Chapter 2

CHANGES.

Four years had come and gone since Mr. Dundas had laid his second wife in the grave beside his first, and the county had discussed the immorality of taking cherry-water as a calmant. For it was to an overdose of this that the verdict at the coroner's inquest had assigned the cause of poor madame's awful and sudden death; though why the medicine should have been found so loaded with prussic acid as to have caused instant death on this special night, when it had been taken so often before with impunity, was a mystery to which there was no solution. Not a trace of poison was to be found anywhere in the house, and no evidence was forthcoming to show how it might have been bought or where procured. Alick Corfield, who understood it all, was not called as a witness, and he told no one what he knew. On the contrary, he burdened his soul with the, to him, unpardonable crime of falsehood that he might shield Leam from detection; for when his father, missing the sixty-minim bottle of hydrocyanic acid, asked him what had become of it, Alick answered, with that wonderful coolness of virtue descending to sin for the protection of the beloved which is sometimes seen in the ingenuous, "I broke it by accident, father, and forgot to tell you."

As the boy had never been known to tell a falsehood in his life, he reaped the reward of good repute, and his father, saying quietly, "That was a bad job, my boy," laid the matter aside as a _caput mortuum_ of no value.

To be sure, he thought more than once that it was an odd coincidence, but he could see no connection between the two circumstances of madame's sudden death and Alick's fracture of that bottle of hydrocyanic acid; and even if there should be any, he preferred not to trace it. So the inquest was a mere show so far as getting at the truth was concerned, and madame died and was buried in the mystery in which she had lived.

Meantime, Leam had been sent to school, whence she was expected to return a little more like other English girls than she had been hitherto, and Mr. Dundas shut up Ford House--he went back to the original name after madame's death--and left England to shake off in travel the deadly despair that had fallen like a sickness on him and taken all the flavor out of his life. He had never cared to search out the real history of that fair beloved woman. Enough had come to his knowledge, in the bills which had poured in from several Sherrington tradesmen on the announcement of her marriage and then of her death, to convince him that he had been duped in facts if not in feeling. For among these bills was one from the local geologist for "a beginner's cabinet of specimens," delivered just about the time when he, Sebastian, had spent so many pleasant hours in arranging the fragments which madame said represented both her knowledge and her lost happiness; also one from the fancy repository, which sold everything, for sundry water-color drawings and illuminated texts, a Table of the Ten Commandments illustrated, and the like, which sufficiently explained all on this side, and settled for ever the dead woman's claims to the artistic and scientific merit with which Mr. Dundas and the rector had credited her.

Also, certain ugly letters from a person of the name of Lowes, in London, put him on the track, had he cared to follow it up, of a deception even worse than that of pretended art or mock science. These letters, written in the same handwriting as that wherein Julius de Montfort, her brother-in-law, the present marquis, had told her of the defalcations of the family solicitor and trustee, called Virginie, Madame la Marquise de Montfort, plain Susan bluntly, and reminded her of the screw that would be turned if the writer was not satisfied; and were letters that demanded money, always money, as the price of continued silence.

But Sebastian had loved his second wife too well to seek to know the truth, if that truth would be to her discredit. He preferred to be deceived; and he had what he preferred. He stifled all doubts, darkened all chinks by which the obtrusive light might penetrate, kept his love if not his faith unshaken, caring only to remember her as beautiful, seductive, soothing, and mourning her as deeply, doubtful as she had proved herself to be, as he had loved her fondly when he believed her honest. It was a curious mental condition for a man to cherish, but it satisfied him, and his regret was not robbed of its pathos by knowledge.

Now that the four years were completed, the widower had to return to his desolate home and make the best he could of the fragments of peace and happiness left to him. Leam was nineteen: it was time for her to be taken from school and given the protection of her father's house. It went against the man's heart to have her, but he was compelled, if he wished to stand well with his friends, and he hoped that the girl would be found improved from these years of discipline and training, and be rational and like other people. Wherefore he came home one dry dull day in October, and the neighborhood welcomed him, if not as their prodigal returned, yet as their lunatic restored to his right mind.

During these four years a few changes had taken place at North Aston. Carry Fairbairn had married--not Frank Harrowby: he had found a rich wife, not in the least to his personal taste, but greatly to his profit; and Carry, after having cried a good deal for a month, had consoled herself with a young clergyman from the North, whom she loved quite as much as if she had never fancied Frank at all, and spoilt in the first months by such submission as caused her to repent for all the years of her life after.

The things of the rectory were much in their old state. Little Fina, madame's child, was there under Mrs. Birkett's motherly care; but as the child was nearly six years old now, the good creature's instinctive love for infants was wearing out, and she was often heard to say how much she wished she could have kept Fina always a baby, and, sighing, how difficult she was to manage! She was an exceedingly pretty little girl, with fair skin, fair hair and dark eyes--willful of course, and spoilt of course; the only one in the house who took her in hand to correct being Adelaide. And as she took her in hand too smartly, Mrs. Birkett generally interfered, and the servants combined to screen her; the result being that the little one was mistress of the situation, after the manner of willful children, and made every one more or less anxious and uncomfortable as her return for their care.

Alick Corfield was the rector's curate. On the whole, this was the most important of all the North Aston events which had taken place during the last four years. Soon after madame's death and Leam's transfer from home to school Alick had a strange and sudden illness. No one knew what to make of it, nor how it came, nor what it was, but the doctor called it cerebral fever, and when the families got hold of the word they were content. Cerebral fever does as well as anything else for an illness of which no one knows and no one seeks to know the cause, and to the origin of which the patient himself gives no clew. It was a peg, and a peg was all that was wanted.

On his recovery he announced his intention of going to Oxford to read for holy orders. His mother was piteously distressed, as might be expected. She feared all sorts of evil for her boy, from damp sheets and unmended linen to over-study, wine-parties and bold-faced minxes weaving subtle webs of fascination. But for the first time in his life Alick stood out against her insistance, and his will conquered hers. The sequel of the struggle was, that he went to Oxford, took his degree, read for orders, passed, and that Mr. Birkett gave him his title as his curate.

It could hardly be said that the relations were entirely harmonious between the military-minded rector, who held to the righteousness of helotry and the value of ignorance in the class beneath him, and the young curate burning with zeal and oppressed with the desire to put all the crooked things of life straight. The one pooh-poohed the enthusiasm of the other, derided his belief in humanity and assured him of failure: the other felt as if he had been taken behind the scenes and shown the blue fire of which the awful lightning of his youth was made. Mr. Birkett could not quite forbid the greater faith, the more loving endeavor which the young man threw into his ministrations, but he was the Sadducee who scoffed and made the work heavy and uphill throughout. He gave a grudging assent to the Bible-classes, the Wednesday evening services at the Sunday-school, the lectures on great men on the first Monday in the month, which Alick proposed and established. He thought it all weariness to the flesh and a waste of time and energy; but the traditions of his order were strong, if he himself did not share them, and he had to give way in the end. He consoled himself with the reflection that the boy would find out his mistake before long, and that then he would know who had been right throughout.

But even zeal and hope and diligence in his work could not lighten the persistent sadness which was Alick's chief characteristic now. Gaunt and silent, with the eyes of a man whose inner self is absent and whose thoughts are not with his company, he looked as if he had passed through the fire, and had not passed through unscathed. No one knew what had happened to him, and, though many made conjectures, none came near the truth. Meanwhile, he seemed as if he lived only to work, and, the clearer-sighted might have added, to wait.

For a further local change, Lionnet was tenanted again by a strange and solitary man, who never went to church and did not visit in the neighborhood. He was in consequence believed to be a forger, an escaped convict in hiding, or, by the more charitable, a maniac as yet not dangerous. North Aston held him in deeper horror than it had held even Pepita, and his true personality exercised its wits more keenly than had even the true personality of madame. In point of fact, he was a quiet, inoffensive, amiable man, who gave his mind to Sanskrit for work and to entomology for play, and did not trouble himself about his own portrait as drawn in the local vernacular. Nevertheless, for all his reserved habits and quiet ways, he had learnt the whole history of the place and people before he had been at Lionnet a month.

At the Hill things remained unchanged for the ladies, save for the additional burden of years and the pleasant news that Edgar was expected home daily. Adelaide, now twenty-four, took the news as a personal grace, and blossomed into smiles and glad humor of which only Josephine understood the source. But Josephine held her tongue, and received the confidence of her young friend with discretion. As she had never dispossessed her own old idol, she could feel for Adelaide, and she was not disposed to look on her patient determination with displeasure. The constancy of the two, however, was very different in essential meaning. With Josephine it was the constancy that is born of an affectionate disposition and the absence of rival Lotharios: with Adelaide it was the result of calculation and decision. The one would have worshiped Sebastian as she worshiped him now had he been ruined, a cripple, a criminal even: the other would have shut out Edgar inexorably from her very dreams had not his personality included the Hill. With the one it was self-abasement--with the other self-consideration; but it came to the same thing in the end, and the men profited equally.

All these changes Sebastian Dundas found to have taken place when he returned to North Aston with gray hair instead of brown, his smooth, fair skin tanned and roughened, and his weak, finely-cut, effeminate mouth hidden by a moustache of a reddish tint, mingled with white. Still, he was Sebastian; and after the first shock of his altered appearance had been got over, Josephine carried her incense in the old way, and found her worship as dear and as tantalizing as ever.

Lastly, as the crowning change of all, Leam came home from school; no longer the arrogant, embittered child, looking at life through the false medium of pride and ignorance, saying rude things and doing odd ones with the most perfect unconsciousness; but well-bred, graceful, sufficiently instructed not to make patent mistakes, and more beautiful by far than she had even promised to be. Her very eyes were lovelier, lovely as they had always been: they had more variety of expression, were more dewy and tender, and, if less tragic, were more spiritual. That hard, dry, burning passion which had devoured her of old time seemed to have gone, as also her savage Spanish pride. She had rounded and softened in body too, as in mind. Her skin was fairer; her lips were not so firmly closed, so rigid in line, so constricted in motion; her brows were more flexible and not so often knit together; and her slight, lithe figure was perfect in line and movement. Still, she had enough of her former manner of being for identity. Grave, quiet, laconic, direct, she was but a modification of the former Leam as they had known her--Leam, Pepita's daughter, and with blood in her veins that was not the ordinary blood of the ordinary British miss.

Her father's artistic perceptions were gratified as he met her at the station and Leam turned her cheek to him voluntarily with tears in her eyes. Turning her cheek was apparently her idea of kissing; but if not too intense an expression of affection, it was at least an improvement on the old hard repulsion, and Sebastian accepted it as the concession it was meant to be. Indeed, they met somewhat as foes reconciled, or rather seeking to be reconciled, and Mr. Dundas did not wish to keep open old sores. Her cheek, turned to him somewhere about the ear, represented to his mind a peace-offering: her eyes full of tears were as a confession of past sins and a promise of amendment. Not that he understood why she was so much more effusive than of old, but if it augured a happier life together, he was glad.

As they drove up to the door of the old home, crowded with memories and associations, a shudder passed over the girl: she grasped her father's hand in her own almost convulsively, and he heard her say below her breath, "Poor papa!"

He wondered why she pitied him. The place must surely be full of memories of her mother for her: why did she say "Poor papa!" to him? He did not see what she saw--that peaceful September evening, and the bottle of cherry-water on the table, with the little phial of thirty deaths in her hand; and now the contents emptied into the harmless draught; and now madame pale and dead. The whole scene transacted itself vividly before her, and she shuddered at her memories and her past self, as always with a kind of vague wonder how she could have been so wicked, and where did she get the force, the courage, for such a cruel crime?

For all these four years at school the shadow of that dreadful deed had been ever in the background of her life; and as time went on, and she came to a better understanding of morality, it grew clear to her as a crime. Its consciousness of guilt had broken down her pride, and thus had made her more malleable, more humble. She could no longer harden herself in her belief that she was superior to every one else. Those girls, her companions--they had not had an Andalusian mother, truly; they did not pray to the saints, and the Holy Virgin took no care of them; they were Protestants and English, frogs and pigs; but they had not committed murder. If she should stand up in the middle of the room and tell them what she had done, which of them would touch her hand again? which of them speak to her? English and Protestants as they were, how far superior in their innocence to her, an Andalusian Catholic, in her guilt! But no one lives with remorse. It comes and goes gustily, fitfully; but the things of the present are stronger than the things of the past, else the man with a shameful secret in his life would go mad.

One of these gusty storms broke over Leam as she passed through the gates of the old home, and for the moment she felt as if she must confess the truth to her father and tell him what evil thing she had done. Yet it passed, as other such storms had passed: the things of the present took their natural place of prominence, and those of the past sank again into the background, shadows that never faded quite away, but that were not actualities pressing against her.

The news of Leam's home-coming created quite a pleasurable excitement in the neighborhood, and the families flocked to Ford House to welcome her among them as one of themselves, all anxious to see if the Ethiopian of North Aston had shed her skin, if the leopardess had changed her spots. They were divided among themselves as to whether she had or had not. Some said she was charming, and like any one else, but others shook their heads, and, like experts in brain disease, professed to see traces of the old lunacy, and to be doubtful as to her cure. At the worst, however, here she was--one of themselves whom they must receive; and common sense dictated that they should make the best of her, and hope all things till they proved some.

There was one among them whom Leam longed yet dreaded to meet. This was Alick Corfield. She wondered what he knew, or rather what he suspected, and she was anxious to have her ordeal over. But, though Mrs. Corfield came, and was just the same as ever, bustling, inquisitive, dogmatic, before ten minutes were over having put the girl through her scholastic facings and got from her the whole of her curriculum, yet Alick did not appear. He waited until after Sunday, when he should see her first in church, and so nerve himself as it were behind the barrier of his sacred office; but after Sunday had passed and he had seen her in her old place, he called, and found her alone.

When they met, and she looked into his face and laid her hand in his, she knew all. He shared her secret, and knew what she had done. It was not that he was either distant or familiar, cold or disrespectful, or anything but glad and reverent; nevertheless, he knew. He was no longer the boy adorer, her slave, her dog: he was her friend, and he wished to make her feel that she was safe with him--known, in his power, but safe.

"You are changed," he said awkwardly.

He thought of her as Leam, heard her always called Leam, but he dared not use the familiar name, and yet she was not "Miss Dundas" to him.

"It is four years since you saw me," she said with a grave smile. "It was time to change."

"But you are your old self too," he returned eagerly. He would have no disloyalty done to the queen of his boyish dreams: what worm soever was at its root, his royal pomegranate flower should be always set fair in the sun where he might be.

"You seem much changed too," she said after a short pause--"graver and older. Is that because you are a clergyman?"

Alick turned his eyes away from the girl's face, and looked mournfully out onto the autumn woods. "Partly," he said.

"And the other part?" asked Leam, pressing to know the worst.

"And the other part?" He looked at her, and his wan face grew paler. "Well, never mind the other part. There are things which sometimes come into a man's life and wither it for ever, as a fire passing over a green tree, but we do not speak of them."

"To no one?"

"To no one."

Leam sighed. No proclamation could have made the thing clearer between them. Henceforth she was in Alick's power: let him be faithful, chivalrous, loyal, devoted, what you will, she was no longer her own unshared property. He knew what she was, and in so far was her master.

Poor Alick! This was not the light in which he held his fatal secret. True, he knew what she had done, and that his young queen, his ideal, was a murderess, who, if the truth were made public, would be degraded below the level of the poorest wretch that had kept an honest name; but he felt himself more accursed than she, in that he had been the means whereby she had gotten both her knowledge and the power to use it. He was the doomed if innocent, as of old tragic times--the sinless Cain guilty of murder, but guiltless in intent. It was for this, as much as for the love and poetry of the boyish days, that he felt he owed himself to Leam--that his life was hers, and all his energies were to be devoted for her good. It was for this that he had prayed with such intensity of earnestness it seemed to him sometimes as if his soul had left his body, and had gone up to the Most High to pluck by force of passionate entreaty the pardon he besought: "Pardon her, O Lord! Turn her heart, enlighten her understanding, convince her of her sin; but pardon her, pardon her, dear Lord! And with her, pardon me."

The man's whole life was spent in this one wild, fervid prayer. All that he did was tinged with the sentiment of winning grace for her and pardon for both. In his own mind they stood hand in hand together; and if he was the intercessor, they were both to benefit, and neither would be saved without the other. And he believed in the value of his prayers and in the objective reality of their influence.

For the final changes in the ordering of home and society at North Aston, the week after Leam returned Edgar Harrowby came from India, and took up his position as the owner of the Hill estate; and the child Fina was brought to Ford House, and formally invested with her new name and condition as Miss Fina Dundas, Sebastian's younger daughter. Mindful of the past, Mr. Dundas expected to have a stormy scene with Leam when he told her his intentions respecting poor madame's child; but Leam answered quietly, "Very well, papa," and greeted Fina when she arrived benevolently, if not effusively. She was not one of those born mothers who love babies from their early nursery days, but she was kind to the child in her grave way, and seemed anxious to do well by her.

The ladies all bestowed on her their nursery recipes and systems in rich abundance--especially Mrs. Birkett, who, though glad to be relieved from the hourly task of watching and contending, was still immensely interested in the little creature, and gave daily counsel and superintendence. So that on the whole Leam was not left unaided with her charge. On the contrary, she ran great risk of being bewildered by her multiplicity of counselors, and of entering in consequence on that zigzag course which covers much ground and makes but little progress.