Ellice Quentin, and other stories

A man about thirty-four years of age was sitting a few years ago in his bachelor rooms in one of the inns of court. It was a spring afternoon, warm for the season; the window was open, and above the high-shouldered brick buildings a glimpse of eastern sky appeared, with a pinkish flush upon it, reflected from the sunset clouds in the opposite quarter of the heavens. Through the window were also visible the boughs of a tree upon which the bright green buds were beginning to unfold; and a couple of sparrows were chirping to one another as they fluttered from twig to twig. A muffled hush was in the air, peculiar to these London enclosures, into which horses and vehicles seldom enter; the roar of the great thoroughfare, though only a few rods distant, being almost inaudible to the occupant of this quiet chamber; while the light ticking of the clock upon the mantelpiece, and the twittering of the birds, were both perceptible to him.

He sat heavily and motionlessly in his chair--a tall, powerfully-built man with gloomy brow and a thick dark beard. In his right hand he held an envelope, which had been torn open; but, after reading the enclosure, he had mechanically put it back. The envelope bore the name of Geoffrey Herne, in a woman's handwriting, and the London postmark. About half an hour had gone by since Herne read the letter, during which time he had been sitting as he was now, plunged in thought. His meditations had not, however, been occupied all that time with the subject of the letter; but certain passages in his past life had been passing in review before his mind: passages in which Ellice Quentin was the central figure. She was a slender girl when he first knew her, looking taller than she was, with strange grey-green eyes, and a clear but bright colour in her cheeks. Her face was very attractive to some people, though it had no pretensions to regular beauty; the features were delicately but oddly formed, indicating a refined and talented but wayward and unaccountable nature. In her ordinary home life, and also when she was in the company of those she did not like, she was silent, repellent, and cold; but she not seldom in favouring circumstances kindled into brilliance of talk and action; and there was a vein of passion in her which was itself the secret of her frequent coldness. Her lips, red as blood, were gracefully moulded and were perfectly under her control; by subtle modulations she could render them expressive of any emotion. Her figure was slight at this time, and scarcely as fully developed as that of most girls of her age; but she never made an ungainly movement, or fell into an awkward position; and she had such a genius for costume that whatever she put on straightway seemed to become an organic part of her. Her wrists were slender and long, and her fingers tapered almost to a point: Geoffrey Herne had felt their touch upon his face as soft as the thrill of delight that at the same moment swept his heart. But that was not until many months after their first meeting, which was unromantic enough; Mr. Quentin having invited him to dinner to discuss some professional business (Herne was a barrister). Ellice had treated him on this occasion with undisguised superciliousness, somewhat to Herne's amusement at first; for Mr. Quentin--an obese and ineffective elderly gentleman--though he boasted of blue blood somewhere in his veins, was far from being in a prosperous or dignified worldly condition; was very poor, in fact, and thought of nothing but obtaining possession of some property to which he had a very questionable claim. Meanwhile tradesmen used to present their bills with annotations at the bottom, intimating a desire more or less urgent to have them settled at once. Hereupon poor Mr. Quentin would wince and splutter; but Ellice, leaning back in her chair, with her hands folded on her lap, would meet his eye coldly and narrowly, with a sarcastic smile curling one side of her lips. Mr. Quentin would rather face a score of insolent creditors than that little smile of his daughter's. For Ellice was a natural aristocrat far more than an hereditary one--she was born for a life of luxury and fastidious refinement, and her father could not help recollecting, at these moments, that he had thrown away eighty thousand pounds of money which should have been hers upon the turf; nor had he the consolation of reflecting that Ellice was ignorant of this fact. Ignorant of it! He sometimes shuddered to think how many facts discreditable to him that cold, silent girl probably knew. She was not always silent either; she could utter agonising remarks in a semi-jocose way. But let us do the young lady justice. It was within Mr. Quentin's memory that once, when he had returned home late at night, after a miserably unsuccessful interview with his lawyers, and had let himself into the house noiselessly with his latch-key, dreading to encounter Ellice's unsympathetic look, he had suddenly felt two slender arms drawn tightly about his neck in the darkness, and a hot and wet cheek pressed against his own. At that the unfortunate man had broken into sobs; Ellice had tried to soothe him, and sitting on his knee, with her head against his shoulder, had spoken to him such words as he had not heard since he and his dead wife were young. But after awhile she had fallen silent, and in the midst of an incoherent monologue of his on the subject of his wrongs and misadventures, she had risen abruptly and left him, with only a curt good-night. She was a strange girl.

Geoffrey Herne's first impression of Ellice had not been particularly favourable, and if she had behaved as most young ladies would have done under the circumstances, he might probably have never bestowed a second thought upon her. But her gratuitous arrogance, after amusing him for awhile, began to pique him; and being possessed of an exceedingly keen tongue and wit of his own, he was tempted to enter into conversation with her. The dialogue which followed was probably worthy of a listener more intelligent than Mr. Quentin; the upshot of it being (so far as Herne was concerned) that he found it would require all his wit, and more than all his temper, to hold his own fairly against this oblique-eyed young lady, with her curving scarlet lips. They parted that night on terms of almost open hostility, and Herne, as he went homewards, more than once found his brows drawing together and his lips compressed at the recollection of the things she had said to him. 'She is a lady, though--confound her impudence!' was the sum of his mental comments. Her image was very vivid in his memory--unpleasantly so, indeed; not only that, but the intonation of her voice--her way of lifting back her head with a kind of haughty surprise when he addressed her; the gesture of her hands and shoulders--all were present to him. Moreover he recalled one or two instances in which she had unmistakably had the better of him in the duel of words, and his face grew hot anew with a really disproportionate vexation. He would rather have made a fool of himself before the Lord Chief Justice of England than before that slender girl of twenty. He then resolved that he would avoid seeing her for the future; but he finally modified his determination so far as to tell himself that he would first give her such evidence of his superior qualities as should make her regret ever having had the temerity to provoke him.

As it turned out, this was a much longer and more arduous enterprise than he had anticipated; insomuch that after several months had gone by he did not seem much nearer the consummation than at first. The antagonism between him and Ellice had been--superficially, at least--constant and unrelenting; but meanwhile he had incidentally come to know her well, and he was too clear-sighted a man not to perceive that she was beginning to be indispensable to him. The discovery occasioned him much anxiety and inward struggle. His predilections had for years been against marriage, and he certainly had little encouragement to think that Ellice would ever dream of marrying him. One day, however, after a peculiarly bitter passage-at-arms, he rose and took up his hat to depart. He had something to say first, though, which had been on his mind for a week or two past.

'You are going?' she said indifferently, or, rather, with an air as of relief.

'Yes, I am going; and, as I shall probably not see you again, I will say good-bye.'

'Oh! You have had enough of it at last?'

'I am going to Australia.'

She looked slowly up at him as he stood near her chair, and looked slowly down again, while the colour gradually deepened in her cheeks. 'This is really the most entertaining thing I have heard from you in a long time,' she said lightly after awhile.

'It is the part of wisdom not to outstay one's best witticism,' returned Geoffrey in the same tone; 'so I'll be off at once. Good-bye.' He held out his hand.

'Good-bye,' she answered coldly. But she did not look up, or move her own hand.

'You won't shake hands?'

'What is the use, since we are never to meet again? If you are going, you can go without that.'

'Well, I suppose I can,' said he; and after standing a moment, during which she made no sign except to draw one deep breath, he turned and walked with a heavy tread to the door.

'Mr. Herne!' he heard her say as he laid his hand upon the latch. He looked round without speaking. She beckoned him to her with a movement of the head and hand.

'Excuse me,' she said, 'but I think you--you have left something. Will you come back here a moment?' There was a vibration in her voice that was new to Geoffrey. He came back.

'You were going away without shaking hands,' she said, looking up at him with a curious smile.

'You said that----'

'Oh, well, don't let us quarrel any more; I am tired of it. Here is my hand.'

Geoffrey took it. How soft it was--and how cold! It lay lightly in the embrace of his fingers, but he could perceive a slight tremulousness in it, which seemed also to pervade her whole body.

'You spoke of my having left something----' he began at length.

Her hand suddenly became alive in his, and grasped it tightly. She drew it to her cheek, that was as smooth as the petal of a lily; then slowly turned her face until her lips rested on it. All the blood flew tumultuously through Geoffrey's veins and sang in his ears. He was on his knee beside her, and looking in her eyes, which met his for a moment, and then sank.

'Now go to Australia!' she said in a whisper.

'Ellice--Ellice! Were you the thing I was leaving behind, my dear?' he said, bending forwards till his lips touched hers.... After that there could be no more misunderstandings.

Geoffrey Herne did not go to Australia, either alone, as he had arranged to do, or with Ellice as his wife, as he perhaps might have done; for at this time she would have followed him anywhere in the world--or out of it. But it was decided that they should remain in England, where Geoffrey had good practice as a barrister, in addition to his settled income of six hundred pounds, and be married in May--that is, in about six months. Mr. Quentin put on a portentous aspect when he was first informed of the affair, protruding his under lip and rubbing slowly behind his ear with his middle finger. He sighed and muttered something about having once anticipated a 'more brilliant future--no offence to you, Herne, of course--for his dear Ellice.' But as a matter of fact he was by no means averse to the match, if he had not actually done what he could to promote it. There is apt to be a good deal of humbug inwoven in the characters of elderly men who have seen better days and are not resigned to worse ones. Geoffrey perceived that Mr. Quentin desired to make a merit of doing what really was pleasing to him; and it was not in an expectant son-in-law's heart to object to that. So matters on that side went smoothly.