ELEANOR’S VICTORY.
BY THE AUTHOR OF “AURORA FLOYD,” “LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET,” &c.
CHAPTER XLI. A TERRIBLE SURPRISE.
With the chill winds of February blowing in her face, Eleanor Monckton entered the wood between Tolldale and Mr. de Crespigny’s estate.
There were no stars in the blank grey sky above that lonely place; black masses of pine and fir shut in the narrow path upon either side; mysterious noises, caused by the capricious moaning of the winter wind, sounded far away in the dark recesses of the wood, awfully distinct amid the stillness of the night.
It was very long since Eleanor had been out alone after dark, and she had never before been alone in the darkness of such a place as this. She had the courage of a young lioness, but she had also a highly nervous and sensitive nature, an imaginative temperament; and the solemn loneliness of this wood, resonant every now and then with the dismal cries of the night-wind, was very terrible to her. But above and beyond every natural womanly feeling was this girl’s devotion to her dead father; and she walked on with her thick shawl gathered closely round her, and with both her hands pressed against her beating heart.
She walked on through the solitude and the darkness, not indifferently, but devotedly; in sublime self-abnegation; in the heroic grandeur of a soul that is elevated by love; as she would have walked through fire and water, if by the endurance of such an ordeal she could have given fresh proof of her affection for that hapless suicide of the Faubourg Saint Antoine.
“My dear father,” she murmured once, in a low voice, “I have been slow to act, but I have never forgotten. I have never forgotten you lying far away from me in that cruel foreign grave. I have waited, but I will wait no longer. I will speak to-night.”
I think she believed that George Vane, divided from her by the awful chasm which yawns, mysterious and unfathomable, betwixt life and death, was yet near enough akin to her, in his changed state of being, to witness her actions and hear her words. She spoke to him, as she would have written to him had he been very far away from her, in the belief that her words would reach him, sooner or later.
The walk, which in the daytime seemed only a pleasant ramble, was a weary pilgrimage under the starless winter sky. Eleanor stopped once or twice to look back at the lighted windows of Tolldale lying low in the hollow behind her; and then hurried on with a quicker step.
“If Gilbert should miss me,” she thought, “what will he do? what will he think?”
She quickened her pace even more at the thought of her husband. What unlooked-for difficulties might she not have to combat if Mr. Monckton should discover her absence and send or go himself in search of her? But she speedily reassured herself upon this point.
“If he should come to Woodlands after me,” she thought, “I will tell him that I wanted to see Mr. de Crespigny once more. I can easily tell him that, for it is the truth.”
Eleanor Monckton had reached the outskirts of the wood by this time, and the low gate in the iron fence—the gateway through which she had passed upon the day when, for the first time, she saw her father’s old friend, Maurice de Crespigny.
This gate was very rarely locked or bolted, but to-night, to her surprise, she found it wide open.
She did not stop to wonder at this circumstance, but hurried on. She had grown very familiar with every pathway in the grounds in her walks beside Mr. de Crespigny’s invalid chair, and she knew the nearest way to the house.
This nearest way was across a broad expanse of turf, and through a shrubbery into the garden at the back of the rooms occupied by the old man, who had for many years been unable to go up and down stairs, and who had, for that length of time, inhabited a suite of rooms on the ground-floor, opening with French windows on to a tiny lawn, shut in and sheltered by a thick belt of pine and evergreens. It was in this shrubbery that Eleanor paused for a few moments to recover her breath after hurrying up the hill, and to reassure herself as to the safety of the papers which she carried in the bosom of her dress—Launcelot Darrell’s water-colour sketch, and her father’s letter. The picture and the letter were safe. She reassured herself of this, and was about to hurry on, when she was arrested by a sound near her. The laurel branches close beside her had rustled as if parted by a man’s strong hand.
Many times, in her journey through the wood, Eleanor had been terrified by a rustling amongst the long grass about the trunks of the trees; but each time the sight of a pheasant flying across her pathway, or a frightened hare scudding away into the darkness, had reassured her. But this time there could be no mistake as to what she had heard. There was no game in Mr. de Crespigny’s garden. She was not alone, therefore. There was a man lurking somewhere under the shadow of the evergreens. She stopped; clutched the documents that she carried in her breast, and then emerged from the shrubbery on to the lawn, ashamed of her fears.
The man whose presence had alarmed her was, no doubt, one of the servants—the gardener, most likely—and he would admit her to the house and save her any encounter with the maiden sisters.
She looked about the garden, but could see no one. Then, in a low voice, she called to the man by name; but there was no answer.
Lights were burned in Mr. de Crespigny’s bed-room, but the windows of the room which the old