Chapter XV: 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!