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 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 Pall-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 smoking-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, luxurious, 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 responsibilities 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 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 post office?
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 Ludgate 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 guineas.” So far, so good. It was a fair amount for a journeyman journalist to pay for a present; but, as Hugh shrewdly reflected, it would kill two birds with one stone. Day after to-morrow was Elsie’s birthday. The watch would give Elsie pleasure; and Hugh, to do him justice, thoroughly 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 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 disappeared in houses and port and riotous living two generations 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 excellent.” 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 indirect 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 similar 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 morning. 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 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 possible 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 watchmaker 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.”
“Would you?” Hugh answered, with an amused smile. “You rate the autographs of a living versifier immensely above their market value. Even Tennyson’s may be bought at a shop in the Strand, you know, for a few shillings. I feel this indeed fame. I shall begin to grow conceited 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 wildest 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!” Hugh cried, with pretended rapture. “This is too 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 newspapers 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 unfortunate 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 decided. 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 surprised look, “was it you, then, who wrote that lovely article, in the ‘Contemporary,’ on ‘The Future of Marriage,’ 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 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 anybody 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 materialism 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 consideration, 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.”
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 fetching. And then, besides, he was not entirely without a conscience. A man should think neither of wealth 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-awkward 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 summoning 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 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 titlepage to the fly-leaf: “A Mile. Winifred Meysey; Hommage de l’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, environed 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 confidentially, 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 persuasive 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, those immortal poems with an autograph inscription by the bard in person. And I’ve done a good stroke of business 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?