Chapter XVI: 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.'