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.
CHAPTER XXII.
EDGAR HARROWBY.
Thirty-two years of age; tall, handsome, well set-up, and every inch a soldier; manly in bearing, but also with that grace of gesture and softness of speech which goes by the name of polished manner; a bold sportsman, ignorant of physical fear, to whom England was the culmination of the universe, and such men as he–gentlemen, officers, squires–the culmination of humanity; a man who loved women as creatures, but despised them as intelligences; who respected socially the ladies of his own class, and demanded that they should be without stain, as befits the wives and mothers and sisters of gentlemen, but who thought women of a meaner grade fair game for the roving fowler; a conservative, holding to elemental differences whence arise the value of races, the dignity of family and the righteousness of caste; an hereditary landowner, regarding landed property as a sacred possession meant only for the few and not to be suffered to lapse into low-born hands; a gentleman, incapable of falsehood, treachery, meanness, social dishonor, but not incapable of injustice, tyranny, selfishness, even cruelty, if such came in his way as the privilege of his rank,–this was Edgar Harrowby as the world saw and his friends knew him, and as North Aston had henceforth to know him.
His return caused immense local excitement and great rejoicing. It seemed to set the social barometer at “fair,” and to promise a spell of animation such as North Aston had been long wanting. And indeed personally for himself it was time that Major Harrowby was at home and at the head of his own affairs. Matters had been going rather badly on the estate without him, and the need of a strong hand to keep agents straight and tenants up to the mark had been making itself somewhat disastrously felt during the last three or four years. Wherefore he had sold out, broken all his ties in India handsomely, as he had broken them in London handsomely once before, when, mad with jealousy, he had fled like a thief in the night, burned his boats behind him, and, as he thought, obliterated every trace by which that loved and graceless woman could discover his real name or family holding; and now had come home prepared to do his duty to society and himself. That is, prepared to marry a nice girl of his own kind, keep the estate well in hand, and set an example of respectability and orthodoxy, family prayers and bold riding, according to the ideal of the English country gentleman.
But, above all, he must marry. And the wife provided for him by the eternal fitness of things was Adelaide Birkett. Who else could be found to suit the part so perfectly? She was well-born, well-mannered; though not coarsely robust, yet healthy in the sense of purity of blood; and she was decidedly pretty. So far to the good of the Harrowby stock in the future. Neither was she too young, though by reason of her quiet country life her twenty-four years did not count more to her in wear and tear of feeling and the doubtful moulding of experience than if she had lived through one London season. She was a girl of acknowledged good sense, calm, equable, holding herself in the strictest leash of ladylike reserve, and governing all her emotions without trouble, patent or unconfessed. Hers was a character which would never floreate into irregular beauties to give her friends anxiety and crowd her life with embarrassing consequences. She despised sentiment and ridiculed enthusiasm, thought skepticism both wicked and disreputable, but at the same time fanaticism was silly, and not nearly so respectable as that quiet, easy-going religion which does nothing of which society would disapprove, but does not break its heart in trying to found the kingdom of God on earth.
All her relations with life and society would be blameless, orthodox, ladylike and thoroughly English. As a wife she would preach submission in public and practice domination and the moral repression belonging to the superior being in private. As a mother she would take care to have experienced nurses and well-bred governesses, who would look after the children properly, when she would wash her hands of further trouble and responsibility, save to teach them good manners at luncheon and self-control in their evening visit to the drawing-room for the “children’s half hour” before dinner. As the mistress of an establishment she would be strict, demanding perfect purity in the morals of her servants, not suffering waste, nor followers, nor kitchen amusements that she knew of, nor kitchen individuality anyhow. Her servants would be her serfs, and she would assume to have bought them by food and wages in soul as well as body, in mind as well as muscle. She would give broken meat in moderation to the deserving poor, but she would let those who are not deserving do the best they could with want at home and inclemency abroad; and she would have called it fostering vice had she fed the husbandless mother when hungry or clothed the drunkard’s children when naked. She would never be talked about for extremes or eccentricities of any kind; and the world would be forced to mention her with respect when it mentioned her at all, having indeed no desire to do otherwise. For she was of the kind dear to the heart of England–one of those who are called the salt of the earth, and who are assumed to keep society safe and pure. She was incredulous of science, contemptuous of superstition, impatient of new ideas–appreciating art, but holding artists as inferior creatures, like actors, acrobats and newspaper writers. She was loyal to the queen and royal family, the nobility and Established Church, bracketing republicans with atheists, and both with unpunished felons; as also classing immorality, the facts of physiology and the details of disease in a group together, as things horrible and not to be spoken of before ladies. She was not slow to believe evil of her neighbors, maintaining, indeed, that to be spoken of at all was proof sufficient of undesirable conduct; but she would never investigate a charge, preferring rather to accept it in its vile integrity than to soil her hands by attempting to unweave its dirty threads; hence she would be pitiless, repellent, but she would never make herself the focus of gossip. She was a human being if you will, a Christian in creed and name assuredly; but beyond and above all things she was a well-mannered, well-conducted English lady, a person of spotless morals and exquisite propriety, in the presence of whom humanity must not be human, truth truthful, nor Nature natural.
This was the wife for Edgar Harrowby as a country gentleman–the woman whom Mrs. Harrowby would have chosen out of thousands to be her daughter-in-law, whom his sisters would like, who would do credit to his name and position; and whom he himself would find as good for his purpose as any within the four seas.
For when Edgar married he would marry on social and rational grounds: he would not commit the mistake of fancying that he need love the woman as he had loved some others. He would marry her, whoever she might be, because she would be of a good family and reasonable character, fairly handsome, unexceptionable in conduct, not tainted with hereditary disease nor disgraced by ragged relatives, having nothing to do with vice or poverty in the remotest link of her connections–a woman fit to be the keeper of his house, the bearer of his name, the mother of his children. But for love, passion, enthusiasm, sentiment–Edgar thought all such emotional impedimenta as these not only superfluous, but oftentimes disastrous in the grave campaign of matrimony.
It was for this marriage that Adelaide had saved herself. She believed that any woman can marry any man if she only wills to do so; and from the day when she was seventeen, and they had had a picnic at Dunaston, she had made up her mind to marry Edgar Harrowby. When he came home for good, unmarried and unengaged, she knew that she should succeed; and Edgar knew it too. He knew it so well after he had been at home about a week that if anything could have turned him against the wife carved out for him by circumstance and fitness, it would have been the almost fatal character of that fitness, as if Fortune had not left him a choice in the matter.
“And what do you think of Adelaide?” asked Mrs. Harrowby one day when her son said that he had been to the rectory. “You have seen her twice now: what is your impression of her?'”
“She is prettier than ever–improved, I should say, all through,” was his answer.
Mrs. Harrowby smiled. “She is a girl I like,” she said. “She is so sensible and has such nice feeling about things.”
“Yes,” answered Edgar, “she is thoroughly well-bred.”
“We have seen a great deal of her of late years,” Mrs. Harrowby continued, angling dexterously. “She and the girls are fast friends, especially she and Josephine, though there is certainly some slight difference of age between them. But Adelaide prefers their society to that of any one about the neighborhood. And I think that of itself shows such good taste and nice feeling.”
“So it does,” said Edgar with dutiful assent, not exactly seeing for himself what constituted Adelaide’s good taste and nice feeling in this preference for his dull and doleful sisters over the brighter companionship of the Fairbairns, say, or any other of the local nymphs. To him those elderly maiden sisters of his were rather bores than otherwise, but he was not displeased that Adelaide Birkett thought differently. If it “ever came to anything,” it would be better that they satisfied her than that she should find them uncongenial.
“She is coming up to dinner this evening,” Mrs. Harrowby went on to say; and Edgar smiled, pulled his moustaches and looked half puzzled if wholly pleased.
“She is a pretty girl,” he said with the imbecility of a man who ought to speak and who has nothing to say, also who has something that he does not wish to say.
“She is better than pretty–she is good,” returned Mrs. Harrowby; and Edgar, not caring to discuss Adelaide on closer ground with his mother, strolled away into his private room, where he sat before the fire smoking, meditating on his life in the past and his prospects in the future, and wondering how he would like it when he had finally abjured the freedom of bachelorhood and had taken up with matrimony and squiredom for the remainder of his natural life.
Punctually at seven Adelaide Birkett appeared. This, too, was one of her minor virtues: she was exact. Mind, person, habits, all were regulated with the nicest method, and she knew as little of hurry as of delay, and as little of both as of passion.
“You are such a dear, good punctual girl!” said Josephine affectionately–Josephine, whose virtues had a few more, loose ends and knots untied than had her friend’s.
“It is so vulgar to be unpunctual,” said Adelaide with her calm good-breeding. “It seems to me only another form of uncleanliness and disorder.”
“And Edgar is so punctual too!” cried Josephine by way of commentary.
Adelaide smiled, not broadly, not hilariously, only to the exact shade demanded by conversational sympathy. “Then we shall agree in this,” she said quietly.
“Oh I am sure you will agree, and in more than this,” Josephine returned, almost with enthusiasm.
Had she not been the willing nurse of this affair from the beginning?–if not the open confidante, yet secretly holding the key to her younger friend’s mind and actions? and was she not, like all the kindly disappointed, intensely sympathetic with love-matters, whether wise or foolish, hopeful or hopeless?
“Who is it that you are sure will agree with Miss Adelaide, if any one indeed could be found to disagree with her?” asked Edgar, standing in the doorway.
Josephine laughed with the silliness of a weak woman “caught.” She looked at Adelaide slyly. Adelaide turned her quiet face, unflushed, unruffled, and neither laughed sillily nor looked slyly.
“She was praising me for punctuality; and then she said that you were punctual too,” she explained cheerfully.
“We learn that in the army,” said Edgar.
“But I have had to learn it without the army,” she answered.
“Which shows that you have by the grace of nature what I have attained only by discipline and art,” said Edgar gallantly.
Adelaide smiled. She did not disdain the compliment. On the contrary, she wished to impress it on Edgar that she accepted his praises because they were her due. She knew that the world takes us if not quite at our own valuation, yet as being the character we assume to be. It all depends on our choice of a mask and to what ideal self we dress. If we are clever and dress in keeping, without showing chinks or discrepancies, no one will find out that it is only a mask; and those of us are most successful in gaining the good-will of our fellows who understand this principle the most clearly and act on it the most consistently.
The evening was a pleasant one for Adelaide, being an earnest of the future for which, if she had not worked hard, she had controlled much. Edgar sang solos to her accompaniment, and put in his rich baritone to her pure if feeble soprano; he played chess with her for an hour, and praised her play, as it deserved: naturally, not thinking it necessary to make love to his sisters, he paid her almost exclusive attention, and looked the admiration he felt. She really was a very pretty young woman, and she had unexceptionable manners; and having cut himself adrift from his ties and handsomely released himself from his obligations, he was not disposed to take much trouble in looking far afield for a wife when here was one ready-made to his hand. Still, he was not so rash as to commit himself too soon. Fine play is never precipitate; and even the most lordly lover, if an English gentleman, thinks it seemly to pretend to woo the woman whom he means to take, and who he knows will yield.
And on her side Adelaide was too well-bred for the one part, and too wise for the other, to clutch prematurely at the prize she had willed should be hers. Her actions must be like her gestures, graceful, rhythmic, rather slow than hurried, and bearing the stamp of purpose and deliberation. When Edgar should make his offer, as she knew he would, she would ask for time to reflect and make up her mind. This would be doing the thing properly and with due regard to her own dignity; for no husband of hers should ever have cause to think that she held her marriage with him as a thing so undeniably advantageous there was no doubt of her acceptance from the first. Every woman must make herself difficult, thought Adelaide, if she wishes to be prized, even the woman who for seven years has fixed her eyes steadily on one point, and has determined that she will finally capture a certain man and land him as her lifelong possession.
Thus the evening passed, with a subtle undercurrent of concealed resolves flowing beneath its surface admiration that gave it a peculiar charm to the two people principally concerned–the one feeling that she had advanced her game by an important move; the other, that the eternal fitness of things ‘was making itself more and-more evident, and that it was manifest to all his senses whom Providence had destined for his wife, and for what ultimate matrimonial end he had been shaped and spared.
A book of photographs was on the table.
“Are you here?” asked Edgar, lowering his bright blue eyes on Adelaide as she sat on a small chair at Mrs. Harrowby’s feet, carrying daughterly incense to that withered shrine.
“Yes, I think so,” she answered.
He turned the pages carefully–passing over his sisters in wide crinolines and spoon bonnets; his mother, photographed from an old picture, in a low dress and long dropping bands of hair, like a mouflon’s ears, about her face; Fred and himself, both as boys in Scotch suits, set stiffly against the table like dolls–with gradual improvement in art and style, till he came to a page where Adelaide’s fair vignetted head of large size was placed side by side with another, also vignetted and also large.
“Ah! there you are; and what a capital likeness!” cried Edgar, with the joyous look and accent of one meeting an old friend, giving that gauge of interest which we all unconsciously give when we first see the photograph of a well-known face. He looked at the portrait long and critically. “Only not so pretty,” he added gallantly. “Those fellows cannot catch the spirit: they give only the outside forms, and not always these correctly. Here is a striking face,” he continued, pointing to Adelaide’s companion-picture–a girl with masses of dark hair, dark eyes, large, mournful, heavily fringed with long lashes, and a grave, sad face, that seemed listening rather than looking. “Who is she? She looks foreign.”
Adelaide glanced at the page, as if she did not know it by heart. “That? Oh! that is only Leam Dundas,” she said with the faintest, finest flavor of scorn in her voice.
“Leam Dundas?” repeated Edgar–“the daughter of that awful woman?”
“Yes, and nearly as odd as the mother,” answered Adelaide, still in the same cold manner and with the same accent of superior scorn.
“At least she used to be, you mean, dear, but she is more like other people now,” said kindly Josephine, more just than politic.
Adelaide looked at her calmly, indifferently. “Yes, I suppose she is rather less savage than of old,” was her reply, “but I do not see much of her,”
“I do not remember to have ever seen her: she must have been a mere child when I was here last,” said Edgar.
“She is nineteen now, I think,” said Mrs. Harrowby.
“Not more?” repeated Adelaide. “I imagined she was one-and-twenty at the least. She looks so very much older than even this–five or six and twenty, full; dark people age so quickly.”
“She seems to be superbly handsome,” Edgar said, still looking at the portrait.
“For those who like that swarthy kind of beauty. For myself, I do not: it always reminds me of negroes and Lascars.”
Adelaide leaned forward, and made pretence to examine Leam’s portrait with critical independence of judgment. She spoke as if this was the first time she had seen it, and her words the thought of the moment resulting.
“There is no negroid taint here,” Edgar answered gravely. “It is the face of a sibyl, of a tragedian.”
“Do you think so? It is fine in outline certainly, but too monotonous to please me, and too lugubrious; and the funny part of it is, there is nothing in her. She looks like a sibyl, but she is the most profoundly stupid person you can imagine.”
“Not now, Addy: she has wakened up a good deal,” again interposed Josephine with her love of justice and want of tact.
“But do you not see the mother in her, Josephine? I do, painfully; and the mother was such a horror! Leam is just like her. She will grow her exact counterpart”
“A bad model enough,” said Edgar; “but this face is not bad. It has more in it than poor old Pepita’s. How fat she was!”
“So will Leam be when she is as old,” said Adelaide quietly. “And do you think these dark people ever look clean? I don’t,”
“That is a drawback certainly,” laughed Edgar, running through the remainder of the book.
But he turned back again to the page which held Leam and Adelaide side by side, and he spoke of the latter while he looked at the former. The face of Leam Dundas, mournful, passionate, concentrated as it was, had struck his imagination–struck it as none other had done since the time when he had met that grand and graceful woman wandering, lost in a fog, in St. James’s Park, and had protected from possible annoyance till he had landed her in St. John’s Wood. He was glad that Leam Dundas lived in North Aston, and that he should see her without trouble or overt action; and as he handed Adelaide into her carriage he noticed for the first time that her blue eyes were not quite even, that her flaxen hair had not quite enough color, and that her face, if pure and fair, was slightly insipid.
“Poor, dear Adelaide!” he said when he returned to the drawing-room, “how nice she is! but how tart she was about this Leam Dundas of yours! Looks like jealousy; and very likely is. All you women are so horribly jealous.”
“Not all of us,” said Maria hastily.
“And I do not think that Adelaide is,” said Josephine. “She has no cause; for though Leam is certainly very lovely, and seems to have improved immensely for being at school, still she and Addy do not come into collision any way, and I do not see why she should be jealous.”
“Perhaps Edgar admired her photograph too much,” said Fanny, who was the stupid one of the three, but on occasions made the shrewdest remarks.
Edgar laughed, not displeasedly. “That would be paying me too high a compliment,” he said.
Whereat his three sisters echoed “Compliment!” in various tones of deprecation, and Josephine added a meaning little laugh for her own share, for which Edgar gave her a kiss, and said in a bantering kind of voice, “Now, Joseph! mind what you are about!”
CHAPTER XXIII.
ON THE MOOR.
It was a gray and gusty day in November, with heavy masses of low-lying clouds rolling tumultuously overhead, and a general look of damp and decay about the fields and banks–one of those melancholy days of the late autumn which make one long for the more varied circumstances of confessed winter, when the deep blue shadows in the crisp snow suggest the glory of southern skies, and the sparkle of the sun on the delicate tracery of the frosted branches has a mimicry of life, such as we imagine strange elves and fairies might create.
There was no point of color in the landscape save the brown foliage of the shivering beech trees, a few coarse splashes of yellow weeds, and here and there a trail of dying crimson leaves threading the barren hedgerows. Everything was “sombre, lifeless, mournful”, and even Edgar Harrowby, though by no means sentimentally impressionable to outward conditions, felt, as he rode through the deserted lanes and looked abroad over the stagnant country, that life on the off-hunt days was but a slow-kind of thing at North Aston, and that any incident which should break the dead monotony of the scene would be welcome.
He had been thinking a great deal of Adelaide for the last four or five days, since she had dined at the Hill, and making up his mind to take the final plunge before long. He was not in love with her, but she suited, as has been said; and that was as good as love to Edgar, who had now to take up his squiredom and country gentleman’s respectability, after having had his share of a young man’s “fling” in rather larger proportion than falls to the lot of most. All the same, he wished that her face had more expression and that her eyes were perfectly straight; and he wanted to see Leam Dundas.
He had made a long round to-day, and was turning now homeward, when, as he had almost crossed the moor, athwart which his road led, he saw standing on a little hillock, away from the main track, the slight figure of a woman sharply defined against the sky. She was alone, doing nothing, not seeming to be looking at anything–just standing there on the hillock, facing the north-west, as if for pleasure in the rough freshness of the breeze.
The wind blew back her dress, and showed her girlish form, supple, flexible, graceful, fashioned like some nymph of olden time. From her small feet, arched and narrow, gripping the ground like feet of steel, to the slender throat on which her head was set with so much grace of line, yet with no sense of over-weighting in its tender curves, an expression of nervous energy underlying her fragile litheness of form, a look of strength–not muscular nor the strength of bulk or weight, but the strength of fibre, will, tenacity–seemed to mark her out as something different from the herd.
Edgar scarcely gave this vague impression words in his own mind, but he was conscious of a new revelation of womanhood, and he scented an adventure in this solitary figure facing the north-west wind on the lonely moor.
Her very dress, too, had a character of its own in harmony with the rest–black all through, save for the scarlet feather in her hat, which burnt like a flame against the gray background of the sky; and her whole attitude had something of defiance in its profound stillness, while standing so boldly against the strong blasts that swept across the heights, which caught his imagination, at that moment ready to be inflamed. All things depend on times and moods, and Edgar’s mood at this moment of first seeing Leam Dundas was favorable for the reception of new impressions.
For, of course, it was Leam–Leam, who, since her return from school, alone and without companionship, was feverish often, and often impelled to escape into the open country from something that oppressed her down in the valley too painfully to be borne. She had never been a confidential nor an expansive schoolfellow; not even an affectionate one as girls count affection, seeing that she neither kissed nor cried, nor quarreled nor made up–neither stood as a model of fidelity nor changed her girl-lovers in anticipation of future inconstancies–writing a love-letter to Ada to-day and a copy of verses to Ethel to-morrow–but had kept with all the same quiet gravity and gentle reticence which seemed to watch rather than share, and to be more careful not to offend than solicitous to win.
All the same, she missed her former comrades now that she had lost them; but most of all she missed the wholesome occupation and mental employment of her studies. Left as she was to herself, thoughts and memories were gathering up from the background where they had lain dormant if extant all these years, and through her solitude were getting a vitality which made her stand still in a kind of breathless agony, wondering where they would lead her and in what they would end. At times such a burning sense of sin would flash over her that she felt as if she must confess that hideous fact of her girlish past. It seemed so shameful that she should be living there among the rest, a criminal with the innocent, and not tell them what she was. Then the instinct of self-preservation would carry it over her conscience, and she would press back her thoughts and go out, as to-day, to cool her feverish blood, and grow calm to bear and strong to hold the heavy burden which she had fashioned by her own mad deed and laid for life on her own hands.
If only the ladies had not insisted so strongly on mamma’s personality in heaven! if only they had not lighted up her imagination, her loyalty, by this tremendous torch of faith and love! How bitterly she regretted the childish fanaticism which had made her imagine herself the providence of that beloved memory, the avenger of those shadowy wrongs! Oh, if she could undo the past and call madame back to life! She would kiss her now, and even call her mamma if it would please her and papa. So she stood on the hillock facing the north-west, thinking these things and regretting in vain.
As Edgar came riding by his large black hound dashed off to Leam and barked furiously, all four paws planted on the ground as if preparing for a spring. The beast had probably no malice, and might have meant it merely as his method of saying, “Who are you?” but he looked formidable, and Leam started back and cried, “Down, dog! go away!” in a voice half angry and half afraid.
Then Edgar saw the face, and knew who she was. He rode across the turf, calling off his dog, and came up to her. It was an opportunity, and Edgar Harrowby was a man who knew how to take advantage of opportunities. It was in his creed to thank Providence for favorable chances by making the most of them, and this was a chance of which it would be manifestly ungrateful not to make the most. It was far more picturesque to meet her for the first time, as now, on the wild moor on a gusty gray November day, than in the gloomy old drawing-room at the Hill. It gave a flavor of romance and the forbidden which was not without its value in the beginning of an acquaintance with such a face as Leam’s. Nevertheless, in spite of the romance that hung about the circumstance, his first words were common-place enough. “I hope my dog has not alarmed you?” he said, lifting his hat.
Leam looked at him with those wonderful eyes of hers, that seemed somehow to look through him. She, standing on her hillock, was slightly higher than Edgar sitting on his horse; and her head was bent as she looked down on him, giving her attitude and gesture something of a dignified assumption of superiority, more like the Leam of the past than of the present. “No, I was not alarmed,” she said. “But I do not like to be barked at,” she added, an echo of the old childish sense of injury from circumstance that was so quaint and pretty in her half-complaining voice.
“I suppose not: how should you?” answered Edgar with sympathetic energy. “Rover is a good-old fellow, but he has the troublesome trick of giving tongue unnecessarily. He would not have hurt you, but I should be very sorry to think he had frightened you. To heel, sir!” angrily.
“No, he did not frighten me.” repeated Leam.
Never loquacious, there was something about this man’s face and manner, his masterful spirit underneath his courteous bearing, his look of masculine power and domination, his admiring eyes that fixed themselves on her so unflinchingly–not with insolence, but as if he had the prescriptive right of manhood to look at her, only a woman, as he chose, he commanding and she obeying–that quelled and silenced her even beyond her wont. He was the first gentleman of noteworthy appearance who had ever spoken to her–not counting Alick, nor the masters who had taught her at school, nor Mr. Birkett, nor Mr. Fairbairn, as gentlemen of noteworthy appearance–and the first of all things has a special influence over young minds.
“You are brave to walk so far alone: you ought to have a dog like Rover to protect you,” Edgar said, still looking at her with those unflinching eyes, which oppressed her even when she did not see them.
“I am not brave, and I do not care for dogs. Besides, I do not often walk so far as this; but I felt the valley stifling to-day,” answered Leam, in her matter-of-fact, categorical way.
“All the same, you ought to have protection,” Edgar said authoritatively, and Leam did not reply.
She only looked at him earnestly, wondering against what she should be protected, having abandoned by this time her belief in banditti and wild beasts.
If his eyes oppressed her, hers half embarrassed him. There was such a strange mixture of intensity and innocence in them, he scarcely knew how to meet them.
“It is absurd to pretend that we do not know each other,” then said Edgar after a short pause, smiling; and his smile was very sweet and pleasant. “You are Miss Dundas–I am Edgar Harrowby.”
“Yes, I know,” Leam answered.
“How is that?” he asked, “_I_ knew _you_ from your photograph–once seen not to be forgotten again,” gallantly–“but how should you know me?”
Leam raised her eyes from the ground where she had cast them. Those slow full looks, intense, tragic, fixed, had a startling effect of which she was wholly unconscious. Edgar felt his own grow dark and tender as he met hers. If the soul and mind within only answered to the mask without, what queen or goddess could surpass this half-breed Spanish girl, this country-born, unnoted, but glorious Leam Dundas? he thought.
“And I knew you from yours,” she answered.
“An honor beyond my deserts,” said Edgar.
Not that he thought the notice of a girl, even with such a face as this, beyond his deserts. Indeed, if a queen or a goddess had condescended to him, it would not have been a grace beyond his merits; but it sounded pretty to say so, and served to make talk as well as anything else. And to make talk was the main business on hand at this present moment.
“Why an honor?” asked Leam, ignorant of the elements of flirting.
Edgar smiled again, and this time his smile without words troubled her. It seemed the assertion of superior intelligence, contemptuous, if half pitiful of her ignorance. Once so serenely convinced of her superiority, Leam was now as suspicious of her shortcomings, and was soon abashed.
Edgar did not see that he had troubled her. Masterful and masculine to an eminent degree, the timid doubts and fears of a young girl were things he could not recognize. He had no point in his own nature with which they came in contact, so that he should sympathize with them. He knew the whole fence and foil of coquetry, the signs of silent flattery, the sweet language of womanly self-conscious love, whether wooing or being won; but the fluttering misgivings of youth and absolute inexperience were dark to him. All of which he felt conscious was that here was something deliciously fresh and original, and that Leam was more beautiful to look at than Adelaide, and a great deal more interesting to talk to.
“If you will allow me, now that I have had the pleasure of meeting you, I will see you safe for at least part of your way home,” he said, passing by her naive query “Why an honor?” as a thing to be answered only by that smile of superior wisdom.
Flinging himself from his horse, he took the bridle in his hand and turned toward home, looking to the girl to accompany him. Leam felt that she could not refuse his escort offered as so much a matter of course. Why should she? It was very pleasant to have some one to walk with–some one not her father, with whom she still felt shy, if not now absolutely estranged; nor yet Alick, in whose pale face she was always reading the past, and who, though he was so good and kind and tender, was her master and held her in his hand. This handsome, courteous gentleman was different from either, and she liked his society and superior ways. And as he began now to talk to her of things not trenching on nor admitting of flirtation–chiefly of the places he had visited, India, Egypt, Italy, Spain–she was not so much abashed by his unflinching looks and masterful manner.
When he entered on Spain and his recollections of what he had seen there, the girl’s heart throbbed, and her pale face grew whiter still with the passionate thrill that stirred her. The old blood was in her veins yet, and, though modified, and in some sense transformed, she was still Pepita’s daughter and the child of Andalusia. And here was truth; not like that poor wretched madame’s talk, which even she had found out to be false and only making believe to know what she did not know. Spain was the name of power with Learn, as it had been with her mother, and she lifted her face, white with its passionate desires, listening as if entranced to all that Edgar said.
It was a good opening, and the handsome soldier-squire congratulated himself on his lucky hit and serviceable memory. Presently he touched on Andalusia, and Leam, who hitherto had been listening without comment, now broke in eagerly. “That is my own country!” she cried. “Mamma came from Andalusia, beautiful Andalusia! Ah! how I should like to go there!”
“Perhaps you will some day,” Edgar answered a little significantly.
Had she been more instructed in the kind of thing he meant, she would have seen that he wished to convey the idea of a love-journey made with him.
She shook her head and her eyes grew moist and dewy. “Not now,” she said mournfully. “Poor mamma has gone, and there is no one now to take me.”
“I will make up a party some day, and you shall be one of us,” said Edgar.
She brightened all over. “Ah! that would be delightful!” she cried, taking him seriously. “When do you think we shall go?”
“I will talk about it,” Edgar answered, though smiling again–Leam wished he would not smile so often–a little aghast at her literalness, and saying to himself in warning that he must be careful of what he said to Leam Dundas. It was evident that she did not understand either badinage or a joke. But her very earnestness pleased him for all its oddity. It was so unlike the superficiality and levity of the modern girl–that hateful Girl of the Period, in whose existence he believed, and of whose influence he stood in almost superstitious awe. He liked that grave, intense way of hers, which was neither puritanical nor stolid, but, on the contrary, full of unspoken passion, rich in latent concentrated power.
“They are very beautiful, are they not?” Leam asked suddenly.
“What? who?” was Edgar’s answer.
“The Andalusian women, and the men,” returned Leam.
“The men are fine-looking fellows enough,” answered Edgar carelessly–“a little too brutal for my taste, but well-grown men for all that. But I have seen prettier women out of Spain than in it.”
“Mamma used to say they were so beautiful–the most beautiful of all the women in the world; and the best.” Leam said this with a disappointed air and her old injured accent.
Edgar laughed softly. “The prettiest Andalusian woman I have ever seen has an English father,” he answered, with a sudden flush on his handsome face as he bent it a little nearer to hers.
“How odd!” said Leam. “An English father? That is like me.”
Edgar looked at her, to read how much of this was real ingenuousness, how much affected simplicity. He saw only a candid inquiring face with a faint shade of surprise in its quiet earnestness, unquestionably not affected.
“Just so,” he answered. “Exactly like you.”
His voice and manner made Leam blush uncomfortably. She was conscious of something disturbing, without knowing what it was. She first looked up into his face with the same expression of inquiry as before, then down to the earth perplexedly, when suddenly the truth came upon her; he meant herself–she was the prettiest Andalusian he had ever seen.
She was intensely humiliated at her discovery. Not one of those girls who study every feature, every gesture, every point, till there is not a square inch of their personality of which they are not painfully conscious, Leam had never taken herself into artistic consideration at all. She had been proud of her Spanish blood, of her mantilla, her high comb and her fan; but of herself as a woman among women she knew nothing, nor whether she was plain or pretty. Indeed, had she had to say offhand which, she would have answered plain. The revelation which comes sooner or later to all women of the charms they possess had not yet come to her; and Edgar’s words, making the first puncture in her ignorance, pained her more by the shock which they gave her self-consciousness than they pleased her by their flattery.
She said no more, but walked by his side with her head held very high and slightly turned away. She was sorry that he had offended her. They had been getting on together so well until he had said this foolish thing, and now they were like friends who had quarreled. She was quite sorry that he had been so foolish as to offend her, but she must not forgive him–at least not just yet. It was very wrong of him to tell her that she was prettier than the true children of the soil; and she resented the slight to Spain and to her mother, as well as the wrong done to herself, by his saying that which was not true. So she walked with her little head held high, and Edgar could get nothing more out of her. When Leam was offended coaxings to make her forget were of no avail. She had to wear through an impression by herself, and it was useless to try for a premature pardon.
Edgar saw that he had overshot the mark, and that his best policy now was absence; wherefore, after a few moments’ silence, he remounted his horse, looking penitent, handsome, full of admiration and downcast.
“I hope we shall soon see you at the Hill, Miss Dundas,” he said, holding her hand in his for his farewell a little longer than was quite necessary for good breeding or even cordiality.
“I very seldom go to the Hill,” answered Leam, looking past his head.
“But you will come, and soon?” fervently.
“Perhaps: I do not know,” answered Leam, still looking past his head, and embarrassed to a most uncomfortable extent.
“Thank you,” he said, as if he had been thanking her for the grace of his life; and with a long look, lifting his hat again, he rode off, just escaping by a few hundred yards the danger of being met walking with Leam by his sisters and Adelaide Birkett. They were all driving together in the phaeton, and the sisters were making much of their young friend.
At that moment Edgar preferred to be met alone and not walking with Leam. He did not stop the carriage–simply nodded to them all with familiar kindness, as a group of relatives not demanding extra courtesy, flinging a few words behind him as he rode on smiling. Nor did the ladies in their turn stop for Leam, whom they met soon after walking slowly along the road; but Josephine said, as they passed, how pretty Learn looked to-day, and how much softer her face was than it used to be; and Maria, even Maria, agreed with kindly Joseph, and was quite eulogistic on the object of her old disdain. Adelaide sat silent, and did not join in their encomiums.
It would have been a nice point to ascertain if the Misses Harrowby would have praised the girl’s beauty as they did had they known that she had grown soft and dewy-eyed by talking of Spain with their brother Edgar, though she had hardened a little afterward when he told her that she was the prettiest Andalusian he had ever seen.
During the dinner at the Hill, where Adelaide was one of the family party, Edgar mentioned casually how that he had met Miss Dundas on the moor, and had had to speak to her because of Rover’s misbehavior.
“Yes? and what do you think of her?” asked Mrs. Harrowby with a sharp glance.
“I scarcely know: I have hardly seen her as yet,” he answered.
“Did she say or do anything very extraordinary to-day?” asked Adelaide with such an air of contemptuous curiosity as seemed to him insufferably insolent.
“No, nothing. Is she in the habit of saying or doing extraordinary things?” he answered back, arching his eyebrows and speaking in a well-affected tone of sincere inquiry.
“At times she is more like a maniac than a sane person,” said Adelaide, breaking her bread with deliberation. “What can you expect from such a parentage and education as hers?”
Edgar looked down and smiled satirically. “Poor Pepita’s sins lie heavy on your mind,” he answered.
“Yes, I believe in race,” was her reply.
“Mother,” then said Edgar after a short silence, “why do you not have Miss Dundas to dine here with Adelaide? It would be more amusing to her, for it must be dull”–turning to their guest and speaking amiably, considerately–“I am afraid very dull–to be so often quite alone with us.”
He did not add what he thought, that it was almost indelicate in her to be here so often. He was out of humor with her to-day.
“She is such an uncertain girl we never know how she may be. I had her to stay here once, and I do not want to repeat the experiment,” was Mrs. Harrowby’s answer.
“But, mamma, that was before she went to school, when she was quite a child. She is so much improved now,” pleaded Josephine.
“Good little soul!” said Edgar under his breath.–“Wine, Joseph?” aloud, as his recognition of her good offices.
“And I like coming alone best, thanks,” said Adelaide with unruffled calmness. “Leam has never been my friend; indeed, I do not like her, and you all,” to the sisters, with a gracious smile and prettily, “have always been my favorite companions.”
“Still, she is very lonely, and it would be kind. Besides, she is good to look at,” said Edgar.
“Do you think so?” said Mrs. Harrowby with crisp lips and ill-concealed displeasure.
“Do I think so, mother? I should have no eyes else. She is superb. I have never seen such a face. She is the most beautiful creature I have ever known of any nation.”
Adelaide’s delicate pink cheeks turned pale, and then they flushed a brilliant rose as she laid down her spoon and left her jelly untasted.
There were no trials of skill at chess, no duets, no solos, this evening. After dinner Edgar went to his own room and sat there smoking. He felt revolted at the idea of spending two or three hours with what he irreverently called “a lot of dull women,” and preferred his own thoughts to their talk. He sauntered into the drawing-room about ten minutes before Adelaide had to leave, apologizing for his absence on the man’s easy plea of “business,” saying he was sorry to have missed her charming society, and he hoped they should see her there soon again, and so on–all in the proper voice and manner, but with a certain ring of insincerity in the tones which Adelaide detected, if the others did not. But she accepted his excuses with the most admirable tact, smiling to the sisters as she said, “Oh, we have been very happy, Josephine, have we not? though,” with a nice admission of Edgar’s claims, not too broadly stated nor too warmly allowed, “of course it would have been very pleasant if you could have come in too.”
“It has been my loss,” said Edgar.
She smiled “Yes” by eyes, lips and turn of her graceful head. In speech she answered, “Of that, of course, you are the best judge for yourself; but none of us here feel as some girls do, lost without gentlemen to amuse them. We can get on very well by ourselves. Cannot we, Joseph?”
And Josephine said gallantly, “Yes,” but her heart was more rueful than her voice, and she thought that some gentlemen were very nice, and that Sebastian Dundas especially made the dull time pass pleasantly.
CHAPTER XXIV.
THE CHILD FINA.
Nothing surprised the North Astonians more than what it was the fashion to call “the admirable manner in which Leam behaved to the child Fina.” If the world which praised her had known all the compelling circumstances, would it have called her admirable then? Yet beyond those natural promptings of remorse which forced her to do the best she could for the child whom her fatal crime had rendered motherless, Leam did honestly behave well, if this means doing irksome things without complaint and sacrificing self to a sense of right. And this was all the more praiseworthy in that sympathy of nature between these two young creatures there was none, and the girl’s maternal instinct was not of that universal kind which makes all children pleasant, whatever they may be. Hence, she did nobly when she did her duty with the uncompromising exactness characteristic of her; but then it was only duty, it was not love.
How should it be love? Her tenacity and reserve were ill matched with Fina’s native inconstancy of purpose and childish incontinence of speech; her pride of race resented her father’s adoption of a stranger into the penetralia of the family; and to share the name she had inherited from her mother with the daughter of that mother’s rival seemed to her a wrong done to both the living and the dead. Naturally taciturn, unjoyful, and ever oppressed by that brooding consciousness of guilt hanging like a cloud over her memory, formless, vague, but never lifting, Fina’s changeful temper and tumultuous vivacity were intensely wearisome to her. Nevertheless, she was forbearing if not loving, and the people said rightly when they said she was admirable.
Her grave patience with the little one did more to open her father’s heart to her than did even her own wonderful beauty, which gratified his paternal pride of authorship, or than her efforts after docility to himself–efforts that would have been creditable to any one, and that with her were heroic. For Mr. Dundas, being of those clinging, clasping natures which must love some one, had taken poor madame’s child into his affections in the wholesale manner so emphatically his own, now in these first days of his new paternity seeming to live only for the little Fina, and never happy but when he had her with him. It was the first time that he felt he had had a child of his own; and he gave her the love which would have been Leam’s had Pepita been less of a savage than she was, and more discreet in the matter of doll-dressing.
The little round, fair-haired creature, with her picturesque Gainsborough head and rose-red lips, pretty, pleasant, facile, easily amused if easily made cross, divertible from her purpose if she was but coaxed and caressed, and if the substitute offered was to her liking–without tenacity, fluid, floating on the surface of things and born of their froth; loving only those who ministered to her pleasure and were in sight; forgetting yesterday’s joys as though they had never been, and her dearest the moment they were absent–a child deliciously caressing because sensual by temperament and instinctively diplomatic, with no latent greatness to be developed as time went on and the flower set into the fruit. Epitomizing the characteristics of the class of which her mother had been a typical example, she was the pleasantest thing of his life to a man who cared mainly to be amused, and who liked with a woman’s liking to be loved.
The strong love of children inherent in him, which had never been satisfied till now, seemed now to have gathered tenfold strength, and the love of the man, who had never cared for his own, for this his little daughter by adoption was almost a passion. If Leam could have been jealous where she did not love, she would have been jealous of her father and Fina. But she was not. On the contrary, it seemed to soften some of the bitterness of her self-reproach, and she was glad that madame’s motherless child was not deserted, but had found a substitute for the protection which she had taken from her; for Leam, criminal, was not ignoble.
A few days after the meeting on the moor between Learn and Edgar, Mr. Dundas drove to the Hill, carrying Fina with him. Leam had a fit of shyness and refused to go: thus Sebastian had the child to himself, and was not sorry to be without his elder and less congenial daughter. He owned to himself that she was good, very good indeed, and a great deal better than he ever expected she would be; yet for all that, with her more than Oriental gravity and reserve, and that look of tragedy haunting her face, she was not an amusing companion, and the little one was.
Mr. Dundas had begun to take up his old habits again with the Harrowbys. He found the patient constancy of his friend Josephine not a disagreeable salve for a wounded heart and broken life; albeit poor dear Joseph was getting stout and matronly, and took off the keen edge of courtship by a willingness too manifest for wisdom. Sebastian liked to be loved, but he did not like to be bored by being made overmuch love to. The things are different, and most men resent the latter, how much soever they desire the former.
Edgar was in the drawing-room when Mr. Dundas was announced. He was booted and spurred, waiting his horse to be brought round. “What a pretty little girl!” he said after a time. True to his type, he was fond of children and animals, and children and animals liked him. “Come and speak to me,” he continued, holding out his hand to Fina.–“Whose child is she?” vaguely to the company in general.
“Mine,” said Mr. Dundas emphatically–“my youngest daughter, Fina Dundas.”
Edgar knew what he meant. He had often heard the story from his sisters, and since his return home he had had Adelaide Birkett’s comments thereon. He looked then with even more interest on the pretty little creature in dark-blue velvet and swansdown, careless, unconscious, happy, as the child of a mystery and a tragedy in one.
“Ah!” he said sympathetically. “Come to me, little one,” again, coaxingly.
Fina, with her finger in her mouth, went up to him half shyly, half boldly, and wholly prettily. She let him take her on his knee and kiss her without remonstrance. She was of the kind to like being taken on knees and kissed–especially by gentlemen who were strong and matronly women who were soft–and she soon made friends. Not many minutes elapsed before, kneeling upon his knees, she was stroking his tawny beard and plaiting it in threes, pulling his long moustache, playing with his watch-guard, and laughing in his face with the pretty audacity of six.
“What a dear little puss!” cried Edgar, caressing her. “Very like you, Joseph, I should think, when you were her age, judging by your picture. Is she not, mother?”
“They say so, but I do not see it,” answered Mrs. Harrowby primly.
She did not like to hear about this resemblance. There was something in it that annoyed her intensely, she scarcely knew why, and the more so because it was true.
“Poor madame used to say so: she saw it from the first, when Fina was quite a little baby,” said Josephine in a low voice.
She was kneeling by her brother’s side caressing Fina. She always made love to the little girl: it was one of her methods of making love to the father.
“Is she like her mother?” asked Edgar in the same low tones, looking at the child critically.
“A little,” answered Josephine–“not much. It is odd, is it not, that she should be more like me?”
Just then Fina laid her fresh sweet lips against Edgar’s, and he kissed her with a strange thrill of tenderness.
“Why, Edgar, I never saw you take so to a child before,” cried Mrs. Harrowby, not quite pleasantly; and on Sebastian adding with his nervous little laugh, which meant the thing it assumed only to play at, “I declare I shall be quite jealous, Edgar, if you make love to my little girl like this.” Edgar, who had the Englishman’s dislike to observation, save when he offered himself for personal admiration, laughed too and put Fina away.
But the child had taken a fancy to him, and could scarcely be induced to leave him. She clung to his hand still, and went reluctantly when her stepfather called her. It was a very little matter, but men being weak in certain directions, it delighted Edgar and annoyed Sebastian beyond measure.
“I hope your elder daughter is well,” then said Edgar, emphasizing the adjective, the vision of Leam as he first saw her, breasting the wind, filling his eyes with a strange light.
“Leam? Quite well, thanks. But how do you know anything about her?” was Sebastian’s reply.
“I met her yesterday on the moor, and Rover introduced us,” answered Edgar laughing.
“How close she is!” said her father fretfully. “She never told me a word about it.”
“Perhaps she thought the incident too trifling,” suggested Edgar, a little chagrined.
“Oh no, not at all! In a place like North Aston the least thing counts as an adventure; and meeting for the first time one of the neighbors is not an incident to be forgotten as if it were of no more value than meeting a flock of sheep.”
Mr. Dundas spoke peevishly. To a man who liked to be amused and who lived on crumbs this reserved companionship was disappointing and tiresome.
“Leam is at home making music,” said Fina disdainfully. She had caught the displeased accent of her adopted father, and echoed it.
“Does she make much music?” asked Edgar with his hand under her chin, turning up her face.
The child shrugged her little shoulders. “She makes a noise,” she said; and those who heard her laughed.
“That is not a very polite way of putting it,” said Edgar a little gravely.
“No,” said Josephine.
“You should speak nicely of your sister, my little one,” put in Sebastian.
Fina looked up into his face reproachfully. “You called it a noise yourself, papa,” she said, pouting. “You made her leave off yesterday as soon as you came in, because you said she made your head ache with her noise, and set your teeth–something, I don’t know what.”
“Did I, dear?” he repeated carelessly. “Well, we need not discuss the subject. I dare say it amuses her to make music, as you call it, and so we need say no more about it.”
“But you did say it was a noise,” persisted Fina, climbing on to his knees and putting her arms round his neck. “And I think it a noise too.”
“Poor Leam’s music cannot be very first-rate,” remarked Maria, who was a proficient and played almost as well as a “professional.” “Four years ago she did not know her notes, and four years’ practice cannot be expected to make a perfect pianiste.”
“But a person may play very sweetly and yet not be what you call perfect,” said Edgar.
“Do you think so?” Maria answered with a frosty smile. “I do not.” Of what use to have toiled for thirty years early and late at scales and thorough-bass if a stupid girl like Leam could be allowed to play sweetly after four years’ desultory practice? “Adelaide Birkett, if you will, plays well,” she added; “but Leam, poor child! how should she?”
“I hope I shall have an opportunity of judging for myself,” said Edgar with his company manner.–“When will you come and dine here, Dundas?–to-morrow? You and your elder daughter: we shall be very glad to see you.”
He looked to his mother. Mrs. Harrowby had drawn her lips tight, and wore an injured air doing its best to be resigned. This was Edgar’s first essay in domestic mastership, and it pained her, not unnaturally.
“Thanks,” said Sebastian. “Willingly, if–” looking to Mrs. Harrowby.
“I have no engagement, and Edgar is master now,” said that lady.
“And mind that Leam comes too,” said Josephine, sharing her favorite brother’s action by design.
“And me,” cried Fina.
Whereat they all laughed, which made Fina cry, to be consoled only by some sweetmeats which Josephine found in her work-basket.
It was agreed, then, that the next day Leam and her father should dine at the Hill.
“Only ourselves,” Edgar said, wanting the excuse of her “being the only lady” to devote himself to Leam. It was strange that he should be so anxious to see her nearer, and in company with his sisters and mother; for after all, why should he? What was she to him, either near or afar off, alone or in the inner circle of his family?
But when the next day came Mr. Dundas appeared alone. Leam had been taken with a fit of shyness, pride–who shall say?–and refused to accept her share of the invitation. Her father made the stereotyped excuse of “headache;” but headaches occur too opportunely to be always real, and Leam’s to-night was set down to the fancy side of the account, and not believed in by the hearers any more than by the bearer.
Edgar raged against her in his heart, and decided that she was not worth a second thought, while the ladies said in an undertone from each to each, “How rude!” Maria adding, “How like Leam!” the chain of condemnation receiving no break till it came to Josephine, whose patient soul refrained from wrath, and gave as her link, “Poor Leam! perhaps she is shy or has really a headache.”
In spite of his decision that she was not worth a second thought, the impression which Leam had made on Edgar deepened with his disappointment, and he became restless and unpleasant in his temper, casting about for means whereby he might see her again. He cast about in vain. This fit of shyness, pride, reluctance–who knows what?–continued with Leam for many days after this. If she went out at all, she went where she knew she should not be met; and if Edgar called at Ford House, she was not to be found. She mainly devoted herself to Fina and some books lent her by Alick, and kept the house with strange persistency. Perhaps this was because the weather was bad, for Leam, who could bear wind and frost and noonday sun, could not bear wet. When it rained she shut herself up in her own room, and pitied herself for the ungenial skies as she had pitied herself for some other things before now.
Sitting thus reading one miserably dark, cold, misty day, the child Fina came in to her with her lessons, which she repeated well. They were very small and insignificant little lessons, for Leam had a fellow-feeling for the troubles of ignorance, and laid but a light hand on the frothy mind inside that curly head. When they were finished the little one said coaxingly, “Now play with me, Leam! You never play with me.”
“What can I do, Fina?” poor Leam replied.
She had never learnt to play when she was a child: she had never built towers and towns, made railway trains and coaches with the sofa and chairs, played at giants through the dark passages and screamed when she was caught. She had only sat still when mamma was asleep, or when she was awake played on the zambomba, or listened to her when she told her of the things of Spain, and made up stories with her dolls that were less edifying than those of Mother Bunch. She could scarcely, however, unpack that old box full of waxen puppets, with the one dressed in scarlet and black, with fishbone horns and a worsted tail, and a queer clumped kind of foot made of folds of leather, cleft in the middle, that used to go by the name of “El senor papa.” What could she do?
“Shall I tell you a story?” she then said in a mild fit of desperation, for story-telling was as little in her way as anything else.
“Yes, yes, tell me a story!” Fina clapped her chubby hands together and climbed up into Leam’s lap.
“What shall it be about–bears or tigers, or what?” asked Leam dutifully.
“Tell me about mamma, my own mamma, not Aunty Birkett,” said Fina.
Leam shuddered from head to foot. This was the first time the little girl had mentioned her mother’s name to her. Indeed, she did not know that she had ever heard of her at all–ever known that she had had a mother; but the servants had talked, and the child’s curiosity was aroused. The dead mother is as much a matter of wondering inquiry as the angels and the stars; and Fina’s imagination was beginning to bestir itself on the mysteries of childish life.
“I have nothing to tell you about her,” said Leam, controlling herself, though she still shivered.
“Yes, you have–everything,” insisted Fina. “Was mamma pretty?” playing with a corner of her sister’s ribbon.
“People said so,” answered Leam.
“As pretty as Cousin Addy?” she asked.
“About,” said Leam, who thought neither supreme.
“Prettier than you?”
“I don’t know: how can I tell?” she answered a little impatiently.
The mother’s blood that ran in her, the mother’s mould in which she had been formed, forbade her to put herself below madame in anything; but, as she was neither vain nor conscious, she found Fina’s question difficult to answer.
“Oh,” cried Fina, in a tone of disappointment, “then she could not have been very pretty.”
“I dare say she was, but I do not know,” returned Leam.
“And she died?” continued Fina, yawning in a childishly indifferent manner.
“Yes, she died.”
“Why? Who killed her? Did papa?” asked Fina.
Leam’s face was very white: “No, not papa.”
“Did God?”
“I cannot tell you, Fina,” said Leam, to whom falsehoods were abhorrent and the truth impossible.
“Did you?” persisted Fina with childish obstinacy.
“Now go,” said Leam, putting her off her lap and rising from her chair in strange disorder. “You are troublesome and ask too many questions.”
Fina began to cry loudly, and Mr. Dundas, from his library below, heard her. He came up stairs with his fussy, restless kindness, and opened the door of the room where his two daughters, of nature and by adoption, were.
“Heyday! what’s all this about?” he cried. “What’s the matter, my little Fina? what are you crying for? Tut, tut! you should not cry like this, darling; and, Leam,” severely, “you should really keep the child better amused and happy. She is as good as gold with me: with you there is always something wrong.”
Fina ran into his arms sobbing. “Leam is cross,” she said. “She will not tell me who killed mamma.”
The man’s ruddy face, reddened and roughened with travel, grew white and pitiful. “God took her away, my darling,” he said with a sob. “She was too good for me, and He took her to live with the angels in heaven,”
“And Leam’s mamma? Is she in heaven too with the angels?” asked Fina, opening her eyes wide through their tears,
“I hope so,” Sebastian answered in an altered voice.
Leam covered her face in her hands; then lifting it up, she said imploringly, “Papa, do not talk to her of mamma. It is sacrilege.”
“I agree with you, Leam,” said Mr, Dundas in a steady voice. “We meet at the same point, but perhaps by different methods.”
[TO BE CONTINUED.]
LETTERS FROM SOUTH AFRICA
BY LADY BARKER.
CAPE TOWN, October 16, 1875.
Safe, safe at last, after twenty-four days of nothing but sea and sky, of white-crested waves–which made no secret of their intention of coming on board whenever they could or of tossing the good ship Edinburgh Castle hither and thither like a child’s plaything–and of more deceitful sluggish rolling billows, looking tolerably calm to the unseafaring eye, but containing a vast amount of heaving power beneath their slow, undulating water-hills and valleys. Sometimes sky and sea have been steeped in dazzling haze of golden glare, sometimes brightened to blue of a sapphire depth. Again, a sudden change of wind has driven up serried clouds from the south and east, and all has been gray and cold and restful to eyes wearied with radiance and glitter of sun and sparkling water.
Never has there been such exceptional weather, although the weather of my acquaintance invariably _is_ exceptional. No sooner had the outlines of Madeira melted and blended into the soft darkness of a summer night than we appeared to sail straight into tropic heat and a sluggish vapor, brooding on the water like steam from a giant geyser. This simmering, oily, exhausting temperature carried us close to the line. “What is before us,” we asked each other languidly, “if it be hotter than this? How can mortal man, woman, still less child, endure existence?” Vain alarms! Yet another shift of the light wind, another degree passed, and we are all shivering in winter wraps. The line was crossed in greatcoats and shawls, and the only people whose complexion did not resemble a purple plum were those lucky ones who had strength of mind and steadiness of body to lurch up and down the deck all day enjoying a strange method of movement which they called walking.
The exceptional weather pursued us right into the very dock. Table Mountain ought to be seen–and very often is seen–seventy miles away. I am told it looks a fine bold bluff at that distance, Yesterday we had blown off our last pound of steam and were safe under its lee before we could tell there was a mountain there at all, still less an almost perpendicular cliff more than three thousand feet high. Robben Island looked like a dun-colored hillock as we shot past it within a short distance, and a more forlorn and discouraging islet I don’t think I have ever beheld. When I expressed something of this impression to a cheery fellow-voyager, he could only urge in its defence that there were a great many rabbits on it. If he had thrown the lighthouse into the bargain, I think he would have summed up all its attractive features. Unless Langalibalele is of a singularly unimpressionable nature, he must have found his sojourn on it somewhat monotonous, but he always says he was very comfortable there.
And now for the land. We are close alongside of a wharf, and still a capital and faithful copy of a Scotch mist wraps houses, trees and sloping uplands in a fibry fantastic veil, and the cold drizzle seems to curdle the spirits and energies of the few listless Malays and half-caste boys and men who are lounging about. Here come hansom cabs rattling up one after the other, all with black drivers in gay and fantastic head and shoulder gear; but their hearts seem precisely as the hearts of their London brethren, and they single out new-comers at a glance, and shout offers to drive them a hundred yards or so for exorbitant sums, or yell laudatory recommendations of sundry hotels. You must bear in mind that in a colony every pot-house is a hotel, and generally rejoices in a name much too imposing to fit across its frontage. These hansoms are all painted white with the name of some ship in bright letters on the side, and are a great deal cleaner, roomier and more comfortable than their London “forbears.” The horses are small and shabby, but rattle along at a good pace; and soon each cab has its load of happy home-comers and swings rapidly away to make room for fresh arrivals hurrying up for fares. Hospitable suggestions come pouring in, and it is as though it were altogether a new experience when one steps cautiously on the land, half expecting it to dip away playfully from under one’s feet. A little boy puts my thoughts into words when he exclaims, “How steady the ground is!” and becomes a still more faithful interpreter of a wave-worn voyager’s sensations when, a couple of hours later, he demands permission to get _out_ of his delicious little white bed that he may have the pleasure of getting _into_ it again. The evening is cold and raw and the new picture is all blurred and soft and indistinct, and nothing seems plain except the kindly grace of our welcome and the
never-before-sufficiently-appreciated delights of space and silence.
OCTOBER 17.
How pleasant is the process familiarly known as “looking about one,” particularly when performed under exceptionally favorable circumstances! A long and happy day commenced with a stroll through the botanic gardens, parallel with which runs, on one side, a splendid oak avenue just now in all the vivid freshness of its young spring leaves. The gardens are beautifully kept, and are valuable as affording a sort of experimental nursery in which new plants and trees can be brought up on trial and their adaptability to the soil and climate ascertained. For instance, the first thing that caught my eye was the gigantic trunk of an Australian blue-gum tree, which had attained to a girth and height not often seen in its own land. The flora of the Cape Colony is exceptionally varied and beautiful, but one peculiarity incidentally alluded to by my charming guide struck me as very noticeable. It is that in this dry climate and porous soil all the efforts of uncultivated nature are devoted to the _stems_ of the vegetation: on their sap-retaining power depends the life of the plant, so blossom and leaf, though exquisitely indicated, are fragile and incomplete compared to the solidity and bulbous appearance of the stalk. Everything is sacrificed to the practical principle of keeping life together, and it is not until these stout-stemmed plants are cultivated and duly sheltered and watered, and can grow, as it were, with confidence, that they are able to do justice to the inherent beauty of penciled petal and veined leaf. Then the stem contracts to ordinary dimensions, and leaf and blossom expand into things which may well be a joy to the botanist’s eye. A thousand times during that shady saunter did I envy my companions their scientific acquaintance with the beautiful green things of earth, and that intimate knowledge of a subject which enhances one’s appreciation of its charms as much as bringing a lamp into a darkened picture-gallery. There are the treasures of form and color, but from ignorant eyes more than half their charms and wonders are held back.
A few steps beyond the garden stand the library and natural history museum. The former is truly a credit to the Colony. Spacious, handsome, rich in literary treasures, It would bear comparison with similar institutions in far older and wealthier places. But I have often noticed in colonies how much importance is attached to the possession of a good public library, and how fond, as a rule, colonists are of books. In a new settlement other shops may be ill supplied, but there is always a good bookseller’s, and all books are to be bought there at pretty nearly the same prices as in England. Here each volume costs precisely the same as it would in London, and it would puzzle ever so greedy a reader to name a book which would not be instantly handed to him.
The museum is well worth a visit of many more hours than we could afford minutes, and, as might be expected, contains numerous specimens of the _Bok_ family, whose tapering horns and slender legs are to be seen at every turn of one’s head. Models are there also of the largest diamonds, and especially well copied is the famous “Star of South Africa,” a magnificent brilliant of purest water, sold here originally for something like twelve thousand pounds, and resold for double that sum three or four years back. In these few hours I perceive, or think I perceive, a certain soreness, if one may use the word, on the part of the Cape Colonists about the unappreciativeness of the English public toward their produce and possessions. For Instance, an enormous quantity of wine is annually exported, which reaches London by a devious route and fetches a high price, as it is fairly entitled to do from its excellence. If that same wine were sent direct to a London merchant and boldly sold as Cape wine, it is said that the profit on it would be a very different affair. The same prejudice exists against Cape diamonds. Of course, as in other things, a large proportion of inferior stones are forced into the market and serve to give the diamonds that bad name which we all know is so fatal to a dog. But it is only necessary to pretend that a really fine Cape diamond has come from Brazil to ensure its fetching a handsome price, and in that way even jewelers themselves have been known to buy and give a good round sum, too, for stones they would otherwise have looked upon with suspicion. Already I have seen a straw-colored diamond from “Du Zoit’s pan” in the diamond-fields cut in Amsterdam and set in London, which could hold its own for purity, radiance and color against any other stone of the same rare tint, without fear or favor; but of course such gems are not common, and fairly good diamonds cost as much here as in any other part of the world.
The light morning mists from that dampness of yesterday have rolled gradually away as the beautiful sunshine dried the atmosphere, and by midday the table-cloth, as the colonists affectionately call the white, fleece-like vapor which so often rests on their pet mountain, has been folded up and laid aside in Cloudland for future use. I don’t know what picture other people may have made to their own minds of the shape and size of Table Mountain, but it was quite a surprise and the least little bit in the world of a disappointment to me to find that it cuts the sky (and what a beautiful sky it is!) with a perfectly straight and level line. A gentle, undulating foreground broken into ravines, where patches of green _velts_ or fields, clumps of trees and early settlers’ houses nestle cosily down, guides the eye half-way up the mountain. There the rounder forms abruptly cease, and great granite cliffs rise, bare and straight, up to the level line stretching ever so far along. “It is so characteristic,” and “You grow to be so fond of that mountain,” are observations I have heard made in reply to the carping criticisms of travelers, and already I begin to understand the meaning of the phrases. But you need to see the mountain from various points of view and under different influences of sun and cloud before you can take in its striking and peculiar charms.
On each side of the straight line which is emphatically Table Mountain, but actually forming part of it, is a bold headland of the shape one is usually accustomed to in mountains. The “Devil’s Peak” is uncompromising enough for any one’s taste, whilst the “Lion’s Head” charms the eye by its bluff form and deep purple fissures. These grand promontories are not, however, half so beloved by Cape Colonists as their own Table Mountain, and it is curious and amusing to notice how the influence of this odd straight ridge, ever before their eyes, has unconsciously guided and influenced their architectural tastes. All the roofs of the houses are straight–straight as the mountain; a gable is almost unknown, and even the few steeples are dwarfed to an imperceptible departure from the prevailing straight line. The very trees which shade the Parade-ground and border the road in places have their tops blown absolutely straight and flat, as though giant shears had trimmed them; but I must confess, in spite of a natural anxiety to carry out my theory, that the violent “sou’-easters” are the “straighteners” in their case.
Cape Town is so straggling that it is difficult to form any idea of its real size, but the low houses are neat and the streets are well kept and look quaint and lively enough to my new eyes this morning. There are plenty of people moving about with a sociable, business-like air; lots of different shades of black and brown Malays, with pointed hats on the men’s heads: the women encircle their dusky, smiling faces with a gay cotton handkerchief and throw another of a still brighter hue over their shoulders. When you add to this that they wear a full, flowing, stiffly-starched cotton gown of a third bright color, you can perhaps form some idea of how they enliven the streets. Swarms of children everywhere, romping and laughing and showing their white teeth in broadest of grins. The white children strike me at once as looking marvelously well–such chubby cheeks, such sturdy fat legs–and all, black or white, with that amazing air of independence peculiar to baby-colonists. Nobody seems to mind them and nothing seems to harm them. Here are half a dozen tiny boys shouting and laughing at one side of the road, and half a dozen baby-girls at the other (they all seem to play separately): they are all driving each other, for “horses” is the one game here. By the side of a pond sit two toddles of about three years old, in one garment apiece and pointed hats: they are very busy with string and a pin; but who is taking care of them and why don’t they tumble in? They are as fat as ortolans and grin at us in the most friendly fashion.
We must remember that this chances to be the very best moment of the whole year in which to see the Cape and the dwellers thereat. The cold weather has left its bright roses on the children’s cheeks, and the winter rains exceptionally having this year made every blade of grass and leaf of tree to laugh and sing in freshest green. After the dry, windy summer I am assured there is hardly a leaf and never a blade of grass to be seen in Cape Town, and only a little straggling verdure under the shelter of the mountain. The great want of this place is water. No river, scarcely a brook, refreshes one’s eye for many and many a league inward. The necessary water for the use of the town is brought down by pipes from the numerous springs which trickle out of the granite cliffs of Table Mountain, but there is never a sufficiency to spare for watering roads or grassplots. This scarcity is a double loss to residents and visitors, for one misses it both for use and beauty.
Everybody who comes here rides or drives round the “Kloof.” That may be; but what I maintain is that very few do it so delightfully as I did this sunny afternoon with a companion who knew and loved every turn of the romantic road, who could tell me the name of every bush or flower, of every distant stretch of hills, and helped me to make a map in my head of the stretching landscape and curving bay. Ah! how delicious it was, the winding, climbing road, at whose every angle a fresh fair landscape fell away from beneath our feet or a shining stretch of sea, whose transparent green and purple shadows broke in a fringe of feathery spray at the foot of bold, rocky cliffs, or crept up to a smooth expanse of silver sand in a soft curling line of foam! “Kloof” means simply cleft, and is the pass between the Table Mountain and the Lion’s Head, The road first rises, rises, rises, until one seems half-way up the great mountain, and the little straight–roofed white houses, the green velts or fields and the parallel lines of the vineyards have sunk below one’s feet far, far away. The mountain gains in grandeur as one approaches it, for the undulating spurs which run from it down to the sea-shore take away from the height looking upward. But when these are left beneath, the perpendicular Walls of granite, rising sheer and straight up to the bold sky-line, and the rugged, massive strength of the buttress-like cliffs, begin to gain something of their true value to the stranger’s eye. The most beautiful part of the road, however, to my taste, is the descent, when the shining expanse of Camp’s Bay lies shimmering in the warm afternoon haze with a thousand lights and shadows from cloud and cliff touching and passing over the crisp water-surface. By many a steep zigzag we round the Lion’s Head, and drop once more on a level road running parallel to the sea-shore, and so home in the balmy and yet bracing twilight. The midday sun is hot and scorching even at this time of year, but it is always cool in the shade, and no sooner do the afternoon shadows grow to any length than the air freshens into sharpness, and by sundown one is glad of a good warm shawl.
OCTOBER 18.
Another bright, ideal day, and the morning passed in a delicious flower-filled room looking over old books and records and listening to odd, quaint little scraps from the old Dutch records. But directly after luncheon (and how hungry we all are, and how delicious everything tastes on shore!) the open break with four capital horses comes to the door, and we start for a long, lovely drive. Half a mile or so takes us out on a flat red road with Table Mountain rising straight up before it, but on the left stretches away a most enchanting panorama. It is all so soft in coloring and tone, distinct and yet not hard, and exquisitely beautiful!
The Blue-Berg range of mountains stretch beyond the great bay, which, unless a “sou’-easter” is tearing over it, lies glowing in tranquil richness. This afternoon it is colored like an Italian lake. Here are lines of chrysoprase, green-fringed, white with little waves, and beyond lie dark, translucent, purple depths, which change with every passing cloud. Beyond these amethystic shoals again stretches the deep blue water, and again beyond, and bluer still, rise the five ranges of “Hottentots’ Holland,” which encircle and complete the landscape, bringing the eye round again to the nearer cliffs of the Devil’s Peak. When the Dutch came here some two hundred years ago, they seized upon this part of the coast and called it Holland, driving the Hottentots beyond the neighboring range and telling them that was to be their Holland–a name it keeps to this day. Their consciences must have troubled them after this arbitrary division of the soil, for up the highest accessible spurs of their own mountain they took the trouble to build several queer little square houses called “block-houses,” from which they could keep a sharp look-out for foes coming over the hills from Hottentots’ Holland. The foes never came, however, and the roofs and walls of the block-houses have gradually tumbled in, and the gun-carriages–for they managed to drag heavy ordnance up the steep hill-side–have rotted away, whilst the old-fashioned cannon lie, grim and rusty, amid a tangled profusion of wild geranium, heath and lilies, I scrambled up to one of the nearest block-houses, and found the date on the dismounted gun to be more than a hundred years old. The view was beautiful and the air fresh and fragrant with scent of flowers.
But to return to our drive. I could gaze and gaze for ever at this lovely panorama, but am told this is the ugliest part of the road. The road itself is certainly not pretty just here, and is cloudy with a fine red dust, but this view of sea and distant hills is enchanting. Soon we get under the lee of the great mountain, and then its sheltering arms show their protective power; for splendid oak avenues begin to border the road all the way, and miniature forests of straight-stemmed pines and shimmering belts of the ghostly silver tree run up all the mountain-clefts. Stem and leaf of the silver tree are all of purest white; and when one gets a gleam of sunlight on a distant patch of these trees, the effect is quite indescribable, contrasting, as they do, with green of field and vineyard. The vines all about here and towards Constantia, thirteen miles off, are dwarf-plants, and only grow to the height of gooseberry-bushes. It is a particular species, which is found to answer best as requiring less labor to train and cultivate, and is less likely to be blown out of the ground by the violent “sou’-easters” which come sweeping over the mountain. These gales are evidently the greatest annoyance which Cape Colonists have to endure; and although everybody kindly suggests that I _ought_ to see one, just to understand what it is like, I am profoundly thankful that I only know it from their description and my own distinct recollection of the New Zealand “nor’-westers.” Those were hot winds, scorching and curling up everything, whereas this is rather a cold breeze, although it blows chiefly in summer. It whirls along clouds of dust from the red clay roads and fields which penetrates and clings to everything in the most extraordinary manner. All along the road the stems and lower branches of the trees are dyed a deep brick-dust color, and I hear moving and pathetic stories of how it ruins clothes, not only utterly spoiling black silk dresses, but staining white petticoats and children’s frocks and pinafores with a border of color exactly like the ruddle with which sheep are branded. Especially is it the terror of sailors, rendering the navigation along the coast dangerous and difficult; for it blends land and water into one indistinct whirl of vaporous cloud, confusing and blurring everything until one cannot distinguish shore from sea.
The vineyards of Constantia originally took their pretty name from the fair daughter of one of the early Dutch governors, but now it has grown into a generic word, and you see “Cloete’s Constantia,” “Von Reybeck Constantia,” written upon great stone gateways leading by long avenues into the various vine-growing plantations. It was to the former of these constantias, which was also the farthest off, that we were bound that pleasant summer afternoon, and from the time we got out of the carriage until the moment we re-entered it–all too soon, but it is a long drive back in the short cold twilight–I felt as though I had stepped through a magic portal into the scene of one of Washington Irving’s stories. It was all so simple and homely, so quaint and so inexpressibly picturesque. The house had stood there for a couple of hundred years, and looks as though it might last for ever, with its air of cool, leisurely repose and comfort and strength.
In the flagged hall stands a huge stalactite some ten feet high, brought a hundred years ago from caves far away in the distant ranges. It is shaped something like a Malay’s hat, only the peak tapers to a point about eight feet high. The drawing-room–though it seems a profanation to call that venerable stately room by so flippant and modern a name–is large, ceiled with great beams of cedar, and lighted by lofty windows, which must contain many scores of small panes of glass. There were treasures of rarest old china and delfware, and curious old carved stands for fragile dishes. A wealth of swinging-baskets of flowers and ferns and bright girl-faces lighted up the solemn, shady old room, in which we must not linger, for there is much to see outside. First to the cellar, as it is called, though it is far from being under ground, and is, in fact, a spacious stone building with an elaborately-carved pediment. Here are rows and rows of giant casks, stretching on either hand into avenues in the black distance, but these are mere children in the nursery, compared to those we are going to see. First we must pause in a middle room full of quaintest odds and ends–crossbows, long whips of hippopotamus hide, strange rusty old swords and firearms–to look at a map of South Africa drawn somewhere about 1640. It hangs on the wall and is hardly to be touched, for the paint and varnish crack and peel off at a breath. It is a marvel of accurate geographical knowledge, and is far better filled in than the maps of yesterday. All poor Livingstone’s great geographical discoveries are marked on it as being–perhaps only from description–known or guessed at all that long time ago. It was found impossible to photograph it on account of the dark shade which age has laid over the original yellow varnish, but a careful tracing has been made and, I believe, sent home to the Geographical Society. It is in the long corridor beyond this that the “stuck-vats” live–puncheons which hold easily some thousand gallons or so, and are of a solemn rotundity calculated to strike awe into the beholder’s heart. Here is white constantia, red constantia, young constantia, middle-aged constantia, and constantia so old as to be a liqueur almost beyond price. When it has been kept all these years, the sweetness by which it is distinguished becomes so absorbed and blended as to be hardly perceptible.
Presently one of the party throws a door suddenly open, and, behold, we are standing right over a wild wooded glen with a streamlet running through it, and black washerwomen beating heaps of white clothes on the strips of shingle. Turtle-doves are cooing, and one might almost fancy one was back again on the wild Scotch west coast, until some one else says calmly, “Look at the ostriches!” Here they come, with a sort of dancing step, twisting their long necks and snake-like heads from side to side in search of a tempting pebble or trifle of hardware. Their wings are slightly raised, and the long fringe of white feathers rustles softly as they trot easily and gracefully past us. They are young male birds, and in a few months more their plumage, which now resembles that of a turkey-cock, will be jet black, except the wing-feathers. A few drops of rain are falling, so we hurry back to where the carriage is standing under some splendid oak trees, swallow a sort of stirrup-cup of delicious hot tea, and so home again as fast as we can go.
OCTOBER 19.
It is decided that I must take a drive in a Cape cart; so directly after breakfast a smart workman-like-looking vehicle, drawn by a pair of well-bred iron-gray cobs, dashes up under the portico. There are capital horses here, but they fetch a good price, and such a pair as these would easily find purchasers at one hundred and fifty pounds. The cart itself is very trim and smart, with a framework sort of head, which falls back at pleasure, and it holds four people easily. It is a capital vehicle, light and strong and uncommonly comfortable, but I am warned not to imagine that all Cape carts are as easy as this one. Away we go at a fine pace through the delicious sparkling morning sunshine and crisp air, soon turning off the red high-road into a sandy, marshy flat with a sort of brackish back-water standing in pools here and there. We are going to call on Langalibalele, and his son, Malambuli, who are located at Uitvlugt on the Cape downs, about four miles from the town. It is a sort of farm-residence; and considering that the chief has hitherto lived in a reed hut, he is not badly off, for he has plenty of room out of doors as well as a good house over his head. We bump over some strange and rough bits of sandy road and climb up and down steep banks in a manner seldom done on wheels. There is a wealth of lovely flowers blooming around, but I can’t help fixing my eyes on the pole of the cart, which is sometimes sticking straight up in the air, its silver hook shining merrily in the sun, or else it has disappeared altogether, and I can only see the horses’ haunches. That is when we are going _down_ hill, and I think it is a more terrible sensation than when we are playfully scrambling up some sandy hillock as a cat might.
Here is the location at last, thank Heaven! and there is Langalibalele sitting in the verandah stoep (pronounced “stoup”) on his haunches on a brick. He looks as comfortable as if he were in an arm-chair, but it must be a difficult thing to do if you think seriously of it. The etiquette seems to be to take no notice of him as we pass into the parlor, where we present our pass and the people in authority satisfy themselves that we are quite in rule. Then the old chief walks quietly in, takes off his soft felt hat and sits himself down in a Windsor arm-chair with grave deliberation. He is uncommonly ugly; but when one remembers that he is nearly seventy years of age, it is astonishing to see how young he looks. Langalibalele is not a true Kafir at all: he is a Fingor, a half-caste tribe contemptuously christened by the Kafirs “dogs.” His wool grows in distinct and separate clumps like hassocks of grass all over his head. He is a large and powerful man and looks the picture of sleek contentment, as well he may. Only one of his sons, a good-natured, fine young man, black as ebony, is with him, and the chief’s one expressed grievance is that none of his wives will come to him. In vain he sends commands and entreaties to these dusky ladies to come and share his solitude. They return for answer that “they are working for somebody else;” for, alas! the only reason their presence is desired is that they may cultivate some of the large extent of ground placed at the old chief’s disposal. Neither he nor his stalwart son would dream for a moment of touching spade or hoe; but if the ladies of the family could only be made to see their duty, an honest penny might easily be turned by oats or rye. I gave him a large packet of sugar-plums, which he seized with childish delight and hid away exactly like the big monkeys at the Zoo.
By way of a joke, Malambuli pretended to want to take them away, and the chattering and laughing which followed was almost deafening. But by and by a gentleman of the party presented a big parcel of the best tobacco, and the chuckling old chief made over at once all my sweetmeats “jintly” to his son, and proceeded to hide away his new treasure. He was dressed exactly like a dissenting minister, and declared through the interpreter he was perfectly comfortable. The impression here seems to be that he is a restless, intriguing and mischief-making old man, who may consider himself as having come out of the hornets’ nest he tried to stir up uncommonly well.
We don’t want to bump up and down the sandy plain again, so a lively conversation goes on in Dutch about the road between one of my gentlemen and somebody who looks like a “stuck-vat” upon short legs. The dialogue is fluent and lively, beginning with “Ja, ja!” and ending with “All right!” but it leads to our hitting off the right track exactly, and coming out at a lovely little cottage-villa under the mountain, where we rest and lunch and then stroll about up the hill spurs, through myrtle hedges and shady oak avenues. Then, before the afternoon shadows grow too long, we drive off to “Groote Schuur,” the ancient granary of the first settlers, which is now turned into a roomy, comfortable country-house, perfect as a summer residence, and securely sheltered from the “sou’-easters.” We approach it through a double avenue of tall Italian pines, and after a little while go out once more for a ramble up some quaint old brick steps, and so through a beautiful glen all fringed and feathered with fresh young fronds of maiden-hair ferns, and masses of hydrangea bushes, which must be beautiful as a poet’s dream when they are covered with their great bunches of pale blue blossom. That will not be until Christmas-tide, and, alas! I shall not be here to see, for already my three halcyon days of grace are ended and over, and this very evening we must steam away from a great deal yet unvisited of what is interesting and picturesque, and from friends who three days ago were strangers, but who have made every moment since we landed stand out as a bright and pleasant landmark on life’s highway.
ON SANKOTA HEAD.
“Yay, Jim, there ain’t no doubt but Sairy Macy’s a mighty nice gal, but, thee sees, what I’m a-contendin’ fur is that she’s tew nice fur thee–that is, not tew nice egzackly, but a leetle tew fine-feathered. No, not that egzackly, nuther; but she’s a leetle tew fine in the feelin’s, an’ I don’t b’lieve that in the long run thee an’ she’ll sort well tugether. Shell git eout o’ conceit with thy ways–thee _ain’t_ the pootiest-mannered feller a gal ever see–an’ thee’ll git eout o’ conceit with hern. Thee’ll think she’s a-gittin’ stuck up, an’