Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 17, No. 097, January, 1876

But had it not been for Alick Corfield, Madame la Marquise de Montfort would not have made quite so much way. Alick and Leam used to meet in Steel's Wood; and when Leam carried her perplexities to Alick, and Alick told her that she ought to yield and gave her the reasons why, after first fiercely combating him, telling him he was stupid, wicked, unkind, she always ended by promising to obey; and when Leam promised the things agreed to might be considered done. In point of fact, then, it was Alick who was really moulding her, in excess of that unconscious plasticity and imitation already spoken of. But this was one of the things which the world did not know, and where judgment went awry in consequence.

Of course the neighborhood saw what was coming—what must come, indeed, by the very force of circumstances. The friendship which had sprung up from the first between Mr. Dundas and madame could not stop at friendship now, when both were free and evidently so necessary to each other. For madame, with that noble frankness backed by wise reticence characteristic of her, had told every one of her loss by which she had been necessitated to become Leam's governess; always adding, "So that I am glad to be able to work, seeing that I am obliged to do so, as I could not borrow, even for a short time: I am too proud for that, and I hope too honest."

Wherefore, as she was evidently Leam's salvation, according to her own account, and Sebastian was confessedly her income, and a very good one too, there was no reason why their several lines should not coalesce in an indissoluble union, and one home be made to serve them instead of two. As indeed it came about.

When the year of conventional mourning had been perfected, on the anniversary of the very day when poor Pepita died, the final words were said, the last frail barrier of madame's conjugal memories and widowed regrets was removed, and Sebastian Dundas went home the gladdest man in England. All that long bad past was now to be redeemed, and he had made a good bargain with life to have passed through even so much misery to come at the end into such reward.

Nothing startled him, nothing chilled him. When madame, laying her hand on his arm, said in a kind of playful candor infinitely bewitching, "Remember, dear friend, I told you beforehand that I have lost all my fortune; in marrying me you marry only myself with my past, my child and my liabilities," his mind repudiated the idea of the flimsiest shadow on that past, the faintest blur on its spotless record. As for her child, it was his: he would give it his name, it should be dearer to him than his own; which, all things considered, was not an overwhelming provision of love; and her liabilities, whatever they were, he would be glad to discharge them as a proof of his love for her and the forging of another golden link between them.

He doubted nothing, believed all, and loved as much as he believed. He was happy, radiant, content: the woman whom he loved loved him, and had consented to become his wife. In giving her dear self to him she was also accepting security and devotion at his hands; and what more can a true man want than to be of good service to the woman he loves? If women like to minister, it is the pride of men to protect; and if the vow to endow with all his worldly goods is a fable in fact, it is true as an instinctive feeling.

When Mrs. Harrowby heard that the marriage was positively arranged, she sat with her daughters at a kind of inquest on their dead friendship with Sebastian Dundas, and came to the conclusion that they must know something more definite now about this person calling herself Madame la Marquise de Montfort. As a stranger it was all very well to overlook the vagueness of her biography—they were not committed to anything really dangerous by simply visiting a householder among them—but it was another matter if she was to be married to one of themselves. Then they must learn who she really was, and Mr. Dundas must satisfy them scrupulously, else they should decline to know her.

"It will make a great gap in our society," said kindly Josephine, who, having the most to suffer, had forgiven the most readily.

"Gap or no gap, it is what we owe to ourselves," said Mrs. Harrowby.

"And to Edgar," added Maria.

"I shall call on Sebastian to-morrow," said Mrs. Harrowby, laying aside her knitting with the air of a minister who has dictated his protocol and has now only to sign the clean copy.

"Sleep on it, mamma," pleaded Josephine.

"It will make no difference," returned the mother; and her elder two echoed in concert, "I hope not."

The next day Mrs. Harrowby did call on Mr. Dundas, and, finding that gentleman at home, succeeded in speaking her mind. She conveyed her ultimatum as a corporate not individual resolution, speaking in the name of the "ladies of the place," which she was scarcely entitled to do.

Mr. Dundas declined to satisfy her. Indeed, it would have been difficult for him to have done so, seeing that he knew no more of Madame de Montfort, his intended wife, than what they all knew; which was substantially nothing, unless her fancy autobiography could be called something. He spoke, however, as if he had her private memoirs and all the branches, roots and hole of the family tree in his pocket; and he spoke loftily, with the intimation that she was superior; to all at North Aston, Mrs. Harrowby herself included.

This interview, with its demand unsatisfied and its assertions unproved, sent the coolness already existing between the Hill and Andalusia Cottage down to freezing-point; and the worst of it was that Mrs. Harrowby did not find backers. The neighborhood did not take up the cause as she expected it would. It halted midway and faced both sides, in the manner so dear to English respectability—less cordial to Mr. Dundas and madame than it would have been had Mrs. Harrowby been friendly, but unwilling to follow her to the bitter end. As they said to each other, it was all very well for Mrs. Harrowby to be so severe on the marriage, because she was angry and disappointed—and an angry and disappointed mother is ever unreasonable—but they who had no daughters to marry, really they did not see why they should persecute that poor madame who was such pleasant company, and had behaved herself with so much propriety since she came. And if Sebastian Dundas was going to make a second mistake, that was his lookout, and would be his punishment.

On the whole, the neighborhood when polled was decidedly more friendly than hostile. The Corfields and Fairbairns were, as they had always been, neutrals of a genial tint, more for than against; Mr. and Mrs. Birkett were warm partisans; and only Adelaide joined hands with the Hill and said that Mrs. Harrowby was justified in her renunciation and that madame was a wretch. And for the first time in her life the rector's daughter spoke compassionately of Leam and humanely of Pepita, saying of the one how much she pitied her, having such a woman for a stepmother; of the other, that, horrible as she was, at least they knew the worst of her, which was more than they could say of madame.

She made her father very angry when she said these things, but she repeated them, nevertheless; and she knew that he dared not scold her too severely before the world for fear of that little something called conscience, and knowledge of the reason why he believed in Madame de Montfort so implicitly.

CHAPTER XVIII

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.