Chapter 4

IN THE BALANCE.

Riding was one of the accomplishments brought by Leam from school, though she had never been able to thoroughly conquer either her timidity or her reluctance. Her childish days of inaction and inclusion had left their mark on her for life, and, moreover, she was not of the race or kind whence, by any process of education possible, could have been evolved a girl of the florid, fearless, energetic kind usually held as the type of the English maiden. Hence she was never quite happy on horseback, and always wondered how it was that people could be enthusiastic about riding. Nevertheless, she had learnt to sit with grace, if not with confidence, and she was too proud to show the discomfort she felt. Her father had bought for her use the showiest chestnut to be had in the market; and as he wished her to ride sometimes with him, if oftener with only the groom at her heels, and as, again, she had honestly set herself to please him, she used to mount her Red Coat, as she called her beast, punctually every other day, and carry her dislike to the exercise as the penance it was fitting she should perform. And besides all this, that devouring fever in her blood, that oppressive consciousness rather than active remembrance, lying always at the back of her life, was best soothed by long hours alone in the open air. For when she had only the groom behind her, Leam--to whom all men were as yet powers undesignated, and a man of low degree a mere animal that made intelligible sounds on occasions and was of a little more use than a dog--forgot him altogether, and was as much alone as if he had not been there.

Once or twice before the hegira of the gentry she had chanced to meet Major Harrowby in her rides, and he had turned with her and accompanied her, which was half a pain to' Leam and half a pleasure. The pain was connected with her reins and her stirrups, her saddle and the girths, the restless way in which the chestnut moved his ears, the discomposing toss of his small impatient head, the snorts which frightened her as the heralds of an outbreak, and his inclination to dance sideways into the hedge rather than walk discreetly in the middle of the road, whereby her seat was disturbed and her courage tried, she all the while not liking to show that she was ill at ease. The pleasure was personal, arising from the strange sense of protection that she felt in Edgar's society and the charming way in which he talked to her. He had seen a great deal, and he had a facile tongue, and between fact and color, memory and make-up, his stories were delightful. Also, after the manner of men who seek to influence a young girl's mind and heart, he lent her books to read, and he marked his favorite passages, which he discussed afterward. They were not passages of abstract thought and impersonal sentiment, like the penciled notes in Alick Corfield's literary loans, but scenes of passion or of pathos, going straight to the heart of youth, which feels rather than reflects, or descriptions of places which were equal to pictures of human life. Under Alick's guidance she had fallen asleep over Wordsworth--under Edgar's she dreamed beneath the stars over Byron, and had heartaches without knowing why.

If they had met sometimes, and by chance, before the families went away, they met now continually, and not by chance. But as Edgar's passion and reason were not in accord, he restrained himself, for him marvelously, and neither made love to her in earnest nor flirted with her in jest. Indeed, Leam was too intense to be approached at any time with levity. As well dress the Tragic Muse in the costume of a Watteau shepherdess as ply Leam Dundas with the pretty follies found so useful with other women. She did not understand them, and it seemed useless to try to make her. If Edgar paid her any of the trivial compliments always on his lips for women, Leam used to look at him with her serious eyes and ask him how could he possibly know what she was like--he, who scarcely knew her at all. If he praised her beauty, she used to turn away her head offended and tell him he was rude. He felt as if he could never touch her, never hold her: his ways were not as hers; and if her fascination for him increased, so did his trouble.

He was in doubt on both sides--for her and for himself. He could not read that silent, irresponsive nature nor measure his influence over her. By no blushes when they met, no girlish poutings when he kept away, by no covert reproaches, no ill-concealed gladness, no tremors and no consciousness could he gain the smallest clew to guide him. She was always the same--grave, gentle, laconic, self-possessed. But who that looked into her eyes could fail to see underneath her Spanish pride and more than Oriental reserve that fund of passion lying hidden like the waters of an artesian well, waiting only to be brought to the surface? He had not yet brought that hidden treasure into the light of the sun and of love, and he wondered if ever he should. And if he should, would it be for happiness? Leam was the kind of girl to love madly under the orange trees and myrtles, to break one's heart for when brothers interposed in the moonlight with rapiers and daggers and caught her away for conventual discipline or for marriage with the don; but as the mistress of an English home, the every-day wife of an English squire with a character to keep up and an example to set, was she fit for that? She was so quaint, so original, there were such depths of passionate thought and feeling side by side with such strange shallows of social and intellectual ignorance--though reticent she was so direct, though tenacious so simple, her love, if difficult to win, had such marvelous vitality when won--that he felt as if she spoke a language sweeter and purer in many of its tones than the current speech of society, but a language with which neither his own people nor that society would ever be familiar.

Amorous and easily impressed as he was, her beauty drew him with its subtle charm, but his doubt and her pride interposed barriers which even he dared not disregard; and at the end of two months he was no nearer than at the beginning that understanding which he would have established with any other pretty woman in less than a week. And he was no surer of himself and what he did really desire. Yet, accustomed as he was to loves as easily won as the gathering of a flower by the wayside, and to the knowledge that Adelaide Birkett, his social match in all things, was ready to pick up the handkerchief when he should think fit to throw it, this very doubt both of himself and Leam made half the interest if all the perplexity of the situation. He knew, as well as he knew that the Corinthian shaft should bear the Corinthian capital, if it was Leam whom he loved it was Adelaide whom he ought to marry. She would carry incense to the gods of British respectability as a squire's lady should, doing nothing that should not be done and leaving as little undone that should be done. She would preside at the Hill dinners with grace and join the meet at the coverside with punctuality; she would dress as became her position, but neither extravagantly nor questionably, and she would be more likely to stint than to squander; she would live as a polite Christian should, in the odor of genteel righteousness, not a fibre laid cross to the conventional grain, not a note out of tune with the orthodox chord. Yes, it was the rector's daughter whom he ought to marry, but it was Pepita's whom he loved. Yet how would things go with such a perplexing iconoclast at the head of affairs? Imagine the feelings of an English squire, M.H. of his county, loving dogs and horses as some women love children, and regarding poaching and vulpicide as crimes almost as bad as murder--imagine his feelings when his beautiful wife, grave and simple, should say at a hunt-dinner, "I do not like riding. I think hunting stupid and cruel: an army of men in red coats after a poor little hare--it is horrid! I think poaching quite right. God gave beasts and birds to us all alike, and your preserves are robberies. I would like to save all the foxes, and I hate the dogs when they catch them;" for be sure she would never learn to call them hounds. What would he feel? It would be an incongruous kind of thing altogether, Edgar used to think when meditating on life as seen through the curling clouds of his cigar.

But he loved her--he loved her: daily with more passion, because daily holding a stronger check on himself, and so accumulating by concentration. It was the old combat between love and reason, personal desires and social feelings, and as yet it was undecided which side would win. Now it was Adelaide and her exact suitability for her part, when he would avoid Leam Dundas for days; now it was Leam and his fervid love for her, his passion of doubt, his fever of longing, when he would all but commit himself and tempt the fortune of the future irrevocably.

One day, during this, time of sickness in the village and Edgar's lonely residence at the Hill, Leam was riding along the Green Lanes, a pretty bit of quiet country, when she heard the well-known hoofs thundering rapidly behind her, and in due time Major Harrowby drew rein at her side. "I saw you from the Sherrington road," he said, his eyes kindling with pleasure at the meeting.

Leam smiled, that pretty little fluttering smile which was so peculiarly her own, playing like a flicker of tender sunshine over her face, but she felt gladder than she showed. It was not her way to flourish her feelings like flags in the face of men. Her reticence was part of her dislike to noise and glare. "I am glad to see you," she returned quietly, her eyes raised for a moment to his.

"I sometimes fear I annoy you by joining you so often," said Edgar.

"No, you do not annoy me," Leam answered.

"It is a pleasure to know at least as much as that," he returned with a forced laugh.

"Yes? But why should you think that you annoy me?" she asked.

"Oh, perhaps you see too much of me, and so get tired of me. The thing is possible," he said, stroking his horse's ears.

Leam looked at him as she had looked before, but this time without the smile. "Are you tired of me that you say so?" she asked.

"No, no, no! How can you say such a thing--how dream it?" cried Edgar. "How could I be tired of you? Why, you are the sunshine of my life, the one thing I "--he checked himself--"I look forward to meeting," he added awkwardly.

"Then why should I be tired of you?" she returned. "You are kind to me; you tell me things I do not know; and," with maddening unconsciousness of how her words might be taken, "there is no one else."

This was the nearest approach to a compliment that Leam had ever made. She meant simply that, as there was no one else to tire her, how could her pleasant friend Major Harrowby possibly do so? But Edgar naturally took her words awry. "And if there were anyone else I suppose I should be nowhere? My part has not often been that of a _pis aller_," with a deep flush of displeasure.

"Why do you say that?" she asked in a slight tone of surprise. "You would be always where you are."

"With you?"

Her face asked his meaning.

"I mean, would you always hold me as much your friend, always care for me as much as you do now--if, indeed, you care for me at all--if any one else was here?" he explained.

Leam turned her troubled eyes to the ground. "I do not change like the wind," she answered, wishing he would not talk of her at all.

"No, I do not think you do or would," returned Edgar, bending his head nearer to hers as he drew his horse closer. "I should think that once loved would be always loved with you, Miss Dundas?" He said this in a low voice that slightly trembled.

She was silent. She had a consciousness of unknown dangers, sweet and perilous, closing around her--dangers which she must avoid she scarcely knew how, only vaguely conscious as she was that they were about. Then she said, with an effort, "I do not like myself talked of. It does not matter what I am."

"To me everything!" cried Edgar impulsively.

"You say what you do not mean," returned Leam. "I am not your sister; how, then, should it matter?"

Her grave simplicity was more seductive to him than the most coquettish wiles would have been. She was so entirely at sea in the art of love-making that her very ignorance provoked a more explicit declaration. "Are there only sisters in the world?" he asked passionately, yet angry with himself for skirting so near to the edge of peril.

"No: there are mothers," said Leam.

Edgar caught his breath, but again checked himself just in time to prevent the words "and wives," that rose to his lips. "And friends," he substituted, with evident constraint and as awkwardly as before. It was not often that a woman had been able to disconcert Edgar Harrowby so strangely as did this ignorant and innocent half-breed Spanish girl.

"And friends," repeated Leam. "But they are not much."

"Alick Corfield? He is my good friend," she answered quietly.

"Yes, I know how much you like him." An understanding ear would have caught the sneering undertone in these words.

"Yes, I like him," responded Leam with unmoved gravity.

"And you are sorry that he is ill--very sorry, awfully sorry?"

"I am sorry."

"Would you be as pained if I were ill? and would you come every day to the Hill to ask after me, as you go to Steel's Corner to ask after him?"

"I would be pained if you were ill, but I would not go to the Hill every day," said Leam.

"No? Why this unfair preference?" he asked.

"Because I am not afraid of Mrs. Corfield," she answered.

"And you are of my mother?"

"Yes. She is severe."

"It is severe in you to say so," said Edgar gently.

"No," said Leam with her proud air. "It is true."

"Then you would not like to be my mother's daughter?" asked Edgar, both inflamed and troubled.

Leam looked him straight in the face, utterly unconscious of his secret meaning. "No," she answered, her head held high, her dark eyes proud and fixed, and her small mouth resolute, almost hard. "I would like to be no one's daughter but mamma's."

"I do love your fidelity," cried Edgar with a burst of admiration. "You are the most loyal girl I know."

She turned pale: her head drooped. "Let us talk of something else," she said in an altered voice. "Myself is displeasing to me."

"But if it pleases me?"

"That is impossible," said Leam. "How can it please you?"

Was it craft? was it indifference? or was it honest ignorance of the true motive of a man's words and looks? Edgar pondered for a moment, but could come to no definite conclusion save rejection of that one hypothesis of craft. Leam was too savagely direct, too uncompromising, to be artful. No man who understood women only half so well as Edgar Harrowby understood them could have credited such a character as hers with deception.

He wavered, then, between the alternative of indifference or ignorance. If the one, he felt bound by self-respect to overcome it--that self-respect which a man of his temperament puts into his successes with women; if the other, he must enlighten it. "Does it not please you to talk of those you like?" he asked after a short pause.

"Yes," said Leam, her face suddenly softening into tenderness as she thought of her mother; of whom Edgar did not think. "Talk to me of Spain and all that you did there."

"And that would be of what you like?" he asked.

"Of what I love," returned Leam in a low voice, her eyes lifted to his, soft and humid.

"How can I read you? What can I think? What do you want me to believe?" cried Edgar in strange trouble.

"What have I said?" she asked with grave surprise. "Why do you speak like this?"

"Are you playing with me, or do you want me to understand that you have made me happy?" he cried, his face, voice, bearing, all changed, all full of an unknown something that half allured and half frightened her.

She turned aside her head with her cold, proud, shrinking air. "I am not playing with you; and you are silly to say I have made you happy," she said, shaking her reins lightly and quickening her chestnut's uneasy pace; and Edgar, quickening the pace of his heavy bay, thought it wiser to let the moment pass, and so stand free and still wavering--in doubt and committed to nothing.

Thus the time wore on, with frequent meetings, always crowded with doubts and fears, hopes, joys, displeasures in a tangled heap together, till the drying winds of March set in and cleared off the last of the fever, which had by now worn itself away, and by degrees the things of North Aston went back to their normal condition. The families came into residence again, and save for the widow's wail and the orphan's cry in the desolated village below, life passed as it had always passed, and the strong did not spend their strength in bearing the burdens of the weak.

The greatest social event that had taken place in consequence of the epidemic was, that Mr. Dundas had made acquaintance with his new tenant at Lionnet. Full of painful memories for him as the place was, he could not let the poor fellow die, he said, with no Christian soul near him. As a landlord he felt that he owed this mark of humanity to one of whom, if nothing absolutely good was known, neither was there anything absolutely bad, save that negative misdemeanor of not coming to church. As this was not an unpardonable offence to a man who had traveled much if he had thought little, Mr. Dundas let his humanity get the upper hand without much difficulty. By which it came about that he and his new tenant became friends, as the phrase goes, and that thus another paragraph was added to the restricted page of life as North Aston knew it.