BLOTTED OUT.
Gone! no one knew where. Gone in the night like a falling star, like a
passing cloud--gone and left no trace, vanished like the sunshine of
yesterday or the flowers of last spring! No one knew what had become of
her, and no one knew where to look for her; for the sole information
gathered by the scared neighbors was, that Leam Dundas was missing and
no one had seen her go.
She was thought by some to have simply run away after the manner of
undisciplined youth aiming at mock heroism; but where, or with whom?
for, said the keen-eyed women and large-mouthed men, incredulous of
maiden meditation fancy free, a pretty young thing of nineteen would
never have left her comfortable home, her father, friends and good name,
without some lover stirring in the matter. And this lover was just the
missing link not to be found anywhere. Others said she had drowned
herself; but here, again, Why? Young girls do not give up their precious
freight of hope in love and present joy in youth for a trifling ailment
or a temporary annoyance. And nothing worse than either could have
befallen Leam, said the reasoners, putting their little twos and twos
together and totting up the items with the serene accuracy of spiritual
arithmeticians, dealing with human emotion as if it was a sum in long
division which any schoolboy could calculate.
Edgar Harrowby, however, who came forward manfully enough to say when
and where--if not how--he had last seen Miss Dundas, leant to the side
of the believers in suicide, and on his own responsibility ordered the
Broad to be dragged. Which looked ugly, said a few of the rasher spirits
in the village, cherishing suspicion of their betters as the birthright
which had never had a chance of being bartered for a mess of pottage;
while the more contemptuous, critical after the event, gave it as their
opinion that the major had a bee in his bonnet somewhere, for what
gentleman in his seven sane senses would have looked for such a mare's
nest as Miss Leam Dundas lying among the bulrushes of the Broad? Drowned
herself? No: it was no drowning of herself that had come to little miss,
be sure of that.
What, however, had come to her no one knew. The fact only was certain:
she had gone, and no one had met her coming or seen her going, and for
all trace left she might as well have melted into air like one of the
fairy women of romance. To be sure, the servants had heard her in her
room in the early evening, and she had refused the tea which they had
brought her, and told them, through the closed door, that she wanted
nothing more that night. So they left her to herself, supposing her to
be in one of her queer moods, to which they were used to give but scant
heed, and not thinking more about her. The next morning she was missing,
but when she had gone was as dark as where.
The discovery, later in the day, that certain effects, such as her
mother's dressing-case and a few personal necessities of daily use, were
gone too, seemed to dispose effectually of the theory of suicide; though
what remained, a lover, companion of her flight, being wanting? It was a
strange thing altogether, and the country was alive with wild theories
and wild reports. But in a few days a letter from Mr. Dundas to the
rector, and another to Edgar, set the question of self-destruction at
rest, though also they gave loose to other energies of conjecture, for
in both he said, "No harm has come to her, and I am content to let her
remain where she has elected to place herself."
As it was just this _where_ which tormented the folk with the sense of
mystery and made them eager for news, the father's meagre
explanation--which, in point of fact, was no explanation at all--was not
found very satisfactory, and a few hard words were said of Mr. Dundas,
his reserve to the world being taken for the same thing as indifference
to his daughter, and resented as an offence. But for the third time in
his life Sebastian was found capable of maintaining this impenetrable
reserve. Pepita's true status in her own country--madame's suspicious
debts and those damaging letters from London--Leam's hiding-place: he
had had strength enough to keep his own counsel about the first two
unbroken, and now he betrayed no more about this last. It may as well be
said that for this he had sufficient reason. Leam, who had confessed
her crime, and announced her intention of flight and of hiding herself
where no one should find her again, had not told him more than these
bare bones of the story. And he did not care to know more. The skeleton
was horrible enough as it stood: he was by no means inclined to clothe
it with the flesh of detail, still less to follow his erring child to
her place of exile. He was content that she should be blotted out. It
was the sole reparation that she could make.
This sudden disappearance ended the foreign tour which had been
Josephine's sweetest anticipations of the honeymoon, for Mr. Dundas
turned back for home at once, intending to put up Ford House for sale
and leave the place for ever. He was ashamed to live at North Aston, he
said, after Leam's extraordinary conduct, her shameful, shameless
_esclandre_, which--said Josephine to her own people, weeping--she
supposed was due to her, the poor little thing not liking her for a
stepmother.
"Though, indeed, she need not have been afraid," said the good creature
effusively, "for I had intended to be kindness itself to the poor dear
girl."
And when she said this, Mrs. Harrowby who never failed an opportunity
for moral cautery, remarked dryly, "In all probability it is as well as
it is, Josephine. You would have been very uncomfortable with her, and
would have been sure to have spoiled her. And, as Adelaide Birkett
always says, very sensibly, she is odd enough already. She need not be
made more so."
Maria threw out a doubt as to whether Mr. Dundas had heard from Leam at
all. It was not like Sebastian to be so close, she said; but Josephine
assured her that he had, and bridled a little at the vapory insinuation
that Sebastian was not perfect. She detailed the whole circumstance with
all the facts fully fringed and feathered. He had received the letter
just as they were preparing to go to the Louvre, but he had not shown it
to her, and she had not asked to see it. She saw, though, that he was
much agitated when he read it, but he had put it in his pocket, and
when she looked for it it was not there. All that he had said was, "Leam
has left home, Josephine, and we must go back at once." Of course she
had not asked questions, she said with a pleasant little assumption of
wifely submission. Her search in her husband's pockets was only what
might have been expected from the average woman, but the wifely
submission was special.
For this curtailment of their sister's enjoyment Maria and Fanny judged
Leam almost more severely than for any other delinquency involved in her
flight. They spoke as if she had planned it purposely to vex her father
and his bride in their honeymoon and deprive them of their lawful
pleasure; but Josephine never blamed her as they did, and when they were
most bitter cast in her little words of soothing and excused her with
more zeal than evidence--excused her sometimes to the point of making
her sisters angry with her and inclined to accuse her of her old
failing, meek-spiritedness carried to the verge of self-abasement.
But the one who suffered most of all those left to lament or to wonder
was poor Alick Corfield. It was a misery to see him with his hollow
cheeks and haggard eyes, like an animal that has been hunted into lone
places, terrified and looking for a way of escape, or like a dog that
has lost its master. He tried every method known to him to gain
information of her directly or indirectly, but Mr. Dundas, ignorant
himself, had only to guard that ignorance from breaking out. As for
knowledge, he could not give what he did not possess, and the terrible
thing that he did know he was not likely to let appear.
One day when the poor fellow broke down, as was not unusual with him
when asking about Leam--and Mr. Dundas read him like a book, all save
that one black page where the beloved name stood inscribed in letters of
his own heart's blood between the words "crime" and "murder"--with a
woman's liking for saying pleasant things which soothed those who heard
them, and did no hurt to those who said them save for the insignificant
manner in which falsehood hurts the soul, Sebastian, laying his hand
kindly on the poor fellow's angular shoulder, said, "I am sorry to know
as much as I do, Alick. There is no one to whom I would have given her
so readily as to you, my dear boy. Indeed, it was always one of my hopes
for the future, poor misguided child! and I can see that it was yours
too. Ah, how I grieve that it is impossible!"
"Why impossible?" asked Alick, who had the faculty of faith, his pale
face flushing.
Mr. Dundas turned white. A look not so much of pain as of abhorrence
came into his face. "Impossible!" he said vehemently. "I would not curse
my greatest enemy with my daughter's hand."
Alick felt his blood run cold. What did he mean? Did he know all, or was
he speaking only with the angry feeling of a man who had been
disappointed and annoyed? There was a short pause. Then said Alick,
looking straight into Sebastian's eyes and speaking very slowly, but
with not too much emphasis, "I would hold myself blessed with her as my
wife had she even committed murder."
Mr. Dundas started perceptibly. "Oh," he answered after a moment's
hesitation, with a forced and sickly kind of smile, "a silly girl's
wrong-headedness does not reach quite so far as that. She has done
wrong, miserably wrong, but between withdrawing herself from her
father's house and committing such a crime as murder there is rather a
wide difference. All the same, I am disgraced by her folly," angrily,
"and I will not let any one--not even you, Alick--know where she is."
"That is cruel to those who love her," pleaded Alick, his eyes filling
with tears.
"If cruel it is necessary," said Mr. Dundas.
"But she must need friends about her now more than she ever did," urged
Alick. "Tell me at least where to find her, that I may do what I can to
console her."
Mr. Dundas shook his head. "No," he said sternly, "She is dead to me,
and shall be dead to my friends. She is blotted out from my love, and I
will blot her out from my memory; and no one's persuasions can bring
back what is effaced. Now, my dear boy, let us understand one another. I
have surprised your secret: you love my daughter, and had she been
worthy of you I would have given her to you more willingly than to any
one I know. But she herself has fixed the gulf between us, which I will
not pass nor help any one else to pass. Learn to look on her as dead,
for she is dead to me, to you, to the world."
"Never to me," cried Alick. "While she lives she must be always to me
what she has been from the first day I saw her. Whatever she has done, I
shall always love her as much as I do now."
"You are faithful," replied Sebastian, "but trust me, boy, no woman that
ever lived was worth so much fidelity. I will protect you against your
own wish, and be your friend in spite of yourself. You shall not know
where she is, and you shall not throw yourself away on her. As she has
elected to be effaced, she shall be effaced--blotted out for ever."
"Then I will consecrate my life to finding her," cried Alick warmly.
Mr. Dundas shrugged his shoulders. "Who can persuade a willful man
against his folly?" he said coldly. "You are following a marsh-light, my
boy, and if you do find it you will only be landed in a bog."
"If I find her I shall have found my reward," Alick answered with boyish
fervor. "It will be happiness enough for me if I can bring back one
smile to her face or lighten one hour of its sorrow."
"Let well alone," said Mr. Dundas; but Alick answered, "Not till it is
well; and God will help me."
Whereupon the interview ended, and Alick left the house, feeling
something as one of the knights of old might have felt when he had vowed
himself to the quest of the Holy Grail.
When Mr. Dundas came home, naturally the families called, as in duty
bound and by inclination led. Excitement concerning Ford House was at
its height, for there were two things to keep it alive--the one to see
how the bride and bridegroom looked, the other to try and pick up
something definite about Leam. And among the rest came Mr. Gryce, with
his floating white locks falling about his bland cherubic face, his mild
blue eyes with their trick of turning red on small provocation, and his
lisping manner of speech, ingenuous, interrogatory, and knowing nothing
when interrogated in his turn--somehow gleaning full ears wherever he
passed, and dropping not even a solitary stalk of straw in return. He
expressed his sorrow that he had not seen lately his young friend, Miss
Dundas.
"In my secluded life," he said, his eyelids reddening, "she is like a
beautiful bird that flashes through the dull sky for a moment, but
leaves the atmosphere brighter than before." He glanced round the room
as if looking for her. "I hope she is well?" he added, not attempting to
conceal a certain accent of disappointment at her absence.
"Quite well when I heard from her," answered Mr. Dundas, doing his best
to speak without embarrassment.
Mr. Gryce turned his face in frank astonishment on the speaker. "Ah! She
is from home, then?" he asked.
"Yes," said Mr. Dundas curtly.
"I had not heard," lisped the tenant of Lionnet. "But I myself have been
from home for a few days, and have just returned. Though, indeed,
present or absent, I know very little of my neighbors' doings, as you
may see. I did not even know that Miss Dundas was from home."
"Yet it was pretty widely talked about," said Mr. Dundas, with a certain
suspicious glance at the cherubic face smiling innocently into his.
"Doubtless the absence of Miss Dundas must have caused a gap," replied
Mr. Gryce, "but you see, as I said, I have been away myself, and when I
am at home I do not gossip."
"Have--Where have you been?" asked Mr. Dundas abruptly, with that sudden
glance as suddenly withdrawn which tells of a half-formed suspicion
neither dwelt on nor clearly made out.
"To Paris," said Mr. Gryce demurely. "I went to see--"
"Oh! you went to see Notre Dame and La Madeleine of course," interrupted
Sebastian satirically.
"No," answered Mr. Gryce with a cherubic smile. "Strange to say, I had
business connected with that odd drama of _Le Sphinx_."
There was not much more talk after this, and Mr. Gryce soon took his
leave, desiring to be most respectfully remembered to Miss Dundas when
her father next wrote, and to say that he was keeping some pretty
specimens of moths for her on her return; both of which messages
Sebastian promised to convey at the earliest opportunity, improvising a
counter-remark of Leam's which he was sorry he could not remember
accurately, but it was something about butterflies and Mr. Gryce, though
what it was he could not positively say.
"Never mind: I will take the will for the deed," said the naturalist as
he smiled himself through the doorway.
And when he had gone Josephine declared that she did not care if he
never came again: there was something she did not like about him. Pushed
for a reason by her husband, who always assumed a logical and masculine
tone to her, she had not one to produce, but she stumbled as if by
chance on the word "sinister," which was just what Mr. Gryce was not. So
Sebastian made her go into the library for the dictionary and hunt up
the word through all its derivations, and thus proved to her
incontestably that she was ignorant of the English language and of human
nature in about equal proportions.
It was soon remarked at the post-office that no letter addressed to Miss
Dundas ever left North Aston, and that none came to Mr. Dundas or any
one else in the queer, cramped handwriting which experience had taught
Mrs. Pepper, post-mistress as well as the keeper of the village general
shop, carried the sentiments of Leam Dundas. This caused a curious
little buzz in the lower parts of the hive when Mrs. Pepper mentioned
it to her friends and gossips; but as no fire can live without fresh
fuel, and as nothing whatever was heard of Leam to stimulate curiosity
or set new tales afloat, by degrees her name dropped out of the daily
discussions of the place, and she was no longer interesting, because she
had become used up and talked out.
Only, Mr. Gryce wrote more frequently than had been his wont to Miss
Gryce at Windy Brow in Cumberland--conjectured to be his sister; and
only, Alick never ceased in his attempts to discover where his lost
queen was hidden, though these attempts had hitherto been hopelessly
baffled, partly because he had not an inch of foothold whence to make
his first spring, nor the thinnest clew to tell him which path to take.
And as a purchaser, the final cause of whose existence seemed to have
been the unquestioning possession of Ford House, came suddenly on the
scene and took the whole thing as it stood, Sebastian and his wife left
the place, taking Fina with them, and migrated to Paris to finish their
interrupted honeymoon. So now it was supposed that the last link
connecting Leam with North Aston was broken, and that she was indeed
blotted out and for ever.
True love is faithful, and Alick Corfield's love was true. Had all the
world forsaken her, he would have remained immovable in his old place
and attitude of devotion--the one fixed idea always possessing him to
find her in her retreat and restore her to self-respect and happiness by
his undying love. But how to find her? All sorts of mad projects passed
through his brain, but mad projects need some methods, and methods in
harmony with existing conditions, if they are to bring success; and
Alick's vague resolves to go out and look for her had no more meaning in
them than the random moves of a bad chessplayer.
Had Sir Lancelot lived at the present time, he would have gone to
Camelot by express, like meaner souls; and had Sir Galahad set out on
his quest in the latter half of the nineteenth century, he would have
either advertised in the newspapers or have employed a detective for
the first part of his undertaking. So, had Alick gone to Scotland Yard
and taken the police into his confidence, Leam would have been found in
less than a week; but as he shrank from bringing her into contact with
the force mainly associated with crime, he was left to his own devices
unassisted, and these devices ended only in constantly-recurring
disappointment, and consequent increase of sorrow.
His sorrow indeed was so great, and told on him so heavily, that every
one said he was going to die. He had been left thin and gaunt enough by
his illness, but distress of mind, coupled with weakness of body,
reduced him to a kind of sketchy likeness of Don Quixote--his pure soul
and honest nature the only beautiful things about him--while his
mother's heart was as nearly broken as his own.