Chapter XIV: 'something Is About to Happen!'

'Captain Goring, let it be distinctly understood that from this day forward your visits to Chilcote cease, and let all this be forgotten,' were the words with which Sir Ranald accosted Goring one forenoon.

'Forgotten!' exclaimed the latter, rising from his seat, hat in hand.

Sir Ranald had suddenly come in and found him seated with Alison, paying one of his usual visits, as Goring wished them to be thought, and the old man was greatly ruffled, even exasperated.

'As for my daughter, sir, I forbid her to speak to you again, to recognise you anywhere, to mention your name, or even think of you!' he continued, with increasing vehemence, lashing himself to fresh anger with the sound of his own words. 'D--n it, sir, in my younger days the pistol would have put an effectual stop to your uncalled-for interloping.'

'Or yours, and your coldness of heart,' replied Goring, who was so confounded by this sudden outburst of wrath as scarcely to know what he said.

He was naturally a proud-spirited young fellow, and rather prompt to ire. He blushed scarlet to the temples at these most affronting speeches; but they gave him double pain when he saw the wan, blanched, and imploring face of poor Alison, whose heart was wrung by the words and bearing of her father--a bearing all so unlike his own usually cold, stately, and aristocratic self.

At that moment she felt a sort of sickening conviction that all was over between her and Bevil, as if she was being torn from him for ever; and, indeed, separation now was nearer than either of them suspected, for cruel events were fated to follow each other fast.

Goring bowed to father and daughter, just touching the hand of the latter as he withdrew. Sir Ranald turned his back upon him and looked through a window; thus Alison had an opportunity to whisper, 'The beeches at eight this evening,' and Bevil left Chilcote with his heart swelling with anger, and smarting under a keen sense of insult and regret.

'Oh, papa, can you forget that he saw Ellon laid in his grave?' she was on the point of saying, while choked with tears, when she suddenly remembered that Ellon's ring was now on Goring's finger, and that the latter's engagement ring was on the third finger of her left hand, where her father, in his abstraction, selfishness, and pre-occupation with monetary affairs, had never even once detected it.

And now, truth to tell, though desperate with poverty, the struggle to keep up appearances, and anger to find his purposes crossed, the old man blushed for himself in having so far forgot what was due to a visitor, a guest, and one gentleman to another, but that emotion was not unmixed with one of satisfaction that 'the affair,' as he thought it, 'between Alison and that fellow was over now and for ever.'

On this day Alison could not dissemble; she cared not to hide her emotion from him, and let the tears of shame and sorrow pour hotly and bitterly down her cheeks, while he looked grimly on, thinking it would 'be all right by-and-by.'

If she were to see Bevil no more, was the girl's constant thought--what would become of her?

The hours in which he had no part lagged fearfully with Alison, and to Bevil, when they met, the minutes seemed to be literally winged. Her whole life had lately been divided into two portions, one when she was briefly with Bevil, and the other when she was _not_. Their meetings had become necessary, as it would seem, to their very existence, and, were these ended, both would find their 'occupation gone.'

They knew not how they got through their days before they loved each other, and had those delicious stolen meetings to look forward to and look back to, as something sweet, new, and beloved, to con and dream over.

Till the advent of Bevil Goring, how drearily dull her life seemed to have been at Chilcote! It was all very well to cull and arrange bouquets with all an artist's eye to colour and form, to warble the old songs her mother had taught in brighter days at Essilmont and elsewhere, with all that sweetness which she inherited from her, and vary these occupations by attendance on her fowls and other pets, hunting with old Archie for the eggs when the hens had taken to laying under the hedges; turning dresses, cleaning her own gloves, and, while longing for the purse of Fortunatus, striving to make sixpence go as far as a shilling, feeling that darning and mending were her purgatory, and economy the bane of her existence; but into that existence, with the love of Bevil Goring, there had come a ray of brightest sunshine, with a new and hitherto unknown sense of happiness. But, alas! it would seem they were now to be followed by sorrow, and the gloom of a hopeless night which would have no end.

As the afternoon and evening stole on, Alison's heart beat wildly and anxiously for the time of her meeting--too probably the last one--with Bevil, and after a frugal dinner of cold mutton and boiled rice (a menu at which her father made more than one grimace), with old Archie Auchindoir in attendance, solemnly and respectfully, as if it had been some banquet suited to Lucullus, when Sir Ranald began to doze over his bottle of carefully-aired St. Peray 'Hermitage'--most probably the last he possessed--Alison rose softly from the table and stole into the entrance hall, where the hands on the clock dial indicated that the hour was nearly eight.

She assumed the hat and shawl she usually wore when in the garden, and passing though the latter, in her resolution to meet Bevil, almost heedless if her father missed her, she was about to open the gate that led to the beech avenue, when she was startled--rooted to the spot for a moment--by seeing, or fancying she saw, before her, amid the dark and uncertain shadows of the November evening, the blacker outline of a dog--of a hound before her.

At this conviction a gasping cry escaped her, and a sense of suffocation came into her slender throat; inspired by a courage beyond what she deemed she possessed, she darted forward, but the outline seemed to melt away before her or elude her eyes. No dog was there, nor could there have been, for no dog of mortal mould could have cleared that lofty wall, and no sound followed the disappearance.

All was still save the drip of the dew as it fell from the overladen leaf of an evergreen.

Alison felt her heart beating painfully, while a deadly chill seemed to settle upon it. Had the family boding of evil been before her? Oh, no, no--impossible. And yet it was said that when Ellon and her mother died---- She tried to thrust the thought away.

It must have been, she said to herself, some peculiar arrangement of light and shadow--some shadow formed in the starlight and thrown on the grass; for often as she heard of that Dog of Doom--the Spectre Hound of Essilmont--she always shrank from believing in its existence, but her heart was filled with vague and undefinable apprehension nevertheless.

There was a step on the gravel, a figure appeared in the shade of the star-lighted avenue, and in another moment she was sobbing heavily in Bevil's arms.

Her excessive agitation he attributed, naturally, to the very unpleasant scene of the forenoon, especially when she said,

'Oh! Bevil, how, or in what terms, am I to apologise to you for the mode in which papa treated you to-day?'

'Poor old gentleman, I can pardon all his petulance, but it fills me with a fear that he designs you to be the wife of another. Curse upon this poverty of mine, which mars as yet the life of us both, Alison. I have done wrong in loving you and winning you without your father's permission; but he never would have accorded it.'

'Oh!' moaned Alison, with her cheek on his breast; 'something is about to happen--something terrible about to befall us!'

'Something, darling--what?'

'Death, or a calamity little short of it, perhaps.'

'I do not understand you,' said Bevil, caressing her with great tenderness, and becoming very anxious on finding how faint her voice was, and how excessively she was trembling. 'Dearest Alison, the night air is chill, I am selfish and barbarous in keeping you here.'

'Don't say so, my love,' murmured the girl, as she nestled close to him, 'for something is about to happen, and heaven knows only when I may meet you again.'

'What fills you so with apprehension?'

And now, with pale and trembling lips, while reclining in Goring's arms, she told him the family legend, at which he--a man of the period--a young officer within a mile or so of his lines at Aldershot, felt inclined to laugh very heartily, but for Alison's intense dejection, and the doubts and fears incident to their mutual position.

'Dearest Alison,' said he, smiling, 'you have one _bête noire_ assuredly--old Cadbury--don't, for heaven's sake, manufacture and adopt another.'

'Bevil, don't jest with me,' she said, imploringly.

'I do not jest with you, sweet one; but tell me all about this devilish hound--for such it must be, of course.'

It would seem that it first appeared on the night of a dreadful storm, centuries ago--a night when the wind howled and roared round Essilmont, and the Ythan, white and foaming, tore in full flood through the dreary heather glens towards the sea, and when the thunder peals seemed to rend heaven; yet amid all this elemental din the gate-ward at Essilmont heard the baying of a dog at the gate, and, opening it, a large black hound came in, and was permitted to crouch by the hall fire, and when the embers of the latter began to sink and fade away, it was remarked by those who were there that the eyes of the great shaggy hound, as it lay with its long sharp nose resting on its outstretched paws, had in them a strangely diabolical and malicious glitter as they roved from face to face.

'I dislike the aspect of this brute,' said the Laird to the Lady of Essilmont, and as he spoke the hound began to lash the floor with his tail. 'Let him be driven forth.'

'I pray you not,' said she. 'The poor animal may have lost its master.'

On this the hound, as if grateful to her, licked her white hand with his red tongue, and she stroked him tenderly. She was Annot Udney, a daughter of the Laird of Auchterellon, and reputed as a witch, and the possessor of a remarkable magic crystal ball, with which she could work good or evil, but the latter most frequently.

'Annot, its aspect chills me,' said the laird again.

'Chills you, Ranald?' exclaimed the lady. 'You whose spear was foremost in the fray last week at the Red Harlaw.'

'Yes--I shudder, and know not why,' he replied, and signed himself with the cross, on which the hound instantly snarled, and showed all his white glistening teeth, while his eyes glared like red and fiery carbuncles.

No more was wanting now to prove to Ranald Cheyne that the animal was a thing of evil, so snatching up a halbert he was about to cleave his head when the lady interposed with outstretched arms and a cry of dismay. She was a woman of rare beauty and great sweetness of manner, notwithstanding her evil repute; so she stayed her husband's arm, and said,

'Let me put forth the hound.'

'You, Annot?'

'Yes--I,' she replied; and patting the dog's rough head it rose and followed her to the outer gate, and now the wild storm which shook the walls some time before was over; it seemed to have spent its fury and passed away.

A little time elapsed; Annot Cheyne did not return: the laird became anxious and impatient, and as all the household were now abed he followed her.

The sky was cloudless now, and the white moonlight fell aslant in silvery sheets over the barbican wall, and in the flood of it that streamed through the outer archway he saw his wife caressing the gigantic hound.

'Annot!' cried he, impatiently. She made no answer, but stooped and again caressed the dog.

At that moment a dark cloud passed suddenly and quickly over the face of the moon, involving the archway in blackness and obscurity; and the baying of the hound was heard, but, as it seemed, at a vast distance.

When, a minute after, the moon emerged from its shadow, the radiance streamed through the archway as before; but there was no one visible--the lady and the hound had disappeared!

'She was never seen again,' said Alison in conclusion; 'but as for the hound, that came and went with the tempest, it has appeared, or has been said to have done so, when--when evil was near the Cheynes of Essilmont; and, whether the story of its appearance was fable or fancy, the evil certainly came in some fashion or other.'

'It is the offspring of vulgar superstition or fevered fancy. How can you think of old-world Scotch nonsense in this age, Alison?' said Bevil Goring.

'If a boding of evil it is, I hope it menaces me, and not poor papa,' said Alison, down whose cheeks the unseen tears were streaming in the dark, 'and as for Lord Cadbury----'

'Don't speak about him--don't think about him!' interrupted Bevil, impatiently. 'And yet,' he added, 'if this old fellow loves you, I do not wonder at it.'

'Why?'

'Because all men who know you must love you, though I hope it is to be your destiny, your strength, to love but one. Yet, Alison, what agony it must be to love you as I do, and only to lose you after all.'

This unfortunate speech, though meant to be a loving compliment by Goring, seemed but the echo of the forebodings that were in the heart of Alison, and she wept heavily while he strained her to his breast and kissed her, not once but many times, and she hung or lay passive in his embrace like a dead weight, while the hearts of both were full of a kind of passionate despair--their future seemed so much without hope--their present menaced by so much turmoil and opposition.

'My darling, my darling,' exclaimed Goring, when at last he released her, 'whatever happens I shall never, never give you up.'

So they parted at last, to meet at their trysting place on the second day ensuing, and Alison, as she hurried homeward, and passed amid the dark shadows of the star-lighted garden, looked fearfully round her with dilated eyes, while her spirit quailed in dread of seeing defined through the gloom what she saw, or thought she saw, before, and hastened into the house, closing the door softly, yet swiftly behind her, as if pursued by something unseen.

Duty detained Goring at the camp during the intervening day, but on the following, full of more lover-like anxiety than ever, with a hundred things to say, to ask, and to hear, hopes to suggest, and comforting speeches to make, he sought the beeches, and waited there till all hope died out.

Alison did not come; the day was cold; the wind bleak and keen as the very last of the damp brown leaves were swept away with it, and at last he turned aside with a heavy heart.

The next day and the next brought the same result. She failed to meet him, and dismay filled his heart lest she might be ill. She was delicate and fragile, and the last night they met she was terribly shaken and excited by the untoward episode of the morning and her superstitious terror of the evening.

From the moment Bevil Goring met and knew Alison Cheyne, his heart had gone out of his own keeping, and never returned to it again. His love for her had become deep and intense, but, strange to say, did not seem a hopeful one, unless fortune changed suddenly with him. It was useless to expect it would do so with her family now.

His position was good; his family name unimpeachable. He bore a high reputation in his regiment as a brave and well-trained officer, and one well used to command; but his means were certainly not what he should ask a wife of Alison's culture to share, nor in any way were they equal to the ambition and dire necessities of the bankrupt baronet of Essilmont.

After some more days of agonising delay and anxiety, Goring resolved to proceed to Chilcote House, and endeavour to discover if aught ailed Alison, or how it was that she had ceased to come to their meeting-place as usual.

From the clustered and ivy-clad chimneys no smoke ascended against the grey November sky. Every window was shuttered and closed. There was an absence of all stir--an oppressive silence everywhere in and around the house--even from the little court where the clucking of Alison's hens was wont to be heard. A spade yet remained stuck in a plot of the garden, as if old silver-haired Archie Auchindoir had suddenly quitted his work there and returned no more.

Either by the result of mischief, or recent neglect, a large mass of the ivy and clematis that overhung the pretty little oaken porch had fallen down, and, if further evidence of total desertion were necessary, a large white ticket on a pole announced in black letters that the 'commodious villa of Chilcote was to let, furnished or unfurnished. Communications to be made in writing to Mr. Solomon Slagg, St. Clement's Lane, City.'

On taking in all these details of a sudden, hasty, and perhaps disastrous departure, the heart of Bevil seemed to stand still for some seconds.

Where had the little household gone, and why? And why did not Alison write to him of her movements? though he could not have replied without compromising her. Was Sir Ranald dead? Was she? Oh, no! no! He must have heard it--friends in camp must have heard through the public prints of any catastrophe.

She was gone--carried off; he could not doubt it--but whither and to what end he could not even surmise; his bower of roses--his fool's paradise, was levelled in the dust at last, and he could but linger, and look hopelessly and questioningly at the ticket of Mr. Solomon Slagg, and at the darkened windows through which Alison must often have looked, perhaps watching for his own approach.

He wrote to Mr. Slagg for information and Sir Ranald's address, but received no answer (doubtless Mr. Slagg was acting under the orders of Lord Cadbury), save printed circulars, from which it appeared that Mr. Slagg was ready to advance 'money confidentially to young officers and others on easy terms, borrowers' own security, repayments at convenience, &c., &c.'

It was terrible for Bevil Goring to surrender those hopes he had been cherishing in the depths of his heart--hopes that, though of recent growth, were strong, and dear, and precious, and the realisation of which had become his daily prayer.

A darkness as sudden seemed to have fallen upon him!

He remembered now all the poor girl's painful forebodings on that last eventful night that _something was about to happen_--the surely absurd story about the spectre dog, which he had so affectionately derided; but now 'something' certainly _had_ come to pass! And what was it?