"What an exquisite little creature! In a week she will come to my hand like a tame bird," was Edgar's thought as he watched her slender, graceful figure slowly crossing the lawn with that undulating step of her mother's nation. "In a week's time I shall have tamed her," he repeated with a difference; and he felt glad that he had bespoken Leam Dundas betimes, and that fate and fortune had made him her prospective proprietor. "She will make me happy," he said as his last thought: he forgot to add either assurance or hope that he should make her the same. That is not generally part of a man's matrimonial calculations.
The confidence of love soon grows. When Leam came back to the seat under the cut-leaved hornbeam, where Edgar still waited for her to have the pleasure of watching her approach, she was not so much ashamed and oppressed as when he had first found her there. She did not want to run away, and she was losing her fear of wrongdoing. She was beginning instead to feel that delightful sense of dependence on a strong man's love which—pace the third sex born in these odd latter times—is the most exquisite sensation that a woman can know. She was no longer alone—no longer an alien imprisoned in family bonds, but, though one of a family, always an alien and imprisoned, never homed and united. Now she was Edgar's as she had been mamma's; and there was dawning on her the consciousness of the same oneness, the same intimate union of heart and life and love, as she had had with mamma. She belonged to him. He loved her, and she—yes, she knew now that she had always loved him, had always lived for him. He was the secret god whom she had carried about with her in her soul from the beginning—the predestined of her life, now for the first time recognized—the only man whom she could have ever loved. To her intense and single-hearted nature change or infidelity was an unimaginable crime, something impossible to conceive. Had she not met Edgar she would never have loved any one, she thought: having met him, it was impossible that she should not have loved him, the ideal to her as he was of all manly nobleness and grace, given to her to love by a Power higher than that of chance.
She was dimly conscious of this deep sense of rest in her new-found joy as she came across the lawn in her pretty summer dress of pearly gray touched here and there with crimson—the loveliest creature to be seen for miles around. Her usually mournful face was brightened with an inner kind of bliss which, from the face of the Tragic Muse, made it the face of a youthful seraph serene and blessed; her smile was one of almost unearthly ecstasy, if it still retained that timid, tremulous, fleeting expression which was so beautiful to Edgar; her eyes, no longer sad and sorrowful, but dewy, tender, bashful, shone with the purity, the confidence, the self-abandonment of a young girl's first and happy love: every gesture, every line, seemed to have gained a greater grace and richness since yesterday; and as she came up to her lover, and laid her hand in his when he rose to meet her and looked for one shy instant into his eyes, then dropped her own in shame-faced tremor at what they had seen and told, he said again to himself that he had done well. If even she should call the hounds at a hunt-dinner dogs, and say that hunting was stupid and cruel, what might not be forgiven to Such beauty, such love as hers?
Yes, he was satisfied with himself and with her; and with himself because of her. He had done well, and she was eminently the right kind of wife for him, let conventional cavilers say what they would. He never felt more reconciled to fortune and himself than he did to-day when he rode by the side of the carriage wherein Leam and Fina sat, and looked through the coming years to the time when he should have a little Fina of his own with her mother Leam's dark eyes and her mother Leam's devoted heart.
The day was perfect, so was the place. Both were all that the day and place of young love should be. The view from the castle heights, with the river below, the woods around and the moor beyond, was always beautiful, but to-day, in the full flush of the early summer, it was at its best. The golden sunshine, alternating with purple shadows, was lying in broad tracts on meadow and moor, and lighting up the forest trees so that the delicate tints and foliage of bough and branch came out in photographic clearness; the river, where it caught the sun like a belt of silver, where it was under the shadow like a band of lapis-lazuli, ran like a vein of life through the scene, and its music could be heard here where they stood; close at hand the old gray ivy-covered ruins, with their stories and memories of bygone times, seemed to add to the vivid fervor of the moment by the force of contrast—that past so drear and old, the present so full of passionate hope and love; while the shadows of things that had once been real trooped among the ruins and flitted in and out the desert places, chased by laughing girls and merry children, as life chases death, youth drives out age, and the summer rises from the grave of winter. It was a day, a scene, to remember for life, even by those to whom it brought nothing special: how much more, then, by those to whom it symbolized the fresh fruition of the summer of the heart, the glad glory of newly-confessed love!
This was Leam's day. Edgar devoted himself publicly to her—so publicly that people gathered into shady corners to discuss what it meant, and to ask each other if the tie already binding the two families was to be supplemented and strengthened by another? It looked like it, they said, in whispers, for it was to be supposed that Major Harrowby was an honorable man and a gentleman, and would not play with a child like Leam.
Dear Mrs. Birkett was manifestly distressed at what she saw. Though Adelaide made her mother no more a confidante than if she had been a stranger, yet she knew well enough where her daughter's wishes pointed; and they pointed to where her own were set. She too thought that Edgar and Adelaide were made for each other, and that Adelaide at the Hill would be eminently matter in the right place. She would not have grudged Leam the duke's son, could she have secured him, but she did grudge her Edgar Harrowby. It would be such a nice match for Addy, who was getting on now, and whose temper at home was trying; and she had hoped fervently that this year would see the matter settled. It was hanging fire a little longer than she quite liked: still, she always hoped and believed until to-day, when Edgar appropriated Leam in this strange manner before them all, seeming to present her to them as his own, so that they should make no further mistake.
But if Mrs. Birkett looked distressed, Adelaide, who naturally suffered more than did her mother, kept her own counsel so bravely that no one could have told how hard she had been hit. If she betrayed herself in any way, it was in being rather more attentive and demonstrative to her guests than was usual with her; but she behaved with the Spartan pride of the English gentlewoman, and deceived all who were present but herself.
Even Edgar took her by outside seeming, and put his belief in her love for him as a fallacy behind him. And it said something for a certain goodness of heart, with all his faults and vanity, that he was more relieved than mortified to think that he had been mistaken. Yet he liked to be loved by women, and the character which he had chiefly affected on the social side of him was that of the Irresistible. Nevertheless, he was glad that he had been mistaken in Adelaide's feelings, and relieved to think that she would not be unhappy because he had chosen Leam and not herself.
Yes, this was Leam's day, her one spell of perfect happiness—the day whereon there was no past and no future, only the glad sufficiency of the present—a day which seemed as if it had been lent by Heaven, so great was its exquisite delight, so pure its cloudless, shadowless sunshine of love.