AU RENDEZVOUS DBS SONS CAMARADES.
In the cosy smoking-room of the Cheyne Row Club, a group of budding geniuses, convened from the four quarters 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 modicum 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 impressions, 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 mosquitoes 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 Aberdeenshire 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 Thousand Islands were simply delicious, and black-bass fishing among the back lakes was the only sport now left alive worthy a British fisherman’s distinguished consideration. Oh yes; the yacht behaved very well indeed, considering, 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 writer 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 Massinger, 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 confidences 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 not himself engaged to a Thing of Beauty somewhere down in Suffolk.”
“Suffolk! most congruous indeed for an idyllic, bucolic, impressionist poet. He’ll come back to town with a wreath round his hat, and his pockets stuffed with stanzas and sonnets to his mistress’ eyebrow, where ‘Suffolk 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 worth 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 anonymous East Anglian heiress. I suppose, by the way, Massinger 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 Wyville 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 horrid 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 struggling 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.
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 moneyworth 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-corner 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 gossipers 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 coldly, “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 yourself all the summer?”
“Oh, I’ve been riding a bicycle through the best part of 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 anarchists for the leader column in the ‘Morning Telephone.’ 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 letterpress, 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 Suffolk, I believe,” Hugh Massinger answered with magnificent 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 mudflats 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 not be chaffed, but it rather relieved him, in his present strained condition of mind, to enter into inoffensive confidences 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 you’ve heard of the family. Her father has a very nice place down by the sea at Whitestrand. They’re the banking 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: slowness 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 apparent ingenuousness, approaching the question of Miss Meysey’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 Winchester, 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!”
“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 remember 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 mansion, and perhaps paint your wife’s portrait for a thousand 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, however, 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 goodhumor, 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 question fairly blanched his cheek, by leading up direct to the skeleton in the 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 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 abruptly. 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 Warren 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 beforehand 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 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 perhaps have heard from rumour or from the public prints that she and I have struck up an engagement. In the lucid language of the newspaper announcements, a marriage has been definitely arranged between us.”
Warren Relf bent his head in sober acquiescence. “I had heard 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 mercantile 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 Whitestrand?” 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 noncommitting lie in answer to this direct and leading question. How to parry that deadly thrust on the spur of the moment he knew not. Relf was gazing at him intently. 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.”
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 moment 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.
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 interrupting, “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 answered him.