Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 17, No. 101, May, 1876

"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.