Bella elopes with Wedderburn

Bella Baxter’s elopement with Duncan Wedderburn abruptly overturns Archibald McCandless’s expectation that she will marry him. The departure is prepared in secret: Wedderburn visits Bella’s bedroom after the household has retired, while her travelling clothes and packed portmanteau make her intention visible only at the last moment. When McCandless tries to stop the separation, Bella makes him unconscious in Godwin Baxter’s operating theatre and leaves a note promising to telegraph from wherever she arrives.

The announcement and its stakes

McCandless learns what is happening from Godwin Baxter at the house on Park Circus. Baxter tells him that Bella is waiting to elope with Wedderburn, a solicitor whose polished manner, good looks, and apparent respectability conceal a history of seducing women among the servant class, gambling, and charging excessive fees for dubious legal work. Baxter also says that Wedderburn’s inherited money has removed the need for honest employment. His account presents the proposed match as a threat, but the decisive fact for McCandless is personal: Bella loves Wedderburn rather than him.

Baxter urges McCandless to hear the full story before trying to change Bella’s mind. The urgency is specific: unless McCandless intervenes, the elopement is due to take place that evening, only two hours later. McCandless responds with alarm about what the couple might have done together. Baxter reassures him that he has no reason to fear an outcome of that kind, explaining that he had arranged for a qualified woman to teach Bella contraception during their world tour in Vienna, and that Bella has told him Wedderburn also understands its use. The conversation therefore frames the departure not only as a romantic crisis but as a decision whose practical consequences Baxter has already tried to anticipate.

Secret meetings and the prepared departure

Baxter’s account of how Wedderburn entered Bella’s life makes the elopement a reversal of an earlier encounter. Wedderburn had come to the house to bring copies of a will for signature. Bella greeted him warmly, but he responded with such coolness and condescension that she became visibly hurt. Mrs. Dinwiddie witnessed the signing. When Wedderburn handed Baxter his bill, Baxter left the room briefly to fetch the payment; by the time he returned, Bella was chatting brightly again, and he assumed the solicitor had passed out of their lives.

That assumption proved wrong. Bella later told Baxter that for the previous three nights Wedderburn had visited her bedroom after the servants had retired. Their meetings depended on signals: Wedderburn imitated an owl’s hoot at midnight, Bella answered by lighting a candle in her window, and he climbed a ladder to reach her. She then told Baxter that she would elope with him that night unless McCandless changed her mind. The clandestine arrangement gives the threatened departure a repeated, deliberate pattern; it is not a sudden idea formed at the breakfast table, even though that is when Baxter reports it to McCandless.

At the window

When McCandless goes upstairs, his anger gives way to grief at the sight of Bella. She sits beside an open window in travelling costume, with a strapped portmanteau at her feet and a broad-brimmed hat and veil resting on top. Looking toward the garden, she appears calm and content, but her serenity is tinged with melancholy. McCandless notices a change in her manner: she no longer seems absorbed only in the immediate present. The packed belongings and the quietness of the pose make the coming separation concrete before either character speaks about it.

Bella welcomes McCandless and says she wishes he could keep her company during her last few minutes in the old home. She adds that God is too miserable for her to bear at that moment. McCandless answers that he is miserable too and reminds her that he thought they were to marry. The exchange places his expectation of marriage beside Bella’s imminent departure, without making her preparations disappear: her hat, veil, and luggage remain ready beside her. She then slips through a door so quickly that McCandless cannot see the interior. Left waiting, he imagines first that Wedderburn has corrupted her and that she will appear naked, and then that she has gone down the servants’ back stairs and is already travelling toward Wedderburn’s rooms. These are McCandless’s fears, not events the narrative confirms.

The operating theatre and the letter

Bella summons McCandless into the old operating theatre built to the specifications of Baxter’s father, Sir Colin Baxter. The room has few, stark furnishings; warm evening light falls through its tall windows and skylights onto the operating table. Benches hold what appear to be barred hutches and kennels, and the room carries both an animal smell and a strong chemical odour. The setting recalls Baxter’s surgical work even as Bella uses it to arrange a private farewell.

McCandless enters without immediately closing his eyes, then feels Bella behind him. She embraces him from the back, reassuring him that she will let nobody hurt him. She puts her hand over his mouth and nose; when he tries to breathe, he loses consciousness. The act removes McCandless from the scene rather than resolving their disagreement. Bella’s tenderness and her use of chloroform are held together in the same moment: she comforts the man she is leaving, but also makes sure he cannot prevent her departure.

Afterward, Baxter tells McCandless that Bella has eloped. He gives him a sheaf of pages written in Bella’s large shorthand. Too distressed and headachy to read them himself, McCandless asks Baxter to read aloud. The note says Bella has chloroformed Candle in the operating theatre, asks Baxter to let him live there when he wakes so the two men can talk, and promises a telegraph naming her destination once she arrives. Signed by Bella as Baxter’s dearly beloved, it turns the knockout from a final rupture into a departure with a stated intention to remain in contact. Yet at the moment the account ends, her destination is still unknown: the promised message has not arrived, and McCandless is left to wake without her.