so ungrateful: I know Mrs. Meysey will never forgive me." "By the time this reaches you I shall have left Whitestrand, I fear forever." "Dar- ling, for heaven's sake, do try to hush this up as much as you can." "Ever your affectionate but broken-hearted Elsie." A gasp burst from her bloodless lips. She laid it down, with both hands on her heart. That signature, "Elsie," betrayed the whole truth. She was white as a sheet now, and trembling visibly from head to foot. But she would go right through with it; she would not flinch; she would know it all all all, utterly. "I never wrote it," she cried to Edie with a choking voice. "I know you didn't, darling," Edie whispered in her ear. 150 THIS MORTAL COIL. "And you know who did?'' Elsie sobbed out, terrified. Edie nodded. "I know who did at least, I suspect. Cry, darling, cry. Never mind us. Don't burst your poor heart for want of crying." But Elsie couldn't cry yet. She put her white hand, trembling, into her open bosom, and pulled out slowly, with long lingering reluctance a tiny bundle of water- stained letters. They were Hugh's letters, that she had worn at her breast on that terrible night. She had dried them all carefully, one by one here in bed at Lowestoft; and she kept them still next the broken heart that Hugh had so lightly sacrificed to Mammon. Smudged and half-erased by immersion as they were, she could still read them in their blurred condition ; and she knew them by heart already, for the matter of that, if the water had made them quite illegible. She drew the last one out of its envelope with reverent care, and laid it down side by side with the forged letter to Winifred. Paper for paper, they answered exactly, in size and shape and glaze and quality. Hugh had often shown her how admirably he could imitate any particular handwriting. The suspicion was profound; but she would give him at least the full benefit of all possible doubts. She held it up to the light and examined the watermark. Both were identical an unusual paper; bought at a fantastic stationer's in Brighton. It was driv- ing daggers into her own heart; but she would go right through with it: she must know the truth. She gave a great gasp, and then took three other letters singly from the packet. Horror and dismay were awakening within her the instincts and ideas of an experienced detective. They were the three previous letters she had last received from Hugh, in regular order. A stain caused by a drop of milk or grease, as often happens, ran right through the entire quire. It was biggest on the front page of the earliest letter, and smallest and dimmest on its back fly- leaf. It went on. decreasing gradually by proportionate gradations through the other three. 'She looked at the letter to Winifred with tearless eyes. It corresponded exactly in every respect; for it had been the fifth and mid- dle sheet of the original series, BREAKING A HEART. 151 Elsie laid them all down on the sofa by her side with an exhausted air and turned wearily to Edie. Her face was flushed and feverish at last. She said nothing, but leaned back with a ghastly sob on her pillow. She knew to a certainty now it was Hugh who had done this name- less thing Hugh who had done it, believing her, his lever, to be drowned and dead Hugh who had done it at the very moment when, as he himself supposed, her lifeless body was tossing and dancing among the mad breakers, that roared and shivered with unholy joy over the hoarse sandbanks of the bar at Whitestrand. It was past belief but it was Hugh who had done it. She could have forgiven him almost anything else save that; but that, never, ten thousand times never! She could have forgiven him even his cold and cruel speech that last night by the river near the poplar: "I have never been engaged to you. I owe you nothing. And now I mean to marry Winifred." She could have forgiven him all, in the depth of her despair. She could have loved him still, even so profound is the power of first-love in a true pure woman's inmost nature if only she could have believed he had melted and repented in sackcloth and ashes for his sin and her sorrow. If he had lost his life in trying to save her! If he had roused the county to search for her body! Nay, even if he had merely gone home, remorseful and self-reproaching, and had pro- claimed the truth and his own shame in an agony of regret and pity and bereavement. For her own sake, she was glad, indeed, he had not done all this; or at least she would perhaps have been glad if she had had the heart to think of herself at all at such a moment. But for him for him she was ashamed and horrified and stricken dumb to learn it. For, instead of all this, what nameless and unspeakable thing had Hugh Massinger really done? Gone home to the inn, at the very moment when she lay there sense- less, the prey of the waves, that tossed her about like a plaything on their cruel crests gone home to the inn, and without one thought of her, one effort to rescue her for how could she think otherwise? full only of vile and craven fears for his own safety, sat down at his desk and 152 THIS MORTAL COIL. deliberately forged in alien handwriting that embodied Lie, that visible and tangible documentary Meanness, that she saw staring her in the face from the paper before her ! It was ghastly ; it was incredible ; it was past conception ; but it was, nevertheless, the simple fact. As she floated insensible down that hideous current, for the sea and the river to fight over her blanched corpse, the man she had loved, the man who had so long pretended to love her, had been quietly engaged in his own room in forging her name to a false and horrible and misleading letter, which might cover her with shame in the unknown grave to which his own cruelty and wickedness and callousness had seemingly consigned her! No wonder the tears stood back unwillingly from her burning eyeballs. For grief and horror and misery like hers, no relief can be found in mere hysterical weeping. And who had done this heartless, this dastardly, this impossible thing? Hugh Massinger her cousin Hugh the man she had set on such a pinnacle of goodness and praise and affection the man she had worshiped with her whole full heart the man she had accepted as the very incarnation of all that was truest and noblest and best and most beautiful in human nature. Her idol was de- throned from its shrine now; and in the empty niche from which it had cast itself prone, she had nothing to set up instead for worship. There was not, and there never had been, a Hugh. The universe swam like a frightful blank around her. The sun had darkened itself at once in her sky. The solid ground seemed to fail beneath her feet, and she felt herself suspended alone above an awful abyss, a seething and tossing and eddying abyss of utter chaos. Edie Relf held her hand still; while the sweet gentle motherly old lady with the snow-white hair and the tender eyes put a cold palm up against her burning brow to help her to bear it. But Elsie was hardly aware of either of them now. Her head swam wildly round and round in a horrible phantasmagoria, of which the Hugh that was not and that never had been formed the central pivot and main revolving point; while the Hugh that was just revealing himself utterly in his inmost blackness and vileness and nothingness whirled round and round that fixed center BREAKING A HEART. 153 ill a mad career, she knew not how, and she asked not wherefore. "Cry, cry, darling, do try to cry," both the other women urged upon her with sobs and tears; but Elsie's eyeballs were hard and tearless, and her heart siood still every moment within her with unspeakable awe a.ad horror and incredulity. Presently she stretched out a vague hand toward Edie. "Give me the telegram, dear," she said in a cold hard voice, as cold and hard as Hugh Massinger's own on that fear- ful evening. Edie handed it to her without a single word. She looked at it mechanically, her lips set tight; then she asked in the same cold metallic tone as before: "Do you know anything of 27 Holmbury Place, Duke Street, St. James?" "Warren says the club porter of the Cheyne Row lives there," Edie answered softly. Elsie fell back upon her pillows once more. "Edie," s.he cried, "oh, Edie, Edie, hold me tight, or I shall sink and die! If only he had been cruel and nothing more, I wouldn't have minded it; indeed, I wouldn't. But that he should be so cowardly, so mean, so unworthy of him- self it kills me, it kills me I couldn't have believed it!" "Kiss her, mother," Edie whispered low. "Kiss her, and lay her head, so, upon your dear old shoulder! She's going to cry now! I know she's going to cry! Pat her cheek : yes, so. If only she can cry, she can let her heart out, and it won't quite kill her." At the words, Elsie found the blessed relief of tears; they rose to her eyes in a torrent flood. She cried and cried as if her heart would burst. But it eased her some- how. The two other women cried in sympathy, holding her hands, and encouraging her to let out her pent-up emotions to the very full by that natural outlet. They cried together silently for many minutes. Then Elsie pressed their two hands with a convulsive grasp; and they knew she would live, and that the shock had not entirely killed out the woman within her. An hour later, when Edie, with eyes very red and swollen, went out once more into the little front parlor to fetch some needlework, Warren Relf intercepted her 154 THIS MORTAL COIL. with eager questioning. "How is she now?" he asked with an anxious face. "Is she very ill? And how did she take it?" "She's crying her eyes out, thank heaven," Edie answered fervently. "And it's'broken her heart. It's almost killed her, but not quite. She's crushed and lacerated like a wounded creature." "But what will she do?" Warren asked, with a wistful look. "Do? Just what I said. Nothing at all. Annihilate and efface herself. She'll accept the position, leaving things exactly where that wretched being has managed to put them; and so far as he's concerned, she'll drop altogether out of existence." "How?" "She'll go with mamma and me to San Remo." "And the Meyseys?" "She'll leave them to form her own conclusions. Henceforth, she prefers to be simply nobody." CHAPTER XVIII. COMPLICATIONS. Elsie spent a full fortnight, or even more, at Lowestoft; and before she vacated her hospitable quarters in the Relfs' rooms, it was quite understood between them all that she was to follow out the simple plan of action so has- tily sketched by Edie to Warren. Elsie's one desire now was to escape observation. Eyes seemed to peer at her from every corner. She wanted to fly forever from Hugh from that Hugh who had at last so unconsciously re- vealed to her the inmost depths of his own abject and self-centered nature; and she wanted to be saved the hid- eous necessity for explaining to others what only the three Relfs at present knew the way she had come to leave Whitestrand. Hungering for sympathy, as women will hunger in a great sorrow, she had opened to Edie, bit by bit, the floodgates of her grief, and told piecemeal the whole of her painful and pitiable story. In her own COMPLICATIONS. 155 mind, Elsie was free from the reproach of an attempt at self-murder; and Edie and Mrs. Relf accepted in good faith the poor heart-broken girl's account of her adventure ; but she could never hope that the outer world could be induced to believe in her asserted innocence. She dreaded the nods and hints and suspicions and innuendoes of our bitter society; she shrank from exposing herself to its sneers or its sympathy, each almost equally distasteful to her delicate nature. She was threatened with the pillory of a newspaper paragraph. Hugh Massinger's lie afforded her now an easy chance of escape. She accepted it willing- ly, without afterthought. All she wanted in her trouble was to hide her poor head where none would find it; and Edie Relf's plan enabled her to do this in the surest and safest possible manner. Besides, she didn't wish to make Winifred unhappy. Winifred loved her cousin Hugh. She saw that now; she recognized it distinctly. She wondered she hadn't seen it plainly long before. Winifred had often been so full of Hugh; had asked so many questions, had seemed so deeply interested in all that concerned him. And Hugh had offered his heart to Winifred be the same more or less, he had at least offered it. Why should she wish to wreck Winifred's life, as that cruel, selfish, ambitious man had wrecked her own? She couldn't tell the whole truth now without exposing Hugh. And for Winifred's sake at least she would not expose him, and blight Wini- fred's dream at the very moment of its first full ecstacy. For Winifred's sake. Nay, rather for his own. For in spite of everything, she still loved him. She could never forgive him, but she still loved him. Or if she didn't love the Hugh that really was, she loved at least the memory of the Hugh that was not and that never had been. For his dear sake, she could never expose that other base creature that bore his name and wore his features. For her own love's sake, she could never betray him. For her womanly consistency, for her sense of identity, she couldn't turn round and tell the truth about him. To acquiesce in a lie was wrong, perhaps; but to tell the truth would have been more than human. "I wish," she cried in her agony to Edie, "I could go 156 THIS MORTAL COIL. away at once and hide myself forever in America or Aus- tralia, or somewhere like that where he would never know I was really living." Edie stroked her smooth black hair with a gentle hand ; she had views of her own already, had Edie. "It's a far cry to Loch Awe, darling," she murmured softly. "Better come with mother and me to San Remo." "San Remo?" Elsie echoed. "Why San Remo?" And then Edie explained to her in brief outlines that she and her mother went every winter to the Riviera, taking with them a few delicate English girls of consumptive tendency, partly to educate, but more still to escape the bitter English Christmas. They hired a villa the same every year on a slope of the hills, and engaged a resident governess to accompany them. But, as chance would have it, their last governess had just gone off, in the nick of time, to get married to her faithful bank clerk at Brix- ton; so here was an opportunity for mutual accommoda- tion. As Edie put the thing, Elsie might almost have supposed, were she so minded, she would be doing Mrs. Relf an exceptional favor by accepting the post and ac- companying them to Italy. And, to say the truth, a Girton graduate who had taken high honors at Cambridge was certainly a degree or two better than anything the delicate girls of consumptive tendency could reasonably have ex- pected to obtain at San Remo. But none the less the ofler was a generous one, kindly meant; and Elsie ac- cepted it just as it was intended. It was a fair exchange of mutual services. She must earn her own livelihood wherever she went; trouble, however deep, has always that special aggravation and that special consolation for penniless people; and in no other house could she pos- sibly have earned it without a reference or testimonial from her last employers. The Relfs needed no such awkward introduction. This arrangement suited both parties admirably; and poor heart-broken Elsie, in her present shattered condition of nerves, was glad enough to accept her new friends' kind hospitality at Lowestoft for the present, till she could fly with them at last, early in October, from this desecrated England and from the chance of running up against Hugh Massinger. COMPLICATIONS. 157 Her whole existence summed itself up now in the one wish to escape Hugh. He thought her dead. She hoped in her heart he might never again discover she was living. On the very first day when she dared to venture out in a Bath-chair, muffled and veiled, and in a new black dress lest any one perchance should happen to recognize her -she asked to be wheeled to the Lowestoft pier; and Edie, who accompanied her out on that sad first ride, \valked slowly by her side in sympathetic silence. Warren Relf followed her too, but at a safe distance ; he could not think of obtruding as yet a male presence upon her shame and grief; but still he could not wholly deny himself either the modest pleasure of watching her from afar, unseen and unsuspected. Warren had hardly so much as caught a glimpse of Elsie since that night on the "Mud- Turtle;" but Elsie's gentleness and the profundity of her sorrow had touched him deeply. He began indeed to sus- pect he was really in love with her; and perhaps his suspi- cion was not entirely baseless. He knew too well, however, the depth of her distress to dream of pressing even his sym- pathy upon her at so inopportune a moment If ever the right time for him came at all, it could come, he knew, only in the remote future. At the end of the pier, Elsie halted the chair, and made the chairman wheel it as she directed, exactly opposite one of the open gaps in the barrier of woodwork that ran round it. Then she raised herself up with difficulty from her seat. She was holding something tight in her small right hand; she had drawn it that moment from the folds of her bosom. It was a packet of papers, tied carefully in a knot with some heavy object. Warren Relf, observing cautiously from behind, felt sure in his own mind it was a heavy object by the curve it described as it wheeled through the air when Elsie threw it. For Elsie had risen now, pale and red by turns, and was flinging it out with feverish energy in a sweeping arch far, far into the water. It struck the surface with a dull thud the heavy thud of a stone or a metallic body. In a second it had sunk like lead to the bottom, and Elsie, bursting into a silent flood of tears, had ordered the chairman to take her home again. 158 THIS MORTAL COIL. Warren Relf, skulking hastily down the steps behind that lead to the tidal platform under the pier, had no doubt at all in his own mind what the object was that Elsie had flung with such fiery force into the deep water; for that night on the "Mud-Turtle," as he tried to restore the in- sensible girl to a passing gleam of life and consciousness, two distinct articles had fallen, one by one, in the hurry of the moment, out of her loose and dripping bosom. He was not curious, but he couldn't help observing them. The first was a bundle of water-logged letters in a hand which it was impossible for him not to recognize. The second was a pretty little lady's watch, in gold and enamel, with a neat inscription engraved on a shield on the back, "E. C. from H. M.," in Lombardic letters. It wasn't Warren Relf s fault if he knew then who H. M. was ; and it wasn't his fault if he knew now that Elsie Challoner had formally renounced Hugh Massinger's love, by flinging his letters and presents bodily into the deep sea, where no one could ever possibly recover them. They had burnt into her flesh, lying there in her bosom. She could carry them about next her bruised and wounded heart no longer. And now, on this very day that she had ventured out, she buried her love and all that belonged to it in that deep where Hugh Massinger himself had sent her. But even so, it cost her hard. They were Hugh's letters those precious much-loved letters. She went home that morning crying bitterly, and she cried till night, like one who mourns her lost husband or her lost children. They were all she had left of Hugh and of her day-dream. Edie knew exactly what she had done, but avoided the vain effort to comfort or console her. "Comfort comfort scorned of devils!" Edie was woman enough to know she could do nothing. She only held her new friend's hand tight clasped in hers, and cried beside her in mute sisterly sympathy. It was about a week later that Hugh Massinger, goaded by remorse, and unable any longer to endure the suspense of hearing nothing further, directly or indirectly, as to Elsie's fate, set out one morning in a dogcart from White- strand, and drove along the coast with his own thoughts, COMPLICATIONS. 159 in a blazing sunlight, as far as Aldeburgh. There, the road abruptly stops. No highway spans the ridge of beach beyond : the remainder of the distance to the Low Light at Orfordness must be accomplished on foot, along a flat bank that stretches for miles between sea and river, untrodden and trackless, one bare blank waste of sand and shingle. The ruthless sun was pouring down upon it in full force as Hugh Massinger began his solitary tramp along that uneven road at the Martello Tower, just south of Aldeburgh. The more usual course is to sail by sea; and Hugh might indeed have hired a boat at Slaughden Quay if he dared ; but he feared to be recognized as having come from Whitestrand to make inquiries about the un- claimed body; for to rouse suspicion would be doubly unwise: he felt like a murderer, and he considered him- self one by implication already. If other people grew to suspect that Elsie was drowned, it would go hard but they would think as ill of him as he himself thought of himself in his bitterest moments. For, horrible to relate, all this time, with that burden of agony and anguish and suspense weighing down his soul like a mass of lead, he had had to play as best he might, every night and morning, at the ardor of young love with that girl Winifred. He had had to imitate with hateful skill the wantonness of youth and the ecstacy of the hap- pily betrothed lover. He had had to wear a mask of pleas- ure on his pinched face while his heart within was full of bitterness, as he cried to himself more than once in his reckless agony. After such unnatural restraint, reaction was inevitable. It became a delight for him to get away for once from that grim comedy, in which he acted his part with so much apparent ease, and to face the genuine tragedy of his miserable life, alone and undisturbed, with his own remorseful thoughts for a few short hours or so. He looked upon that fierce tramp in the eye of the sun, trudging ever on over those baking stones, and through that barren spit of sand and shingle, to some extent in the light of a self-imposed penance a penance, and yet a splendid indulgence as well ; for here there was no one to watch or observe him. Here he could let the tears trickle down his face unreproved, and no longer pretend 160 THIS MORTAL COIL. to believe himself happy. Here there was no Winifred to tease him with her love. He had sold his own soul for a few wretched acres of stagnant salt marsh : he could gloat now at his ease over his hateful bargain; he could call himself "Fool" at the top of his voice; he could groan and sigh and be as sad as night, no man hindering him. It was an orgy of remorse, and he gave way to it with wild orgiastic fervor. He plodded, plodded, plodded ever on, stumbling wearily over that endless shingle, thirsty and footsore, mile after mile, yet glad to be relieved for awhile from the strain of his long hypocrisy, and to let the tears flow easily and naturally one after the other down his parched cheek. Truly he walked in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity. The iron was entering into his own soul ; and yet he hugged it. The gloom of that barren stretch of water-worn pebbles, the weird and widespread desolation of the landscape, the fierce glare of the midday sun that poured down mercilessly on his aching head, all chimed in congenially with his present brooding and melancholy humor, and gave strength to the poignancy of his remorse and regret. He could torture himself to the bone in these small matters, for dead Elsie's sake ; he could do penance, but not make restitution. He couldn't even so tell out the truth before the whole world, or right the two women he had cruelly wronged, by an open confession. At last, after mile upon mile of weary staggering, he reached the Low Light, and sat down, exhausted, on the bare shingle just outside the lighthouse-keeper's quarters. Strangers are rare at Orfordness; and a morose-looking man, soured by solitude, soon presented himself at the door to stare at the newcomer. "Tramped it?" he asked curtly, with an inquiring glance along the shingle beach. "Yes, tramped it," Hugh answered, with a weary sigh, and relapsed into silence, too utterly tired to think of how he had best set about the prosecution of his delicate in- quiry, now that he had got there. The man stood with his hand on his hip, and watched the stranger long and close, with frank mute curiosity, as one watches a wild beast in its cage at a menagerie. At COMPLICATIONS. IGI last he broke the solemn silence once more with the one inquisitive word, "Why?" "Amusement," Hugh answered, catching the man's laconic humor to the very echo. For twenty minutes they talked on, in this brief dis^ jointed Spartan fashion, with question and answer as to the life at Orfordness tossed to and fro like a quick ball between them, till at last Hugh touched, as if by accident, but with supreme skill, upon the abstract question of pro- visioning lighthouses. , "Trinity House steam-cutter," the man replied to his short suggested query, with a sidelong jerk of his head to southward. "Twice a month. Pritty fair grub. Biscuit and pork an' tinned meat an' soo on." "Queer employment, the cutter's men," Hugh inter- posed quietly. "Must see a deal of life in their way some- times." The man nodded. "Yis, an' death too," he assented with uncompromising brevity. "Wrecks?" "And corpsus." "Corpses?" "Ah, corpsus, I believe you. Drownded one. Plenty on 'em." "Here?" "Sometimes. But moostly on the north side. Drift wooth the tide. Cutter's man found one oonly a week agoo last Sarraday. Oover hinder against that groyne to windwud." "Sailor?" "Not this time gal young woman." "Where did she come from?" Hugh asked eagerly, yet suppressing his eagerness in his face and voice as well as he was able. "Doon't know, u'm sure," the man answered with some- thing very like a shrug. "They doon't carry their naames and poorts wroot on their foreheads as though they wor vessels. Lowstof, Whitestrand, Southwold, Aldeburgh might ha' bin any on 'em." Hugh continued his inquiries with breathless interest 162 THIS MORTAL COIL. a few minutes longer, then he asked again in a trembling voice: "Any jewelry on her?" The man eyed him suspiciously askance. Detective in disguise, or what? he wondered. "Ast the cutter's man," he drawled out slowly, after a long pause. "If there was anything val'able on the corpse, t'eent likely he'd leave it about har for the coroner to nail not he!" The answer cast an unexpected flood of light on the seafaring view of the treasure-trove of corpses, for which Hugh had hardly before been prepared in his own mind. That would account for her not having been recognized. "Did they hold an inquest?" he ventured to ask nervously. The lighthouse-man nodded. "But whot's the use o' that? noo evidence," he continued. "Moost o' theae drownded bodies aren't 'dentified. Jury browt it in 'Foun d drownded.' Convenient vardick save a lot o' trouble." "Where do they bury them?" Hugh asked, hardly able to control his emotion. The man waved his hand with a careless dash toward a sandy patch just beyond the High Light. "Cover hinder," he answered. "There's shiploads on 'em there. Easy dig- gin.' Easier than the shingle. We buried the crew of a Hamburg brigantine there all in a lump last winter. They went ashore on the Oaze Sands. All hands drownded, about a baker's dozen on 'em. Coroner carne oover from Orford an' set on 'em, here on the spot, as yow may say. That's consecrated ground. Bishop came from Norwich and said his prayers oover it. A corpse coon't lay better, nor more comfortable, if it come to that, in Woodbridge Cemetery." He laughed low to himself at his own grim wit; and Hugh, unable to conceal his disgust, walked off alone, as if idly strolling in a solitary mood, toward that desolate graveyard. The lighthouse-man went back, rolling a quid in his bulged cheek, to his monotonous avocations. Hugh stumbled over the sand with blinded eyes and tot- tering feet till he reached the plot with its little group of rude mounds. There was one mound far newer and fresher than all the rest, and a wooden label stood at its head with a number roughly scrawled on it in wet paint 240." His heart failed and sank within him. So this COMPLICATIONS. 163 was her grave! Elsie's grave! Elsie, Elsie, poor, deso- late, abandoned, heart-broken Elsie. He took off his hat in reverent remorse as he stood by its side. Oh, heavens, how he longed to be dead there with her! Should he fling himself off the top of the lighthouse now? Should he cut his throat beside her nameless grave? Should he drown himself with Elsie on that hopeless stretch of wild coast? Or should he live on still, a miserable, wretched, self-condemned coward, to pay the penalty of his cruelty and his baseness through years of agony. Elsie's grave! If only he could be sure it was really Elsie's! He wished he could. In time, then, he might venture to put up a headstone with just her initials those sacred initials. But no; he dared not. And perhaps, after all, it might not be Elsie. Corpses came up here often and often. Had they not buried whole shiploads together, as the lighthouse-man assured him, after a ter- rible tempest? He stood there long, bareheaded in the sun. His re- morse was gnawing the very life out of him. He was rooted to the spot. Elsie held him spellbound. At length he roused himself, and with a terrible effort returned to the lighthouse. "Where did you say this last body came up ?" he asked the man in as careless a voice as he couM easily master. The man eyed him sharp and hard. "Yow fare anxious about that there young woman," he answered coldly. "She Mooted longside by the groyne oover hinder. Tide flung har up. That's where they moostly do come ashore from Lowstof or Whitestrand. Current sweep 'em right along the coost till they reach the ness: then it fling 'em up by the groyne as reg'lar as clockwork. There's a cross-current there ; that's what make the point and the sandbank." Hugh faltered. He knew full well he was rousing sus- picion ; yet he couldn't refrain for all that from gratifying his eager and burning desire to know all he could about poor martyred Elsie. He dared not ask what had become of the clothes, much as he longed to learn, but he wan- dered away slowly, step after step, to the side of the groyne. Its further face was sheltered by heaped-up 164 THIS MORTAL, C OIL. shingle from the lighthouse-man's eye. Hugh sat down in the shade, close under the timber balks, and looked around him along the beach where Elsie had been washed ashore a lifeless burden. Something yellow glittered on the sand hard by. As the sun caught it, it attracted for a second his casual attention by its golden shimmering. His heart came up with a bound into his mouth. He knew it he knew it he knew it in a flash. It was Elsie's watch! Elsie's! Elsie's! The watch he himself had given years and years ago no; six weeks since only as a birthday present to poor dear dead Elsie. Then Elsie was dead! He was sure of it now*. No need for further dangerous questioning. It was by Elsie's grave indeed he had just been standing. Elsie lay buried there beyond the shadow of a doubt, unknown and dis- honored. It was Elsie's grave and Elsie's watch. What room for hope or for fear any longer? It was Elsie's watch, but rolled by the current from Lowestoft pier, as the lighthouse-man had rightly told him was usual, and cast ashore, as everything else was always cast, by the side of the groyne where the stream in the sea turned sharply outward at the extreme eastern- jnost point of Suffolk. He picked it up with tremulous fingers and kissed it tenderly; then he slipped it unobserved into his breast- pocket, close to his heart Elsie's watch! and began his return journey with an aching bosom, over those hot bare stones, away back to Aldeburgh. The beach seemed longer and drearier than before. The orgy of remorse had passed away now, and the coolness of 'utter despair had come over him instead of it. Half-way on, he sat down at last, wearier than ever, on the long pebble ridge, and gazed once more with swimming eyes at that visible token of Elsie's doom. Hope was dead' in his heart now. Horror and agony brooded over his soul. The world without was dull and dreary; the world within was a tempest of passion. He would freely have given all he possessed that moment to be dead 'and buried in one grave with Elsie. At that same instant at the Low Light the ^ cutter's COMPLICATIONS. 165 man, come across in an open boat from Orford, was talking carelessly to the underling at the lighthouse. "Well, Tom, bor, how're things lookin' wi' yow?" he asked with a laugh. "Middlin' like, an' that stodgy," the other answered grimly. "Ho\v do yow git on?" "Well, we ha' tracked down that there body," the Trin- ity House man said casually; "the gal's, I mean, what I picked up on the ness; an' arter all my trouble, Tom, yow'll hardly believe it, but blow me if I made a penny on it." "Yow din't?" the lighthouse-man murmured interro- gatively. "Not a farden," the fellow Bill responded in a discon- solate voice. "The body worn't a nob's; so far, in that respeck, she worn't nobody arter all, but oonly one o' them there light-o'-loves down hinder at Lowstof. She was a sailor's moll, I reckon. Flung harself off Lowstof pier one dark night, maybe a fortnight agoo, or maybe three weeks. She'd bin hevin' some wuds wooth a young man she'd bin a-keepin' company wooth. I never see a more promisin' or more disappointin' corpse in my breath- in' life. When I picked har up, I say to Jim, I say, 'Yow may take yar davy on't, bor, that this gal is a nob. I goo by har looks, an' I 'spect there's money on har.' Why, har dress aloon would ha' made any one take har for a real lady. And arter all, what do it amount to? Nothen at all! Jest the parish paay for har. That's Suffolk all cover, and rile me when I think on't. If it han't bin for a val'able in the way o' rings what fell off har finger, in a manner of speakin,' and dropped as yow may say into an honest man's pocket when he was a-takin' har to the dead-house why, it fare to me, that there honest man would a bin out o' pocket a matter of a shillen or soo, and all thraow the interest he took in a wuthless an' good- for-nothen young woman. Corpsus may look out for theirselves in future, as far as I'm consarned, and that's to a sartinty. I ha' had too much on 'em. They're more bother than they're wuth. That's jest the long an' short on't blow me if it een't." 16$ THIS MORTAL COIL. CHAPTER XIX. AU RENDEZVOUS DBS SONS CAMARADES. In the cosy smoking-room of the Cheyne Row Club, a group of budding geniuses, convened from the four quar- ters of the earth, stood once more in the bay-window, looking out on the dull October street, and discussing with one another in diverse tones the various means which each had adopted for killing time through his own modi- cum of summer holidays. Reminiscences and greetings were the order of the day. A buzz of voices pervaded the air. Everybody was full to the throat of fresh impres- sions, and everybody was laudably eager to share them all, still hot from the press, with the balance of humanity as then and there represented before him. The mos- quitoes at the North Cape were really unendurable: they bit a piece out of your face bodily, and then perched on a neighboring tree to eat it; while the midnight sun, as advertised, was a hoary old imposter, exactly like any other sun anywhere, when you came to examine him through a smoked glass at close quarters. Cromer was just the jolliest place to lounge on the sands, and the best center for short excursions, that a fellow could find on a year's tramp all round the shores of England, Scotland, Wales, or Ireland. Grouse were scanty and devilish cunning in Aberdeen- shire this year; the young birds packed like old ones; and the accommodation at Lumphanan had turned out on nearer view by no means what it ought to be. A most delightful time indeed at Beatenberg, just above the Lake of Thun, you know, with exquisite views over the Bernese Oberland; and such a pretty little Swiss maiden, with liquid blue eyes and tow-colored hair, to bring in one's breakfast and pour out coffee in the thick white coffee-cups. And then the flowers! a perfect paradise for a botanist, I assure you. Montreal in August was hot and stuffy, but the Thou- sand Islands were simply delicious, and black-bass fishing among the back lakes was the only sport now left alive AU RENDEZVOUS DES EONS CAMARADES. 167 \vorthy a British fisherman's distinguished consideration. Oh yes; the yacht behaved very well indeed, consider- ing, on her way to Iceland as well as any yacht that sailed the seas but just before reaching Reykjavik that's how they pronounce it, with the j soft and a falling intonation on the last syllable a most tremendous gale came thundering down with rain and lightning from the Yatna Jokull, and, by George, sir, it nearly foundered her outright with its sudden squalls in the open ocean. You never saw anything like the way she heeled over; you could touch the trough of the waves every time from the gunwale. Had anything new been going on, you fellows, while we were all away? and had anybody heard anything about the Bard, as Cheyne Row had unanimously nicknamed Hugh Massinger? Yes, one budding genius in the descriptive-article trade the w r riter of that interesting series of papers in the "Charing Cross Review" on Seaside Resorts afterward reprinted in crown octavo fancy boards, at seven -and- sixpence, as "The Complete Idler" had had a letter from the Bard himself only three days ago, announcing his intention to be back in harness in town again that very morning. "And what's the Immortal Singer been doing with himself this hot summer?" cried a dozen voices for it was generally felt in Cheyne Row circles that Hugh Mas- singer, though still as undiscovered as the sources of the Congo, was a coming man of proximate eventuality. "Has he hooked his heiress yet? He swore, when he left town in July, he was going on an angling expedition as a fisher of women in the eastern counties." "Well, yes," the recipient of young love's first con- fidences responded guardedly; "I should say he had. To be sure, the Immortal One doesn't exactly 'mention the fact or amount of the young lady's fortune ; but he does casually remark in a single passing sentence that he has ^ot himself engaged to a Thing of Beauty somewhere down in Suffolk." "Suffolk! most congruous indeed for an idyllic, bu- colic, impressionist poet. He'll come back to town with 168 THIS MORTAL COIL. a wreath round his hat, and his pockets stuffed with stanzas and sonnets to his mistress' eyebrow, where 'Suf- folk punches' shall sweetly rhyme to 'the red-cheek apple that she gaily munches,' with slight excursions on lunches, bunches, crunches, and hunches, all a la Massinger, in endless profusion. Now then, Hatherly; there's a guinea's wortji ready made for you to your hand already. Send it by the first post yourself to the lady, and cut out the Bard on his own ground with the beautiful and anony- mous East Anglian heiress. I suppose, by the way, Mas- singer didn't happen to confide to you the local habitation and the name of the proud recipient of so much interested and anapaestic devotion?" "He said, I think, if I remember right, her name was Meysey." "Meysey! Oh, then, that's one of the Whitestrand Meyseys, you may be sure ; daughter of old Tom Wy ville Meysey, whose estates have all been swallowed up by the sea. They lie in the prebend of Consumptum per Mare. If he's going to marry her on the strength of her red, red gold, or of her vested securities in Argentine and Turkish, he'll have to collect his arrears of income from a sea-green mermaid at the bottom of the deep blue sea; which will be worse than even dealing with that hor- rid Land League, for the Queen's writ doesn't run beyond the foreshore, and Xo Rent is universal law on the bed of the ocean." "I don't think they've all been quite swallowed up," one of the bystanders remarked in a pensive voice: he was Suffolk born; ''at least, not yet, as far as I've heard of them. The devouring sea is engaged in taking them a bite at a time, like Bob Sawyer's apple; but he's left the Hall and the lands about it to the present day so' Relf tells me." "Has she money, I wonder?" the editor of that strug- gling periodical, the "Night- Jar," remarked abstractedly. "Oh, I expect so, or the Bard wouldn't ever have dreamt of proposing to her. The Immortal Singer knows his own worth exactly, to four places of decimals, and estimates himself at full 'market value. He's the last man on earth to throw himself away for a mere trifle. AU RENDEZVOUS DES BONS CAMARADES. 169 When he sells his soul in the matrimonial exchange, it'll be for the highest current market quotation, to an eligible purchaser for cash only, who must combine considerable charms of body and mind with the superadded advantage of a respectable balance at Drummond's or at Coutts'. The Bard knows down to the ground the exact money- worth of a handsome poet; he wouldn't dream of letting himself go dirt cheap, like a common every-day historian or novelist." As the last speaker let the words drop carelessly from his mouth, the buzz of voices in the smoking-room paused suddenly: there was a slight and awkward lull in the conversation for half a minute; and then the crowd of budding geniuses was stretching out its dozen right hands with singular unanimity in rapid succession to grasp the ringers of a tall dark new-comer who had slipped in, after the fashion usually attributed to angels or their opposite, in the very nick of time to catch the last echoes of a candid opinion from his peers and contemporaries upon his own conduct. "Do you think he heard us?" one of the peccant gos- sipers whispered to another with a scared face. "Can't say," his friend whispered back uneasily. "He's got quick ears. Listeners generally hear no good of themselves. But anyhow, we've got to brazen it out now. The best way's just to take the bull by the horns boldly. Well, Massinger, we were all talking about you when you came in. You're the chief subject of conversation in literary circles at the present day. Do you know it's going the round of all the clubs in London at this moment that you shortly contemplate committing matrimony?" Hugh Massinger drew himself up stiff and erect to his full height, and withered his questioner with a scathing glance from his dark eyes such as only he could dart at will to scarify and annihilate a selected victim. "I'm going to be married in the course of the year," he answered cold- ly, "if that's what you mean by committing matrimony. Mitchison," turning round with marked abruptness to an earlier speaker, "what have you been doing with your- self all the summer?" "Oh, I've been riding a bicycle through the best part of 170 THIS MORTAL C OIL. Finland, getting up a set of articles on the picturesque aspect of the Far North for the 'Porte-Crayon,' you know, and at the same time working in the Russian an- archists for the leader column in the 'Morning Tele- phone.' Bates went with me on the illegitimate machine yes, that means a tricycle ; the bicycle alone's accounted lawful: he's doing the sketches to illustrate my letter- press, or I'm doing the letterpress to illustrate his sketches whichever you please, my little dear; you pays your money and takes your choice, all for the small sum of sixpence weekly. The roads in Finland are abominably rough, and the Finnish language is the beastliest and most agglutinative I ever had to deal with, even in the entrancing pages of Ollendorff. But there's good copy in it very good copy. The 'Telephone' and the 'Porte- Crayon' shared our expenses. And where have you been hiding your light yourself since we last saw you?" "My particular bushel was somewhere down about Suf- folk, I believe," Hugh Massinger answered with mag- nificent indefiniteness, as though minute accuracy to the matter of a county or two were rather beneath his sublime consideration. "I've been stopping at a dead-alive little place they call Whitestrand : a" sort of moribund fishing village, minus the fish. It's a lost corner among the mud- flats and the salt marshes; picturesque, but ugly, and dull as ditch-water. And having nothing else on earth to do there, I occupied myself with getting engaged, as you fellows seem to have heard by telegraph already. This is an age of publicity. Everything's known in London nowadays. A man can't change his coat, it appears, or have venison for dinner, or wear red stockings, or stop to chat with a pretty woman, but he finds a flaring paragraph about it next day in the society papers." "May one venture to ask the lady's name?" Mitchison inquired courteously, a little apart from the main group. Hugh Massinger's manner melted at once. He would no^be chaffed, but it rather relieved him, in his present strained condition of mind, to enter into inoffensive con- fidences with a polite listener. "She's a Miss Meysey," he said in a lower tone, drawing over toward the fireplace: "one of the Suffolk Meyseys AU RENDEZVOUS DES BONS CAMARADES. 171 you've heard of the family. Her father has a very nice place down by the sea at Whitestrand. They're the bank- ing people, you know: remote cousins of the old hanging judge's. Very nice old things in their own way, though a trifle slow and out of date not to say mouldy. But after all, rapidity is hardly the precise quality one feels called upon to exact in a prospective father-in-law: slow- ness goes with some solid virtues. The honored tortoise has never been accused by its deadliest foes of wasting its patrimony in extravagant expenditure." "Has she any brothers?" Mitchison asked with appar- ent ingenuousness, approaching the question of Miss Mey- sey's fortune (like Hugh himself) by obscure byways, as being a politer mode than the direct assault. "There was a fellow called Meysey in the fifth form with me at Win- chester, I remember; perhaps he might have been some sort of relation." Hugh shook his head in emphatic dissent. "No," he answered; "the girl has no brothers. She's an only child the last of her family. There was one son, a captain in the Forty-fourth, or something of the sort; but he was killed in Zululand, and was never at Winchester, or I'm sure I should have heard of it. They're a kinless lot, extremely kinless: in fact, I've almost realized the highest ambition of the American humorist, to the effect that he might have the luck to marry a poor lonely friendless orphan." "She's an heiress, then?" Hugh nodded assent. "Well, a sort of an heiress," he admitted modestly, as who should say, "not so good as she might be." "The estate's been very much impaired by the inroads of the sea for the last ten years; but there's still a decent remnant of it left standing. Enough for a man of modest expectations to make a living off in these hard times, I fancy." "Then we shall all come down in due time," another man put in a painter by trade joining the group as he spoke, "and find the Bard a landed proprietor on his own broad acres, living in state and bounty in the baronial Hall, lord of Burleigh, fair and free, or whatever other name the place may be called by!" 172 THIS MORTAL COIL. "If I invite you to come," Hugh answered significantly with curt emphasis. "Ah yes, of course," the artist answered. "I dare say when you start your carriage, you'll be too proud to re- member a poor devil of an oil and color-man like me. In those days, no doubt you'll migrate like the rest to the Athenaeum. Well, well, the world moves once every twenty-four hours on its own axis and in the long run we all move with it and go up together. When I'm an R. A., I'll run down and visit you at the ancestral man- sion, and perhaps paint your wife's portrait for a thou- sand guineas, bien entendu. And what sort of a body is the prospective father-in-law?" "Oh, just the usual type of Suffolk Squire, don't you know," Massinger replied carelessly. "A breeder of fat oxen and of pigs, a pamphleteer on Guano and on Grain, a quarter-session chairman, abler none; but with a faint reminiscences still of an Oxford training left in him to keep the milk of human kindness from turning sour by long exposure to the pernicious influence of the East Anglian sunshine. I should enjoy his society better, how- ever, if I were a trifle deaf. He has less to say, and he says it more, than any other man of my acquaintance. Still, he's a jolly old boy enough, as old boys go. We shall rub along somehow till he pops off the hooks and leaves us the paternal acres on our own account to make merry upon." So far Hugh had tried with decent success to keep up his usual appearance of careless ease and languid good- humor, in spite of volcanic internal desires to avoid the painful subject of his approaching marriage altogether. He was schooling himself, indeed, to face society. He was sure to hear much of his Suffolk trip, and it was well to get used to it as early as possible. But the next ques- tion fairly blanched his cheek, by leading up direct to the skeleton imthe cupboard: "How did you first come to get acquainted with them?" The question must inevitably be asked again, and he must do his best to face it with pretended equanimity. "A relation of mine a distant cousin a Girton girl- was living with the family as Miss Meysey's governess AU RENDEZVOUS DES BONS CAMARADES. 173 or companion or something," he answered with what jauntiness he could summon up. "It was through her that I first got to know my future wife. And old Mr. Meysey, the coming pap-in-law " He stopped dead short. Words failed him. His jaw fell apruptly. A strange thrill seemed to course through his frame. His large black eyes protruded suddenly from their sunken orbits; his olive-colored cheek blanched pale and pasty. Some unexpected emotion had evidently checked his ready flow of speech. Mitchison and the painter turned round in surprise to see what might be the cause of this unwonted flutter. It was merely War- ren Relf who had entered the club, and was gazing with a stony British stare from head to foot at Hugh Massinger. The poet wavered, but he did not flinch. From the fixed look in Relf's eye, he felt certain in an instant that the skipper of the "Mud-Turtle" knew something if not everything of his fatal secret. How much did he know? and how much not? that was the question. Had he tracked Elsie to her nameless grave at Orfordness? Had he recognized the body in the mortuary at the lighthouse? Had he learned from the cutter's man the horrid truth as to the corpse's identity? All these things or any one of them might well have happened to the owner of the "Mud-Turtle," cruising in and out of East Anglian creeks in his ubiquitous little vessel. Warren Relf was plainly a dangerous subject. But in any case, Hugh thought with shame, how rash, how imprudent, how unworthy of himself thus to betray in his own face and features the terror and astonishment with which he regarded him! He might have known Relf was likely to drop in any day at the club ! He might have known he would sooner or later meet him there! He might have prepared before- hand a neat little lie to deliver pat with a casual air of truth on their first greeting! And instead of all that, here he was, discomposed and startled, gazing the painter straight in the face like a dazed fool, and never knowing how or where on earth to start any ordinary subject of polite conversation. For the first time in his adult life he was so taken aback with childish awe and mute surprise that he felt positively relieved when Relf boarded him with 174 THIS MORTAL COIL. the double-barrelled question: "And how did you leave Miss Meysey and Miss Challoner, Massinger?" Hugh drew him aside toward the back of the room and lowered his voice still more markedly in reply. "I left Miss Meysey very well," he answered with as much ease of manner as he could hastily assume. "You may per- haps have heard from rumor or from the public prints that she and I have struck up an engagement. In the lucid language of the newspaper announcements, a mar- riage has been definitely arranged between us." Warren Relf bent his head in sober acquiescence. "I had herlrd so," he said with grim formality. "Your siege was successful. You carried the citadel by storm that day in the sandhills. I won't congratulate you. You know my opinion already of marriages arranged upon that mer- cantile basis. I told it you beforehand. We need not now recur to the subject. But Miss Challoner? How about her? Did you leave her well? Is she still at White- strand?" He looked his man through and through as he spoke, with a cold stern light in those truthful eyes of his. Hugh Massinger shuffled uneasily before his steadfast glance. Was it only his own poor guilty conscience, or did Relf know all? he wondered silently. The man was eyeing him like his evil angel. He longed for time to pause and reflect; to think out the best possible non- committing lie in answer to this direct and leading ques- tion. How to parry that deadly thrust on the spur of the moment he knew not. Relf was gazing at him intent- ly. Hesitation would be fatal. He blundered into the first form of answer that came uppermost. "My cousin Elsie has gone away," he stammered out in haste. "She she left the Meyseys quite abruptly." "As a consequence of your engagement?" Relf asked sternly. This was going one step too far. Hugh Massinger felt really indignant now, and his indignation enabled him to cover his retreat a little more gracefully. "You have no right to ask me that," he answered in genuine anger. "My private relations with my own family are surely no concern of yours or of any one's." AU RENDEZVOUS DES BONS CAMARADES. 175 Warren Relf bowed his head grimly once more. "Where has she gone?" he asked in a searching voice. "I'm interested in Miss Challoner. I may venture to inquire that much at least. I'm told you've heard from her. Where is she now? Will you kindly tell me?" "I don't know," Hugh answered angrily, driven to bay. Then with a sudden inspiration, he added significantly: "Do you either?" "Yes," Warren Relf responded with solemn directness. The answer took Massinger aback once more. A cold shudder ran down his spine. Their eyes met. For a moment they stared one another out. Then Hugh's glance fell slowly and heavily. He dared not ask one word more. Relf must have tracked her, for certain, to the lighthouse. He must have seen the grave, perhaps even the body. This was too terrible. Henceforth, it was war to the knife between them. "Hast thou found me, O my enemy?" he broke out sullenly. "I have found you, Massinger, and I have found you out," the painter answered in a very low voice, with a sudden burst of unpremeditated frankness. "I know you now for exactly the very creature you are a liar, a forger, a coward, and only two ringers' width short of a murderer. There! you may make what use you like of that. For myself, I will make no use at all of it. For reasons of my own, I will let you go. I could crush you if I would, but I prefer to screen you. Still, I tell you once for all the truth. Remember it well. I know it; you know it ; and we both know we each of us know it." Hugh Massinger's fingers itched inexpressibly that mo- ment to close round the painter's honest bronzed throat in a wild death-like struggle. He was a passionate man, and the provocation was terrible. The provocation was terrible because it was all true. He was a liar, a forger, a coward and a murderer! But he dared not he dared not. To thrust those hateful words down Relf's throat would be to court exposure, and worse than exposure; and exposure was just what Hugh Massinger could never bear to face like a man. Sooner than that, the river, or aconite. He must swallow it all, proud soul as he was. He must swallow it all, now and forever. 176 THIS MORTAL COIL. As he stood there irresolute, with blanched lips and itching fingers, his nails pressed hard into the palms of his hands in the fierce endeavor to repress his passion, he felt a sudden light touch on his right shoulder. It was Hatherly once more. "I say, Massinger," the journalist put in lightly, all unconscious of the tragedy he was in- terrupting, "come down and knock about the balls on the table a bit, will you?" If Hugh Massinger was to go on living at all, he must go on living in the wonted fashion of nineteenth-century literate humanity. Tragedy must hide itself behind the scenes; in public he must still be the prince of high comedians. He unclosed his hands and let go his breath with a terrible effort. Relf stood aside to let him pass. Their glances met as Hugh left the room arm in arm with Hatherly. Relfs was a glance of contempt and scorn; Hugh Massinger's was one of undying hatred. He had murdered Elsie, and Relf knew it. That was the way Massinger interpreted to himself the "Yes" that the painter had just now so truthfully and directly an- swered him. CHAPTER XX. EVENTS MARCH. "Papa is still in Scotland," Winifred wrote to Hugh, "slaying many grouse; and mamma and I have the place all to ourselves now, so we're really having a lovely time, enjoying our holiday immensely (though you're not here), taking down everything, and washing and polishing, and rearranging things again, and playing havoc with the household gods generally. We expect papa back Fri- day. His birds have preceded him. I do hope he re- membered to send you a brace or two. I gave him your town address before he left, with very special directions to let you have some; but, you know, you men always forget everything. As soon as he comes home, he'll make us take our alterations all down again, which will be a EVENTS MARCH 177 horrid nuisance, for the drawing-room does look so per- fectly lovely. We've done it up exactly as you recom- mended, with the sage green plush for the old mantel- piece, and a red Japanese table in the dark corner; and I really think, now I see the effect, your taste's simply exquisite. But then, you know, what else can you expect for a distinguished poet! You always do everything beautifully and I think you're a darling." At any other time this naive girlish appreciation of his decorative talents would have pleased and flattered Hugh's susceptible soul ; for, being a man, he was of course vain ; and he loved a pretty girl's approbation dearly. But just at that moment he had no stomach for praise, even though it came from Sir Hubert Stanley; and whatever faint ris- ing flush of pleasure he might possibly have felt at his little fiancee's ecstatic admiration was all crushed down again into the gall of bitterness by the sickening refrain of her repeated postscripts: "No further news yet from poor Elsie. Has she written to you? I shall be simply frantic if I don't hear from her soon. She can never mean to leave us all in doubt like this. I'm going to advertise to- morrow in the London papers. If only she knew the state of mind she was plunging me into, I'm sure she'd write and relieve my suspense, which is just agonizing." A kiss from your little one : in the corner here. Be sure you kiss it where I've put the cross. Good-night, darling Hugh. Yours ever, Winifred." Hugh flung the letter down on the floor of his chamber in an agony of horror. Was his crime to pursue him thus through a whole lifetime? Was he always to hear sur- mises, conjectures, speculations, doubts as to what on earth had become of Elsie? Was he never to be free for a single second from the shadow of that awful pursuing episode? Was Winifred, when she became his wedded wife, to torture and rack him for years together with ques- tions and hesitations about the poor dead child who lay, as he firmly and unreservedly believed, in her nameless grave by the lighthouse at Orfordness? There was Only one possible way out of it a way that Hugh shrank from almost as much as he shrank from the terror and shame of exposure. It was ghastly: it was gruesome: 178 THIS MORTAL COIL. it was past endurance; but it was the one solitary way of safety. He must write a letter from time to time, in Elsie's handwriting, addressed to Winifred, giving a fic- titious account of Elsie's doings in an imaginary home, away over somewhere in America or the antipodes. He must invent a new life and a new life-history, under the Southern Cross, for poor dead Elsie: he must keep her alive like a character in a novel, and spin her fresh sur- roundings from his own brain, in some little-known and inaccessible quarter of the universe. But then, what a slavery, what a drudgery, what a per- petual torture! His soul shrank from the hideous con- tinued deceit. To have perpetrated that one old fatal forgery, in the first fresh flush of terror and remorse, was not perhaps quite so wicked, quite so horrible, quite so soul-destroying as this new departure. He had then at least the poor lame excuse of a pressing emergency ; and it was once only. But to live a life of consistent lying to go on fathering a perennial fraud to forge pretended letters from mail to mail to invent a long tissue of suc- cessful falsehoods and that about a matter that lay near- est and dearest to his own wounded and remorseful heart all this was utterly and wholly repugnant to Hugh Massinger's underlying nature. Set aside the wickedness and baseness of it all, the poet was a proud and sensitive man; and lying on such an extended scale was abhorrent to his soul from its mere ignominy and aesthetic repul- siveness. He liked the truth : he admired the open, frank, straightforward way. Tortuous cunning and mean subter- fuges roused his profoundest contempt and loathing when he saw them in others. Up till now, he had en- joyed his own unquestioning self-respect. Vain and shallow and unscrupulous as he was, he had hitherto sked serenely in the sunshine of his own personal appro- bation. He had done nothing till lately that sinned against his private and peculiar code of morals, such as His proposal to Winifred had, for the first time, opened the sluices of the great unknown within him, and hornless depths of deceit and crime were welling up ow and crowding in upon him to drown and obliterate whatever spark or scintillation of conscience had ever been EVENTS MARCH. 179 his. It was a hateful sight. He shrank himself from the effort to realize it. And Warren Relf knew all! That in itself was bad enough. But if he also invented a continuous lie to palm off upon Winifred and her unsuspecting people, then Warren Relf at least would know it constantly for what it was, and despise him for it even more profoundly than he despised him at present. All that was horrible hor- rible horrible. Yet there was one person whose opin- ion mattered to him far more than even Warren Relf's one person who would hate and despise with a deadly hatred and utter scorn the horrid perfidy of his proposed line of conduct. That person was one with whom he sat and drank familiarly every day, with whom he conversed unreservedly night and morning, with whom he lived and moved and had his being. He could never escape or de- ceive or outwit Hugh Massinger. Patriae quis exsul se quoque fugit? Hugh Massinger would dog him, and follow his footsteps wherever he went, with his un- feigned contempt for so dirty and despicable a course of action. It was vile, it was loathsome, it was mean, it was horrible in its ghastly charnel-house falseness and foulness; and Hugh Massinger knew it perfectly. If he yielded to this last and lowest temptation of Satan, he might walk about henceforth with his outer man a whited sepulcher but within he would be full of dead men's bones and vile imaginings of impossible evil. Thinking which things definitely to himself, in his own tormented and horrified soul, he sat down and wrote another forged letter. It was a hasty note, written as in the hurry and bustle of departure, on the very eve of a long journey, and it told Winifred, in rapid general terms, that Elsie was just on her way to the continent, en route for Australia no mat- ter where. She would join her steamer (no line men- tioned) under an assumed name, perhaps at Marseilles, perhaps at Genoa, perhaps at Naples, perhaps at Brindisi. Useless to dream of tracking or identifying her. She was going away from England for ever and ever this last underlined in feminine fashion and it would be quite hopeless for Winifred to cherish the vain idea of seeing 180 THIS MORTAL COIL. her again in this world of misfortunes. Some day, per- haps, her conduct would be explained and vindicated; for the present, it must suffice that letters sent to her at the address as before the porter's of the Cheyne Row Club, though Hugh did not specifically mention that fact would finally reach her by private arrangement. Would Winifred accept the accompanying ring, and wear it always on her own finger, as a parting gift from her affectionate and misunderstood friend, Elsie? The ring was one from the little jewel-case he had stolen that fatal night from Elsie's bedroom. Profoundly as he hated and loathed himself for his deception, he couldn't help stopping half way through to admire his own devilry of cleverness in sending that ring back now to Winifred. Nothing could be so calculated to disarm suspicion. Who could doubt that Elsie was indeed alive, when Elsie not only wrote letters to her friends, but sent with them the very jewelry from her own fingers as a visible pledge and token of her identity? Besides, he really wanted Wini- fred to wear it; he wished her to have something that once was Elsie's. He would like the woman he was now deceiving to be linked by some visible bond of memory to the woman he had deceived and lured to her destruc- tion. He kissed the ring, a hot burning kiss, and wrapped it reverently and tenderly in cotton-wool. That done, he gummed and stamped the letter with a resolute air, crushed his hat firmly down on his head, and strode out with feverishly long strides from his rooms in Jermyn Street to the doubtful hospitality of the Cheyne Row. Would Warren Relf be there again, he wondered? Was that man to poison half London for him in future? Why on earth, knowing the whole truth about Elsie knowing that Elsie was dead and buried at Orfordness did the fellow mean to hold his vile tongue and allow him, Hugh Massinger, to put about this elaborate fiction un- checked, of her sudden and causeless disappearance? In- explicable quite! The thing was a mystery; and Hugh Massinger hated mysteries. He could never know now at what unexpected moment Warren Relf might swoop down upon him from behind with a dash and a crash and EVENTS MARCH. 181 an explosive exposure. He was working in the dark, like navvies in a tunnel. Surely the crash must come some day! The roof must collapse and crush him utterly. It was ghastly to wait in long blind expectation of it. The forged letter still remained in his pocket unposted. He passed a couple of pillar-boxes, but could not nerve himself up to drop it in. Some grain of grace within him was fighting hard even now for the mastery of his soul. He shrank from committing himself irrevocably by a single act to that despicable life of ingrained deception. In the smoking-room of the club he found nobody, for it was still early. He took up the "Times," which he had not yet had time to consult that morning. In the Agony Column, a familiar conjunction of names at- tracted his eye as it moved down the outer sheet. They were two names never out of his thoughts for a moment for the last fortnight. "Elsie," the advertisement ran in clear black type, "Do write to me. I can stand this fearful suspense no longer. Only a few lines to say you are well. I am so frightened. Ever yours, Winifred." He laid the paper down with a sudden resolve, and striding across the room gloomily to the letter-box on the mantel-piece, took the fateful envelope from his pocket at last, and held it dubious, between finger and thumb, dangling loose over the slit in the lid. Heaven and hell still battled fiercely for the upper hand within him. Should he drop it in boldly, or should he not? To be or not to be a liar for life? that was the question. The envelope trembled between his finger and thumb. The slit in the box yawned hungry below. His grasp was lax. The letter hung by a corner only. Nor was his impulse, even, so wholly bad : pity for Winifred urged him on ; remorse and horror held him back feebly. He knew not in his own soul how to act; he knew he was weak and wicked only. As he paused and hesitated, unable to decide for good or evil a noise at the door made him start and waver. Somebody coming! Perhaps Warren Relf. That address on the envelope "Miss Meysey, The Hall, Whitestrand, Suffolk." If Relf saw it, he would know it was well an imitation of Elsie's handwriting. She had sent a note 182 THIS MORTAL, C OIL. to Relf on the morning of the sandhills picnic. If any one else saw it, they would see at least it was a letter to his fiancee and they would chaff him accordingly with chaff that he hated, or perhaps they would only smile a superior smile of fatuous recognition and smirking amusement. He could stand neither above all, not Relf. His fingers relaxed upon the cover of the envelope. Half uncon- sciously, half unwillingly, he loosened his hold. Plop! it fell through that yawning abyss, three inches down, but as deep as perdition itself. The die w r as cast! A liar for a lifetime ! He turned round, and Hatherley, the journalist, stood smiling good-morning by the open doorway. Hugh Mas- singer tried his hardest to look as if nothing out of the common had happened in any way. He nodded to Hath- erley, and buried his face once more in the pages of the "Times." "The Drought in Wales" "The Bulgarian Difficulty" "Painful Disturbances on the West Coast of Africa." Pah ! What nonsense ! What commonplaces of opinion! It made his gorge rise with disgust to look at them. Wales and Bulgaria and the \Vest Coast of Africa, when Elsie was dead! dead and unnoticed! A boy in buttons brought in a telegram Central News Agency and fixed it by the corners with brass- headed pins in a vacant space on the accustomed notice- board. Hatherley, laying down his copy of "Punch," strolled lazily over to the board to examine it. "Meysey! JVleysey!" he repeated musingly. "Why, Massinger, that must be one of your Whitestrand Meyseys. Precious uncommon name. There can't be many of them." Hugh rose and glanced at the new telegram uncon- cernedly. It couldn't have much to do with himself! But its terms brought the blood with a hasty rush to his pale cheek again. "Serious Accident on the Scotch Moors. Aberdeen, Thursday. As Sir Malcolm Farquharson's party were shooting over the Glenbeg estate yesterday, near Kmcardine-O'Neil, a rifle held by Mr. Wyville Mey- sey burst suddenly, wounding the unfortunate gentleman in the face and neck, and lodging a splinter of jagged metal in his left temple. He was conveyed at once from tne spot m an insensible state to Invertanar Castle, where EVENTS MARCH. 183 he now lies in a most precarious condition. His wife and daughter were immediately telegraphed for." "Invertanar, 10:40 a. m. Mr. Wyville Meysey, a guest of Sir Malcolm Farquharson's at Invertanar Castle, wounded yesterday by the bursting of his rifle on the Glenbeg moors, expired this morning very suddenly at 9:20. The unfortunate gentleman did not recover con- sciousness for a single moment after the fatal accident." A shudder of horror ran through Hugh's frame as he realized the meaning of that curt announcement. Not for the mishap; not for Mrs. Meysey; not for Winifred: oh, dear no ; but for his own possible or rather probable dis- comfiture. His first thought was a characteristic one. Mr. Meysey had died unexpectedly. There might or there might not be a will forthcoming. Guardians might or might not be appointed for his infant daughter. The estate might or might not go to Winifred. He might or he might not now be permitted to marry her. If she hap- pened to be left a ward in Chancery, for example, it would be a hopeless business : his chance would be ruined. The court would never consent to accept him as Winifred's husband. And then and then it would be all up with him. It was bad enough to have sold his own soul for a mess of pottage for a few hundred acres of miserable salt marsh, encroached upon by the sea with rapid strides, and half covered with shifting, drifting sandhills. It was bad enough to have sacrificed Elsie dear, tender, delicate, loving-hearted Elsie, his own beautiful, sacred, dead Elsie to that wretched, sordid, ineffective avarice, that fractional worship of a silver-gilt Mammon. He had regretted all that in sackcloth and ashes for one whole endless hopeless fortnight or more, already. But to have sold his own soul and to have sacrificed Elsie for the priv- ilege of being rejected by Winifred's guardian for the chance of being publicly and ignominiously jilted by the Court of Chancery for the opportunity of becoming a common laughing-stock to the quidnuncs of Cheyne Row and the five o'clock tea-tables of half feminine London that was indeed a depth of possible degradation from which his heart shrank with infinite throes of self-commiserating 18 4 THIS MORTAL C OIL. reluctance. He could sell his own soul for very little, and despise himself well for the squalid ignoble bargain; but to sell his own soul for absolutely nothing, with a dose of well-deserved ridicule thrown in gratis, and no Elsie to console him for his bitter loss, was more than even Hugh Massinger's sense of mean self-abnegation could easily swallow. He flung himself back unmanned, in the big leather- covered armchair, and let the abject misery of his own thoughts overcome him visibly in his rueful countenance. "I never imagined," said Hatherley afterward to his friends, the Relfs, "that Massinger could possibly have felt anything so much as he seemed to feel the sudden death of his prospective father-in-law, when he read that .tele- gram. It really made me think better of the fellow." CHAPTER XXI. CLEARING THE DECKS. Warren Relf had arranged for his mother and sister, with Elsie Challoner, to seek the friendly shelter of San Remo early in October. The sooner away from England the better. Before they went, however, to avert the chance of a disagreeable encounter, he met them on their arrival in town at Liverpool Street, and saw them safely across to the continental train at London Bridge. It chanced to be the very self-same day that Hugh Massinger had posted his second forged note to poor fatherless Winifred. Elsie dared hardly look the young painter in the face even now, for shame and timidity; and Warren Relf, re- specting her natural sensitiveness, concentrated most of his attention on his mother and Edie, scarcely allowing Elsie to notice by shy side-glances his unobtrusive prepa- rations for her own personal comfort on the journey. But Elsie's quick eye observed them all, gratefully, none the less for that. She liked Warren: it was impossible for anybody not to like and respect the frank young painter, CLEARING THE DECKS. 185 with his honest bronzed face, and his open, manly, out- spoken manners. Timid as she was and broken-hearted still, she could not go away from England forever and ever for Elsie never meant to return again without thanking him just once in a few short words for all his kindness. As they stood on the bare and windy platform with which the South-Eastern Railway Company wooes our suffrages at London Bridge, she drew him aside for a moment from his mother and sister with a little hasty shrinking glance which Warren could not choose but follow. "Mr. Relf," she said, looking down at the floor and fumbling with her parasol, "I want to thank you; I can't go away without thanking you once." He saw the effort it had cost her to say so much, and a wild lump rose sudden in his throat for gratitude and pleasure. "Miss Challoner," he answered, looking back at her with an unmistakable light in his earnest eyes, "say nothing else. I am more than sufficiently thanked already. I have only one thing to say to you now. I know you wish this episode kept secret from every one: you may rely upon me and upon my mate in the yawl. If ever in my life I can be of any service to you, remember you can command me. If not, I shall never again ob- trude myself upon your memory. Good-bye, good-bye." And taking her hand one moment in his own, he held it for a second, then let it drop again. "Now go," he said in a tremulous voice "go back to Edie." Elsie one blush went back a^ he bade her. "Good- bye," she said, as she glided from his side "good-bye, and thank you." That was all that passed between those two that day. Yet Elsie knew, with profound regret, as the train steamed off through the draughty corridors on its way to Dover, that Warren Relf had fallen in love with her; and Warren Relf, standing alone upon the dingy, gusty platform, knew with an ecstacy of delight and joy that Elsie Challoner was grateful to him and liked him. It is something, gratitude. He valued that more from Elsie Challoner than he would have valued love from any other woman. With profound regret, for her part, Elsie saw that War- ren Relf had fallen in love with her; because he was such 186 THIS MORTAL COIL. an honest, manly, straightforward, good fellow, and be- cause from the very first moment she had liked him. Yet what to her were love and lovers now? Her heart lay buried beneath the roots of the poplar at Whitestrand, as truly as Hugh Massinger thought it lay buried in the cheap sea-washed grave in the sand at Orfordness. She was grieved to think this brave and earnest man should have fixed his heart on a hopeless object It was well she was going to San Remo forever. In the whirl and bustle and hurry of London life, Warren Relf would doubtless soon forget her. But some faces are not easily forgotten. From London Bridge, Warren Relf took the Metropol- itan to St. James' Park, and walked across, still flushed and hot, to Piccadilly. At the club, he glanced hastily at that morning's paper. The first paragraph on which his eye lighted was Winifred Meysey's earnest advertisement in the Agony Column. It gave him no little food for reflection. If ever Elsie saw that advertisement, it might alter and upset all her plans for the future and all his own plans into the bargain. Already she felt profoundly the pain and shame of her false position with Winifred and the Meyseys: that much Warren Relf had learned from Edie. If only she knew how eagerly Winifred pined for news of her, she might be tempted after all to break her reserve, to abandon her concealment, and to write full tidings of her present whereabouts to her poor little fright- ened and distressed pupil. That would be bad ; for then the whole truth must sooner or later come out before the world; and for Elsie's sake, for Winifred's sake, perhaps even a wee bit for his own sake also, Warren Relf shrank unspeakably from that unhappy exposure. He couldn't bear to think that Elsie's poor broken bleeding heart should be laid open to its profoundest recesses before the eyes of society, for every daw of an envious old dowager to snap and peck at. He hoped Elsie would not see the advertisement. If she did, he feared her natural tender- ness and her own sense of self-respect would compel her to write the whole truth to Winifred. She might see it at Marseilles, for they were going to run nght through to the Mediterranean by the special CLEARING THE DECKS. 187 express, stopping a night to rest themselves at the Hotel du Louvre in the Rue Cannebiere. Edie would be sure to look at the "Times," and if she saw the advertisement, to show it to Elsie. But even if she didn't, ought he not himself to call her attention to it? Was it right of him, having seen it, not to tell her of it? Should he not rather leave to Elsie her- self the decision what course she thought best to take under these special circumstances? He shrank from doing it It grieved him to the quick to strain her poor broken heart any further. She had suffered so much: why rake it all up again? And even as he thought all these things, he knew each moment with profounder certainty than ever that he loved Elsie. There is nothing on earth to excite a man's love for a beautiful woman like being compelled to take tender care for that woman's happiness having a gentle solicitude for her most sacred feelings thrust upon one by circumstances as an absolute necessity. Still, Warren Relf was above all things honest and trustworthy. Not to send that adver- tisement straight to Elsie, even at the risk of hurting her own feelings, would constitute in some sort, he felt, a breach of confidence, a constructive falsehood, or at the very best a suppressio veri; and Warren Relf was too utterly and transparently truthful to allow for a moment any paltering with essential verities. He sighed a sigh of profound regret as he took his penknife with lingering hesitation from his waistcoat pocket. But he boldly cut out the advertisement from the Agony Column, none the less, thereby defacing the first page of the "Times," and rendering himself liable to the censure of the committee for wanton injury to the club property; after the perpetra- tion of which heinous offense he walked gravely and soberly into the adjoining writing-room and sat down to indite a hasty note intended for his sister at the Hotel du Louvre: "My dear Edie: "Just after you left, I caught sight of enclosed advertisement in the second column of this morning's Times/ Show it to Her. I can't bear to send it I can't 188 THIS MORTAL COIL. bear to cause her any further trouble or embarrassment of any sort after all she has suffered ; and yet it would be wrong, I feel, to conceal it from her. If she takes my advice, she will not answer it. Better let things remain as they are. To write one line would be to upset all. For heaven's sake, don't show her this letter. "With love to you both and kind regards to Her, Your affectionate brother, "W. R." He addressed the letter, "Miss Relf/ Hotel du Louvre, Marseilles," and went over with it to the box on the mantel- shelf, where Hugh Massinger's letter was already lying. When Edie Relf received that letter next evening at the hotel in the Rue Cannebiere, she looked at it once and glanced over at Elsie. She looked at it twice and glanced over at Elsie. She looked at it a third time and then, with a woman's sudden resolve, she did exactly what Warren himself had told her not to do she handed it across the table to Elsie. Hugh's plot trembled indeed in the balance that mo- ment; for if only Elsie wrote to Winifred, ignoring of course his last forged letter, then lying on the hall table at Whitestrand, all would have been up with him. His lie would have come home to him straight as a lie. The two letters would in all probability not have coincided. Wini- fred would have known him from that day forth for just what he was a liar and a forger. And yet if, by that simple and natural coincidence, Elsie had sent a letter from Marseilles merely assuring Winifred of her safety and answering the advertisement, it would have fallen in completely with Hugh's plot, and rendered Winifred's assurance doubly certain. Elsie had sailed to Australia by way of Marseilles, then. In a npvel, that coincidence would surely have occurred. In real life, it might easily have done so, but as a matter of fact it didn't; for Elsie read the letter slowly first, and then the adver- tisement. "Poor fellow!" she said as she passed the letter back again to Edie. "It was very kind of him ; and he did quite right. I think I shall take his advice, after all. It's ter- CLEARING THE DECKS. 189 ribly difficult to know what one ought to do. But I don't think I shall write to Winifred." Not for herself. She could bear the exposure, if it was to save Winifred. But for Winifred's sake, for poor dear Winifred's. She couldn't deprive her of her new lover. Ought she to let Winifred marry him? What trouble might not yet be in store for Winifred? No, no. Hugh would surely be kinder to her. He had sacrificed one lov- ing heart for her sake; he was not likely now to break another. How little we all can judge for the best. It would have been better for Elsie and better for Winifred, if Elsie had done as Warren Relf did, and not as he said if she had written the truth, and the whole truth at once to Winifred, allowing her to be her own judge in the matter. But Elsie had not the heart to crush Winifred's dream; and very naturally. No one can blame a woman for refusing to act with more than human devotion and foresight. Hugh Massinger had left the headquarters of Bohemia for twenty minutes at the exact moment when Warren Relf entered the Cheyne Row Club. He had gone to tele- graph his respectful condolences to Winifred and Mrs. Meysey at Invertanar Castle, on their sad loss, with con- ventional politeness. When he came back, he found, to his surprise, the copy of the "Times" still lying open on the smoking-room table; but Winifred's advertisement was cut clean out of the Agony Column with a sharp pen- knife. In a moment he said to himself, aghast: "Some enemy hath done this thing." It must have been Relf! Nobody else in the club knew anything. Such espionage was intolerable, unendurable, not to be permitted. For three days he had been trembling and chafing at the hor- rid fact that Relf knew all and might denounce and ruin him. That alone was bad enough. But that Relf should be plotting and intriguing against him! That Relf should use his sinister knowledge for some evil end! That Relf should go spying and eavesdropping and squirming about like a common detective! The idea was fairly past endurance. Among gentlemen such things were not to be permitted. Hugh Massinger was prepared not to permit them. 19 THIS MORTAL, COIL. He passed a day and night of inexpressible annoyance. This situation was getting too much for him. He was fighting in the dark: he didn't understand Warren Relf's silence. If the fellow meant to crush him, for what was he waiting? Hugh could not hold all the threads in his mind together. He felt as though Warren Relf was going to make, not only the Cheyne Row Club, but all London altogether too hot for him. To have drowned Elsie, to be jilted by Winifred, and to be baffled after all by that crea- ture Relf this, this was the hideous and ignominious future he saw looming now visibly before him! It was with a heavy heart that next evening at seven he dropped into the club dining-room. Would Relf be there? he wondered silently. And if so, what course would Relf adopt toward him? Yes, Relf was there, at a corner table, as good luck would have it, with his back turned to him safely as he entered ; and that fellow Potts, the other mudbank artist they hung their wretched daubs of flat Suffolk seaboard side by side fraternally on the walls of the Institute was dining with him and concocting mis- chief, no doubt, for the house of Massinger. Hugh half determined to turn and flee : then all that was manly and genuine within him revolted at once against that last dis- grace. He would not run from this creature Relf. He would not be turned out of his own club he was a mem- ber of the committee and a founder of the society. He would face it out and dine in spite of him. But not before the fellow's very eyes; that was more than in his present perturbed condition Hugh Massinger could manage to stand. He skulked quietly round, unseen by Relf, into the side alcove a recess cut off by an arched doorway where he gave his order in a very low voice to Martin, the obsequious waiter. Martin was surprised at so much reserve. Mr. Massinger, he was generally the very freest and loudest-spoken gentleman in the whole houseful of 'em. He always talked, he did, as if the club and the kitchen and the servants all belonged to him. From the alcove, by a special interposition of fate, Hugh could hear distinctly what Relf was saying. Strange incredible a singular stroke of luck: he had indeed caught the man in the very; act and moment of conspiring. CLEARING THE DECKS. 191 They were talking of Elsie ! Their conversation came to him distinct, though low. Unnatural excitement had quickened his senses to a strange degree. He heard it all every sound every syllable. "Then you promise, Frank, on your word of honor as a gentleman, you'll never breathe a word of this or of any part of Miss Challoner's affair to anybody anywhere?" "My dear boy, I promise, that's enough. I see the necessity as well as you do. So you've actually got the letter, have you?" "I've got the letter. If you like, I'll read it to you. It's here in my pocket. I have to restore it by the time Mr. Meysey returns to-morrow." Mr. Meysey! Restore it! Then, for all his plotting, Relf didn't know that Mr. Meysey was dead, and that his funeral was fixed to take place at Whitestrand on Monday or Tuesday ! There was a short pause. What letter? he wondered. Then Relf began reading in a low tone: "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." Great heavens, it was his own forged letter to Winifred! How on earth had it ever come into Relf's possession! Plot, plot plot and counterplot! Dirty, underhand, hole-and-corner spy-business! Relf had wheedled it out of the Meyseys somehow, to help him to track down and confront his enemy ! Or else he had suborned one of the Whitestrand servants to steal or copy their master's cor- respondence! He heard it through to the last word, "Ever your affec- tionate but heart-broken Elsie." What were they going to say next? Nothing. Potts just drew a long breath of surprise, and then whistled shortly and curiously. "The man's a blackguard, to have broken the poor girl's heart," he observed at last, "let alone this. He's a blackguard, Relf. I'm very sorry for her. And what's become of Miss Challoner now, if it isn't indiscreet to ask the question?" "Well, Potts, I've only taken any other man into my confidence at all in this matter, because you knew more than half already, and it was impossible, without telling 192 THIS MORTAL, COIL. you the other half, fully to make you feel the necessity for keeping the strictest silence about it. I'd rather not tell either you or anybody else exactly where Miss Challoner's gone now. But at the present moment, if you want to know the precise truth, I've no doubt she's at Marseilles, on her way abroad to a further destination which I prefer on her account not to mention. More than that it's better not to say. But she wishes it kept a profound secret, and she intends never to return to England.*' As Hugh Massinger heard those words, those reassur- ing words, a sudden sense of freedom and lightness burst instantly over him in a wild rush of reaction. Aha! aha! poor feeble enemy! Was this all? Then Relf knew really nothing! That mysterious "Yes" of his was a fraud, a pretense, a mistake, a delusion! He was all wrong, all wrong and in error. Instead of knowing that Elsie was dead dead and buried in her nameless grave at Orford- ness he fancied she was still alive and in hiding! The man was a windbag. To think he should have been ter- rified he, Hugh Massinger by such a mere empty boastful eavesdropper! Why, Relf, after all, was himself deceived by the forged letters he had so cleverly palmed off upon them. The special information he pretended to possess was only the special information derived from Hugh Massinger's own careful and admirable forgeries. He hugged himself in a perfect transport of delight. The load was lifted as if by magic from his breast. There was nothing on earth for him, after all, to be afraid of! He saw it all at a glance now. Relf was in league with the servants at the Meyseys'. Some prying lady's-maid or dishonest flunkey must have sent him the first letter to Winifred, or at least a copy of it: nay, more; he or she must have intercepted the second one, which arrived while Winifred was on her way to Scotland else how could Relf have heard this last newly fledged fiction about the journey abroad the stoppage at Marseilles the determination never to return to England? And how greedily and eagerly the man swallowed it all his nasty second-hand servants'-hall information ! Hugh positively despised him in his own mind for his ready credulity and his mean du- plicity. How glibly he retailed the plausible story, with CLEARING THE DECKS. 193 nods and hints and additions of his own: "At the present moment, I've no doubt she's at Marseilles, on her way abroad to a further destination, which I prefer on her account not to mention." What airs and graces and what comic importance the fellow put on, on the strength of his familiarity with this supposed mystery! Any other man with a straigthfonvard mind would have said out- right plainly, "to Australia;" but this pretentious jacka- napes with his stolen information must make up a little mystification all of his own, to give himself importance in the eyes of his greedy gobemouche of a companion. It was too grotesque! too utterly ridiculous! And this w-as the man of whom he had been so afraid! His own dupe ! the ready fool who swallowed at second-hand such idle tattle of the servants' hall, and employed an under- strapper or a pretty soubrette to open other people's let- ters for his own information! From that moment forth, Hugh might cordially hate him, Hugh might freely despise him ; but he would never, never, never be afraid of him. One only idea left some slight suspicion of uneasiness on his enlightened mind. He hoped the lady's maid that hy- pothetical lady's-maid had sent on the forged letter after reading it to Winifred. Not that poor Winifred would have time to think much about Elsie at present, in the midst of this sudden and unexpected bereavement: she would be too full of her own dead father, no doubt, to pay any great attention to her governess' misfortunes. But still, one doesn't like one's private letters to be so vulgarly tampered with. And the worst of it was, he could hardly ask her whether she had received the note or not. He could hardly get at the bottom of this low conspiracy. It was his policy now to let sleeping dogs lie. The less said about Elsie the better. Yet in his heart he despised Warren Relf for his mean- ness. He might forge himself: nothing low or ungentle- manly or degrading in forgery. Dishonest, if you like; dishonest, not vulgar. But to open other people's letters pah! the disgusting smallness and lowness and vul- garity of it! A sort of under-footmannish type of crimin- ality. Peccafortiter, if you will, of course, but don't be a cad and a disgrace to your breeding. 194 THIS MORTAL COIL. CHAPTER XXII. HOLY MATRIMONY. The way of the transgressor went easy for a while with Hugh Massinger. His sands ran smoother than he could himself have expected. His two chief bugbears faded away by degrees before the strong light of facts into pure nonentity. Relf did not know that Elsie Challoner lay dead and buried in a lonely grave at Orfordness; and Winifred Meysey was not left a ward in Chancery, or otherwise inconvenienced and strictly tied up in her plans for marry- ing him. On the contrary, the affairs of the deceased were arranged exactly as Hugh himself would have wished them to be ordered. The will in particular was a perfect gem: Hugh could have thrown his arms round the blame- less attorney who drew it up : Mrs. Meysey appointed sole executrix and guardian of the infant; the estate and Hall bequeathed absolutely and without remainder to Winifred in person; a life-interest in certain specified sums only, as arranged by settlement, to the relict herself; and the coast all clear for Hugh Massinger. Everything had turned out for the best The late Squire had chosen the happiest possible moment for dying. The infant and the guardian were on Hugh's own side. There need be no long engagement, no tremulous expectation of dead men's shoes now : nor would Hugh have to put up for an indefin- ite term of years with the nuisance of a father-in-law's perpetual benevolent interference and well-meant dicta- tion. Even the settlements, those tough documents, would be all drawn up to suit his own digestion. As Hugh sat, decorously lugubrious, in the dining-room at White- strand with Mr. Heberden, the family solicitor, two days after the funeral, he could hardly help experiencing a certain subdued sense of something exceedingly akin to stifled gratitude in his own soul toward that defective breech-loader which had relieved him at once of so many embarrassments, and made him practically Lord of the Manor of Consumptum per Mare, in the hundred of Dun- HOLY MATRIMONY. 195 wich and county of Suffolk, containing by admeasure- ment so many acres, roods, and perches, be the same more or less and mostly less, indeed, as the years pro- ceeded. But for that slight drawback, Hugh cared as yet abso- lutely nothing. One only trouble, one visible kill-joy, darkened his view from the Hall windows. Every prin- cipal room in the house faced due south. Wherever he looked, from the drawing-room or the dining-room, the library or the vestibule, the boudoir or the billiard-room, the Whitestrand poplar rose straight and sheer, as con- spicuous as ever, by the brink of the Char, where sea and stream met together on debatable ground in angry en- counter. Its rugged boles formed the one striking and beautiful object in the whole prospect across those deso- late flats of sand and salt marsh, but to Hugh Massinger that ancient tree had now become instinct with awe and horror a visible memorial of his own crime for it was a crime and of poor dead Elsie in her nameless grave by the Low Lighthouse. He grew to regard it as Elsie's monument. Day after day, while he stopped at White- strand, he rose up in the morning with aching brows from his sleepless bed for how could he sleep, with the break- ers that drowned and tossed ashore his dear dead Elsie thundering wild songs of triumph from the bar in his ears? and gazed out of his window over the dreary outlook, to see that accusing tree with its gnarled roots confronting him ever, full in face, and poisoning his success with its mute witness to his murdered victim. Every time he looked out upon it, he heard once more that wild, wild cry, as of a stricken life, when Elsie plunged into the careering current. Every time the wind shrieked through its creaking branches in the lonely night, the shrieks went to his heart like so many living human voices crying for sympathy. He hated and despised himself in the very midst of his success. He had sold his own soul for a wasted strip of swamp and marsh and brake and sandhill, and he found in the end that it profited him nothing. Still, time brings alleviation to most earthly troubles. Even remorse grows duller with age till the day comes for it to burst out afresh in fuller force than ever and goad 196 THIS MORTAL C OIL. its victim on to a final confession. Days and weeks and months rolled by, and Hugh Massinger by slow degrees began to feel that Othello was himself again. He wrote, as of old, his brilliant leaders every day regularly for the "Morning Telephone": he slashed three-volume novels with as much vigor as ever, and rather more cynicism and cruelty than before, in the "Monday Register:" he touched the tender stops of various quills, warbling his Doric lay to Ballade and Sonnet, in the wonted woods of the "Pimlico Magazine" with endless versatility. Nor was that all. He played high in the evening at Palla- vicinfs, more recklessly even than had been his ancient use ; for was not his future now assured to him ? and did not the horrid picture of his dead drowned Elsie, tossed friend- less on the bare beach at Orfordness, haunt him and sting him with its perpetual presence to seek in the feverish ex- citement of roulette some momentary forgetfulness of his life's tragedy? True, his rhymes were sadder and gloomier now than of old, and his play wilder : no more of the rollicking, humorous, happy-go-lucky ballad-mon- gering that alternated in the "Echoes from Callimachus" with his more serious verses: his sincerest laughter, he knew himself, with some pain was fraught, since Elsie left him. But in their lieu had come a reckless abandon- ment that served very well at first sight instead of real mirth or heartfelt geniality. In the olden days, Hugh had always cultivated a certain casual vein of cheerful pessi- mism : he had posed as the man who drags the lengthen- ing chain of life behind him good-humoredly : now, a grim sardonic smile usurped the place of his pessimistic bonhomie, and filled his pages with a Carlylese gloom that \vas utterly alien to his true inborn nature. Even his light- er work showed traces of the change. His wayward arti- cle, "Is Death Worth Dying?" in the "Nineteenth Cen- tury," was full of bitterness; and his clever skit on the Blood-and-Thunder school of fiction, entitled "The Zulu- Had," and published as a Christmas "shilling shocker," had a sting and a venom in it that were wholly wanting to his earlier performances in the same direction. The critics said Massinger was suffering from a shallow spasm of Byronic affectation. He knew himself he was really HOLY MATRIMONT. 197 suffering from a profound fit of utter self-contempt and wild despairing carelessness of consequence. The world moves, however, as Galileo remarked, in spite of our sorrows. Three months after Wyville Meysey's death, Whitestrand received its new master. It was strange to find any but Meyseys at the Hall, for Meyseys had dwelt there from time immemorial; the first of the bankers, even, though of a younger branch, having pur- chased the estate with his newly-gotten gold from an elder and ruined representative of, the main stock. The wedding was a very quiet affair, of course: half-mourn- ing at best, with no show or tomfoolery; and what was of much more importance to Hugh, the arrangements for the settlements were most satisfactory. The family solicit- or wasn't such a fool as to make things unpleasant for his new client. Winifred was a nice little body in her way, too; affectionately proud of her captive poet: and from a lordly height of marital superiority, Hugh rather liked the pink and white small woman than otherwise. But he didn't mean to live much at Whitestrand either "At least while your mother lasts, my child," he said cautiously to Winifred, letting her down gently by gradual stages, and saving his own reputation for kindly consideration at the same moment. "The good old soul would naturally like still to feel herself mistress in her own house. It would be cruel to mother-in-law to disturb her now. Whenever we come down, we'll come down strictly on a visit to her. But for ourselves, we'll nest for the present in London." Nesting in London suited Winifred, for her part, ex- cellently well. In 'poor papa's day, indeed, the Meyseys had felt themselves of late far too deeply impoverished since the sandhills swallowed up the Yondstream farms even to go up to town in a hired house for a few weeks or so in the height of the season, as they had once been wont to do, during the golden age of the agricultural interest. The struggle to keep up appearances in the old home on a reduced income had occupied to the full their utmost energies during these latter days of universal de- pression. So London w r as to Winifred a practically al- most unknown world, rich in potentialities of varied enjoyment. She had been there but seldom, on a visit THIS MORTAL COIL. to friends; and she knew nothing as yet of that brillivit circle that gathers round Mrs. Bouverie Barton's Wednes- day evenings, where Hugh Massinger was able to intro- duce her with distinction and credit. True, the young couple began life on a small scale, in a quiet little house most aesthetically decorated on economical principles down a side-street in the remote recesses of Philistine Bayswater. But Hugh's coterie, though unsuccessful, was nevertheless ex officio distinguished: he was hand- in-glove with the whole Cheyne Row set the Royal Academicians still in embryo; the Bishops Designate of fate w r ho at present held suburban curacies; the Cabinet Ministers whose budget yet lingered in domestic arrears ; the germinating judges whose chances of the ermine were confined in near perspective to soup at sessions, or the smallest of small devilling for rising juniors. They were not rich in this world's goods, those discounted celebrities ; but they were a lively crew, full of fun and fancy, and they delighted Winifred by their juvenile exuberance of wit and eloquence. She voted the men with their wives, when - they had any which wasn't often, for Bohemia can sel- dom afford the luxury of matrimony the most charming society she had ever met; and Bohemia in return voted "little Mrs. Massinger," in the words of its accepted mouthpiece and spokesman, Hatherley, "as witty a piece of Eve's flesh as any in Illyria." The' little "arrangement in pink and white" became, indeed, quite a noted person- age in the narrow world of Cheyne Row society. To say the truth, Hugh detested Whitestrand. He never wanted to go near the place again, now that he had made himself in very deed its lord and master. He hated the house, the grounds, the river; but above all he hated that funereal poplar that seemed to rise up and men- ace him each time he looked at it with the pains and penal- ties of his own evil conscience. At Easter, Winifred dragged him home once more, to visit the relict in her lonely mansion. The Bard went, as in duty bound; but the duty was more than commonly distasteful. They reached Whitestrand late at night, and were shown upstairs it once into a large front bedroom. Hugh's heart leaped up in his mouth when he saw it. It was Elsie's room; HOLY MATRIMONY. 199 the room into which he had climbed on that fateful even- ing; the room bound closest up in his memory with the hideous abiding nightmare of his poisoned life ; the room he had never since dared to enter; the room he had hoped never more to look upon. "Are we to sleep here, Winnie?" he cried aghast, in a tone of the utmost horror and dismay. And Winifred, looking up at him in silent surprise, answered merely in an unconcerned voice: "Why, yes, my dear boy; what's wrong with the room? It's good enough. We're to sleep here, of course certainly." He dared say no more. To remonstrate would be mad- ness. Any reason he gave must seem inadequate. But he would sooner have slept on the bare ground by the river-side than have slept that night in that desecrated and haunted room of Elsie's. He did not sleep. He lay awake all the long hours through, and murmured to himself, ten thousand times over, "Elsie, Elsie, Elsie, Elsie!" His lips moved as he murmured sometimes. Winifred opened her eyes once he felt her open them, though it was as dark as pitch and seemed to listen. One's senses grow preternaturally sharp in the night watches. Could she have heard that mute movement of his silent lips? He hoped not. Oh no; it was impossible. But he lay awake till morning in a deadly terror, the cold sweat standing in big drops on his brow, haunted through the long vigils of the dreary night by that picture of Elsie, in her pale white dress, with arms uplifted above her helpless head, flinging herself wildly from the dim black poplar, through the gloom of evening, upon the tender mercies of the swift dark water. Elsie, Elsie, Elsie, Elsie! It was for this he had sold and betrayed his Elsie! In the morning when he rose, he went over to the win- dow Elsie's window, round whose sides the rich wistaria clambered so luxuriantly and looked out with weary sleepless eyes across the weary dreary stretch of barren Suffolk scenery. It was still winter, and the wistaria on the wall stood bald and naked and bare of foliage. How different from the time when Elsie lived there! He could see where the bough had broken with his weight that awful 200 THIS MORTAL COIL. night of Elsie's disappearance. He gazed vacantly across the lawn and meadow toward the tumbling sandhills. "Winifred," he said he was in no mood just then to call her Winnie "what a big bare bundle of straight tall switches that poplar is! So gaunt and stiff! I hate the very sight of it. It's a great disfigurement. I wonder your people ever stood it so long, blocking out the view from their drawing-room windows.'.' Winifred rose from the dressing-table and looked out by his side in blank surprise. "Why, Hugh," she cried, noting both his unwonted tone and the absence of his now customary pet form of her name, "how r can you say so? I call it just lovely. Blocking out the view, indeed! Why, it is the view. There's nothing else. It's the only good point in the whole picture. I love to see it even in winter the dear old poplar so tall and straight with its twigs etched out in black and gray against the sky like that. I love it better than anything else at White- strand." Hugh drummed his fingers on the frosted pane impa- tiently. "For my part, I hate it," he answered in a short but sullen tone. "Whenever I come to live at White- strand, I shall never rest till I've cut it down and stubbed it up from the roots entirely/' "Hugh!" There was something in the accent that made him start. He knew why. It reminded him of Elsie's voice as she cried aloud "Hugh!" in her horror and agony upon that fateful evening by the grim old poplar. "Well, Winnie," he answered much more tenderly. The tone had melted him. Winifred flung her arms around him with every sign of grief and dismay and burst into a sudden flood of tears. "Oh, Hugh," she cried, "you don't know what you say: you can't think how you grieve me. Don't you know why? You must surely guess it. It isn't that the White- strand poplar's a famous tree a seamark for sailors a landmark for all the country round historical almost, not to say celebrated ! It isn't that it was mentioned by Fuller and Drayton, and I'm sure I don't know how many other famous people poor papa knew, and was fond of quoting UNDER THE PALM TREES. 201 them. It's not for all that, though for that alone I should be sorry to lose it, sorrier than for anything else in all Whitestrand. But, oh, Hugh, that you should say so! That you should say, Tor my part, I hate it.' Why, Hugh, it was on the roots of that very tree, you know, that you saw me for the very first time in my life, as I sat there dangling my hat with Elsie. It was from the roots of that tree that I first saw you and fell in love with you, when you jumped off Mr. Relf's yawl to rescue my poor little half-crown hat for me. It was from there you first won my heart you won my heart my poor little heart. And to think you really want to cut down that tree would nearly, very nearly break it. Hugh, dear Hugh, never, never, never say so !" No man can see a woman cry unmoved. To do so is more or less than human. Hugh laid her head tenderly on his big shoulder, soothed and kissed her with loving gentleness, swore he was speaking without due thought or reflection, declared that he loved that tree every bit as much in his heart as she herself did, and pacified her gradually by every means in his large repertory of mascu- line blandishments. But deep down in his bosom, he crushed his despair. If ever he came to live at White- strand, then, that hateful tree must ever rise up in mute accusation to bear witness against him ! It could not! It should not! He could never stand it Either they must never live at Whitestrand at all, or else or else, in some way unknown to Winifred, he must man- age to do away with the Whitestrand poplar. CHAPTER XXIII. UNDER THE PALM-TREES. A lone governess, even though she be a Girton girl, van- ishes readily into space from the stage of society. It's wonderful how very little she's missed. She comes and goes and disappears into vacancy, almost as the cook and the housemaid do in our modern domestic phantasma- goria; and after a few months, everybody; ceases even 202 THIS MORTAL COIL. to inquire what has become of her. Our round horizon knows her no more. If ever at rare intervals she hap- pens to flit for a moment across our zenith again, it is but as a revenant from some distant sphere. She has played her part in life, so far as we are concerned, when she has "finished the education" of our growing girls, as we cheer- fully phrase it what a happy idea that anybody's educa- tion could ever be finished! and we let her drop out altogether from our scheme of things accordingly, or feel her, when she invades our orbit once more, as inconvenient as all other revenants proverbially find themselves. Hence, it was no great wonder indeed that Elsie Challoner should subside quietly into the peaceful routine of her new residence at the Villa Rossa at San Remo, with "no questions asked," as the advertisements frankly and in- genuously word it. She had a few girl-friends in Eng- land old Girton companions who tracked her still on her path through the cosmos, and to these she wrote un- reservedly as to her present whereabouts. She didn't enter into details, of course, about the particular way she came to leave her last temporary home at the Meyseys' at White- strand : no one is bound to speak out everything ; but she said in plain and simple language she had accepted a new and she hoped more permanent engagement on the Riviera. That was all. She concealed nothing and added nothing. Her mild deception was purely negative. She had no wish to hide the fact of her being alive from any- body on earth but Hugh and Winifred; and even from them, she desired to hide it by passive rather than by active concealment. But it is an error of youth to underestimate in the long run the interosculation of society in our modern Babylon. You may lurk and languish and lie obscure for a while; but you do not permanently evade anybody: you may suffer eclipse, but you cannot be extinguished. While we are young and foolish, we often think to ourselves, on some change in our environment, that Jones or Brown has now dropped entirely out of our private little universe that we may safely count upon never again happening upon him or hearing of him anyhow or anywhere. We tell Smith something we know or suspect about Miss UNDER THE PALM TREES. 203 Robinson, under the profound but, alas, too innocent con- viction that they two revolve in totally different planes of life, and can never conceivably collide against one another. We leave Mauritius or Eagle City, Nebraska, and imagine we are quit for good and all of the insignificant Mauri- tians or the free-born, free-mannered and free-spoken citizens of that far western mining camp. Error, error, sheer juvenile error! As comets come back in time from the abysses of space, so everybody always turns up every- where. Jones and Brown run up against us incontinently on the King's Road at Brighton ; or occupy the next table to our own at Delmonico's; or clap us on the shoulder as we sit with a blanket wrapped round our shivering forms, intent upon the too wintry sunrise on the summit of the Rigi. Miss Robinson's plane bisects Smith's hori- zon at right angles in the dahabeeyah on the Upper Nile, or discovers our treachery at an hotel at Orotava in the Canary Islands. Our Mauritian sugar-planter calls us over the coals for our pernicious views on differential duties and the French bounty system among the stormy channels of the Outer Hebrides; and Colonel Bill Man- ningham, of the "Eagle City National Examiner," in- trudes upon the quiet of our suburban villa at remote Surbiton to inquire, with Western American picturesque- ness and exuberance of vocabulary, what the Hades we meant by our casual description of Nebraskan society as a den of thieves, in the last number of the St. Petersburg "Monitor?" Oh no; in the pre-Columbian days of Boadicea, and Romulus and Remus, and the Twenty-first Dynasty, it might perhaps have been possible to mention a fact at Nineveh or Pekin with tolerable security against its being repeated forthwith in the palaces of Mexico or the huts of Honolulu; but in our existing world of rail- ways and telegraphs and penny postage, and the great ubiquitous special correspondent, when Morse and Wheat- stone have wreaked their worst, and whosoever enters Jerusalem by the Jaffa Gate sees a red-lettered notice- board staring him in the face, "This way to Cook's Ex- cursion Office" the attempt to conceal anything has be- come simply and purely a ridiculous fallacy. When we go to Timbuctoo, we expect to meet with some of our 204 THIS MORTAL COIL. wife's relations in confidential quarters; and we are not surprised when the aged chief who entertains us in Pari- sian full dress at an eight o'clock dinner in the Fiji Islands relates to us some pleasing Oxford anecdotes of the mis- sionary bishop whom in unregenerate days he assisted to eat, and under whom we ourselves read Aristotle and Tacitus as undergraduates at dear sleepy old Oriel. More than ever nowadays is the proverb true, "Quod taciturn velis nemini dixeris." It was ordained, therefore, in the nature of things, that sooner or later Hugh Massinger must find out Elsie Chal- loner was really living. No star shoots ever beyond the limits of our galaxy. But the discovery might be post- poned for an indefinite period ; and besides, so far as Elsie herself was concerned, her only wish was to keep the fact secret from Hugh in person, not from the rest of the world at large; for she knew everybody else in her little sphere believed her merely to have left the Meyseys' in a most particular and unexplained hurry. Now, Hugh for his part, even if any vague rumor of her having been sighted here or there in some distant nook of the Riviera by So-and-so or What's-his-name might happen at any time to reach his ear, would certainly set it down in his own heart as one more proof of the signal success of his own clever and cunningly designed deception. As a matter of fact, more than one person did accidentally, in the course of .conversation, during the next few years mention to Hugh that somebody had said Miss Challoner had been seen at Marseilles or Cannes, or Genoa or some- where; and Hugh in every case did really look upon it only as another instance of Warren Relf's blind acceptance of his bland little fictions. The more people thought El- sie was alive, the more did Hugh Massinger in his own heart pride himself inwardly on the cleverness and far- sightedness of the plot he had laid and carried out that awful evening at the Fisherman's Rest at Whitestrand in Suffolk. Thus it happened that Elsie was not far wrong, for the present at least, in her calculation of chances as to Hugh and Winifred. The very day Elsie reached San Remo, news of Mr, UNDER THE PALM TREES. 205 Meysey's death came to her in the papers. It was a sud- den shock, and the temptation to write to Winifred then was very strong; but Elsie resisted it. She had to resist it to crush down her sympathy for sympathy's sake. She couldn't bear to break poor Winifred's heart at such a moment by letting her know to the full all Hugh's base- ness. It was hard indeed that Winifred should think her unfeeling, should call her ungrateful, should suppose her forgetful; but she bore even that for Winifred's sake without murmuring. Some day, perhaps, Winifred would know; but she hoped not. For Winifred's sake, she hoped Winifred would never find out what manner of man she proposed to marry. And for Hugh's, too. For with feminine consistency and steadfastness of feeling, Elsie even now could not learn to hate him. Nay, rather, though she recognized how vile and despicable a thing he was, how poor in spirit, how unworthy of her love, she loved him still she could not help loving him. For Hugh's sake, she wished it all kept secret forever from Winifred, even though she herself must be the victim and the scapegoat. Winifred would think harshly of her in any case : why let her think harshly of Hugh also? And so, in the little Villa Rossa at San Remo, among that calm reposeful scenery of olive groves and lemon orchards, Elsie's poor wounded heart began gradually to film over a little with external healing. She had the blessed deadening influence of daily routine to keep her from brooding; those six pleasant, delicate, sensitive, sym- pathetic consumptive girls to teach and look after and walk out with perpetually. They were bright young girls, as often happens with their type ; extremely like Winifred herself in manner too like, Elsie sometimes thought in her own heart with a sigh of presentiment. And Elsie's heart was still young, too. They clambered together, like girls as they were, among the steep hills that stretch behind the town; they explored that pretty coquettish country; they wandered along the beautiful olive-clad shore ; they made delightful excursions to the quaint old villages on the mountain sides Taggia and Ceriana, and San Romolo and Perinaldo moldering gray houses 206 THIS MORTAL COIL. perched upon pinnacles of mouldering gray rock, and pierced by arcades of Moorish gloom and medieval sol- emnity. All alike helped Elsie to beat down the mem- ory of her grief, or to hold it at bay in her poor tortured bosom. That she would ever be happy again was more than in her most sanguine moments she dared to expect; but she was not without hope that she might in time grow at least insensible. One morning in December, at the Villa Rossa, about the hour for early breakfast, Elsie heard a light knock at her door. It was not the cook with the cafe-au-lait arid roll and tiny pat of butter on the neat small tray for the first breakfast: Elsie knew that much by the lightness of the knock. "Come in," she said; and the door opened and Edie entered. She held a letter in her right hand, and a very grave look sat upon her usually merry face. "Somebody dead?" Elsie thought with a start. But no; the letter was not black-bordered. Edie opened it and drew from it slowly a small piece of paper, an advertise- ment ( from the "Times." Then Elsie's breath came and went hard. She knew now what the letter portended. Not a death : not a death but a marriage ! "Give it me, dear," she cried aloud to Edie. "Let me see it at once. I can bear it I can bear it" Edie handed the cutting to her, with a kiss on her fore- head, and sat with her arm round Elsie's waist as the poor dazed girl, half erect in the bed, sat up and read that final seal of Hugh's cruel betrayal: "On Dec. i/th, at White- strand Parish Church, Suffolk, by the Rev. Percy W. Bickersteth, M. A., cousin of the bride, assisted by the Rev. J. Walpole, vicar, Hugh Edward de Carteret Mas- singer, of the Inner Temple, Barrister-at-law, to Winifred Mary, only daughter of the late Thomas Wyville Meysey, of Whitestrand Hall, J. P." Elsie gazed at the cutting long and sadly; then she murmured at last in a pained voice: "And he thought I was dead! He thought he had killed me!" Edie's fiery indignation could restrain itself no longer. "He's a wicked man," she cried: "a wicked, bad, horrible creature; and I don't care what you say, Elsie; I hope UNDER THE PALM TREES. 207 he'll be punished as he well deserves for his cruelty and wickedness to you, darling." "I hope not I pray not," Elsie answered solemnly. And as she said it, she meant it. She prayed for it pro- foundly. After a while, she set down the paper on the table by her bedside, and laying her head on Edie's shoulder, burst into tears a torrent of relief for her burdened feelings. Edie soothed her and wept with her, tenderly. For half an hour Elsie cried in silence ; then she rose at last, dried her eyes, burned the little slip of paper from the "Times" resolutely, and said to Edie: "Now it's all over." "All over?" Edie echoed in an inquiring voice. "Yes, darling, all over," Elsie answered very firmly. "I shall never, never cry any more at all about him. He's Winifred's now, and I hope he'll be good to her. But, oh, Edie, I did once love him so!" And the winter wore away slowly at San Remo. Elsie had crushed down her love firmly in her heart now crushed it down and stifled it to some real purpose. She knew Hugh for just what he was; she recognized his cold- ness, his cruelty, his little care for her; and she saw no sign as how should she see it? of the deadly remorse that gnawed from time to time at his tortured bosom. The winter wore away, and Elsie was glad of it Time was making her regret less poignant. Early in February, Edie came up to her room one after- noon, when the six consumptive pupils were at work in the schoolroom below with the old Italian music-master, under Mrs. Relf's direction, and seating herself, girl-fash- ion, on the bed, began to talk about her brother Warren. Edie seldom talked of Warren to Elsie: she had even ostentatiously avoided the subject hitherto, for reasons of her own which will be instantly obvious to the meanest intelligence. But now, by a sort of accident or design, she mentioned casually something about how he had always taken them, most years, for so many nice trips in his yawl to the lovely places on the coast about Bordig- hera and Mentone, and even Monte Carlo. "Then he sometimes comes to the Riviera with you, 208 THIS MORTAL COIL,. does he?" Elsie asked listlessly. She loved Edie and dear old Mrs. Relf, and she was grateful to Warren for his chivalrous kindness; but she could hardly pretend to feel profoundly interested in him. There had never been more than one man in the world for her, and that man was now Winifred's husband. "He always comes," Edie answered, with a significant stress on the word always. "Indeed, this is the very first year he's ever missed coming since we first wintered here. He likes to be near us while we're on the coast. It gives him a chance of varying his subjects. He says himself, he's always inclined to judge of genius by its power of breaking out in a fresh place not always repeating its own successes. In summer he sketches round the mouth of the Thames and the North Sea, but in winter he always alters the venue to the Mediterranean. Variety's good for a painter, he thinks : though, to be sure, that doesn't really matter very much to him, because nobody ever by any chance buys his pictures." "Can't he sell them, then?" Elsie asked more curiously. "My dear, Warren's a born artist, not a picture-dealer; therefore, of course, he never sells anything. If he were a mere dauber, now, there might be some chance for him. Being a real painter, he paints, naturally enough, but he makes no money." "But the real painter always succeeds in the end, doesn't he?" "In the end, yes; I don't doubt that: within a century or two. But what's the good of succeeding, pray, a hun- dred years after you're dead and buried? The' bankers won't discount a posthumous celebrity for you. I should like to succeed while I was alive to enjoy it. I'd rather have a modest competence in the nineteenth century than the principal niche in the Temple of Fame in the middle of the twentieth. Besides, Warren doesn't want to suc- ceed at all, dear boy at least, not much. I wish to good- ness he did. He only wants to paint really great pictures." That's the same thing, isn't it? or very nearly." "Not a bit of it. Quite the contrary in some cases. Warrens one of them. He'll never succeed while he lives, poor child, unless his amiable sister succeeds in UNDER THE PALM TREES. 209 making him. And that's just what I mean to do in time, too, dear. I mean to make Warren earn enough to keep himself and a wife and family." Elsie looked down at the carpet uneasily. It wanted darning. "Why didn't he come this winter as usual?" she asked in haste, to turn the current of the conversation. "Why? Well, why. What a question to ask! Just because you were here, Elsie." Elsie examined the holes in the Persian pattern on the floor by her side with minuter care and precision than ever. "That was very kind of him," she said after a pause, defining one of them with the point of her shoe accurately. "Too kind," Edie echoed "too kind, and too sensitive." "I think not," Elsie murmured low. She was blushing visibly, and the carpet was engrossing all her attention. "And I think yes," Edie answered in a decisive tone. "And when I think yes, other people ought as a matter of course to agree with me. There's such a thing as being too generous, too delicate, too considerate, too thoughtful for others. You've no right to swamp your own individ- uality. And I say, Warren ought to have brought the yawl round