RECKONING WITH LEAM.
The announcement of her father's intended marriage with madame came
on Leam with a crushing sense of terror and despair. Unobservant youth
sees little, and even what it does see it does not comprehend. Though
the girl had accustomed herself by slow degrees to many works and ways
which mamma had never known; though the faculties which had been, as
it were, imprisoned by that close-set, hide-bound love of hers were
now a little loosened and set free; though the activities of youth
were stirring in her, and her inner life, if still isolated, was a
shade more expanded than of old,--yet she had no desire for greater
change, and she had no keener vision for the world outside herself
than before. She saw nothing of that diabolical thing which her
father and madame had been so long plotting as the outcome of their
friendship, the parable of which her education had been the text. If
her intelligence was warping out from the narrow limits in which her
mother had confined it, it was still below the average--as much as her
feverish love and tenacious loyalty were above. All that she knew
was, mamma dead was the same as mamma living, only to be more tenderly
dealt with, as she could not defend herself; and that she wondered how
papa could be so wicked as to affront her now that she was not able to
punish him and let him know what she thought of him.
When he told her that he was going to give her a new mother, one whom
she must love as she had loved her own poor dear mamma--- he was so
happy he could afford to be tender even to that terrible past and poor
Pepita--Leam's first sensation was one of terror, her first movement
one of repulsion. She flung off the hand which he had laid on her
shoulder and drew back a few steps, facing him, her breath held, her
tragic eyes flashing, her face struck to stone by what she had heard.
"Well, my dear, you need not look so surprised," said Mr. Dundas
jauntily. "And you need not look so terrified. Your new mother will
not hurt you,"
"She shall not be my mother, papa," said Learn: "I will not own her."
"You will do what I tell you to do," her father returned with
admirable self-command.
"Not when you tell me to do a crime," flashed Leam.
Mr. Dundas smiled. "Your words are a trifle strong," he said.
"It is a crime," she reiterated. "But if you have forgotten mamma, and
want to affront her now that she cannot defend herself, I have not,
and never will."
Mr. Dundas smiled again. If he was so happy that he could afford to
be tender to the past, so also could he afford to be patient with
the present. "Foolish child!" he said compassionately: "you do not
understand things yet."
"I understand that I love mamma, and will not have this wicked woman
in her place," said Leam hotly.
"I think you will," he answered, playing with his watch-guard. "And in
the future, my little daughter, you will thank me."
"Thank you? For what?" asked Leam. "You made mamma miserable when she
lived: you and your madame helped to kill her, and now you put this
woman in her place! Papa, I wonder Saint Jago lets you live."
"As Saint Jago is kind enough to leave me in peace, perhaps you
will follow his example. What a saint allows my little daughter may
accept," said Mr. Dundas mockingly.
"No," said Leam with pathetic solemnity, "if the saints forget mamma,
I will not."
"My dear, you are a fool," said Mr. Dundas.
"You may call me what you like, but madame shall not be my mother,"
returned Leam.
"Madame will be your mother because she will be my wife," said
Mr. Dundas slowly. "Unfortunately for you--perhaps for myself
also--neither you nor I can alter the law of the land. The child must
accept the consequences of the father's act."
"Then I will kill her," cried Leam.
Her father laughed gayly. "I think we will brave this desperate
danger," he said. "It is a fearful threat, I grant--an awful
peril--but we must brave it, for all that."
"Papa," said Leam, "I will pray to the saints that when you die you
may not go to heaven with mamma and me."
It was her last bolt, her supreme effort at threat and entreaty, and
it meant everything. If her words of themselves would have amused
Mr. Dundas as a child's ignorant impertinence, the superstition of an
untaught, untutored mind, her looks and manner affected him painfully.
True, he did not love her--on the contrary, he disliked her--but, all
the same, she was his child; and, dissected, realized, it was rather
an awful thing that she had said. It showed an amount of hatred and
contempt which went far beyond his dislike for her, and made him
shudder at the strength of feeling, the tenacity of hate, in one so
young.
If more absurdity than good sense is talked about natural affection,
still there is a residuum of fact underneath the folly; and Leam's
words had struck down to that small residuum in her father's heart. It
was not that he was wounded sentimentally so much as in his sense of
proprietorship, his paternal superiority, and he was angry rather than
sorrowful. It made him feel that he had borne with her waywardness
long enough now: it was time to put a stop to it. "Now, Leam, no more
insolence and no more nonsense," he said sternly. "You have tried my
patience long enough. This day month I marry Madame de Montfort, with
or without your pleasure, my little girl. In a month after that I
bring her home here as my wife, consequently your mother, the mistress
of the house and of you. I give you the best guide, the best friend,
you have ever had or could have: you will live to value her as she
deserves. Your own mother was not fit to guide you: your new one will
make you all that my dearest hopes would have you. Now go. Think over
what I have said. If you do not like our arrangements, so much the
worse for you."
"The saints will never let her come here as my mother. I will pray to
them night and day to kill her." said Leam in a deep voice, clenching
her hands and setting her small square teeth, as her mother used to
set hers, like a trap.
Naturally, the second Mrs. Dundas could not be brought home without
a certain upsetting of the old order and a rearrangement of things
to suit the new. And the upsetting was not stinted, nor were the
exertions of Mr. Dundas. He superintended everything himself, to the
choice of a tea-cup, the looping of a curtain, and racked his brains
to make his beloved's bower the fit expression of his love, though
never to his mind could it be worthy of her deserving. There was not
an ornament in the place but was dedicated to her, placed where she
could see it on such and such an occasion, and shifted twenty times a
day for a more advantageous position. Everything which the house
had of most beautiful was pressed into her service, and even Leam's
natural rights of inheritance were ignored for madame's better
endowing. Lace, jewelry, trinkets, all that had been Pepita's, was
now hers, and the man's restless desire to make her rich and her home
beautiful seemed insatiable.
But there was always Leam in the background with whom he had to
reckon--Leam, who wandered through the house in her straight-cut,
plain black gown, made in the deepest fashion of mourning devisable,
pale, silent, feverish, like an avenging spirit on his track; undoing
what he had done if he had profaned an embodied memory of her mother,
and as impervious to his anger as he was to her despair.
One day he carried from the drawing-room to the boudoir which was to
be madame's, and had been Pepita's, a certain Spanish vase which had
been a favorite ornament with her because it reminded her of home.
He firmly fixed it on the bracket destined for it, opposite the couch
where he longed so ardently to see his fair and queenly loved one
sitting--he by her side in the lovers' paradise of secure content; but
the next time he went into the room he found it lying in fragments on
the floor. None of the servants knew how the mischance had happened:
the window was not open, and none of them had been in the room.
How, then, came it there, broken on the floor? When he asked Leam,
wandering by in that pale, feverish, avenging way of hers, he knew the
truth.
"Yes," she said defiantly, "I broke it. It was mamma's, and your
madame shall not have it."
"If you intend to go on like this I shall have you sent to school or
shut up in a lunatic asylum," cried Mr. Dundas in extreme wrath.
"Then I shall be alone with mamma, and shall not see you or your
madame," answered Leam, unconquered.
"You are a hardened, shameful, wicked girl," said her father angrily.
"Madame is an angel of goodness to undertake the care of such a
wretched creature as you are. I could not do too much for her if I
gave her all I had, and you can never be grateful enough for such a
mother."
"She is not my mother, and she shall not pollute mamma's things," Leam
answered with passionate solemnity. "If you give them to her I will
break or burn them. Mamma's things are her own, and she shall not be
made unhappy in heaven."
Provoked beyond himself, Sebastian Dundas said scornfully, "Heaven!
You talk of heaven as if you knew all about it, Leam, like the next
parish. How do you know she is there, and not in the place of torment
instead? Your mother was scarcely of the stuff of which angels are
made."
"Then if she is in the place of torment, she is unhappy enough as
it is, and need not be made more so," said faithful Leam, suddenly
breaking into piteous weeping; adding through her sobs, "and madame
shall not have her things."
Her tenacity carried the day so far that Mr. Dundas left off
rearranging the old, and sent up to London for things new and without
embarrassing memories attached to them. On which Leam swept off all
that had been her mother's, and locked up her treasures in her own
private cupboard, carrying the key in the hiding-place which that
mother had taught her to use, the thick coils of her hair. And her
father, warned by that episode of the vase, and a little dominated,
not to say appalled, by her resolute fidelity, shut his eyes to her
domestic larceny and let her carry off her relics in safety.
So the time passed, miserably enough to the one, if full of hope and
the promise of joy to the other; and the wedding morning came whereon
Sebastian Dundas was to be made, as he phrased it, happy for life.
It had been madame's desire that Leam should be her bridesmaid. She
had laid great stress on this, and her lover would have gratified her
if he could. He had no wish that way--rather the contrary--but her
will was his law, and he did his best to carry it into effect. But
when he told Leam what he wanted--and he told her quite carelessly,
and so much as a matter of course that he hoped she too would accept
her position as a matter of course--the girl, enlightened by love if
not by knowledge, broke into a torrent of disdain that soon showed him
how sleeveless his errand was likely to be.
He did his best, and tried all methods from pleading to threatening,
but Leam was immovable. No power on earth should bend her, she said,
or make her take part in that wicked day. She go to church? She would
expect to be struck dead if she did. She expected, indeed, that all of
them would be struck dead. She had prayed the saints so hard, so hard,
to prevent this marriage, she was sure they would at the last; and if
they did not, she would never believe in them nor pray to them again.
But she did believe in them, and she was sure they would punish this
dreadful crime. No, she would take no part in it. Why should she put
herself in the way of being punished when she was not to blame?
So Mr. Dundas had the mortification of carrying to his bride-elect
the intelligence that he had been worsted in his conflict with his
daughter, and that her hatred and reluctance were to be neither
concealed nor overcome.
Madame was sorry, she said with her sweetest air of patience and
liberal comprehension. She would have liked the dear girl to have been
her bridesmaid: it would have been appropriate and touching. But
as she declined--and her feelings were easy to be understood and
honorable, if a little extreme--she, madame, elected to be married
as a widow should, with only Mrs. Birkett and Mr. Fairbairn as the
witnesses, Mr. Fairbairn to give her away for form's sake. The dear
rector of course would marry them in this simple manner. They must
hope that time and her own unvarying affection--Mr. Dundas called it
sweetness, angelic patience, greatness of soul--would soften poor Leam
into loving acceptance of what would be so much to her good when she
could be got to understand it. Meanwhile they must be patient--content
to go gradually and gain her bit by bit. She, madame, would be
quite content with her presence in the room, when they returned to
breakfast, in the pretty white muslin frock ordered from town as the
sign of her participation in the event.
But when the morning came, where was Leam? The most diligent search
failed to discover her, and the only person who could have betrayed
her whereabouts was the last whom they would have thought of asking.
Of course, Mr. Dundas was properly distressed at this strange
disappearance, and madame was unduly afflicted. She proposed that the
marriage should be delayed till the girl was found, but the lover was
stronger than the father, and she was overruled--yielding because it
is the duty of the wife to yield, but only because of that duty--for
her own part desirous of delay until they were assured of the safety
of Leam.
The ceremony, however, was performed within the canonical hours, the
rector a little tremulous and apparently suffering from sore throat;
and as the happy pair drove away, madame, remembering her advent and
her objects more than a year ago now, could not but confess that she
had done better than she expected, and, her conscience whispered,
better than she deserved.
All this time Leam was sitting on the lower branches of the yew tree
beneath which that godless ruffian had murdered his poor sweetheart
two generations ago in Steel's Wood. It was a lonely corner, where no
one would have gone by choice at the best of times, but now, with its
bad name and evil association, it was entirely deserted. Leam had made
it her hiding-place ever since madame had taken her in hand to teach
her the correct pronunciation of Shibboleth, and she had escaped
from her teaching and run away into the wood, armed banditti and wild
beasts notwithstanding. And one day, hunting in it for fungi, Alick
Corfield had found her sitting there, and thenceforth they had shared
the retreat between them.
No one knew that they met there, and no one suspected it--not even
Mrs. Corfield, who believed, after the manner of mothers who bring up
their boys at home, that she knew the whole of her son's life from end
to end, and that he had not a thought kept back from her, nor had ever
committed an action of which she was not cognizant.
Alick had installed Leam as the girl-queen of his imagination, and
paid her the homage which she seemed to him to deserve more than many
a real queen crowned and sceptered or princess born in the purple. It
pleased him to write bad poems to her as his Infanta, his royal rose,
his pomegranate flower, his nestling eagle waiting for strength to
fly upward to the sun--all with halting feet and strained metaphor.
He drew pictures of her by the dozen, mostly symbolic and all out
of drawing, but expressive of his admiration, his hope, his respect;
while to Leam he was little better than a two-legged talking dog whose
knowledge interested and whose goodness swayed her, but on whose neck
she set her little foot and kept it there. She always treated him with
profound disdain, even when he told her curious things that were like
fairy-tales, some of which she did not believe if they were too far
removed from the narrow area of her personal experience. Thus, when he
assured her that certain plants fed on flies as men feed on meat, she
told him with her sublime Spanish calm, "I do not believe it." And she
said the same when he one day informed her that the planets could be
weighed and their distance from the earth and the sun measured. In
the beginning she knew nothing--neither whether the earth was round or
flat, nor what was the meaning of the stars, nor the name of one wild
flower excepting daisies, nor of one great man. That fallow waste
called her mind was virgin ground in truth, but Alick was patient,
and labored hard at the stubborn soil; and when madame had given the
credit to her own tact and those ugly little books from which she
taught, it was to him really that Leam's microscopic amount of
plasticity and reception was due.
These secret meetings amused Leam, and kept her from that ceaseless
inward contemplation of her mother which else was her only voluntary
occupation. They gave her a sense of power, as well as of successful
rebellion to her father, that gratified her pride. To be sure,
they were not what mamma would have liked. Alick Corfield was an
Englishman, and mamma hated the English. But then, Leam reflected, she
had not known Alick: if she had, she would have seen there was no harm
in him, and that he was not teaching her things which a child of Spain
ought not to know, and which Saint Jago would be angry with her for
learning. And perhaps now that mamma was up in heaven, and knew all
that went on here at home, she would not mind her little Leama seeing
Alick Corfield so often. In her prayers she told her very faithfully
all that she had done and felt and thought; she never deceived her a
hair's breadth; and as she had asked her permission so often and so
humbly, she made sure now that it was granted. Mamma could not refuse
her when she asked her so earnestly; and she was not angry, but on the
contrary glad, that her little heart had such a good dog to care for
her, and that she was defying el señor papa, that false image of the
false saint.
For the rest, it was only natural that she should like the air of
quasi adventure and independence which this unknown, intercourse with
Alick gave her. And as she was still in that conscienceless phase of
youth when liking means everything, and honor without love is a grass
having neither root nor flower, she continued to meet her faithful
dog, and to learn from him--not all that he could tell her, but what
she chose to accept.
So here it was, perched among the lower branches of the yew tree in
Steel's Wood, that Leam spent her father's wedding-day with Madame la
Marquise de Montfort; and when she became hungry Alick went home and
brought her some dry bread and grapes from Steel's Corner, Dry bread
and grapes--this was all that she would have, she said. She was not
greedy like the English, who thought of nothing but eating, she added
in her disdainful way; and if Alick brought her anything but bread and
grapes, she would fling it into the wood. On his life he was not to
touch anything on papa's table. She would rather die of hunger than
eat their wicked food. She wondered it did not choke them both.
"Now go," she said superbly, "and come back soon: I am hungry," as if
her sense of inconvenience was a catastrophe which heaven and earth
should be moved to avert.
But young and so beautiful as she was, her little tricks of pride and
arbitrariness were just so many additional charms to Alick; and if
she had not flouted and commanded him, he would have thought that
something terrible was about to happen: had she become docile,
grateful, familiar, he would have expected her to die before the day
was out. He liked her superb assumption of superiority. She was his
girl-queen, and he was her slave; she was his mistress, and he was her
dog; and, dog-like, he fawned at her feet even when she rated him and
placed her little foot on his neck.