by Grant Allen
“Detained at Mentone with sympathizing friends. Return to-morrow. Make all arrangements on my account. Massinger.”
Then he presented himself at the bureau of the Hotel de Paris. Monsieur had no luggage; but no matter for that: the hotel made haste to accommodate him at once with the best of rooms, not even requiring a deposit beforehand. All Monte Carlo knew well, indeed, that Monsieur had been winning. His name and fame had been noised abroad by many-headed trumpeters. His pockets were literally stuffed with gold. He was the hero of the day. He had carried everything at the Casino before him. Attentive servants awaited his merest beck or nod; everybody was pleased; the world smiled on him. Alphonse, Marie, look well after Monsieur! Monsieur has had the very best of fortune.
He supped with Raffalevsky in a beautifully decorated salle-a-manger. They recounted to one another, gleefully, gloomily, their winnings and losses. The totals were heavy. They totted them up with varying emotions. Hugh had won three thousand four hundred pounds. Raffalevsky had made a hole in his larger capital to the tune of something like two thousand seven hundred. At the announcement, Hugh smiled his most benevolent and philosophical smile. “After all,” he said, as he scanned the wine-card, toothpick in hand, in search of a perfectly sound Burgundy, “if one man wins, another must lose. You have there the initial weak point of gambling. It’s at bottom a truly anti-social amusement But these things equalize themselves in the long run; they equalize themselves by the doctrine of averages. Taken collectively, we’re better off than we were at lunch at any rate. Then, his Serenity of Monaco had pocketed a couple of hundred louis out of the pair of us, viewed in the lump.
This evening, on the contrary, we’re seven hundred pounds to the good, as a firm, against him. I like to best these hereditary plunderers. It’s a comfort to think that, in spite of everything, we’re more than even with him on the day’s transactions!”
Raffalevsky, however, strange to say, appeared to derive but scanty consolation from this very vicarious jointstock triumph; he didn’t see things in the proper light. The man was sullen, positively sullen. Apparently, a person of morose disposition! People oughtn’t to let a little reverse of fortune produce such obviously damping effects upon their minds and spirits. At all hazards, they should at least be polite in general-society. “If you’d lost fifty or sixty thousand francs yourself, Monsieur,” the Russian cried petulantly, “you wouldn’t talk in quite so airy and easy a way about our joint position.”
“Possibly not,” Hugh answered, with perfect goodhumor, showing his even row of pearl-white teeth in a pleasant smile, and toying with the pickle-fork. Fortune had favored him. He would bear it gracefully. Xo meanness for him! He would do things on the proper scale now. He’d stand Raffalevsky a splendid supper. He summoned the waiter with a lordly wave of his languid hand and ordered a bottle of the very finest white Hermitage.
CHAPTER XLVI
THE TURN OF THE TIDE.
At Paris, Warren Relf parted with Elsie. He saw her safely to the Northern Railway Station, put her into the first night-train for Calais, and then wriggled back himself to his temporary lair, a quiet hotel on the Cours-la-Reine, just behind the Palais de l’Industrie. He went back to bed, but not to sleep. It was a gusty night, that night in Paris. The wind shook and rattled the loose panes in the big French windows that opened on to the balcony; the rain beat wildly in sudden rushes against the rattling glass; the chimney-pots on all the neighboring roofs moaned and howled and shivered in concert. Warren Relf reproached himself bitterly, as he listened to its sound, that he hadn’t decided on escorting Elsie the whole of her way across to England. Mrs. Grundy would no doubt have disapproved, to be sure; but what did he care in his heart, after all, for that strange apothesis of censorious matronhood? It would have been better to have seen Elsie safe across the Channel, Mrs. Grundy to the contrary notwithstanding, and installed her comfortably in London lodgings. He wished he had done it, now he heard how the wind was roaring and tearing; a northeast wind, yet damp and rain-laden. Warren Relf knew its ways and its manners full well. It must be blowing great-guns across the North Sea now, he felt only too sure, and forcing whole squadrons of angry waves through the narrow funnel of the Straits of Dover.
As the night wore on, however, the wind rose steadily, till it reached at last the full dignity of a regular tempest. Warren Relf couldn’t sleep in his bed for distress. He rose often, and looked out on the gusty street for cold comfort. The gas was flaring and flickering in the lamps; the wind was sweeping fiercely down the Cours-la-Reine; and the few belated souls who still kept the pavement were cowering and running before the beating rain with heads bent down and cloaks or overcoats wrapped tight around them. It must indeed be an awful night on the English Channel; Warren stood aghast to think to himself how awful. What on earth could ever have possessed him, he wondered now, to let Elsie make her way alone, on such a terrible evening as this, without him by her side, across the stormy water!
He would receive a telegram, thank Heaven, first thing in the morning. Till then, his suspense would be really painful.
As for Elsie, she sped all unconscious on her way to Calais, comfortably ensconced in her first-class compartment “pour dames seules,” of which she had fortunately the sole monopoly. The rain beat hard against the windows, to be sure; and the wind shook the door with its gusts more than once, or made the feeble oil-lamp in the roof of the carriage flicker fitfully; but Elsie, absorbed in deeper affairs, hardly thought of it at all in her own mind till she reached the stretch of open coast that abuts on the mouth of the Somme near Abbeville. There the fact began at last to force itself upon her languid attention that the Channel crossing would be distinctly rough. Still, even then, she hardly realized its full meaning, for the wind was off-shore along the Picardy coast; and it was not till the train drew up with a dash on the quay at Calais that she fully understood the serious gravity of the situation. The waves were breaking fiercely over the mouth of the harbor, and the sea was rising so high outside that passengers were met with stern resolve at the terminus wall by the curt notice:
“Owing to the rough weather prevailing to-night, the Dover boat will not sail till morning.”
“A cause du mauvais temps.” Cause enough, to be sure, wittt such a sea running! Elsie saw at a glance that to cross through such a mountain of waves would have been quite impossible. Did the Boulogne boat intend to start? she asked helplessly. No, madame; the service all along the coast was interrupted to-night, by stress of weather. There would be no steamer till the wind moderated. Tomorrow morning, perhaps, or to-morrow evening.
So Elsie went perforce to an hotel in the town and waited patiently for the sea to calm itself. But she, too, got no sleep; she lay aw r ake all night, and thought of Winifred.
Away at Monte Carlo, no wind blew. Hugh Massinger went to rest there at his ease at the Hotel de Paris, and slept his sleep out with perfect complacency. No qualms of conscience, no thoughts of Winifred, disturbed his slumber. He had taken the precaution to doubly lock and bolt his door, and to lay his winnings between the bolster and the mattress; so he had nothing to trouble about. He had also been careful to purchase a good sixchambered revolver at one of the numerous shops that line the Casino gardens. It isn’t safe, indeed, at Monte Carlo, they say, for a successful player, recognized as such, to go about with too much money as hard cash actually in his possession. Raffalevsky, in fact, had told him, with most unnecessary details, some very unpleasant stories, before he retired to rest, about robberies committed at Monte Carlo upon the helpless bodies of heavy winners.
Raffalevsky was clearly in a savage ill-temper that evening at having dropped a few thousand pounds at the tables strange, that men should permit themselves to be so deeply affected by mere transient trifling monetary reverses and he took it out by repeating or inventing truculent tales, evidently intended to poison the calm rest of Hugh Massinger’s innocent slumbers. There was that ugly anecdote, for example, about the lucky boulevardier in the high fina
ncial line who won three hundred thousand francs at a couple of sittings and was murdered in a firstclass carriage on his way back to Nice by an unknown assailant, never again recognized or brought to justice. There was that alarming incident of the fat Lyons silkmerchant with the cast in his eye who deposited his gains, like a prudent bourgeois that he was, with a banker at Monaco, but was nevertheless set upon by an organized band of three well-dressed but ill-informed ruffians, who positively searched him from head to foot, stripped him, and then threw him out upon the four-foot way, a helpless mass, in the Mont Boron Tunnel, happy to escape with bare life and a broken leg from the merciless clutches of the gang of miscreants. And there was that dramatic incident of the Nevada heiress who, coming to Monte Carlo with the gold of California visibly bulging her capacious pockets, had to fight for her life in her own bedroom at this very hotel, and defend her property from unholy hands by the summary process of shooting down with her own domestic revolver two of her cowardly midnight visitors. She was complimented by the authorities on her gallant defense, and replied with spirit that, for the matter of that, this sort of thing was really no novelty to her; for she’d shot down more than one importunate suitor for her hand and heart already in Nevada.
Then Raffalevsky had grown more lugubrious in his converse still, and descended to tales of the recurrent suicides that diversify the monotony of the Monegasque world. He estimated that twelve persons at least per annum, on a moderate average, blew their brains out in the Casino and grounds, after risking and losing their last napoleon at the roulette tables. To kill yourself in the actual salons themselves, he admitted with a sigh, was indeed considered by gentlemanly players as a boorish solecism: persons of breeding, intent on an exit from this vale of tears, usually retired for the purpose of shooting themselves to a remote and sequestered spot in the Casino gardens, behind a convenient clump of picturesque datepalms. This spot was known to habitual frequenters of Monte Carlo as the Place Hari-kiri, or Happy Despatch Point. But if, by hazard, any inconsiderate person was moved to shoot himself in the salles de jeu, a rapid contingent of trained lackeys stood ever at hand ready to rush in at a moment’s notice to drag away the offender’s body or wipe up the mess; and play proceeded at once the same as usual.
Raffalevsky dilated upon all the particulars of the various murders, suicides, and robberies, with a wealth of diction and a fertile exuberance of sanguinary detail that would certainly have done honor in its proper place to M. Zola or a penny dreadful. It shocked Hugh’s fine sense of the becoming in language his keen feeling for reserve in literature to listen to so many revolting and sickening items. But the Russian was clearly in a humor that evening for blood and wounds. He spared no strong point in his catalogue of horrors. He revelled in gore. He insisted on the minutest accuracy of anatomical description. He robbed and murdered like one who loved it. He even strained the resources of the French language, sufficiently rich, for the rest, in terms of awe, as he rang the changes and piled up the agonies in his vivid recital of crimes and catastrophies.
Nevertheless, Hugh slept soundly in spite of it all in his bed till morning, and when he woke, found his goodly pile of gold and notes intact as ever between bolster and mattress. He had never slept so well since he went to Whitestrand.
But at Whitestrand itself that night things were quite otherwise. Such a storm was hardly remembered on the German Ocean within the memory of the oldest sailors. Early in the evening, the coastguardman at the shelter just beyond the Hall grounds, warned by telegram from the Meteorological Office, had raised the cone for heavy weather from the northeast. By nine o’clock, the surf was seething and boiling on the bar, and the waves were dashing themselves in huge sheets of foam against Hugh Massinger’s ineffectual breakwater. The sand flew before the angry gusts: it blinded the eyes and filled the lungs of all who tried to face the storm on the sea-front: even up the river and at the Hall itself it pervaded the air with a perfect bombardment of tiny grains. It was only possible to remain outdoors by turning one’s back upon the fierce blast, or by covering one’s face, not with a veil, but with a silk pocket-handkerchief. The very coastguardmen, accustomed by long use to good doses of solid silica in the lungs, shrank back with alarm from the idea of facing that running fire of driven sand-particles. As for the smacks and boats at large on the sea, they were left to their fate nothing could be done by human hands to help or save them.
By midnight, tide was well at its full, and the beach being covered, the bombardment of sand slowly intermitted a little. But sheets of foam and spray still drove on before the wind, and fishermen, clad in waterproof suits from head to foot, stood facing them upon the shore to watch the fate of Hugh Massinger’s poor helpless breakwater. The sea was roaring and raving round its sides now like a horde of savages, and the scour was setting in fiercer than ever to wash away whatever remained of Whitestrand.
“Will it stand, Bill?” the farm-bailiff asked in anxious tones of Stannaway, the innkeeper, as they strained their eyes through the gloom and spray to catch sight of the frail barrier that alone protected them the stone breakwater which had taken the place of the old historical Whitestrand poplar.
Stannaway shook his head despondently. “Sea like that’s bound to wash it away,” he answered hard through the teeth of the wind. “It’d wash away anything. An’ when it goes, it’s all up with Whitestrand.”
The whole village, indeed, men, women, and children alike, had collected by this time at the point by the river, to watch the progress of the common enemy. There was a fearful interest for every one of them in seeing the waves assail and beat down that final barrier of their hearths and homes. If the breakwater went, Whitestrand must surely follow it, now or later, bit by bit, in piecemeal destruction. The sea would swallow it up wholesale, as it swallowed up Dunwich and Thorpe and Slaughden. Those domestic examples gave point to their terror. To the Suffolk coast-dwellers, the sea indeed envisages itself ever, not as a mere natural expanse of water, but as a slow and patient yet implacable assailant.
By two in the morning, a fresh excitement supervened to keep up the interest: a collier hull, deserted and waterlogged, came drifting in by slow stages before the driving gale across the broad sand-flats. She was a dismasted hulk, rackety and unseaworthy, abandoned by all who had tried to sail her; and she drifted slowly, slowly, slowly on, driven before the waves, foot by foot, a bit at a time, over the wet sands, till at last, with one supreme effort of force, the breakers cast her up, a huge burden, between the shore and the breakwater, blocking with her broadside one entire end of the channel created by the scour behind the spot once occupied by the famous poplar. The waves, in fact, das’hed her full against the farther end of the breakwater, and jammed her up with prodigious force between shore and wall, a temporary barrier against their own advances. Then retiring for a moment to recruit their rage, they broke in sheets of helpless foam against the w6oden bulwark they had raised themselves in the direct line of their own progress.
What followed next followed so fast that even the sturdy Whitestranders themselves, accustomed as they were to heavy seas and shifting sands and natural changes of marvelous rapidity, stood aghast at its suddenness and its awful energy. In a few minutes, before their very eyes, the sea had carried huge masses and shoals of flying sand over the top of the wall and the stranded ship, and lodged them deep in the hollow below that the scour had created in the rear of the breakwater. The wall was joined as if by some sudden stroke of a conjurer’s wand to the mainland beyond; and the sea, still dashing madly against the masonry and the ship, set to work once more to erect fresh outworks in front against its own assaults by piling up sand with incredible speed in dunes and mounds upon their outer faces. Even as they looked, the breakwater was rapidly lost to view in a mountain of beach: the broken stump of mast on the wrecked collier hardly showed above the level of the mushroom hillock that covered and overwhelmed with its hasty debris the buried hull of the unknown vessel. Hummock after hummock grew apace outside with startl
ing rapidity in successive lines along the shore to seaward. New land was forming at each crash of the waves. The Aeolian sand was doing its work bravely. By five in the morning, men walked secure where the sea had roared but six hours before. It had left the buried breakwater now a quarter of a mile inland at least, and was till engaged with mad eagerness in its rapid task of piling up fresh mounds and heaps in endless rows, to seaward and to seaward and ever to seaward.
Whitestrand was saved. Nay, more than that, it was gaining once more in a single night all that it had lost in twenty years to the devouring ocean.
When morning broke, the astonished Whitestranders could hardly recognize their own beach, their own shore, their own salt marshes, their own river. Everything was changed as if by magic. The estuary was gone, and in its place stretched a wide expanse of undulating sandhills. The Char had turned its course visibly southward, bursting the dikes on the Yond-stream farms, and flowing to the sea by the old channel from which Oliver’s engineers had long since diverted it. The Hall stood half a mile farther from the water’s edge than it had done of old, and a belt of bare and open dune-land lay tossed between its grounds and the new high-tide mark. The farm-bailiff examined them in the gray dawn with a practiced eye. “If we plant them hills all over with maramgrass and tamarisk,” he said reflectively, “they’ll mat like the other ones, and Squire will have as many acres of new pastureland north o’ Char as ever he lost o’ salt marsh and meadow south of the old river.”
If Hugh Massinger had only known it, indeed, the storm and the strange chances of tempest had done far more for him that single night while he slept at Monte Carlo than luck at roulette had managed to do for him the day before in that hot and crowded sink of iniquity in the rooms of the Casino.
For from that day forth Whitestrand was safe. It was more than safe; it began to grow again. The blown sand ceased to molest it: the sea and the tide ceased to eat it away: the breakwater had done its work well, after all; and a new barrier of increasing sandhills had sprung up spontaneously by the river’s mouth to guard its seaward half from future encroachment. If Hugh could only have known and believed it, the estate was worth every bit as much that wild morning as ever it had been in the palmiest days of the Elizabethan Meyseys. And the family solicitor, examining the mortgages in his own office, remarked to himself with a pensive glance that the Squire might have raised that little sum, if only he’d waited, at scarcely more than half the interest, on his own security and his improved property. For Whitestrand now would fetch money.