RETRIBUTION.
Oh the horror and drudgery of those next few weeks, while Hugh, in a fever of shame and disgust, was anxiously and wearily making difficult arrangements, financial or otherwise,’ for that hopeless flitting to the sunny South, that loomed ahead so full of gloom and wretchedness for himself and Winifred! The speechless agony of running about, with a smile on his lips and that nameless weight on his crushed heart, driving horrid, sordid, cheese-paring bargains with the family attorney and the London moneylenders for still further advances on those squalid worthless pieces of stamped paper! The ignominious discussions of percentage and discount, the undignified surrender of documents and title-deeds, the disgusting counter-checks and collateral securities, the insulting whispers of doubt and uncertainty as to his own final financial solvency!’ All these indignities would in themselves have been quite excruciating enough to torture a proud man of Hugh Massinger’s haughty and sensitive temperament. But to suffer all these, with the superadded wretchedness of Winifred’s growing illness and Winifred’s gathering cloud of suspicion about his own conduct, was simply unendurable. Above all, to know in his own soul that Winifred was jealous of poor dead Elsie! If only he could have made a clean breast of it all! If only he could have said to her in one single outburst, “Elsie is dead!” it might perhaps have been easier. But after all his own clever machinations and deceptions, after all his long course of confirmatory circumstantial evidence the letters, the ring, the messages, the details how on earth could Winifred ever believe him? His cunning recoiled with fatal precision upon his own head. The bolt he had shot turned back upon his breast. The pit that he digged he himself had fallen therein.
So there was nothing for it left now but to face the unspeakable, to endure the unendurable. He must go through with it all, let it cost what it might. For at least in the end he had one comfort. At San Remo, Winifred would find out she was mistaken; there was no Elsie at all, there or elsewhere.
What had led her astray into this serious and singular error, he wondered. That problem exercised his weary mind not a little in the night-watches. Morning after morning, as the small hours clanged solemnly from the Whitestrand church tower, Hugh lay awake and turned it over in anxious debate with his own wild thoughts. Could somebody have told her they had met some Miss Challoner or other accidentally at San Remo? Could Warren Relf, vile wretch that he was, industriously have circulated some baseless rumor as to Elsie’s whereabouts on purpose to entrap him? Or could Winifred herself intuitively have arrived at her own idea, woman-like, by some false interference some stupid mistake as to postmark or envelope or name or handwriting? It was all an insoluble mystery to him; and Winifred would do nothing toward clearing it up. Whenever he tried by devious routes to approach the subject from a fresh side, Winifred turned round upon him at once with fierce indignation in her pale blue eyes and answered always: “You know it all. Don’t try to deceive me. It’s no good any longer. I see through you at last. Why go on lying to me?”
The more he protested the more scornful and caustic Winifred grew. The more genuinely and sincerely he declared his bewilderment, the more convinced she felt in her own mind that he acted a part with marvelous skill and with consummate heartlessness.
It was terrible not to be trusted when he told the plain truth; but it was his own fault. He could not deny it. And that it was his own fault made it all the bitterer for him. He hadn’t even the solace of a righteous indignation to comfort his soul in the last depth of contumely.
When you know that troubles come undeserved, you have the easy resource of conscious rectitude at any rate to support you. The just man in adversity is least to be pitied. It is the sinner who feels the whip smart. Hugh had to swallow it all manfully, and to eat humble-pie at his private table into the bargain. It was his own fault; he had unhappily no one but himself to blame for it.
Meanwhile Winifred grew rapidly worse, so ill, that even Hugh began to perceive it, and despaired of being able to carry her in safety to San Remo. The shock at the Relfs’ had told seriously upon her weak and shattered constitution: the constant friction of her relations with Hugh continued to tell upon it every day that passed over her. The motherless girl and childless mother brooded in secret over her great grief; she had no one, absolutely no one on earth who could sympathize with her in her terrible trouble. She longed to fling herself upon Elsie’s bosom the dear old Elsie that had once been, the Elsie that perhaps could still understand her and to cry aloud to her for pity, for sympathy. When she got to San Remo, she sometimes thought, she would tell all every word to Elsie; and Elsie at least must be very much changed if in spite of all she could not feel for her.
Proud as she was, she would throw herself on Elsie’s mercy. Elsie had wronged her, and she would tell all to Elsie. But not to Hugh. Hugh was hard and cold and unyielding as steel. It would not be for long. She would soon be released. And then Hugh She shrank from thinking it.
Money was cheap, the lawyers said; but Hugh found he had to pay dear for it. Money was plentiful, the newspapers reported; but Hugh found it as scarce as charity. He took a long time to conclude his arrangements; and when he concluded them, the terms were ruinous. Never mind; Winifred wouldn’t last long; he had only himself to think about in future.
At last the day came for their journey South. They were going alone, without even a maid; glad to have paid the servants their arrears and escape alive from the clutches of the butchers and bakers. November fogs shrouded the world. Hugh had completed those vile transactions of his with the attorneys and the money-lenders, and felt faintly cheered by the actual metallic chink of gold for the journey rattling and jingling in his trousers’ pocket. But Winifred sat very weak and ill in the far corner of the first-class carriage that bore them away from Charing Cross Station. They had come up the day before from Almundham to town, and spent the night luxuriously in the rooms of the Metropole. You must make a dying woman comfortable. And Hugh had dropped round with defiant pride into the Cheyne Row Club, assuming in vain the old jaunty languid poetical air “of the days before he had degenerated into landowning,” Hatherley said afterward just to let recalcitrant Bohemia see for itself it hadn’t entirely crushed him by its jingling jibes and its scathing critics of “A Life’s Philosophy.” But the protest fell flat; it was indeed a feeble one: heedless Bohemia, engrossed after its wont with its last new favorite, the rising author of “Lays of the African Lakeland,” held out to Hugh Massinger of Whitestrand Hall its flabbiest right hand of lukewarm welcome. And this was the Bohemia that once had grasped his landless fingers with fraternal fervor of sympathetic devotion! The chilliness of his reception in the scene of his ancient popularity stung the Bard to the quick. No more for him the tabor, the cymbals, and the oaten pipe; no more the blushful Cheyne Row Hippocrene. He felt himself demode. The rapid stream of London society and London thought had swept eddying past and left him stranded. As the train rolled on upon its way to Dover, Hugh Massfnger of Whitestrand Hall and its adjacent sandhills leaned back disconsolate upon the padded cushions of his leatherlined carriage and thought with a sigh to himself of the days without name, without number, when, proud as a lord, he had traveled third in a bare pen on the honest earnings of his own right hand, and had heard of mortgages, in some dim remote impersonal way, only as a foolish and expensive aristocratic indulgence. A mortgage was nowadays a too palpable reality, with the glamor of romance well worn off it. He wished its too, too solid sheepskin would melt, and reduce him once more to wooden seats and happiness. Oh, for some enchanted carpet of the Arabian Nights, to transport him back with a bound from his present self to those good old days of Thirds and Elsie!
But enchanted carpets are now unhappily out of date, and Channel steamers have quite superseded the magical shallops of good Haroun-al-Raschid. In plain prose, the Straits were rough, and Winifred suffered severely from the tossing. At Calais, they took the through train for Marseilles, having secured a coupe-lit at Charing Cross beforehand.
That was a terrible night, that night spent in the coupelit with Winifred: the most terrible Hugh had ever endured since the memorable evening when Elsie drowned herself.
They had passed round Paris at gray dusk, in their comfortable through-carriage, by the Chemin de Per de Ceinture to the Gare de Lyon, and were whirling along on their way to Fontainebleau through the shades of evening, when Winifred first broke the ominous silence she had preserved ever since they stopped at St. Denis. “It won’t be for long now,” she said dryly, “and it will be so convenient for you to be at San Remo.”
Hugh’s heart sank once more within him. It was quite clear that Winifred thought Elsie was there. He wished to heaven she was, and that he was no murderer. Oh, the weight that would have been lifted off his weary soul if only he could think it so! The three years’ misery that would rise like a mist from his uncertain path, if only he did not know to a certainty that Elsie lay buried at Orfordness in the shipwrecked sailors’ graveyard by the Low Lighthouse. He looked across at Winifred as she sat in her place. She was pale and frail; her wasted cheeks showed white and hollow. As she leaned back there, with a cold light gleaming hard and chilly from her sunken blue eyes those light blue eyes that he had never loved those cruel blue eyes that he had learned at last to avoid with an instinctive shrinking, as they gazed through and through him with their flabby persistence he said to himself with a sigh of relief: “She can’t last long. Better tell her all, and let her know the truth. It could do no harm. She might die the happier. Dare I risk it, I wonder? Or is it too dangerous?”
“Well?” Winifred asked in an icy tone, interpreting aright a little click in his throat and the doubtful gleam in his shifty eyes as implying some hesitating desire to speak to her. “What are you going to tell me next? Speak it out boldly! don’t be afraid. It’s no novelty. You know I’m not easily disconcerted.”
He looked back at her nervously with bent brows. That fragile small creature! He positively feared her. Dare he tell her the truth? And would she believe it? Those blue eyes were so coldly glassy. Yet, with a sudden impulse, he resolved to be frank; he resolved to unburden his guilty soul of all its weight of care to Winifred.
“No lie, Winifred, but the solemn truth,” he blurted out slowly, in a voice that of itself might have well produced complete conviction on any one less incredulous than the wife he had cajoled and deceived so often. “You think Elsie’s at San Remo, I know. You’re wrong there; you’re quite mistaken. She’s not in San Remo, nor in Australia either. That was a lie. Elsie’s dead dead three years ago before we were married. Dead and buried at Orfordness. And I’ve seen her grave, and cried over it like a child, too.”
He spoke with solemn intensity of earnestness; but he spoke in vain. Winifred thought, herself, till that very moment, she had long since reached the lowest possible depth of contempt and scorn for the husband on whom she had thrown herself away; but as he met her then with that incredible falsehood as she must needs think it on his lying lips, with so grave a face and so profound an air of frank confession, her lofty disdain rose at once to a yet sublimer height of disgust and loathing of which till that night she could never even have conceived herself capable. “You hateful Thing!” she cried, rising from her seat to the center of the carriage, and looking down upon him physically from her point of vantage as he cowered and slank like a cur in his corner. “Don’t dare to address me again, I say, with lies like that. If you can’t find one word of truth to tell me, have the goodness at least, since I don’t desire your further conversation, to leave we the repose of your polite silence.”
“But Winifred,” Hugh cried, clasping his hands together in impotent despair, “this is the truth, the very, very truth, the whole truth, that I’m now telling you. I’ve hidden it from you so long by deceit and treachery. I acknowledge all that: I admit I deceived you. But I want to tell you the whole truth now; and you won’t listen to me! Oh, heaven, Winifred, you won’t listen to me!”
On any one else, his agonized voice and pleading face would have produced their just and due effect; but on Winifred impossible. She knew he was lying to her even when he spoke the truth; and the very intensity and fervor of his horror only added to her sense of utter repulsion from his ingrained falseness and his native duplicity. To pretend to her face, with agonies of mock remorse, that Elsie was dead, when she knew he was going to San Remo to see her! And taking his own wedded wife to die there! The man who could act so realistically as that, and tell lies so glibly at such a moment, must be falser to the core than her heart had ever dreamed or conceived of.
“Go on,” she murmured, relapsing into her corner. “Continue your monologue. It’s supreme in ks way no actor could beat it. But be so good as to consider my part in the piece left out altogether. I shall answer you no more. I should be sorry to interrupt so finished an artist!”
Her scathing contempt wrought up in Hugh a perfect fury of helpless indignation. That he should wish to confess, to humble himself before her, to make reparation! and that Winifred should spurn his best attempt, should refuse so much as to listen to his avowal! It was too ignominious. “For heaven’s sake,” he cried, with his hands clasped hard, “at least let me speak. Let me have my say out. You’re all wrong. You’re wronging me utterly. I’ve behaved most wickedly, most cruelly, I know: I confess it all. I abase myself at your feet. If you want me to be abject, I’ll grovel before you! I admit my crime, my sin, my transgression. I won’t pretend to justify myself at all. I’ve lied to you, forged to you, deceived you, misled you!” (At each clause and phrase of passionate self-condemnation, Winifred nodded a separate sardonic acquiescence.) “But you’re wrong about this. You mistake me wholly. I swear to you, my child, Elsie’s not alive. You’re jealous of a woman who’s been dead for years. For my sin and shame I say it, she’s dead long ago!”
He might as well have tried to convince the door-handle. Winifred’s loathing found no overt vent in angry words; she repressed her speech, her very breath almost, with a spasmodic effort. But she stretched out both her hands, the palms turned outward, with a gesture of horror, contempt, and repulsion; and she averted her face with a little cry of supreme disgust, checked down deep in her rising throat, as one averts one’s face instinctively from a loathsome sore or a venomous reptile. Such hideous duplicity to a dying woman was more than she could brook without some outer expression of her outraged sense of social decency.
But Hugh could no longer restrain himself now; he had begun his tale, and he must run right through with it. The fever of the confessional had seized upon his soul; remorse and despair were goading him on. He must have relief for his pent-up feelings. Three years of silence were more than enough. Winifred’s very incredulity compelled him to continue. He must tell her all all, all, utterly. He must make her understand to the uttermost jot, willy, nilly, that he was not deceiving her!
He opened the floodgates of his speech at once, and flowed on in a headlong torrent of confession. Winifred sat there, cowering and crouching as far from him as possible in the opposite corner, drinking in his strange tale with an evident interest and a horrible placidity. Not that she ever moved or stirred a muscle; she heard it all out with a cold set smile playing around the corners of her wasted mouth, that was more exasperating by far to behold than any amount of contradiction would have been to listen to. It goaded Hugh into a perfect delirium of feverish self-revelation. He would not submit to be thus openly defied; he must tell her all all all, till she believed him.
With eager lips, he began his story from the very beginning, recapitulating point by point his interview with Elsie in the Hall grounds, her rushing away from him to the roots of the poplar, her mad leap into the swirling black water, his attempt to rescue her, his unconsciousness, and his failure. He told it all with dramatic completeness. Winifred saw and heard every scene and tone and emotion as he reproduced it. Then he went on to tell her how he came to himself again on the bank of the dike, and how in cold and darkness he formed his Plan, that fatal, horrible, successful Plan, which he had ever since been engaged in carrying out and in detesting. He described how he returned to the inn, unobserved and untracked; how he forged the first compromising letter from Elsie; and how, once embarked upon that career of deceit, there was no drawing back for him in crime after crime till the present moment He despised himself for it; but still he told it. Next came the episode of Elsie’s bedroom; the theft of the ring and the other belongings; the hasty flight, the fall from the creeper; and his subsequent horror of the physical surroundings connected with that hateful night adventure. In his agony of self-accusation he spared her no circumstance, no petty detail: bit by bit he retold the whole story in all its hideous inhuman ghastliness the walk to Orfordness, the finding of the watch, the furtive visit to Elsie’s grave, his horror of Winifred’s proposed picnic ‘to that very spot a year later. He ran, unabashed, in an ecstacy of humiliation, through the entire tale of his forgeries and his deceptions: the sending of the ring; the audacious fiction of Elsie’s departure to a new home in Australia: the long sequence of occasional letters; the living lie he had daily and hourly acted before her. And all the while, as he truly said, with slow tears rolling one by one down his dark cheeks, he knew himself a murderer: he felt himself a murderer; and all the while, poor Elsie was lying, dishonored and unknown, a nameless corpse, in her pauper grave upon that stormy sand-pit.
Oh, the joy and relief of that tardy confession! the gush and flow of those pent-up feelings! For three long years and more, he had locked it all up in his inmost soul, chafing and seething with the awful secret; and now at last he had let it all out, in one burst of confidence, to the uttermost item.
As for Winifred, she heard him out in solemn silence to the bitter end, with ever growing contempt and shame and hatred. She could not lift her eyes to his face, so much his very earnestness horrified and appalled her. The man’s aptitude for lying struck her positively dumb. The hideous ingenuity with which he accounted for everything the diabolically clever way in which he had woven in, one after the other, the ring, the watch, the letters, the picnic, the lonely tramp to Orfordness smote her to the heart with a horrible loathing for the vile wretch she had consented to marry. That she had endured so long such a miserable creature’s bought caresses filled her inmost soul with a sickening sense of disgust and horror. She cowered and crouched closer and closer in her remote corner; she felt that his presence there actually polluted the carriage she occupied; she longed for Marseilles, for San Remo, for release, that she might get at least farther and farther away from him. She could almost have opened the door in her access of horror and jumped from the train while still in motion, so intense was her burning and goading desire to escape forever from his poisonous neighborhood.
At last, as Hugh with flushed face and eager eyes calmed down a little from his paroxysm of self-abasement and self-revelation, Winifred raised her eyes once more from the ground and met her husband’s ah, heaven! that she should have to call that thing her husband! His acting chilled her; his pretended tears turned her cold with scorn. “Is that all?” she asked in an icy voice. “Is your romance finished?”
“That’s all!” Hugh cried, burying his face in his hands and bending down his body to the level of his knees in utter and abject self-humiliation. “Winifred! Winifred! it’s no romance. W’on’t you, even now, even now, believe me?”
“It’s clever clever extremely clever!” Winifred answered in a tone of unnatural calmness. “I don’t deny it shows great talent. If you’d turned your attention seriously to novel-writing, which is your proper metier, instead of to the law, for which you’ve too exuberant an imagination, you’d have succeeded ten thousand times better there than you could ever do at what you’re pleased to consider your divine poetry. Your story, I allow, hangs together in every part with remarkable skill. It’s a pity I should happen to know it all from beginning to end for a tissue of falsehoods. Hugh, you’re the profoundest and most eminent of liars. I’ve known people before who would tell a lie to serve their own ends, when there was anything to gain by it. I’ve known people before who, when a lie or the truth would either of them suit their purposes equally, told the lie by preference out of pure love of it But I’ve never till to-night met anybody on earth who would tell a lie for the mere lie’s sake, to make himself look even more utterly mean and despicable and small than he is by nature. You’ve done that. You’ve reached that unsurpassed depth of duplicity. You’ve deliberately invented a clever tissue of concerted lies even you yourself couldn’t fit them all in so neat and pat on the spur of the moment you must have worked your romance up by careful stages in your own mind beforehand and all for what? To prove yourself innocent? Oh no; not at all! but to make yourself out even worse than you are a liar, a forger, and all but a murderer. I loathe you; I despise you. For all your acting you know you’re lying to me even now, this minute. You know that Elsie Challoner, whom you pretend to be dead, is awaiting your own arrival to-night by arrangement at San Remo.”
Hugh flung himself back in the final extremity of utter despair on the padded cushions. He had played his last card with Winifred, and lost. His very remorse availed him nothing. His very confession was held to increase his sin. What could he do? Whither turn? He knew no answer. He rocked himself up and down on his seat in hopeless misery. The worst had come. He had blurted out all. And Winifred, Winifred would not believe him.
“I wish it was true!” he cried; “I wish it was true, Winnie! I wish she was there. But it isn’t; it isn’t! She’s dead! I killed her! and her blood has weighed upon my head ever since! I pay for it now! I killed her! I killed her!”
“Listen!”
Winifred had risen to her full height in the coupe once more, and was standing, gaunt and haggard and deadly wan like a shrunken little tragedy queen above him. Her pale white face showed paler and whiter and more deathlike still by the feeble light of the struggling oil-lamp; and her bloodless lips trembled and quivered visibly with inner passion as she tried to repress her overpowering indignation with one masterful effort. “Listen!” she said, with fierce intensity. “What you say is false. I know you’re lying to me. Warren Relf told me himself the other day in London that Elsie Challoner was still alive, and living, where you know she lives, over there at San Remo.”
Warren Relf! That serpent! That reptile! That eavesdropper! Then this was the creature’s mean revenge! He had lied that despicable lie to Winifred! Hugh hated him in his soul more fiercely than ever. He was baffled once more; and always by that same malignant intriguer!
“Where did you see Relf?” he burst out angrily. His indignation, flaring up to white-heat afresh at this latest machination of his ancient enemy, gave new strength to his words and new point to his hatred. “I thought I told you long since at Whitestrand to hold no further communication with that wretched being!”
But Winifred by this time, worn out with excitement, had fallen back speechless and helpless on the cushions. Her feeble strength was fairly exhausted. The fatigue of the preparations, the stormy passage, the long spell of traveling, the night journey, and, added to it all, this terrible interview with the man she had once loved, but now despised and hated, had proved too much in the end for her weakened constitution. A fit of wild incoherence had overtaken her; she babbled idly on her seat in broken sentences. Her muttered words were full of “mother” and “home” and “Elsie.” Hugh felt her pulse. He knew it was delirium. His one thought now was to reach San Remo as quickly as possible. If only she could live to know Warren Relf had told her a lie, and that Elsie was dead dead dead and buried!
Perhaps even this story about Warren Relf and what he had told her was itself but a product of the fever and delirium! But more probably not. The man who could open other people’s letters, the man who could plot and plan and intrigue in secret to set another man’s wife against uppermost to hurt his enemy and to serve his purpose. He knew that lie would distress and torture Winifred, and he had struck at Hugh, like a coward that he was, through a weak, hysterical, dying woman! He had played on the mean chord of feminine jealousy. Hugh hated him as he had never hated him before. He should pay for this soundly the cur, the scoundrel!