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."