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 towards Hugh with true seafaring dexterity, so that it struck the water straight in front of his face fiat 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 struggle was all in vain, and that the interests of English literature, and of a well-known insurance office in which he held a small life policy, imperatively demanded acquiescence 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 honour safe, and the lost hat now clasped tight in his 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 himself 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 foolhardy 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 cheerfulness 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 cerements,’ 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 towards 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 them with arms clasped round one another’s waists. Winifred 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? 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 invariably 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 fellow—” She checked her self suddenly, with a flushed face, for she felt her own transports needed moderating now, and her praise was getting perhaps somewhat beyond the limits of due laudation as expected from cousins. A governess, even when she comes from Girton, must rise, like Cæsar’s wife, above suspicion. It must be generally 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 somebody 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 up stream to Whitestrand, and landed at last, with an easy run, beside the little hithe. At the village inn — the Fisherman’s Rest, by W. Stannaway — Hugh Massinger, in spite of his disreputable dampness, 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 immediately 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 desired to have some more settled pied-à-terre for his literary labours 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 portmanteau there. — Thank you, thank you.” And with a graceful bound, he was off to his room — a low-roofed old chamber on the ground-floor — as airy and easy as if nothing 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 Rembrandt cap, that served still more obviously than ever to emphasize the full nature and extent of his poetical pretensions. 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, according 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 youthful 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 graceful either, as your cousin, Miss Challoner.”
“Oh, Elsie’s well enough in her own way, no doubt,” Hugh went on, with a smile of expansive admiration. “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 l’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 doit, 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 and 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 the 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 Meyseys 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 incontinently establish and endow her, just to improve the beauty and future of the race, on the strictest evolutionary and Darwinian principles.”
“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 encroaching 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 conquering 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 soldiering 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 seem 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 ours, where heiresses are scarce — and actions for breach of promise painfully common — one never knows beforehand 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 one who saw her this morning to doubt that Miss Challoner 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 confidence; “I’m absolutely certain of it — as sure as I 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,” Massenger 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 heart is just at that precise moment the theatre of a most agreeable and unaffected flutter. I think to myself, ‘This time it’s serious.’ I look at the moon, and feel sentimental. 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 prevention-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, however, 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 sérieux. — 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 wonder. 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 honourable gentleman’s own familiar signature, Hugh had written 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; I’ve turned one out for them off-hand, 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 practised mastery, “Warren H. Relf” on a corner of the sheet in the precise likeness of the painter’s own large and flowing handwriting.
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 faculty or knowledge on earth I possess. I know seventeen distinct ways of cheating at loo, without the possibility 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 confidence in their own prudence and their own sagacity.”