by Grant Allen
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 favored the brave; but how now to utilize her curious information? 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 concealment. 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 resolutely, “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 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 sideglance.
“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 himself. 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 always 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 representation or proposition to Massinger.”
“She’ll do nothing of the kind, my dear,” Edie answered promptly with brisk confidence. “You’re a goose, Warren, and you don’t one tiny little bit understand the inferior creatures. You men always think you know instinctively 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; she’ll allow this hateful wretch Massinger to go on believing 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 Moxies, 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, poetical 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 scoundrel, and I hate his very name; and I want him for myself; so I won’t allow him to marry your Winifred, or whatever 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 mustn’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 her. She’ll cease to live now; she’ll annihilate herself; she’ll retire from life; and that horrid man’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?
Was 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 discussed. Warren met Mr. Meysey himself at the Almundham 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.”
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 summoned up courage to murmur “Yes.”
It seemed the mere unearthly ghost of eyes, 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 connection 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.”
“Darling, 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.
“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 waterstained 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 driving 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 flyleaf. 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 middle sheet of the original series, 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 nameless 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 proclaimed 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 senseless, 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 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 dethroned 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 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 stood 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 fearful 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 himself 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 somehow. 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.