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.