DUNASTON CASTLE.
It was not a bad idea to continue the wedding-gayeties of yesterday
evening by a picnic to-day. People are always more or less out of
sorts after a ball, and a day spent in the open air soothes the
feverish and braces up the limp. Wherefore the rectory gave a picnic
to blow away the lingering vapors of last evening at the Hill, and the
place of meeting chosen was Dunaston Castle.
Leam had of course been invited with the rest. Had she been a
different person, and more in accord with the general sentiments of
the neighborhood than she was, she would have been made the "first
young lady" for the moment, because of her connection with the
bridegroom; but being what she was--Leam--she was merely included with
the rest, and by Adelaide with reluctance.
The day wore on bright and clear. Already it was past two o'clock, but
Leam, irresolute what to do, sat in the garden under the shadow of the
cut-leaved hornbeam, from the branches of which Pepita used to swing
in her hammock, smoking cigarettes and striking her zambomba. One part
of her longed to go, the other held her back. The one was the strength
of love, the other its humiliation. How could she meet Major Harrowby
again? she thought. She had kissed him of her own free will last
night--she, Leam, had kissed him; she had leant against his breast,
he with his arms round her; she had said the sacred and irrevocable
words, "I love you." How could she meet him again without sinking to
the earth for shame? What a strange kind of shame!--not sin and yet
not innocence; something to blush for, but not to repent of; something
not to be repeated, but not to wish undone. And what a perplexed state
of feeling!--longing, fearing to see Edgar again--praying of each
moment as it came that he should not appear; grieved each moment as it
passed that he was still absent.
So she sat in all the turmoil of her new birth, distracted between
love and shame, and not knowing which was stronger--feeling as if in a
dream, but, every now and then waking to think of Dunaston, and should
she go or stay away--when, just as little Fina came running to her,
ready dressed and loud in her insistence that they should set off at
once, the lodge-gates swung back and Edgar Harrowby rode up to the
door. When she saw him dismount and walk across the lawn to where she
sat--though it was what she had been waiting for all the day, hoping
if fearing--yet now that it had come and he was really there, she
wished that the earth would open at her feet, or that she could flee
away and hide herself like a scared hind in her cover. But she could
not have risen had there been even any place of refuge for her.
Breathing with difficulty, and seeing nothing that was before her, she
was chained to her seat by a feeling that was half terror, half
joy--a feeling utterly inexplicable in its total destruction of her
self-possession to reticent Leam, who hitherto had held herself in
such proud restraint, and had kept her soul from all influence
from the world without. And now the citadel was stormed and she was
conquered and captive.
Meanwhile, the handsome officer walked over the sunny lawn with his
military step, well set up, lordly, smiling. He liked to see this
bashfulness in Leam. It was the sign of submission in one so unsubdued
that flattered his pride as men like it to be flattered. Now indeed he
was the man and the superior, and this trembling little girl, blushing
and downcast, was no longer his virgin nymph, self-contained and
unconfessed, but the slave of his love, like so many others before
her.
The child ran up to him joyfully. She and Edgar were "great friends,"
as he used to say. He lifted her in his arms, placed her on his
shoulder like a big blue forget-me-not gathered from the grass, then
deposited her by Leam on the seat beneath the cut-leaved hornbeam.
And Leam was grateful that the little one was there. It was somehow a
protection against herself.
"I came to take you to the castle," said; Edgar, looking down on the
drooping figure with a tender smile on his handsome face as he took
her hand in his; and held it. "Are you ready?"
Leam's lips moved, but at the first inaudibly. "No," she then said
with an effort.
"It is time," said Edgar, still holding her hand.
"I do not think I shall go," she faltered, not raising her eyes from
the ground.
Edgar, towering above her, always smiling--the child playing with his
beard as she stood on the seat breast-high with himself--still holding
that small burning hand in his, Leam not resisting, then said in
Spanish, "My soul! have pity on me."
The old familiar words thrilled the girl like a voice from the dead.
Had anything been wanting to rivet the chains in which love had
bound her, it was these words, "My soul," spoken by her lover in her
mother's tongue. She answered more freely, almost eagerly, in the same
language, "Would you be sorry?" and Edgar, whose Castilian was by no
means unlimited, replied in English "Yes" at a venture, and sat down
on the seat by her.
"Fina, go and ask Jones to tell you pretty stories about the bay," he
then said to the child.
"And may I ride him?" cried Fina, sure to take the ell when given the
inch.
"Ask Jones," he answered good-naturedly "I dare say he will put you
up."
Whereupon Fina ran off to the groom, whom she teased for the next half
hour to give her a ride on the bay.
But Jones was obdurate. The major's horse was not only three sticks
and a barrel, like some on 'em, he said, and too full of his beans for
a little miss like her to mount. The controversy, however, kept the
child engaged if it made her angry; and thus Edgar was left free to
break down more of that trembling defence-work within which Leam was
doing her best to entrench herself.
"Do you know, Leam, you have not looked at me once since I came?"
he said, after they had been sitting for some time, he talking on
indifferent subjects to give her time to recover herself, and she
replying in monosyllables, or perhaps not replying at all.
She was silent, but her eyes drooped a little lower.
"Will you not look at me, darling?" he asked in that mellifluous voice
of his which no woman had yet been found strong enough to withstand.
"Why?" said Leam, vainly trying after her old self, and doing her best
to speak as if the subject was indifferent to her, but failing, as how
should she not? The loud beatings of her heart rang in her ears, her
lips quivered so that she could not steady them, and her eyes were so
full of shame, their lids so weighted with consciousness, that truly
she could not have raised them had she tried.
"Why? Look at me and I will tell you," was his smiling answer.
She turned to him, and, as once before, bound by the spell of loving
obedience, lifted her heavy lids and raised her dewy eyes slowly till
they came to the level of his. Then they met his, and Edgar laughed--a
happy and abounding laugh which somehow Leam did not resent, though in
general a laugh the cause of which she did not fully understand was an
offence to her or a stupidity.
"Now I am satisfied," he said in his sweetest voice. "Now I know that
the morning has not destroyed the dream of the night, and that you
love me. Tell it me once more, Leam, sweet Leam! I must hear it in the
open sunshine as I heard it in the starlight: tell me again that you
love me."
Leam bent her pretty head to hide her crimson cheeks. How hard this
confession was to her, and yet how sweet! How difficult to make, and
yet how sorry she would be if anything came between them so that it
was left unmade!
"Tell me, my Leam, my darling!" said Edgar again, with that delicious
tyranny of love, that masterful insistence of manly tenderness, which
women prize and obey.
"I love you," half whispered Leam, feeling as if she had again
forfeited her pride and modesty, and for the second time had committed
that strange sweet sin against herself for which she blushed and of
which she did not repent.
"And I love you," he answered--"fervently, madly if you like. I never
knew what love was before I knew you, my darling. When you are all my
own I will make you confess that the love of an English gentleman is
worth living for."
"_You_ are worth living for," said Leam with timid fervor, defending
him against all possible rivalry of circumstance or person. "I do not
care about your English gentlemen. It is only you."
"That brute of a Jones!" muttered Edgar as he put his arm round her
waist and glanced toward the door.
"No," said Leam gravely, shrinking back, "you must not do that."
"What a shy wild bird it is!" he said lovingly, though he was
disappointed. And he did not like this kind of disappointment. "Will
you never be tamed, my Leam?"
"Not to that," said innocent Leam in the same grave way; and Edgar
smiled behind his golden beard, but not so that she could see the
smile.
"Ah, but you must obey me now--do as I tell you in everything," he
said with perfect seriousness of mien and accent. "You have given
yourself to me now, and if I ask you to kiss me you must, just as
readily as Fina, and let me caress and pet you as much as I like."
"Must I? but I do not like it," said Leam simply.
He laughed outright, and--Jones not looking--took her hand and carried
it to his lips. "Is this unpleasant?" he asked, looking up from under
his eyebrows.
Leam blushed, hesitated, trembled. "No," she then said in a low voice,
"not from you."
On which he kissed it again, and Leam had no wish to retract her
confession.
"Now go and make ready to come to the castle," he said after a
moment's pause. "I told you before that you must obey me, now that you
have promised to be my wife. Command is the husband's privilege, Leam,
and obedience the wife's happiness: don't you know? So come, darling!
They were all to assemble at two," looking at his watch, "and here we
are close on three! You do not wish not to go now, my pet?"
"No," said Leam, with her happy little fleeting smile: "I am glad to
go. I shall be with you, and you wish it."
"What an exquisite little creature! In a week she will come to my
hand like a tame bird," was Edgar's thought as he watched her slender,
graceful figure slowly crossing the lawn with that undulating step
of her mother's nation. "In a week's time I shall have tamed her," he
repeated with a difference; and he felt glad that he had bespoken Leam
Dundas betimes, and that fate and fortune had made him her prospective
proprietor. "She will make me happy," he said as his last thought:
he forgot to add either assurance or hope that he should make her the
same. That is not generally part of a man's matrimonial calculations.
The confidence of love soon grows. When Leam came back to the seat
under the cut-leaved hornbeam, where Edgar still waited for her
to have the pleasure of watching her approach, she was not so much
ashamed and oppressed as when he had first found her there. She did
not want to run away, and she was losing her fear of wrongdoing. She
was beginning instead to feel that delightful sense of dependence on a
strong man's love which--_pace_ the third sex born in these odd latter
times--is the most exquisite sensation that a woman can know. She was
no longer alone--no longer an alien imprisoned in family bonds, but,
though one of a family, always an alien and imprisoned, never homed
and united. Now she was Edgar's as she had been mamma's; and there
was dawning on her the consciousness of the same oneness, the same
intimate union of heart and life and love, as she had had with mamma.
She belonged to him. He loved her, and she--yes, she knew now that she
had always loved him, had always lived for him. He was the secret
god whom she had carried about with her in her soul from the
beginning--the predestined of her life, now for the first time
recognized--the only man whom she could have ever loved. To her
intense and single-hearted nature change or infidelity was an
unimaginable crime, something impossible to conceive. Had she not met
Edgar she would never have loved any one, she thought: having met him,
it was impossible that she should not have loved him, the ideal to her
as he was of all manly nobleness and grace, given to her to love by a
Power higher than that of chance.
She was dimly conscious of this deep sense of rest in her new-found
joy as she came across the lawn in her pretty summer dress of pearly
gray touched here and there with crimson--the loveliest creature to be
seen for miles around. Her usually mournful face was brightened with
an inner kind of bliss which, from the face of the Tragic Muse, made
it the face of a youthful seraph serene and blessed; her smile was
one of almost unearthly ecstasy, if it still retained that timid,
tremulous, fleeting expression which was so beautiful to Edgar; her
eyes, no longer sad and sorrowful, but dewy, tender, bashful, shone
with the purity, the confidence, the self-abandonment of a young
girl's first and happy love: every gesture, every line, seemed to have
gained a greater grace and richness since yesterday; and as she came
up to her lover, and laid her hand in his when he rose to meet her
and looked for one shy instant into his eyes, then dropped her own in
shame-faced tremor at what they had seen and told, he said again to
himself that he had done well. If even she should call the hounds at
a hunt-dinner _dogs_, and say that hunting was stupid and cruel, what
might not be forgiven to Such beauty, such love as hers?
Yes, he was satisfied with himself and with her; and with himself
because of her. He had done well, and she was eminently the right kind
of wife for him, let conventional cavilers say what they would. He
never felt more reconciled to fortune and himself than he did to-day
when he rode by the side of the carriage wherein Leam and Fina sat,
and looked through the coming years to the time when he should have a
little Fina of his own with her mother Leam's dark eyes and her mother
Leam's devoted heart.
The day was perfect, so was the place. Both were all that the day and
place of young love should be. The view from the castle heights, with
the river below, the woods around and the moor beyond, was always
beautiful, but to-day, in the full flush of the early summer, it was
at its best. The golden sunshine, alternating with purple shadows, was
lying in broad tracts on meadow and moor, and lighting up the forest
trees so that the delicate tints and foliage of bough and branch came
out in photographic clearness; the river, where it caught the sun
like a belt of silver, where it was under the shadow like a band of
lapis-lazuli, ran like a vein of life through the scene, and its
music could be heard here where they stood; close at hand the old gray
ivy-covered ruins, with their stories and memories of bygone times,
seemed to add to the vivid fervor of the moment by the force
of contrast--that past so drear and old, the present so full of
passionate hope and love; while the shadows of things that had once
been real trooped among the ruins and flitted in and out the desert
places, chased by laughing girls and merry children, as life chases
death, youth drives out age, and the summer rises from the grave of
winter. It was a day, a scene, to remember for life, even by those to
whom it brought nothing special: how much more, then, by those to whom
it symbolized the fresh fruition of the summer of the heart, the glad
glory of newly-confessed love!
This was Leam's day. Edgar devoted himself publicly to her--so
publicly that people gathered into shady corners to discuss what
it meant, and to ask each other if the tie already binding the two
families was to be supplemented and strengthened by another? It looked
like it, they said, in whispers, for it was to be supposed that Major
Harrowby was an honorable man and a gentleman, and would not play with
a child like Leam.
Dear Mrs. Birkett was manifestly distressed at what she saw. Though
Adelaide made her mother no more a confidante than if she had been
a stranger, yet she knew well enough where her daughter's wishes
pointed; and they pointed to where her own were set. She too thought
that Edgar and Adelaide were made for each other, and that Adelaide at
the Hill would be eminently matter in the right place. She would not
have grudged Leam the duke's son, could she have secured him, but she
did grudge her Edgar Harrowby. It would be such a nice match for Addy,
who was getting on now, and whose temper at home was trying; and she
had hoped fervently that this year would see the matter settled. It
was hanging fire a little longer than she quite liked: still, she
always hoped and believed until to-day, when Edgar appropriated Leam
in this strange manner before them all, seeming to present her to them
as his own, so that they should make no further mistake.
But if Mrs. Birkett looked distressed, Adelaide, who naturally
suffered more than did her mother, kept her own counsel so bravely
that no one could have told how hard she had been hit. If she
betrayed herself in any way, it was in being rather more attentive and
demonstrative to her guests than was usual with her; but she behaved
with the Spartan pride of the English gentlewoman, and deceived all
who were present but herself.
Even Edgar took her by outside seeming, and put his belief in her love
for him as a fallacy behind him. And it said something for a certain
goodness of heart, with all his faults and vanity, that he was more
relieved than mortified to think that he had been mistaken. Yet he
liked to be loved by women, and the character which he had chiefly
affected on the social side of him was that of the Irresistible.
Nevertheless, he was glad that he had been mistaken in Adelaide's
feelings, and relieved to think that she would not be unhappy because
he had chosen Leam and not herself.
Yes, this was Leam's day, her one spell of perfect happiness--the day
whereon there was no past and no future, only the glad sufficiency of
the present--a day which seemed as if it had been lent by Heaven, so
great was its exquisite delight, so pure its cloudless, shadowless
sunshine of love.
Leam neither knew nor noted how the neighbors looked. They had somehow
gone far off from her: when they spoke she answered them mechanically,
and if she passed them she took no more heed than if they had been so
many sheep or dogs lying about the grass. She only knew that she
was with Edgar--that she loved him and that he loved her. It was a
knowledge that made her strong to resist the whole world had the whole
world, opposed her, and that dwarfed the families into insignificant,
almost impersonal, adjuncts of the place, of no more consequence than
the ferns growing about the fallen stones. Not even Adelaide could jar
that rich melodious chord to which her whole being vibrated. It was
all peace, contentment, love; and for the first and only time in her
life Leam Dundas was absolutely happy.
The two lovers, always together and apart from the rest, wandered
about the ruins till evening and the time for dispersion and
reassembling at the rectory came. The sunset had been in accord with
the day, golden and glorious, but after the last rays had gone heavy
masses of purple clouds that boded ill for the morrow gathered with
strange suddenness on the horizon. Still the lovers lingered about
the ruins. The families had left them alone for the latter part of the
time, and they discussed now Leam's forwardness as they had discussed
before Edgar's intentions. But neither Edgar nor Leam took heed. They
were in love, and the world beyond themselves was simply a world of
shadows with which they had no concern.
It had been such a day of happiness to both that they were loath to
end it, so they lingered behind the rest, and tried, as lovers do, to
stop time by love. They were sitting now on one of the fallen blocks
of stone of the many scattered about, he talking to her in a low
voice, "I love you, I love you," the burden of his theme; she for the
most part listening to words which made the sweetest music discord,
but sometimes responding as a tender fainter echo. He did not see
the eyes that were watching him from behind the broken wall, nor the
jealous ears that were drinking in their own pain so greedily. He saw
only Leam, and was conscious only that he loved her and she him.
Presently he said, tempting her with the lover's affectation of
distrust, "I do not think you love me really, my Leam," bending over
her as if he would have folded her to his heart. Had she been any but
Leam he would. But the love-ways that came so easy to him were lessons
all unlearnt as yet by her, and he respected both her reticence and
her reluctance.
"Not love you!" she said with soft surprise--"I not love you!"
"Do you?" he asked.
She was silent for a moment. "I do love you," she said in her quiet,
intense way. "I do not talk--you know that--but if I could make you
happy by dying for you I would. I love you--oh, I cannot say how much!
I seem to love God and all the saints, the sun and the flowers, Spain,
our Holy Mother and mamma in you. You are life to me. I seem to have
loved you all my life under another name. When you are with me I have
no more pain or fear left. You are myself--more than myself to me."
"My darling! and you to me!" cried Edgar.
But his voice, though sweet and tender, had not the passionate ring of
hers, and his face, though full of the man's bolder love, had not
the intensity which made her so beautiful, so sublime. It was all the
difference between the experience which knew the whole thing by
heart, and which cared for itself more than for the beloved, and the
wholeness, the ecstasy, of the first and only love born of a nature
single, simple and concentrated.
Adelaide, watching and listening behind the broken wall, saw and heard
it all. Her head was on fire, her heart had sunk like lead; she could
not stay any longer assisting thus at the ruin of her life's great
hope; she had already stayed too long. As she stole noiselessly away,
her white dress passing a distant opening looked ghastly, seen through
the rising mist which the young moon faintly silvered,
"What is that?" cried Leam, a look of terror on her pale face as she
rapidly crossed herself. "It is the Evil Sign."
"No," laughed Edgar, profiting by the moment to take her in his
arms, judging that if she was frightened she would be willing to feel
sheltered. "It is only one of the ladies passing to go down. Perhaps
it is Adelaide Birkett: I think it was."
"And that would be an evil sign in itself," said Leam, still
shuddering. And yet how safe she felt with his arms about her like
this!
"Poor dear Addy! why should she be an ill omen to you, you dear little
fluttering, frightened dove?"
"She hates me--always has, so long as I can remember her," answered
Leam. "And you are her friend," she added.
"Her friend, yes, but not her lover, as I am yours--not her future
husband," said Edgar.
Leam's hand touched his softly, with a touch that was as fleeting and
subtle as her smile.
"A friend is not a wife, you know," he continued. "And you are to be
my wife, my own dear and beloved little wife--always with me, never
parted again."
"Never parted again! Ah, I shall never be unhappy then," she murmured.
A flash of summer lightning broke through the pale faint moonlight and
lighted up the old gray towers with a lurid glow.
Leam was not usually frightened at lightning, but now, perhaps because
her whole being was overwrought and strung, she started and crouched
down with a sense of awe strangely unlike her usual self.
"Come, we are going to have a storm," said Edgar, whom every
manifestation of weakness claiming his superior protection infinitely
pleased and seemed to endear her yet more to him. "We must be going,
my darling, else I shall have you caught in the rain. We shall just
have time to get to the rectory before it comes on, and they are
waiting for us."
"I would rather not go to the rectory to-night," said Leam with a
sudden return to her old shy self.
"No? Why, my sweet?" he said lovingly. "How can I live through the
evening without you?"
"Can you not? Do you really wish me to go?" she answered seriously.
"Of course I wish it: how should I not? But tell me why you raise an
objection. Why would you rather not go?"
"I would rather be alone and think of you than only see you at the
rectory with all those people," she answered simply.
"But we have had all the people about here, and yet we have been
pretty much alone," he said.
"We could not be together at the rectory, and"--she blushed, but her
eyes were full of more than love as she raised them to his face--"I
could not bear that any one should come between us to-day. Better be
alone at home, where I can think of you with no one to interrupt me."
"It is a disappointment, but who could refuse such a plea and made in
such a voice?" said Edgar, who felt that perhaps she was right in
her instinct, and who at all events knew that he should be spared
something that would be a slight effort in Adelaide's own house. "I
shall spoil you, I know, but I cannot refuse you anything when you
look like that. Very well: you shall go home if you wish it, my
beloved, and I will make your excuses."
"Thank you," said Leam, with the sweetest little air of humbleness and
patience.
"How could that fool Sebastian Dundas say she was difficult to manage?
and how can Adelaide see in her the possibility of anything like
wickedness? She is the most loving and tractable little angel in the
world. She will give me no kind of trouble, and I shall be able to
mould her from the first and do what I like with her."
These were Edgar's thoughts as he took Leam's hand on his arm, holding
it there tenderly pressed beneath his other hand, while he said aloud,
"My darling! my delight! if I had had to create my ideal I should have
made _you_. You are everything I most love;" and again he said, as so
often before, "the only woman I have ever loved or ever could love."
And Learn believed him.
Adelaide accepted Major Harrowby's excuses for Miss Dundas's sudden
headache and fatigue gallantly, as she had accepted her position
through the day: she showed nothing, expressed nothing, bin: bore
herself with consummate ease and self-possession. She won Edgar's
admiration for her tact and discretion, for the beautiful results of
good-breeding. He congratulated himself on having such a friend as
Adelaide Birkett. She would be of infinite advantage to Learn when his
wife, and when he had persuaded that sweet doubter to believe in her
and accept her as she was, and as he wished her to be accepted. As
it was in the calendar of his wishes at this moment that Adelaide had
never loved him, never wished to marry him, he dismissed the belief
which he had cherished so long as if it had never been, and decided
that it had been a mistake throughout. She was just his friend--no
more, and never had been more. He was not singular in his
determination to find events as his desires ruled them. It is a
pleasant way of shuffling off self-reproach and of excusing one's own
fickleness.
Edgar just now believed as he wished to believe, and shut out all the
rest. As he lit his last cigar, sitting on the terrace at the Hill
and watching the sheet-lightning on the horizon, he thought with
satisfaction on the success of his life. Specially he congratulated
himself on his final choice. Leam would make the sweetest little
wife in the world, and he loved her passionately. But "spooning" was
exhausting work: he would cut it short and marry her as soon as he
could get things together. Then his thoughts wandered away to some
other of his personal matters; and while Leam was living over the
day hour by hour, word by word, he had settled the terms for Farmer
Mason's new lease, had decided to rebuild the north lodge, which was
ugly and incommodious; and on this, something catching the end of that
inexplicable association of ideas, he wondered how some one whom he
had left in India was going on, and what had become of Violet Cray.