The yellow book: an illustrated quarterly (11.1896)

By Robert Shews 109
These became rarer and rarer, and at last stopped altogether.
One ceased to hear of him or from him. If he still painted,
he contrived to conceal his results from his admirers in England.
It was a comfort, though, to be rid of the Blecks. We breathed
freely ; a menace had been removed. Elsingford had been immo-
lated to the public good. It was a high price ; but, after all, the
deliverance was worth it.

II
Harvard would have found it difficult to explain how he had
come by such a complete impression of the way matters stood, or
why he felt so little doubt of its correctness. He hadn’t been able
to ask many questions. Elsingford hadn’t been able to tell him
very much ; a man can’t complain of his wife. But Harvard had
instincts, intuitions. One can reconstruct a mastodon from a
tooth and a claw. A word here, a look, a gesture there, and
Elsingford’s very reticence, had made it all horribly clear.
Elsingford was certainly very ill. It had begun the winter
before, at New York, with an attack of what he and Hennie
called the “grip”—probably the influenza. This had left him
with a cough, which he couldn’t succeed in throwing off. In the
spring the doctors had insisted that he must stop work and go
abroad. Change, rest, recreation would set him up. He wanted
to come to England, but Hennie objected. When they had left
England on their honeymoon Elsingford had understood that they
were to return in the autumn : they had really stopped in New
York upwards of four years. Hennie, little by little, had opened
her heart to him. With consternation he had discovered in it a
violent hatred of his country and his country-people. She hated
their very names, she said. England was a sink of iniquity and
stodginess.