Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 17, No. 102, June, 1876

"Leam, why did you love me?" he cried, taking her hands in his and keeping them.

"How could I help it? Who would not love you?" she answered.

Again he gave a sudden heavy sob, and again the poor pale, tortured face reflected the pain it witnessed.

"Good-bye!" she then said, drawing her hands from his. "Remember only, when you blame me, that I told you, not to let you be degraded. And forgive me before I die, for I loved you—ah, better than my own life!"

With a sudden impulse she stooped forward, took back his right hand in both of hers, pressed it to her bosom, kissed it passionately again and again, then turned with one faint, half-suppressed moan, and left him. And as he heard her light feet cross the hall, wearily, heavily, as the feet of a mourner dragging by the grave of the beloved, he knew that his dream of love was over. But, with the strange satire of the senses in moments of sorrow, noting ever the most trivial things, Edgar noted specially the powerful perfume of a spray of lemon-plant which she bruised as she pressed his hand against her breast.

That evening Edgar Harrowby went down to the rectory. He was strong enough in physique and in some phases of will, but he was not strong all through, and he had never been able to face unassisted the first desolation of a love-disappointment.

Adelaide, in a picturesque dress and her most becoming mood, welcomed him with careful cordiality as a prodigal whose husks, clinging about his coat, were to be handled tenderly as if they were pearls. She saw that something was gravely wrong, and she grasped the line of connection if she did not understand the issue; but, mindful of the doctrine of letting well alone—also of that of catching a heart at the rebound—she made no allusion in the beginning, but let her curiosity gnaw her like the Spartan boy's fox without making a sign. At last, however, her curiosity became impatience, and her impatience conquered her reserve. She was clever in her generation and fairly self-controlled, but she was only a woman, after all.

"And when did you see that eccentric little lady, Miss Leam?" she asked with a smile—not a bitter smile, merely one of careless amusement, as if Leam was acknowledged to be a comical subject of conversation and one naturally provoking a smile.

"Dear Adelaide," said Edgar, not looking at her, but speaking with unusual earnestness, "do not speak ill of Leam Dundas—neither to me nor to any one else. I ask it as a favor."

Adelaide turned pale. "Tell me only one thing, Edgar: are you going to marry her?" she asked, her manner as earnest as his own, but with a different meaning.

"No. Marry her? Good God, no!" was his vehement reply. Then more tenderly: "But for all that do not speak ill of her. Will you promise, dear, good friend?"

"Yes, I will promise," she answered with what was for her fervor and a sudden look of intense relief. "I never will again, Edgar; and I am sorry if I have hurt you at any time by what I may have said. I did not mean to do so."

"No, I know you did not. I can appreciate your motives, and they were good," Edgar answered with emotion; and then their two pairs of fine blue eyes met, and both pairs were moist.

This was just at the moment when Leam, pale, rigid as a statue, thickly veiled, and holding a box in her hand, met Mr. Gryce in Steel's Wood, he having gone to catch such rare specimens of sleeping lepidoptera as the place afforded and his eyes could discern.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

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."