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

"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 Dundas abruptly, with that sudden glance as suddenly withdrawn which tells of a half-formed suspicion neither dwelt on nor clearly made out.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.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

WINDY BROW

While North Aston was employing its time in wondering, and Alick Corfield was breaking his heart in sorrowing, Leam was doing battle with her despair and distress at Windy Brow—doing the best she could to keep her senses clear and to live through the penance which she had inflicted on herself.

So far, Mrs. Pepper's conclusions, based on a badly-gummed envelope, were right: Miss Gryce of Windy Brow was the sister of Mr. Gryce of Lionnet, though even Mrs. Pepper did not know that Leam Dundas, under the name of Leonora Darley, was living with her.

It is not the most obvious agents that are the most influential. The greatest things in Nature are the work of the smallest creatures, and our lives are manipulated far more by unseen influences, known only to ourselves, than by those patent to the world. In all North Aston, Mr. Gryce was the man who had apparently the least hold on the place and the slightest connection with the people. He had come there by accident and by choice lived in retirement, though also by choice he had not been there a month before he knew all there was to be known of every individual for miles round. The merest chances had made him personally acquainted with Sebastian Dundas—those chances his tenancy of Lionnet and the slight attack of fever which called forth his landlord's sentiment and pity. Through the father he came to know the daughter, when the prying curiosity of his nature, his liking for secret influence and concealed action, together with the kind heart at bottom, and his real affection for the girl whose confidence he had partly forced and partly won, threw the whole secret into his hands and made him master of the situation—the keeper of the seal set against the writings whom no one suspected of complicity. This was exactly the kind of thing he liked, and the kind of thing that suited him, human mole, born detective and conspirator as he was.

When Leam met him in the wood on the evening of her confession to Edgar, she met him with the deliberate intention of confessing her fearful secret to him too, and of asking him to help her to escape, like the friend which he had promised he would be. She knew that it was impossible for her now to live at North Aston, and the sole desire she had was to be blotted out, as she had been.

There was no excitement about her, no feverish exaltation that would burn itself cold before twenty-four hours were over—only the dead dreariness of heartbreak, the tenacious resolution of despair. She neither wept nor wrung her hands, but quiet, pale, rigid, she told her terrible story in the low and level tones in which a Greek Fate might have spoken, as sad and as immutable. She had sinned, and now had made such atonement as she could by confession—to her lover to save him from pollution, to her father to cancel his obligations to her, to her friend to be helped in her lifelong penance. This done, she had strengthened herself to bear all that might come to her with that resignation of remorse which demands no rights and inherits no joys. She was not one of those emotional half-hearted creatures who resolve one day, break down the next, and drift always. For good and evil alike she had the power to hold where she had gripped and to maintain what she had undertaken; and even her life at Windy Brow did not shake her.

And that life might well have shaken both a stronger mind and even a more resolute will than hers.

A square stone house of eight rooms, set on a bleak fell-side where the sun never shone, where no fruits ripened, no flowers bloomed and no trees grew, save here and there a dwarfed and twisted thorn covered with pale gray lichen and bent by the wind into painful deformity of growth—a house which had no garden, only a strip of rank, coarse grass before the windows, with a potato-patch and kail-yard to the side; where was no adornment within or without, no beauty of color, no softness of line, merely a rugged, lonesome, square stone tent set up on a mountain-spur, as it would seem for the express reception of tortured penitents not seeking to soften sorrow,—this was Windy Brow, the patrimony of the Gryces, where Keziah, Emmanuel's eldest sister, lived and had lived these sixty years and more.

The house stood alone. Monk Grange, the hamlet to which it geographically belonged—a place as bleak and bare as itself, and which seemed to have been flung against the fell-foot as if a brick-layer's hodman had pitched the hovels at haphazard anyhow—was two good miles away, and the market-town, to be got at only by crossing a dangerous moor, was nine miles off—as far as Sherrington from North Aston.

The few poor dwellers in Monk Grange had little to do with the market-town. They lived mostly on what they managed to raise and rear among themselves—holding braxy mutton good enough for feast-days, and oatmeal porridge all the year round the finest food for men and bairns alike. As for the gudewives' household necessaries, they were got by the carrier who passed once a fortnight on their road; and for the rest, if aught was wanting more than that which they had, they did without, and, according to the local saying, "want was t' master."

Society of a cultured kind there was none. The clergyman was an old man little if it all superior to the flock to which he ministered. He was a St. Bees man, the son of a handloom weaver, speaking broad Cumberland and hopelessly "dished" by a hard word in the Bible. He was fond of his glass, and was to be found every day of his life from three to nine at the Blucher, smoking a clay pipe and drinking rum and milk. He had never married, but he was by no means an ascetic in his morals, as more than one buxom wench in his parish had proved; and in all respects he was an anachronism, the like of which is rare now among the fells and dales, though at one time it was the normal type for the clergy of the remoter North Country districts.

This old sinner—Priest Wilson as he was called—and Miss Gryce of Windy Brow represented the wealth and intellect of a place which was at the back of everything, out of the highway of life and untouched by the progress of history or science. And the one was not very much superior to the other save in moral cleanliness; which, however, counts for something.

If North Aston had said with a sniff that Mr. Gryce was not thoroughbred, what would have been its verdict on Sister Keziah? He at least had rubbed off some of the native fell-side mould by rolling about foreign parts, gathering experience if not moss, and becoming rich in knowledge if not in guineas; but Keziah, who had spent the last twenty years of her life in close attendance on a paralytic old mother, had stiffened as she stood, and the local mould encrusting her was very thick. Nevertheless, she too had a good heart if a rough hand, and, though eccentric almost to insanity, as one so often finds with people living out of the line and influence of public opinion, yet was as sound at the core as she was rude and odd in the husk.

She was a small woman, lean, wrinkled, and with a curious mixture of primness and slovenliness in her dress. She wore a false front, which she called a topknot, the small, crimped, deep-brown mohair curls of which were bound about her forehead with a bit of black velvet ribbon, while gray hairs straggled from underneath to make the patent sham more transparent still; and over her topknot she wore a rusty black cap that enclosed the keen monkeyish face like a ruff. Her every-day gown was one of coarse brown camlet, any number of years old, darned and patched till it was like a Joseph's coat; and the Rob Roy tartan shawl which she pinned across her bosom hid a state of dilapidation which even she did not care should be seen. She wore a black stuff apron full of fine tones from fruit-stains and fire-scorchings; and she took snuff.

She was reputed to be worth a mort of money, and she had saved a goodly sum. It would have been more had she had the courage to invest it; but she had a profound distrust of all financial speculations—had not Emmanuel lost his share by playing at knucklebones with it in the City?—and she was not the fool to follow my leader into the mire. For her part, she put her trust in teapots and stockings, with richer hoards wrapped in rags and sewn up in the mattress, and here a few odd pounds under the rice and there a few hidden in the coffee. That was her idea of a banking account, and she held it to be the best there was.

"Don't lend your hat," she used to say, "and then you'll not have to go bareheaded." And sometimes, talking of loans on securities, she would take a pinch of snuff and say she "reckoned nowt of that man who locked his own granary door and gave another man the key."

To all appearance, she lived only to scrape and hoard, moidering away her loveless life on the futile energies and sordid aims of a miser's wretched pleasures. But every now and then she had risen up out of the slough into which she had gradually sunk, and had done some grand things that marked her name with so many white stones. While she gloried in her skill in filching from the pig what would serve the chickens, in making Jenny go short to save to-day's baking of havre-bread, in skimping Tim's bowl of porridge—his appetite being a burden on her estate which she often declared would break her—she had more than once given a hundred pounds at a blow to build a raft for a poor drowning wretch who must otherwise have sunk. In fact, she was one of those people who are small with the small things of life and great with the great—who will grudge a daily dole of a few threshed-out stalks of straw, but who sometimes, when rightly touched, will shower down with both hands full sheaves of golden grain. That is, she had mean aims, a bad temper, no imagination, but the capacity for pity and generosity on occasions.

Above all things, she hated to be put out of the way or intruded on. When her brother Emmanuel came down on her without a word of warning, bringing a girl with eyes that, as she said, made her feel foolish to look at, and a manner part scared, part stony, and wholly unconformable, telling her to keep this precious-bit madam like a bale of goods till called for, and to do the best with it she could, she was justified, she said, in splurging against his thoughtlessness and want of consideration, taking a body like that all of a heap, without With your leave or By your leave, or giving one a chance of saying Yes I will, or No I won't.

But though she splurged she gave way; and after she had fumed and fussed, heckled the maid and harried the man, said she didn't see as how she could, and she didn't think as how she would, sworn there was no bedding fit to use, and that she had no place for the things—apples and onions chiefly—that were in the spare room if she gave it up for the young lass's use, she seemed to quiet down, and going over to Leam, standing mutely by the black-boarded fireplace, put on her spectacles, peered up into her face, and said in shrill tones, rasping as a saw, though she meant to be kind, "Ah, well! I suppose it must be; so go your ways up stairs with Jenny, bairn, and make yourself at home. It's little I have for a fine young miss like you to play with, but what I have you're welcome to; so make no bones about it: d'ye hear?"

"But I am in your way," said Leam, not moving. "You do not want me?"

Miss Gryce laughed. "Want ye?" she shouted. "Want ye, do you say? Nay, nay, honey, it was no wanting of you or your marras that would ever have given me a headache, I'll ensure ye. But now that you are here you can bide as long as you've a mind; and you're welcome kindly. And Emmanuel there knows that my word is as good as my bond, and what I say I mean."

"Am I to stay?" asked Leam, turning to Mr. Gryce with a certain forced humility which showed how much it cost her to submit.

"Yes," he answered, less cheerfully and more authoritatively than was his manner at North Aston, speaking without a lisp and with a full Cumberland accent. "It is the best thing I can do for you—all I have to offer."

To which Leam bent her sad head with pathetic patience—pathetic indeed to those who knew the proud spirit that it reported broken and humbled for ever. Following the red-armed, touzled, ragged maid to the dingy cabin that was to be her room, she left her friend to explain to his sister, so far as he chose and could, the necessity under which he found himself of leaving his adopted daughter, Leonora Darley, in her care for a week or two, until such time as he should return and claim her.

"Your adopted daughter? God bless my soul, man! but you are the daftest donnet I ever saw on two legs!" cried Keziah, snatching up the coarse gray knitting which was the sole unanchored circumstance in the room and casting off her heel viciously. "What call had you to adopt a daughter—you with never a wife to mother her nor a house of your own to take her to? For I reckon nowt of your furnished houses here and your beggarly apartments there, as you know. And now you can do nothing better than bring her here to fash the life out of me before the week's over! But that's always the way with you men. You talk precious big, but it's mighty little you put your hands to; and when you hack out yokes for which you get a deal of praise, you take care not to bear them on your own backs. It's us women who have to do that."

"One would have supposed you would have liked a pretty young thing like that in the house. You are lonesome enough here, and it makes a little life," said Emmanuel quietly.

He knew his sister Keziah, and that she must have her head when the talking fit was on her.

"'A pretty young thing like that!'" she repeated scornfully. "Lord love you, born cuddy as you are! What's her good looks to me, I wonder, but a pound spent on a looking-glass, and Jenny taken off her work to make cakes and butter-sops for her dainty teeth? We'll have all the men-folk too havering round to see which of 'em may have the honor of ruining himself for my fine lady. And I'll not have it, I tell ye. I'll not have my house turned into a fair, with madam there as the show. Life! what do I want with 'life' about me, or you either, Emmanuel? I've got my right foot in the grave, and I reckon yours is not far off; and what we've both got to do now is to see that we make a good ending for our souls."

"At all events, you don't refuse to take her for a week or two?" asked Emmanuel innocently.

"Did I say I refused? Did I send her up stairs as the nighest road to the street-door?" retorted his sister with disdain. "Did I not tell you, as plain as tongue could speak, that she is welcome to her bit and sup, and I'll pass the time away for her in the best way I can, though bad is the best, I reckon?"

"Well, well, you are a good body," said her brother.

"Ay," she answered, "I am good enough when I jump your way. But tell me, Emmanuel," changing from the disdain of the superior creature holding forth on high matters to the inferior to the familiar gossip of the natural woman, "what's to do with her? It's as plain as a pike-staff that something is troubling her, and maybe it will be some of your love nonsense? for it's mainly that as fashes the lasses. Good Lord! I'm thankful I was never hindered that way."

"Yes," said Mr. Gryce, "she has had what you women call a disappointment; and," speaking with unusual energy, "the man was a fool and a coward, and she has had a lucky escape."

"Say ye? If so, then there is no call for her to carry on," said Keziah philosophically. "But the poor bairn's looking wantle enough now, though I warrant me the fell-side air will brisk her up in no time."