EVIL TIDINGS.
That night before retiring to rest, when seated near Mary, and
affecting to read to Ellinor quietly by the light of a pleasantly
shaded lamp, all the stirring and startling events of the recent hour
or two seemed a kind of dream--an unreality--though the illusion was
apt to be dispelled by Mary's wondering surmises as to what Jack had
been fighting with, and who made all the noise prior to the dog's
return with somewhat ensanguined teeth and jaws!
Ellinor, as she looked furtively from time to time at Mary's sweet
and placid face, with its downcast looks and soft, yet firm
expression, felt inclined to cast herself on her breast and confess
all the story of the late escape. But her heart failed her; it was
too full of shame for her duplicity, with doubt, bewilderment, and a
strange kind of hope in the future.
Her day-dreams, as we have described them, were too bright and too
recent to be quite dispelled or abandoned yet.
And both sisters were quite unaware that they owed the fact of their
being placidly seated as usual together at that time to Jack the
terrier, who lay asleep with his head resting on Mary's feet, yet
snarling from time to time and showing his teeth; for he was
dreaming--as dogs will dream--of his late encounter and revenge. For
though Jack had snarled fiercely when assailed by Gaiter's foot and
the driver's whip, he had made his first attack 'with that savage and
insidious silence' which, as Bell in his British quadrupeds says,
indicate the character of the bull-dog; and, though called a
fox-terrier, the gallant Jack had a strong cross of the bull in him.
Betimes next morning Ellinor sought the spot where she was to have
met Sir Redmond. There the wayside grass was bruised, torn, and
spotted with blood, which the dew of the August night had failed to
wash away, and there lay a half-smoked cigar and a gentleman's kid
glove. On the latter, Jack, who accompanied her, with cocked ears
and tail, and with his bandy legs looking more impudent and confident
than usual, pounced with a snort of triumph, and tore it to shreds
with his teeth and paws, thus giving Ellinor the first light she had
on last night's mystery.
There were marks close by where horses' hoofs had been planted, and
the deep ruts of carriage wheels--a carriage brought for her; all
silent witnesses that Sir Redmond had been there!
And all this had happened but last night--exactly twelve hours ago;
yet it looked as if a score of years had passed since she stole
silently from her room and approached the shaded lane!
Troubles and hopes always look brighter by day than by night, in
sunshine than under clouds and rain; so Ellinor began to consider the
whole affair with more composure.
To her it had seemed that, 'although love in a cottage is a very fine
thing, love in a Belgravian mansion was decidedly preferable;' but
all that just then seemed to be over and done with, when, during the
day, she heard incidentally through old Elspat of Sir Redmond's
sudden departure from Craigmhor--the departure in which she was to
have shared!
She loved Sir Redmond with her head only, and not with her heart; and
though Robert Wodrow might not have quite divined the difference, yet
a difference in such love there is.
And Ellinor as she reflected, vowed to herself that never again would
she risk the loss of position as Colonel Wellwood's daughter (even to
be a baronet's wife), or place herself so foolishly in a comparative
stranger's power, till he was free to claim and wed her, despite
relations and wealth.
Little did the simple Ellinor know the reality of the escape she had
so narrowly made from the pitfall prepared for her. '_Væ victis!_ is
the watchword of civilisation,' says a writer; 'a trustful, loving
girl succumbs to the artifices of a scoundrel, and society punishes
her by averting the light of its countenance from her, while the man
who has committed a crime only next to murder in atrocity is let off
scot-free. And so the world wags, my venerable masters! and it is a
jolly one, take it at its worst aspect.'
Ignorant of the baffled elopement, of course, and perhaps of Sir
Redmond's departure from the neighbourhood of Invermay, Robert
Wodrow, intent on plans of his own, came near Ellinor no more, and
seemed to ignore her existence.
And, strange to say, ere long she became indignant that he made no
sign or advance; while rumour said he was perhaps going away, no one
knew whither. There has seldom been a woman who liked to see a once
avowed lover slip from her grasp; and Robert Wodrow certainly had
been Ellinor's lover till the serpent entered her paradise in the
shape of rank and ambition.
But we are somewhat anticipating the events of the day subsequent to
her intended flight.
Mary, after evening fell, and having been round among some of her
poor people, was seated somewhat thoughtfully alone, and seemed to
have lost most of her usual buoyancy of spirit. Was it a prevision
of coming evil, she thought, or the result of the weather? The sun
had sunk like a red, glowing ball behind the hills, and there was in
the air an extraordinary stillness which produced a depressing effect
upon her spirits.
The recent visits of Captain Colville and Sir Redmond Sleath, on the
one hand, and the cold and haughty demeanour of Lady Dunkeld and her
daughter, on the other, had begun to impress upon her the necessity
for making a change in their little household, and having some
pleasant, motherly, and elderly lady to reside with them as a
chaperone; and her mind was full of thought on this matter when Dr.
Wodrow was announced. She welcomed him with pleasure, as usual, all
unaware that he was the bearer of tidings that would render all her
plans for the future unavailing!
He noticed the cloud on Mary's face through her smile of welcome,
and, taking her hand kindly in his own, he said,
'Mary dear, is there anything you particularly dread?'
'How strange that you should ask me this,' replied Mary, 'for I am
rather ashamed to say that I feel as if something of evil were about
to happen--but the emotion is vague and undefined.'
'Then you believe in presentiments?'
'I do--sometimes--do not you, Dr. Wodrow?'
'I am afraid I do,' said he, with increasing kindness and gravity of
manner. 'So Robert and Ellinor have completely quarrelled?'
'I fear so.'
'George Eliot says that "Every man who is not a monster, a
mathematician, or a moral philosopher is the slave of some woman or
other." But I came not to speak of Robert, poor fellow, but of
something concerning yourself.'
'Of me!' said Mary, startled by the growing gravity of his manner.
'Yourself and Ellinor! I have wanted much to see you all day, my
dear.'
'Why?'
'I have news for you.'
'Good news or bad?'
'Bad, I grieve to say, my dear bairn,' said he, as he paused again
with something pitiful in his handsome old face, while Mary's colour
changed, and her heart began to beat quicker with pain and
apprehension.
'Have you had a letter from a Mr. Luke Sharpe?'
'No--who is he?'
'A lawyer--a writer to the signet in Edinburgh--who is the legal
agent of your cousin Wellwood.'
'What is all this to me--to us?'
'Your uncle is dead. Your cousin is the next male heir--heir of
entail--so Birkwoodbrae, and everything else of which your uncle died
possessed that is entailed, goes to him, and you and Ellinor can
reside here no longer--so Mr. Sharpe has written me.'
He evidently said this with an effort--with manifest difficulty, and
as if he dreaded to look in the face of Mary, who for some moments
felt as if stunned, and gazed at the lawyer's letter, which he placed
before her, as she would at a serpent, and scarcely taking in its
meaning.
'Understand me, child. Your father's elder brother, who permitted
you to live unmolested here--as Birkwoodbrae was but a moiety of the
entailed property--is dead, and young Wellwood, the guardsman of whom
Captain Colville spoke so often, claims all.'
'And we must go away?' said Mary, in a low, strange, wailing voice,
all unlike her own.
'Away--yes--but where?'
'God only knows!'
And as she spoke the girl wrung her slender interlaced fingers, while
the old minister kindly patted her head, as he had often done in her
childhood. After a pause, Mary said, in a voice broken more than
once by a hard dry sob,
'Our uncle in Australia would seem to have died months ago according
to this letter, yet we only hear of the event now.'
'Yes.'
'And we have been living here in another person's house, though we
deemed it our own--another person's, and not thinking of rent?' she
added, bitterly.
'Yes.'
Mary thought the doctor took the matter somewhat placidly, and felt
indignation mingle with her grief.
'And for the roof that covered us, Ellinor and I have actually been
indebted for months to our cousin Wellwood, the cold-blooded son of a
cold-blooded father, who died at feud with ours, and amid the whirl
of London life never troubled himself about our existence, even when
we were left as orphan girls upon the world. So we have been living
here in dear, dear Birkwoodbrae in a fool's paradise, after
all--after all!' continued Mary, with growing bitterness of tone and
heart.
'"The paradise of fools--to few unknown," as Milton has it,' said the
doctor, sententiously.
'To turn us out of Birkwoodbrae is nothing less than the most cruel
injustice!' resumed Mary, with anger.
'But legal. It is the law of entail.'
'Birkwoodbrae is twice as valuable now as it was when poor papa
settled here, some twenty years ago, and he and we have made it so.
It is hard, it is bitter, our home--our dear home--we have known no
other; and so near where they lie--papa and mamma--so near this house
in which I closed their eyes.'
'I doubt not that if your cousin Wellwood were properly appealed
to----'
'We should die rather than appeal to him!' interrupted Mary,
impetuously, while stamping her little foot upon the floor. 'To do
so would be enough to make papa turn in his grave. Though
Birkwoodbrae is inexpressibly dear to Ellinor and to me. Papa used
to say of cousin Wellwood as a boy, though he never saw him, that he
was a puzzle to the whole family.'
'How, Mary?'
'Well, as--as--like a treacherous cuckoo's egg that is dropped into a
sparrow's nest and becomes a puzzle to the poor sparrow, which
wonders and compares it with her own little brood.'
'What an odd simile, my dear,' said Dr. Wodrow, his face actually
rippling over with a smile brighter than Mary relished under the
circumstances, and recalled the aphorism of that unpleasant fellow,
J. J. Rousseau, that many people feel an internal satisfaction at the
troubles of even their best friends.
'Then you will not trust a little to humanity and to Wellwood?'
'Death were preferable, I repeat!' exclaimed Mary, though her tears
were falling fast now.
'Consider--blood is thicker than water, among us in Scotland
particularly.'
'Ellinor and I will never stoop so low,' replied Mary, alternately
interlacing her fingers in her lap, and mechanically caressing the
head of Jack, who had placed his nose on her knee, and regarded her
wistfully with his great black eyes, as if he knew instinctively that
something distressed his mistress by the expression of her face.
'Well, what will be, will be!' said Dr. Wodrow, from his fatalist or
Presbyterian point of view, as he cast his eye upward to the ceiling.
Mary heard his voice as one hears in a dream. The flies buzzed in
the window curtains, the last of the birds still twittered about
among the climbing creepers at the open sash, the roses sent forth
their fragrance still, and the drooping foliage of the silver birches
was gently stirred by the soft evening breeze.
The old clock ticked loudly on the mantelpiece--unnaturally so--as
Mary thought it seemed to do 'when mamma and papa died;' but when the
minister urged again that she should attempt to temporise,
'No,' she exclaimed, emphatically, 'we shall not accept a farthing or
a farthing's worth of what belonged to our common ancestors. It
would ill become Colonel Wellwood's daughters to do so now.'
'Lady Dunkeld, I doubt not, has great influence with your cousin
Wellwood.'
'She knows him, then?'
'Yes; people in "Society," as it is called, all know something of
each other.'
'And you would have me seek his interest through her? Enough of
this, dear Dr. Wodrow. I think you should know me better,' said
Mary, covering her eyes with white and tremulous fingers, as if she
would thrust back her tears.
'The recognition of the inevitable in human affairs often brings
composure when all else fails, we read somewhere,' said the minister.
'Whatever _is_, is doubtless best, and this apparent stroke of evil
fortune may--nay, must be so,' said Mary; 'yet it is hard to bear
just now--hard to bear.'
Dr. Wodrow regarded her bowed head with a soft, kind, and admiring
smile.
'All will come right in the end, dear Mary,' said he, confidently,
and then added, almost laughingly, 'I am sure Captain Colville's
advice may prevail with you; and he will be back before I can return
from Edinburgh, whither I must go on the morrow morning early.
Mary's pallor increased at the mention of Captain Colville's name;
but she said, firmly and doggedly,
'He is the last man in the world whose advice I would seek.'
But before the well-meaning old minister came back from his journey
the crisis in the sisters' affairs seemed ended and over.
At last he was gone, and Mary sat for a time in the twilighted old
dining-room as one who was stunned or in a dream, while the beloved
and reverend figures of her dead parents seemed once again to occupy
in fancy their favourite places by the hearth.
The good old honest furniture of the room was all of the 'old
school,' and had been familiar to her from her childhood; the vast
sofa with its wide arms and cosy cushions; the dark mahogany
sideboard that was like a mural monument, with two urn-like
knife-boxes thereon, and over which hung an old, old circular convex
mirror, surmounted by an eagle with a glass ball in its beak. The
horsehair chairs were ranged in rank and file along the wall; and all
these household features spoke to Mary's heart so much of the past
and of home that the details of the room gave her a sensation of
acute agony, as she caught them at a glance and covered her face with
her hands.
She tried to realise the new life--the homeless life--that must lie
before her and Ellinor now, and the rocks, the shoals, and pitfalls
that too probably would be ahead.
Her first emotion of relief--if it could be called so--came when she
shared her grief with the startled Ellinor; and far into the August
night sat the two crushed creatures talking over the storm-cloud that
had so suddenly enveloped them--a cloud that must have descended at
some time, though as yet they had not quite foreseen it.
'I cannot believe it--I cannot realise it!' said they both,
conjunctly and severally, again and again, as they mingled their
tears and caresses together, each clinging to the other as if for
consolation and help.
'What on earth will become of us!' exclaimed Ellinor, pushing back
the masses of dark brown hair from her forehead.
'We shall go away, and at once, in search of a new home--a little
nest somewhere far away from all who know us, Ellinor; for the
condolence, the wonder, surmises, and pity of neighbours would prove
intolerable to me!' exclaimed Mary. 'We shall have to put our
shoulders to the wheel, as poor papa used to say when in money
straits. I must turn my French and music to account.'
'And I my drawing,' said Ellinor.
'Yes, dearest,' added Mary, kissing her, 'my few accomplishments will
require some brushing up, but your pencil is always a ready one; and
people never know what they can do till they try. But then,
Birkwoodbrae--dear, bonnie Birkwoodbrae--to think we shall never see
it more!' exclaimed Mary, relapsing into a storm of grief again;
after which she became more composed, and began resolutely to think
of the future that must be faced--the future which would necessarily
begin for them on the morrow; and as Mary was by nature independent
and self-reliant, as she thought on the pittance left them by their
father, she said that, by God's help, they might battle with the
world yet; and battle with it too in London.
The human mind, it has been said, is naturally pliable, and, provided
it has the most slender hope to lean upon, adapts itself to the
exigencies of fortune, especially if the imagination be a gay and
luxuriant one.
The dreary night of their new and great sorrow wore on till the small
hours of the morning came, and at last the sisters slept; and 'sleep
is a generous robber that gives in strength what it takes in time.'
So the worthy old minister had gone to Edinburgh.
Mary conceived not unnaturally that this visit to the Scottish
metropolis meant one to Mr. Luke Sharpe with reference to her cousin
Wellwood, and the monetary affairs of herself and Ellinor; but she
was determined on having no temporising, no patronage, or
half-measure from that quarter; and resolved to leave Birkwoodbrae
and to go forth to find another home in another land, and to this end
she began restlessly, but resolutely, to take the means at once.
Strange to say, Ellinor, the romantic and volatile, did not seemed so
much cast down after a time. She had her own secret hopes, thoughts,
and ambition, in which Mary had no share, or of which she had no
exact knowledge as yet; but to the latter to leave Birkwoodbrae, to
see no more the kind old folks at the cosy manse; to see no more her
pensioners, her feathered pets, and flowers, the hills, the glen, the
rockbound stream, and the 'siller birks' that shaded it--to be far
away from all and everything that was dear--to lose, more than all,
the dawning love of her young heart--was indeed a catastrophe
hitherto unlooked for, and at times her soul seemed to die within
her. But she was more often in those moods to which the young are
said to be subject in time of trouble--'in which the existing alone
seems unendurable, and anything better than what is.'