HOW FAUST SUCCEEDED.
The day, an eventful one, indeed, to Ellinor--wore on; the 'to-morrow
night' of Sir Redmond's arrangements had become 'to-night,' and the
hour of nine seemed to be approaching swiftly.
Mary's warnings to Ellinor to 'be wary' recurred to the latter
persistently and reproachfully, yet she never wavered or swerved from
her purpose, though with reference to marriage there came to her
memory the words of a writer who says it _is_ a solemn thing when you
come to think of it, that if you make a mistake in the matter you are
in for it, and nothing can pull you out again.
Ellinor's ambition was, as we have shown, dazzled on one hand, while
love and novelty lured her on the other. Her heart was wrung by the
duplicity with which she was treating her sister, and the
contemplation of what that sister's emotions would be when she was
missed; but Sleath's brilliant promises and visions of the future
that was before them, deadened the sense of the present for a time.
She wrote a farewell letter to Mary, which the latter would in time
find on her toilet table.
'The first step is taken now, I cannot retrace it,' thought Ellinor,
as she closed this letter, a very incoherent and blurred one; 'and
now to begone--to steal away without seeing darling Mary, whom I
could not look in the face.'
Nervously and hurriedly she went through her drawers and
repositories, selecting and thrusting into a hand-bag those articles
which she thought were necessary for her journey or flight. Now and
then something turned up which reminded her of happy past hours, of
Mary's love, and their parents' memory; she gazed with tear-blinded
eyes on some faded photographs, and kissed them passionately as if
she could neither look on them long enough nor part with them.
At last her assortment was made, and, fearful of meeting Mary, she
threw on her hat and cloak, grasped her bag, slipped softly from the
house by a back way, and passing through the old doorway with the
date and legend on its lintel, went quickly towards the place of
meeting, with her heart beating wildly, painfully, and all her pulses
tingling.
The anxiety--the craving that had possessed her at times to get away
from the reproachful eyes of Robert Wodrow and the upbraiding
speeches of his mother, was about to be relieved now; for under the
mal-influence of Sleath the girl's nature seemed to have been
changed, but the last words Mrs. Wodrow had said to her were in her
memory then:--
'You took the love of my boy--the one deep love of his life it seemed
to be--made a plaything of his heart, and then cast it aside to break
and wither, it may be to die!'
Anyone who saw Ellinor at this juncture would have found a curious
rigidity in the usually soft outline of her sweet face, and a
perplexed and troubled expression in her hazel eyes as she walked
onward, feeling it was not yet too late to return.
But she had passed her word, plighted her troth, given her promise to
this man, and why should she not redeem her pledge? She was leaving
a homely and dull, a grey and sequestered, if perfectly peaceful
life, for the new and brilliant one to be shared with him, who loved
her so well, and she would fulfil her contract.
Some--no doubt many--there would be who might have no pity for the
rash imprudence of a motherless girl yielding to the temptation given
her and eloping thus; and her name, her story, and her transgression,
in many a false version, might be bandied from lip to lip, a
conviction that galled and fretted her naturally proud spirit; but
the consciousness of all this was inferior to a sense of what she
knew Mary would feel, on finding herself deceived thus and left
alone--alone to face the scandal, gossip, _esclandre_, and
reprehension to which her act would give rise; and the knowledge gave
Ellinor acute mental agony.
She had been that morning at the churchyard, as if to bid her parents
farewell in spirit, and saw the last chaplets that she and Mary had
woven lying on their graves, all withered now, and she had marvelled
when flowers from her hands would be laid there again.
All was still around her now; she could hear, however, the voice of
Mary's tame owl in its nest in the garden wall, and the rush of the
May over its rocky bed.
When might she hear that familiar sound in the sweet moonlight again?
Ay, Ellinor, when?
Perfectly cool and audacious Sir Redmond Sleath was at the appointed
place betimes, and though an intrigue or adventure of this kind was
nothing new to him, his heart was certainly beating faster than usual
under his well-cut coat as he quitted the hired brougham at the end
of the lane which diverged from the highway towards Birkwoodbrae.
The moon, a sickly and slender one, was waning, and the chill, pale
light of its crescent cast the shadows of the tall silver birches
across the pathway as he picked his way forward to where the outline
of the house at Birkwoodbrae came before him, with its grey walls and
windows half covered by masses of monthly roses and Virginia
creepers. The house and all around it seemed still as the grave. He
had come betimes, we say, and was thus at his post a little before
Ellinor came forth to meet him.
He heard no sound and saw no sign, and to him seconds seemed like
minutes--minutes hours. Could anything have happened? Had Mary
baffled the plans of Ellinor, or had the courage of the latter failed
her at the last moment? He had known of such things; and there was a
curious suppressed gleam--a latent glitter in his cold blue eyes that
would not have been pleasant to see.
He heard the house clock strike the hour of nine, and just as the
last stroke sounded he saw the waving of a dress and of a white
skirt, the wearer of which turned into the lane, and he smiled as
such men smile over the triumph of their own selfishness and
heartlessness; but now Ellinor, for she it was, paused in her
approach, for something between a yell and a hoarse oath escaped Sir
Redmond, blended with fierce growling, and he felt as if his right
leg had been caught in the sharpest of mantraps.
True to the instincts of hate and vengeance for more than one kick
administered by Sleath, Jack, the bull terrier, who had been upon the
prowl, had caught the baronet by the calf of the leg and held him
fast!
Now, whether it was a dog, a cat, a hare, or a rabbit on which Jack
fastened, he never relaxed his hold while life remained in his
victim; and so, after tearing Sir Redmond's trousers from heel to
waistband, Jack's sharp teeth were closed nigh to meeting in the
muscles of his enemy's right leg.
And well might Ellinor pause in wonder and affright as she shrank
under the shadow of a hedge, for to the fierce imprecations of Sir
Redmond, and the angry snarling of the dog, were added the swearing
of the valet, John Gaiters, and the shouts of the brougham driver.
By the time the dog let go and trotted leisurely to the house, there
was nothing left for Sir Redmond and his two attendants but an
ignominious retreat, and they drove off accordingly.
To Sleath it was a matter for the fiercest exasperation that his
carefully matured and well-laid scheme to entrap a beautiful and
well-nigh friendless girl--a scheme on the very verge of its
fruition--had been baffled, and baffled so absurdly, so grotesquely,
and with so much physical agony, by 'an accursed cur which he would
yet shoot like a rat,' as he hissed through his clenched teeth.
And Sleath was, strange to say, the more furious because he had
meditated a perfidy towards Ellinor.
Terror of the dog's bite and probable hydrophobia made her would-be
lover nearly beside himself. He came no more near Birkwoodbrae, so,
for the present, she was safe from him. His pedestrianism was
effectually marred for several days, and even had he been able to
concoct any fresh nefarious scheme, events were about to occur at
Birkwoodbrae beyond the conception of all.
However, on the day of the projected elopement, he had made all his
arrangements for leaving Craigmhor, and, having formally bade adieu
to Lord Dunkeld's household, he could not return, and had to carry
out his plans for travelling south without the fair companion whom he
intended should accompany him. In the snug comfort of a Pullman car
he gave loose to the rage and mortification naturally inspired by his
most humiliating and grotesque defeat. He drank heavily, and there
was a fiendish expression of determination in his face that terrified
even his usually stolid valet, Mr. John Gaiters.
Though she heard the shrill voice of Elspat crying,
'Oh, Miss Wellwood, Jack's been up to mischief--fighting with
something; his jaws are all over with blood!'
Ellinor knew not precisely what had happened: she only felt that all
was over, how or why she knew not; but a revulsion of feeling took
possession of her, a flood of tears relieved her, and on her knees by
her bedside she thanked Heaven for her escape!