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

by Various

THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS.

BY MRS. E. LYNN LINTON, AUTHOR OF "PATRICIA KEMBALL."

CHAPTER XXXVII.

UNWORTHY.

The storm had passed with the night, and the day was bright and joyful—almost hard in its brightness and cruel in its joy; for while the sun was shining overhead and the air was musical with the hum of insects and the song of birds, the flowers were broken, the tender plants destroyed, the uncut corn was laid as if a troop of horse had trampled down the crops, and the woods, like the gardens and the fields, were wrecked and spoiled. But of all the mourners sighing between earth and sky, Nature is the one that never repents, and the sun shines out over the saddest ruin as it shines out over the richest growth, as careless of the one as of the other.

Edgar came down from the Hill in the sunshine, handsome, strong, jocund as the day. As he rode through the famous double avenue of chestnuts he thought, What a glorious day! how clear and full of life after the storm! but he noted the wreckage too, and was concerned to see how the trees and fields had suffered. Still, the one would put forth new branches and fresh leaves next year; and if the other had been roughly handled, there was yet a salvage to be garnered. The ruin was not irreparable, and he was in the mood to make the best of things. Do not the first days of a happy love ever give the happiest kind of philosophy for man and woman to go on?

And he was happy in his love. Who more so? He was on his way now to Ford House as a man going to his own, serene and confident of his possession. He had left his treasure overnight, and he went to take it up again, sure to find it where he had laid it down. He had no thought of the thief who might have stolen it in the dark hours, of the rust that might have cankered it in the chill of the gray morning. He only pictured to himself its beauty, its sweetness and undimmed radiance—only remembered that this treasure was his, his own and his only, unshared by any, and known in its excellence by none before him.

He rode up to the door glad, dominant, assured. Life was very pleasant to the strong man and ardent lover—the English gentleman with his happiness in his own keeping, and his future marked out in a clear broad pathway before him. There was no cloud in his sky, no shadow on his sea: it was all sunshine and serenity—man the master of his own fate and the ruler of circumstance—man the supreme over all things, a woman's past included.

Not seeing Leam in the garden, Edgar rang the bells and was shown into the drawing-room, where she was sitting alone. The down-drawn blinds had darkened the room to a pleasant gloom for eyes somewhat overpowered by the blazing sunshine and the dazzling white clouds flung like heaps of snow against the hard bright blue of the sky; yet something struck more chill than restful on the lover as he came through the doorway, little fanciful or sentimental as he was.

Leam, who had not been in bed through the night, was sitting on the sofa in the remotest and darkest part of the room. She rose as he entered—rose only, not coming forward to meet him, but standing in her place silent, pale, yet calm and collected. She did not look at him, but neither did she blush nor tremble. There was something statuesque, almost dead, about her—something that was not the same Leam whom he had known from the first.

He went up to her, both hands held out. She shrank back and folded hers in each other, still not looking at him.

"Why, Leam, what is it?" he cried in amazement, pained, shocked at her action. Was she in her right mind? Had she heard of his former attentions to Adelaide, divined their ultimate meaning, and been seized with a mad idea of sacrifice and generosity? It must be with Adelaide, he thought, rapidly reviewing his past. He was absolutely safe about Violet Cray, who had never known his name; and those later Indian affairs were dead and as good as buried. What, then, did it mean?

"No, not till you have heard me," said Leam in a low voice. "And never after."

"My darling! what is it?" he repeated.

"You must not call me dear names: I am unworthy," said Leam. "No," checking him as he would have spoken, smiling with a sense of relief that her craze—if it was a craze—went to the visionary side of her own unworthiness, and was not due to any knowledge of his misdemeanors, as she might think them. "Do not speak. I have to tell you. I had forgotten it," she went on to say in the same tense, compressed manner—the manner of one who has a task to get through, and has gathered all her strength for the effort, leaving none to be squandered in emotion—"I was so happy in these last days I had forgotten it. Now I have remembered, and we must part."

Edgar was grieved to see her in such deadly trouble, for it was easy to see her pain beneath her still exterior, but he was confident, and if grieved not afraid. Leam's little life, so innocent and uneventful as it must have been, could hold no such tremendous evil, could have been smirched with no such damning stain, as that at which she seemed to hint. Grant even that there had been something more between her and Alick Corfield than he would quite like to hear—which was his first thought—still, that more must needs be very little, could but be very simple. His wife must be spotless—that he knew, and he would marry none whose past was not as unsullied as new-fallen snow, as unsullied as must be her future—absolute purity—the unruffled emotions of a maidenhood undisturbed until now even by dreams, even by visions. He owed it to himself and his position that his wife, man of many loves as he was, should be this; but at the worst the childish affection of brother and sister, which was all that could possibly have been between Leam and that awkward young gangrel Alick Corfield, could have nothing in it that he ought to take to heart or that should influence him. Yes, he might smile and not be afraid. And indeed her delicate conscience was another grace in his eyes. He loved her more than ever for the honesty that must confess all its little sins. Sweet Leam! Leam having to confess! Leam! she who was almost too modest for an ordinary lover's comfort, needing to be tamed out of her savage bashfulness, not to be reproved for transgressing the proper reticence of an English maid. It was a pretty play, but it was only a play.

"Come and sit by me and make full confession, my darling," he said lovingly.

"I will stand where I am. You sit," said Leam, without looking at him.

He seated himself on the sofa. "And now what has my little culprit to say for herself?" he asked pleasantly, putting on a playful magisterial air.

"It is over," said Leam, her hands pressed in each other with so tight a clasp that the strained knuckles were white and started. "You must not love me: I cannot be your wife."

"Why?" He showed his square white teeth beneath the golden sweep of his moustache, his moist red lips parted, always smiling.

"I have done a great crime," said Leam in a low, monotonous voice.

"A crime! That is a large word for a small peccadillo—larger than any sin of yours merits, my sweetheart."

"You do not know," said Leam with a despairing gesture. "How can you know when you have not heard?"

"Well, what may be its name?" he asked, willing to humor her.

She paused for a moment: then with a visible effort, drawing in her breath, she said, in a voice that was unnaturally calm and low, "I killed madame."

"Leam!" cried Edgar, "how can you talk such nonsense? The thing is growing beyond a joke. Unsay your words; they are a wrong done to me."

He had started to his feet while he spoke, and now stood before her with a strangely scared and startled face. Naturally, as such a man would, he was resolute not to accept such a terrible confession, and one so unlikely, so impossible; but something in the girl's voice and manner, something in its sad, still reality, seemed to overpower his determination to find this simply a bad joke which she was playing off on his credulity. And then the thing fitted only too well. He had heard half a dozen times of Madame de Montfort's sudden death, and how very strange it was that the draught which she had taken so often with impunity before should have been found so laden with prussic acid on the first night of her homecoming as to kill her in an instant—how strange, too, that not the strictest search or inquiry could come upon a trace of such poison bought or possessed by any member of the family, for what police-officer would look to find a sixty-minim bottle of prussic acid concealed among the coils of a young girl's hair? And when Leam said in that quiet if desperate manner that it was she who had killed madame, her words made the whole mystery clear and solved the as yet unsolved problem.

Nevertheless, he would not believe her, but said again, passionately, "Unsay your words, Leam: they offend me."

"I cannot," said Leam.

He laughed scornfully. "Kill Madame de Montfort. Absurd! You could not. It was impossible for a girl like you to kill any one," he cried in broken sentences. "How could you do such a thing, Leam, and not be found out? Silly child! you are raving."

"I put poison into the bottle, and she died," said Leam in a half whisper.

"Leam! you a murderess!"

She quivered at the word, at the tone of loathing, of abhorrence, of almost terror, in which he said it, but she held her terrible ground. She had begun her martyrdom, her agony of atonement for the sake of truth and love, and she must go through now to the end. "Yes," she said, "I am a murderess. Now you know all, and why you must not love me."

"I cannot believe you," he pleaded helplessly. "It is too horrible. My darling, say that you have told me this to try me—that it is not true, and that you are still my own, my very own, my pure and sinless Leam."

He knelt at her feet, clasping her waist. He was not of those who, like Alick, could bear the sin of the beloved as the sacrifice of pride, of self, of soul to that love. He himself might be stained from head to heel with the soil of sin, but his wife must be, as has been said, without flaw or blemish, immaculate and free from fault. Any lapse, involving the loss of repute should it ever be made public, would have been the death-knell of his hopes, the requiem of his love; but such an infamy as this! If true it was only too final.

"Oh, no! no! do not do that," cried Leam, trying to unclasp his hands. "Do not kneel to me. I ought to kneel to you," she added with a little cry that struck with more than pity to Edgar's heart, and that nearly broke her down for so much relaxing of the strain, so much yielding to her grief, as it included.

"Leam, tell me you are joking—tell me that you did not do this awful thing," he cried again, his handsome face, blanched and drawn, upturned to her in agony.

She put her hands over her eyes. "I cannot lie to you," she said. "And I must not degrade you. Do not touch me: I am not good enough to be touched by you."

He loosened his arms, and she shrank from him almost as if she faded away.

"Why did you deceive me?" he groaned. "You should not have let me love you, knowing the truth."

"I did not know that you loved me, or that I loved you, till that night," she pleaded piteously. "If I had known I would have prevented it. I have told you as soon as I remembered."

"You have broken my heart," he cried, flinging himself on the sofa, his face buried in the cushions. And then, strong man as he was, a brave soldier and an English country gentleman, he burst into a passion of tears that shook him as the storm had shaken the earth last night—tears that were the culmination of his agony, not its relief.

Leam stood by him as pale as the shattered lilies in the garden. What could she do? How could she comfort him? Tainted and dishonored, she dared not even lay her hand on his—her infamous and murderous hand, and he so pure and noble! Neither could she pray for him, nor yet for herself. Pray? to whom? To God? God had turned His face away from her, even as her lover had now turned away his: He was angry with her, and still unappeased. She dared not pray to Him, and He would not hear her if she did. The saints were no longer the familiar and parental deities, grave and helpful, to whom she could refer all her sorrows and perplexities, as in earlier times, sure of speedy succor. The teaching of the later days had destroyed the simple fetichism of childhood; and now—afraid of God, by whom she was unforgiven; the saints swept out of her spiritual life like those mist-wreaths of morning which were once taken for solid towers and impregnable fortresses; the Holy Mother vanished with the rest; all spiritual help a myth, all spiritual consolation gone—how could she pray? Lonely as her life had been since mamma died, it had never been so lonely as now, when she felt that God had abandoned her, and that she had sacrificed her lover to her sense of truth and honor and what was due to his nobility.

She stood by him and watched his passionate outburst with anguish infinitely more intense than his own. To have caused him this sorrow was worse than to have endured it for herself. There was no sacrifice of self that she could not have made for his good. Spaniard as she was, she would have been above jealousy if another woman would have made him happier than she; and if her death would have given him gain or joy, she would have died for him as another would have lived. Yet it was she, and she only, who was causing him this pain, who was destroying his happiness and breaking his heart.

She dared not speak nor move. It took all the strength she drew from silence to keep her from breaking into a more terrible storm of grief than even that into which he had fallen. She dared not make a sign, but simply stood there, doing her best to bear her heavy burden to the end. The only feeling that she had for herself was that it was cruel not to let her die, and why did not mute anguish kill her?

For the rest, she knew that she had done the thing that was right, however hard. It was not fitting that she should be his wife; and it was better that he should suffer for the moment than be degraded for all time by association with one so shameful, so dishonored, as herself.

Presently, Edgar cleared his eyes and lifted up his face. He was angry with himself for this unmanly burst of feeling, and because angry with himself disposed for the moment to be hard on her. She was standing there in exactly the same spot and just the same attitude as before, her head a little bent, her hands twined in each other, her eyes with the pleading, frightened look of confession turned timidly to him; but as he raised himself from the sofa, pushing back his hair and striding to the window as if to hide the fact of his having shed tears, she turned her eyes to the floor. She was beginning to feel now that she must not even look at him. The gulf that separated them, dug by her own ineffaceable crime, was so deep, the distance so wide!

A painful silence fell between them: then Edgar, not looking at her, said in a constrained voice, "I will keep your dreadful secret, Leam, sacredly for ever. You feel sure of that, I hope. But, as you say, we must part. I do not pretend to be better than other men, but I could not take as my wife one who had been guilty of such an awful crime as this."

"No," said Leam, her parched lips scarcely able to form a word at all.

"Your secret will be safe with me," he repeated.

She did not reply. In giving up himself she had given up all that made life lovely, and the refuse might as well go as not.

"But we must part."

"Yes," said Leam.

He turned back to the window, desperately troubled. He did really love her, passionately, sincerely. He longed at this very moment to take her in his arms and tell her that he would accept her crime if only he might have herself. Had he not been the master of the Hill and a Harrowby he would have done so, but the master of the Hill and the head of the house of Harrowby had a character to maintain and a social ideal to keep pure. He could not bring into such a home as his, present to his mother as her daughter, to his sisters as their sister, a girl who by her own confession was a murderess—a girl who, if the law had its due, would be hanged by the neck in the precincts of the county jail till she was dead. He might have been sinful enough in his own life, in the ordinary way of men—and truly there were passages in his past that would scarcely bear the light—but what were the worst of his misdemeanors compared with this awful crime? No: he must resolutely crush the last lingering impulse of tenderness, and leave her to work through her own tribulation, as he also must work through his.

"But we must part," he said for a third time.

Her lips quivered. She did not answer, only bent her head in sign of acquiescence.

"It is hard to say it, harder still to do; and I who loved you so dearly!" cried Edgar with the angry despair of a man forced against himself to give up his desire.

She put up her hands. "Don't!" she said with a sharp cry. "I cannot bear to hear about your love."

He gave a sudden sob. Her love for him was very precious to him—his for her very strong.

"Why did you tell me?" he then said. "And yet you did the right thing to tell me: I was wrong to say that. It was good of you, Leam—noble, like yourself."

"I love you. That is not being noble," she answered slowly and with infinite pathos. "I could not have deceived you after I remembered."

"You are too noble to deceive," he said, holding out his hand.

Leam turned away. "I am not fit to touch your hand," she said, the very pride of contrition in her voice—pride for him, if humiliation for herself.

"For this once," he pleaded.

"I am unworthy," she answered.

At this moment little Fina came jumping into the room. She had in her hand a rose-colored scarf that had once been poor madame's, and which the nurse, turning out an old box of hers, had found and given to the child.

After she had kissed Edgar, played with his bréloques, looked at the works of his watch, plaited his beard into three strings, and done all that she generally did in the way of welcome, she shook out the gauze scarf over her dress.

"This was mamma's—my own mamma's," she said. "Leam will never tell me about mamma: you tell me, Major Harrowby," coaxingly.

"I cannot: I did not know her," said Edgar in an altered voice, while Leam looked as if her judgment had come, but bore it as she had borne all the rest, resolutely.

"I want to hear about mamma, and who killed her," pouted Fina.

"Hush, Fina," said Leam in an agony: "you must not talk."

"You always say that, Leam, when I want to hear about mamma," was the child's petulant reply.

"Go away now, dear little Fina," said Edgar, who felt all that Leam must feel at these inopportune words, and who, moreover, weak as he was in this direction, was longing for one last caress.

"I will go and send her nurse," said Leam, half staggering to the door.

Had anything been wanting to show her the impossibility of their marriage, this incident of Fina's random but incisive words would have been enough.

"Leam! not one word more?" he asked as he stood against the door, holding the handle in his hand.

"No," she said hopelessly. "What words can we have together?"

"And we are parting like this, and for ever?"

"For ever. Yes, it has to be for ever," she answered almost mechanically.

"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."

"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."

"I hope it will," said her brother.

"What does she eat, now? You see, now I've got the lass on my hands, I cannot hunger her," said Keziah. "Not that I can give her dainties and messes," she added hastily, the miser's cloak suddenly covering the woman's heart. "She'll have to take what we get, and be thankful for her meat. Still, it's as well to know what a body's been accustomed to when they come like this, all of a heap."

"Don't fash yourself about her," answered Emmanuel. "Do what you can—that you will, I know—but leave her to herself: that's the way for her. She's an odd little body, and the least said the soonest mended with Leam."

"With who, d'ye say?" asked Keziah sharply.

"Lean—Leonora," said Emmanuel cherubically.

"Well, I wouldn't call a daughter of mine after old Pharaoh's kine," snapped Keziah with supreme scorn; and at that moment Leam came into the room, and Keziah bustled out of it to tig after Jenny and ding at Tim, as these two faithful servitors were wont to express the way of their mistress toward them.

"My dear, I did not know that things were so miserable here for you, but you must just bide here till the scent grows cold, and then I'll come for you and put you where you'll be better off," said Mr. Gryce kindly when he was alone with Leam.

"This will do," said Leam, suppressing a shudder as she looked round the little room, where what had originally been a rhubarb-colored paper—chosen because it was a good wearing color—was patched here and there with scraps of newspapers or bits of other patterned papers; where the huge family Bible and a few musty and torn odd volumes of the Spectator and the Tatler comprised the sole library; and where the only ornaments on the chimneypiece were three or four bits of lead ore from the Roughton Gill mines, above Caldbeck.

"You have been used to something far different," said Emmanuel, compassionately.

"My past is over," she answered in a low voice.

"But you'll come to a better future," he cried, his mild blue eyes watery and red.

"Shall I? When I die?" was her reply as she passed her hand wearily over her forehead, and wished—ah, how ardently!—that the question might answer itself now at once.

But the young live against their will, and Leam, though bruised and broken, had still the grand vitality of youth to support her. Of the stuff of which in a good cause martyrs, in a bad criminals, are made, she accepted her position at Windy Brow with the very heroism of resignation. She never complained, though every circumstance, every condition, was simply torture; and so soon as she saw what she was expected to do, she did it without remonstrance or reluctance. Her life there was like a lesson in a foreign language which she had undertaken to learn by heart, and she gave herself to her task loyally. But it was suffering beyond even what Emmanuel Gryce supposed or Keziah ever dreamed of. She, with the sun of the South in her veins, her dreams of pomegranates and orange-groves, of music and color and bright blue skies, of women as beautiful as mamma, of that one man—not of the South, but fit to have been the godlike son of Spain—suddenly translated from soft and leafy North Aston to a bleak fell-side in the most desolate corner of Cumberland—where for lush hedges were cold, grim gray stone walls, and the sole flowers to be seen gorse which she could not gather, and heather which had no perfume—to a house set so far under the shadow that it saw the sun only for three months in the year, and where her sole companion was old Keziah Gryce, ill-favored in person, rough of mood if true of soul, or creatures even worse than herself;—she, with that tenacious loyalty, that pride and concentrated passion, that dry reserve and want of general benevolence characteristic of her, to be suddenly cast among uncouth strangers whose ways she must adopt, and who were physically loathsome to her; dead to the only man she loved, his love for her killed by her own hand, herself by her own confession accursed; and to bear it all in silent patience,—was it not heroic? Had she been more plastic than she was, the effort would not have been so great. Being what she was, it was grand; and made as it was for penitence, it had in it the essential spirit of saintliness. For saintliness comes in small things as well as great, and George Herbert's swept room is a true image. There was saintliness in the docility with which she rose at six and went to bed at nine; saintliness in the quiet asceticism with which she ate porridge for breakfast and porridge for supper—at the first honestly believing it either a joke or an insult, and that they had given her pigs' food to try her temper; saintliness in the silence with which she accepted her dinners, maybe a piece of fried bacon and potatoes, or a huge mess of apple-pudding on washing-days, or a plate of poached eggs cooked in a pan not over clean; saintliness in the enforced attention which she gave to Keziah's rambling stories of her pigs and her chickens, her mother's ailments, Jenny's shortcomings in the matter of sweepings and savings, Tim's wastefulness in the garden over the kailrunts, and the hardships of life on a lone woman left with only a huzzy to look after her; saintliness in the repression of that proud, fastidious self to which Keziah's familiarity and snuff, Jenny's familiarity and disorder, the smell of the peat—which was the only fuel they burnt—reeking through the house, and the utter ugliness and barren discomfort of everything about, were hourly miseries which she would once have repudiated with her most cutting scorn; saintliness in the repression of that self indeed at all four corners, and the resolute submission to her burden because it was her fitting punishment.

So the sad days wore on, and the fell-side air had not yet brisked up Emmanuel's adopted daughter as his sister prophesied. Indeed, she seemed slighter and paler than ever, and if possible more submissive to her lot and more taciturn. And as her intense quietude of bearing suited Miss Gryce, who could not bear to be fussed, and time proved her douce and not fashious, she became quite a favorite with her rough-grained hostess, who wondered more and more where Emmanuel had picked her up, and whose bairn she really was.

Her only pleasure was in wandering over the fells, whence she could see the tops of the Derwentwater mountains, and from some points a glimpse of blue Bassanthwaite flowing out into the open; where mountain-tarns, lying like silver plates in the purple distance, were her magic shows, seen only in certain lights, and more often lost than found; whence she could look over the broad Carlisle plain and dream of that day on the North Aston moor when she first met Edgar Harrowby; and whence the glittering strip of the Solway against the horizon made her yearn to be in one of the ships which she could dimly discern passing up and down, so that she might leave England for ever and lay down the burden of her life and her sorrow in mamma's dear land.

So the hours passed, dreary as Mariana's, and hopeless as those wherein we stand round the grave and know that the end of all things has come. And while North Aston wondered, and Alick mourned, and Edgar repented of his past folly with his handsome head in Adelaide's lap, Leam Dundas moved slowly through the shadow to the light, and from her chastisement gathered that sweet grace of patience which redeemed her soul and raised her from sin to sanctity.

CHAPTER XL.

LOST AND NOW FOUND.

In bringing up Alick tied tight to her apron-strings, feeding him on moral pap, putting his mind into petticoats, and seeking to make him more of a woman than a man, Mrs. Corfield had defeated her design and destroyed her own influence. During his early growth the boy had yielded to her without revolt, because he was more modest than self-assertive—had no solid point of resistance and no definite purpose for which to resist; but after his college career he developed on an independent line, and his soul escaped altogether from his mother's hold. Had she let him ripen into manhood in the freedom of natural development, she would have been his chosen friend and confidante to the end: having invaded the most secret chambers of his mind, and sought to mould every thought according to the pattern which she held best, when the reaction set in the pendulum swung back in proportion to its first beat; and as a protest against his former thraldom he now made her a stranger to his inner life and shut her out inexorably from the holy place of his sorrow.

The mother felt her son's mind slipping from her, but what could she do? Who can set time backward or reanimate the dead? Day by day found him more silent and more suffering, the poor little woman nearly as miserable as himself. But the name of Leam, standing as the spectre between them, was never mentioned after Mrs. Corfield's first outburst of indignation at her flight—indignation not because she was really angry with Leam, but because Alick was unhappy.

After Alick's stern rejoinder, "Mother, the next time you speak ill of Leam Dundas I will leave your house for ever," the subject dropped by mutual consent, but it was none the less a living barrier between them because raised and maintained in silence.

"Oh, these girls! these wicked girls!" Mrs. Corfield had said with a mother's irrational anger when speaking of the circumstance to her husband. "We bring up our boys only for them to take from us. As soon as they begin to be some kind of comfort and to repay the anxiety of their early days, then a wretched little huzzy steps in and makes one's life in vain."

"Just so, my dear," said Dr. Corfield quietly. "These were the identical words which my mother said to me when I told her I was going to marry you."

"Your mother never liked me, and I did like Leam," said Mrs. Corfield tartly.

"As Leam Dundas, maybe; but as Leam the wife of your son, I doubt it."

"If Alick had liked it—" said Mrs. Corfield, half in tears.

"You would have been jealous," returned her husband. "No: all girls are only daughters of Heth to the mothers of Jacobs, and I never knew one whom a mother thought good enough for her boy."

"You need not discredit your own flesh and blood for a stranger," cried Mrs. Corfield crossly; and the mute man with an aggravating smile suddenly seemed to repent of his unusual loquacity, and gradually subsided into himself and his calculations, from which he was so rarely aroused.

Alick, ceasing to make a confidante of his mother, began to make a friend of Mr. Gryce. Perhaps it ought rather to be said that Mr. Gryce began to make a friend of him. The old philosopher, with that corkscrew mind of his, knew well enough what was amiss with the poor lank-visaged curate. Being of the order of the benevolent busybodies fond of playing Providence, how mole-like soever his method, he had marked out a little plan of his own by which he thought he could make all the crooked roads run straight and discord flow into harmony. But he too fell into the mistake common to busybodies, benevolent and otherwise—treating souls as if they were machines to be wound up and kept going by the clockwork of an extraneous will and neatly manipulated by well-arranged circumstance.

One day he joined Alick in his walk to an outlying cottage of the parish, where the husband was sick and the wife and children short of food, and the Church sent its prayer-book and ministers as the best substitute it knew for a wholesome dwelling and sufficient wages. Theology was not much in the way of an old heathen who reduced all religions save Mohammedanism to the transmuted presentation of the archaic solar myth, and who thought Buddhism far ahead of every other creed; but he liked the man Alick, if the parson bored him, and he was caressing a plan which he had in his pocket.

"You find your life here satisfying, I suppose?" he began, his blue eyes looking into the wayside banks for creatures.

"Is any life?" answered Alick, his eyes turned to the vague distance.

"Not fully: the spirit of progress, working by discontent, forbids the social stagnation of rest and thankfulness; but we can come to something that suffices for our daily wants if it does not satisfy all our longings. Work in harmony with our nature, and doing good here and there when we can, both these help us on. But the work must be harmonious and the good we do manifest."

"So far as that goes, Church-work is pleasant to me—all, indeed, I care for or am fit for; but North Aston is stony ground," said Alick.

"Can you wonder? When the husbandman-in-chief is such a man as Mr. Birkett, you must make your account with stones and weeds. The spiritual cannot flourish under the hand of the unspiritual; and, considering the pastor, the flock is far from bad."

"That may be, but we do not like to live only in comparatives," said Alick. "I confess I should be happier in a cure where I was more of one mind with my rector than I am here, and not decried or ridiculed on account of every scheme for good that I might propose. Parish-work here is shamefully neglected, but Mr. Birkett will not let me do anything to mend it."

"Ah!" said Mr. Gryce, catching a luckless curculio by the way, "that is bad. A more harmonious one would certainly be, as you say, far more agreeable. Or a little parish of your own—a parish, however small, which would be all your own, and you not under the control of any one below your diocesan? How would that do? That would be my affair if I were in the Church."

Alick's face lightened. "Yes," he said, "that is my dream—at least one of them. I would not care how small the place might be, if I had supreme control and might work unhindered in my own way."

"It will come," said Mr. Gryce cheerily. "All things come in time to him who knows how to wait."

"Ah, if I could believe that!" sighed Alick, thinking of Leam.

"Take my word for it," returned Mr. Gryce. "It will do you no harm to have a dash of rose-color in your rather sombre life; and Hope, if it tells flattering tales, does not always tell untrue ones."

"I fear my hope has flattered me untruly," said Alick, his faithful heart still on Leam.

Mr. Gryce captured a caterpillar wandering across the road. "Conduct is fate," he said. "If this poor fellow had not been troubled with a fit of restlessness, but had been content to lie safely hidden among the grass-roots where he was born, he would not have been caught. Yes, conduct is fate for a captive caterpillar as well as for man."

"And yet who can foresee?" said Alick. "We all walk in the dark blindfold."

"As you say, who can foresee? That makes perhaps the hardship of it, but it does not alter the fact. Blindly walking or with our eyes wide open, our steps determine our destiny, and our goal is reached by our own endeavors. We ourselves are the artificers of our lives, and mould them according to our own pattern."

"But that part of our lives which is under the influence of another? How can we manipulate that?" said Alick. "Love and loss are twin powers which create or crush without our co-operation."

"I only know one irreparable manner of loss—that by death," said Mr. Gryce steadfastly. "For all others while there is life there is hope, and I hold nothing, beyond the power of the will to remedy."

"I wish I could believe that," Alick sighed again; and again Mr. Gryce said cheerily, "Then take that too on trust, and believe me if you do not believe in your own inborn elasticity, your own power of doing and undoing."

"There are some things which can never come right when they have once gone wrong," said Alick.

"You think so? I know very few," his companion answered in the hearty, inspiriting manner which he had used all through the interview, talking with a broader accent and lisping less than usual, looking altogether more manly and less cherubic than his wont. "I am a believer myself in the power of the will and holding on." After a pause he added suddenly, "You would be really glad of a small living, no matter where situated, nor how desolate and unimportant, where you would be sole master?"

"Yes," said Alick. "If I could win over one soul to the higher life, I should count myself repaid for all my exertions. We must all have our small beginnings."

"I am an odd old fellow, as you know, Mr. Corfield," laughed Emmanuel Gryce. "Give me your hand: I can sometimes see a good deal of the future in the hand."

Alick blushed and looked awkward, but he gave his bony, ill-shaped hand all the same.

After a little while, during which Mr. Gryce had bent this finger this way and that finger another way, had counted the lines made by the bended wrist, and had talked half to himself of the line of Jupiter and the line of Saturn, the line of life and that of Venus, he said quietly, "You will have your wish, and soon. I see a most important change of residence at about this time, which in conjunction with this," pointing to a small cross at the root of the fourth finger, "will be certainly to your advantage."

"How strange!" said Alick. "One scarcely knows whether to laugh at it all as old wives' fables or to believe in the mysterious forewarnings of fate, the foremarkings of the future."

"There are more things in heaven and earth—" said Mr. Gryce. "And we know so little we may well believe a trifle more."

The fact was, all this was founded on these circumstances: He had at this moment a letter in his pocket from his sister Keziah telling him that old Priest Wilson had been found dead in his bed last night; the bishop's chaplain was a friend of his, both having been at the same station in India; and the perpetual curacy of Monk Grange was one which, if offices went according to their ratio of unpleasantness, a man should have been paid a large income to take. Hence there was no chance of a rush for the preferment, and the bishop would be grateful for any intimation of a willing martyr. Through all of which chinks whereby to discover the future Mr. Gryce founded his prophecy; and through them, too, it came about that he proved a true prophet. In three days' time from this the post brought a letter to Alick Corfield from the bishop offering him the perpetual curacy of Monk Grange, income seventy pounds a year and a house.

Before speaking even to his mother, Alick rushed off with this letter to Mr. Gryce. The old leaven of superstition which works more or less in all of us—even those few who think proof a desirable basis for belief, and who require an examination conducted on scientific principles before they accept supernaturalism as "only another law coming in to modify those already known"—that superstition which belongs to most men, and to Alick with the rest, made this letter a matter of tremendous excitement to him. He saw in it the hand of God and the finger of Fate. It was impossible that Mr. Gryce, living at North Aston, should know anything of a small country incumbency in the North. It was all that study made of his poor parched and knuckly hand. And what had been seen there was manifestly the thing ruled for him by Providence and destiny.

"How could you possibly tell?" he cried, looking at his own hand as if he could read it as his clever friend had done.

"That is my secret," said Emmanuel, smiling at the credulity on which he traded. Then, thinking a flutter outward of the corners of his cards the best policy in the circumstances about them at the moment, he added, "And when you get there you will understand more than you do now. For you will go?"

"Surely," said Alick: "it would be unfaithful in me to refuse."

"But see if you cannot make arrangements to take the place on trial for a few months. I know very little of your ecclesiastical law, but grant even that it is as devoid of common sense as I should suppose—seeing who are the men who make, administer and obey it—still, I should think that a temporary incumbency might be arranged."

"I should think so, and I will take your advice," said Alick, over whom Emmanuel Gryce was fast establishing the power which belongs to the stronger over the weaker, to the more astute over the more dense.

"You will find an adopted daughter of mine in the neighborhood," then said Mr. Gryce with the most amiable indifference. "She lives with my sister at our old home on the fell-side: Windy Brow the place is called. You must tell me how she looks and what you think of her altogether when you write to me, as I suppose you will do, or when you come home, if you elect not to take the cure even on trial."

"I am not much in the way of criticising young ladies," said Alick sadly.

"She is rather a remarkable girl, all things considered," returned Mr. Gryce quietly. "Her name is Leonora Darley. You will remember—Leonora Darley. Ask for her when you go up to Windy Brow: Leonora Darley," for the third time.

"All right: Miss Leonora Darley," repeated Alick, suspecting nothing; and again Mr. Gryce smiled as he dug his fingers into the earth of a chrysalis-box. How pleasant it was to pull the strings and see his puppets dance!

Of course, Mr. Birkett's consent was a necessary preliminary to Alick's departure, but there was no difficulty about it. The military rector was tired to death, so he used to say, of his zealous young aide-de-camp, and hailed the prospect of getting rid of him handsomely with a frank pleasure not flattering to poor Alick's self-love. "Certainly, my dear boy, certainly," he said. "It will be better for you to have a place of your own, where you can carry out your new ideas. You see I am an old man now, and have learnt the value of letting well alone. You are in all the fever-time of zeal, and believe that vice and ignorance are like the walls of Jericho, to fall down when you blow your trump. I do not. But on the whole, it is as well that you should learn the realities of life for yourself, and carry your energies where they may be useful."

"Then you do not mind?" asked Alick boyishly.

The rector gave a loud clear laugh. "Mind! a thousand times no," he said, rubbing his plump white hands. "I can manage well enough alone, and if I cannot there are dozens of young eligibles ready to jump at the place. Mind! no. Go in Heaven's name, and may you be blessed in your undertaking!"

The last words came in as grace-lines, and with them Alick felt himself dismissed.

If the rector had been facile to deal with, Mrs. Corfield was not. When she heard of the proposed arrangement, and that she was to lose her boy for the second time out of her daily life, and more permanently than before, her grief was as intense as if she had been told of his approaching death. She wept bitterly, and even bent herself to entreaty; but Alick, to whom North Aston had become a dungeon of pain since Leam went, held pertinaciously to his plan—not without sorrow, but surely without yielding. He was fascinated by the idea of a cure where he might be sole master, not checked by rectorial ridicule when he wished to establish night schools or clothing clubs, penny savings banks, or any other of the schemes in vogue for the good of the poor; thinking too, not unwisely, that the best heal-all for his sorrow was to be found in change of scene and more arduous work together. Also, he thought that if his vague tentative advertisements in the papers, which he dared not make too evident, had as yet brought nothing, some more satisfactory way of discovering Leam's hiding-place might shape itself when he was alone, freer to act as he thought best. On all of which accounts he resisted his mother's grief, and his own at seeing her grieve, and decided on going down to Monk Grange the next day.

Had not Dr. Corfield been ailing at this time, the mother would have accompanied her son. The possibility of damp sheets weighed heavy on her mind; and landladies who filch from the tea-caddy, with landladies' girls, pert and familiar, preparing insidious gruel and seductive cups of coffee, were the lions which her imagination conjured up as prowling for her Alick through the fastnesses of Monk Grange. Circumstances, however, were stronger than her desire; and, happily for Alick, she was perforce obliged to remain at home while her darling went out from the paternal nest to shake those limp wings of his, and bear himself up unassisted in a new atmosphere in the best way he could.

It was on the cold and rainy evening of a cold and rainy summer's day that Alick arrived at Monk Grange—an evening without a sunset or a moon, stars or a landscape; painful, mournful, as those who dwell in the North Country know only too well as the tears on its face of beauty. He had driven in a crazy old gig from Wigton, and the nine miles which lay between that not too brilliant town and the desolate fell-side hamlet which he had been so fain to make his own spiritual domain had not been such as disposed him to a cheerful view of things. The rain had fallen in a steady, pitiless downpour, which seemed to soak through every outer covering and to penetrate the very flesh and marrow of the tired traveler as it pattered noisily on the umbrella and streamed over the leather apron; and the splash of the horse's hoofs through the liquid mud and broad tracts of standing water was as dreary as the "splash, splash" of Bürger's ballad. And when all this was over, and they drew up at the Blucher, with its handful of desolate gray hovels round it, the heart of the man sank at the gloomy surroundings into the midst of which he had flung himself. But the zeal of the churchman was as good a tonic for him as the best common sense, and he waited until to-morrow and broad daylight before he allowed himself to even acknowledge an impression. The warm fireside at the Blucher cheered him too, and his supper of eggs and bacon and fresh crisp havre-bread satisfied such of his physical cravings as, unsatisfied, make a man's spiritual perceptions very gaunt.

He went to bed, slept, and the next day woke up to a glory of sun and sky, a brilliancy of coloring, a photographic sharpness and clearness of form, a suggestion of beauty beyond that which was seen, which transformed the place as if an angel had passed through it in the night. As he tramped about the sordid hamlet he forgot the rude uncouthness of men and place for a kind of ecstasy at the loveliness about him. Every jutting rock of granite shone in the sun like polished jasper, and the numberless little rills trickling down the fell-sides were as threads of silver, now concealed in the gold of the gorse, and now whitening the purple of the heather. The air was full of blithesome sounds. Overhead the sky-larks sang in jocund rivalry, mounting higher and higher as if they would have beaten their wings against the sun: the bees made the heather and the thyme musical as they flew from flower to flower, and the tinkling of the running rills was like the symphony to a changeful theme. It was in real truth a transformation, and the new-comer into the fitful, seductive, disappointing North felt all its beauty, all its meaning, and gave himself up to his delight as if such a day as yesterday had never been.

After he had done what he wished to do in the village, he went up the fell-side road to Windy Brow, and, obeying his instructions, asked when he got there "if Miss Leonora Darley was at home."

"Na, she bain't," said Jenny, eying poor innocent Alick as a colley might eye a wolf sniffing about the fold. "T' auld mistress is."

"Say Mr. Corfield, please," said Alick; and Jenny, telling him to "gang intilt parlor," scuffled off to Keziah, pottering over some pickled red cabbage, which made the house smell like a vinegar-cask.

"I've heard tell of you," said Miss Gryce as she came in wiping her hands on a serviceable and by no means luxurious cloth: "Emmanuel wrote me a letter about you. You're kindly welcome to Monk Grange, but you're only a haverel to look at. Take a seat, and tell me—how's Emmanuel, my brother?"

"He was well when I saw him the day before yesterday: at least he said nothing to the contrary," answered Alick with his conscientious literalness.

"I like that," said Keziah, also eying him, but as a colley might have eyed a strange sheep, not a wolf. "A random rory would have made no difference between now and two days back, and believing and being. You cannot be over-particular in the truth, I take it."

Alick blushed, shifted his place and looked uneasy. And again, as so often before, it came across him: had he done right, judged by the highest law, to conceal the truth as he knew it about Leam?

"Hoot, man! there's no call for you to sit on pins and needles in that fashion," said Keziah. "It's a daft body that cannot hear a word of praise without turning as red as a turkey-cock and fidging like a parched pea on a drum-head. I've not turned much of you over yet, and maybe I'll come to what I'll have no mind to praise; so keep your fidges till you are touched up with the other end of the stick. And so you are to be our new priest, are you?"

"I am going to offer myself for a time," said Alick.

"For a time? That's a thing as has two sides to it. If you are not to our minds, that's its good side: if you are, and we are not to yours, that's its bad. I doubt if our folk will care to be played Jumping Joan with in that fashion."

"I will be guided by the will of the Lord," said Alick reverently.

"Humph! I like the words better nor the chances in them," returned Keziah, taking a pinch of snuff. "But maybe things'll work round as one would have them; and whether you stay or you do not, the Lord's will be done, amen! and His grace follow you, young man!"

"Thank you," said Alick with emotion, getting up and shaking the pickle-stained and snuff-discolored hand.

"I have a message for Miss Leonora Darley," he then said after a pause. "Mr. Gryce told me I was to be sure and tell him how she was looking."

"Eh, poor bairn! she is not very first-rate," the old woman answered tenderly. At least it was tenderness in her: in another person her voice and manner might have been taken for crabbedness and impatience. "She's up by there, on the fell somewhere. She a'most lives on the fell-side, but it don't make her look as brisk as I should like. Have you seen the view from our brow-top? It is a real bonny one; and you'll maybe find Leonora not far off. I don't think she wanders far."

"I should like to see it," said Alick. "The country altogether looks splendid to-day."

"Ay, it's a bonny day enough if it would but last. Come your ways with me and I'll set you out by the back door. You can come in again the same road if you've a mind."

On which she bustled up, and Alick, escorted by her, went through the house and on to the fell-side.

It was, if possible, grander now than it had been in the earlier part of the day. The hot sun had cleared away the lingering mist, and the cloudless sky was like one large perfect opal, while the earth beneath shone and glistened as if it were a jewel set with various-colored gems. There was not a mean or sordid thing about. Touched by the splendid alchemy of the sun, the smallest circumstance was noble, the poorest color glorious. Alick stood on the fell-brow entranced: then turning, he saw slowly coming across the pathless green a young slight figure dressed in gray. He looked as it came near, and his heart beat with a force that took all power from him. It was absurd, he knew, but there was such a strange look of Leam about that girl! He stood and watched her coming along with that slow, graceful, undulating step which was Leam's birthright. Was he mad? Was he dreaming? What was this mocking trick of eyesight that was perplexing him? Surely it was madness; and yet—no, it could be no one else. Supreme, beloved, who else could personate her so as to cheat him?

She came on, her eyes always fixed on the distance, seeing nothing of Alick standing dark against the sky. She came nearer, nearer, till he saw the glory of her eyes, the curve of her lip, and could count the curling tresses on her brow. Then he came down from the height and strode across the space between them.

She lifted up her eyes and saw him. For an instant the sadness cleared out of them as the mists had cleared from the sky: her pathetic mouth broke into a smile, and she held out both her hands. "Alick, dear Alick! my good Alick!" she cried in a voice of exquisite tenderness.

"My queen!" he said kneeling, his honest upturned face wet with tears. "Lost and now found!"

[TO BE CONTINUED.]