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

CHAPTER XXXV.
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.