Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 17, No. 097, January, 1876

CHAPTER XIX

AT STEEL'S CORNER

"I hope you will not be bored, my boy, but I am thinking of bringing that wretched Leam Dundas here for a few days. I don't like a girl of her age and character to be left for a full month alone. It is not right, for who knows what she may not do? If she ran away on the wedding-day, she may run away again, and then where would we all be? I cannot think what her father was about to leave her unprotected like this. So I shall just take and bring her here; and if you are bored with her, you must make the best of it."

Mrs. Corfield and Alick were sitting in the "work-room" on the morning of the fifth day after the marriage, when the thought struck the little woman of the propriety of Leam's visit to them for the month of her father's absence. She did not see her son's face when she spoke, being busy with her wood-carving. If she had, she would not have thought that the presence of Leam Dundas would bore or annoy him. The clumsy features gladdened into smiles, the dull eye brightened, the dim complexion flushed: if ever a face expressed supreme delight, Alick's did then; and it expressed what he felt, for, as we know, the one love of his boyish life was this girl-queen of his fancy. Not that he was in love with her in the ordinary sense of being in love. He was too reverent and she too young for vulgar passion or commonplace sentiment. She was something precious to his imagination, not his senses, like a child-queen to her courtier, a high-born lady to her page. He bore with her girlish temper, her girlish insolence of pride, her ignorant opposition, with the humility of strength bending its neck to weakness—the devotion and unselfish sweetness characteristic of him in other of his relations than those with Leam. Judge, then, if he was likely to be bored, as his mother feared, or if this project of a closer domestication with her was not rather a "bit of blue" in his sky which made these early autumn days gladder than the gladdest summer-time.

To will and to do were synonymous with Mrs. Corfield: her motto was velle est agere; and a resolve once taken was like iron at white heat, struck into the shape of deed on the instant. Darting up from her chair, birdlike and angular, she put away her work. "Order the trap," she said briskly, "and come with me. We will go at once, before that poor creature has had time to do anything, wild, or silly."

"I do not think she would do anything wild or silly, mother," said Alick in a deprecating voice. It galled him to hear his darling spoken of so slightingly.

"No? What has she ever done that was rational?" cried his mother sharply. "From the beginning, when she was a baby of three months old, and howled at me because I kissed her, and that dreadful mother of hers flew at me like a wildcat and said I had the evil eye, Leam Dundas has been more like some changeling than an ordinary English girl. I declare it sometimes makes my heart ache to, see her with those awful eyes of hers, looking as if she had seen one does not know what—as if she was being literally burnt up alive with sorrow. However, don't let us discuss her: let us fetch her and save her from herself. That is more to the purpose at this moment."

And Alick said "Yes," and went out to order the trap with alacrity.

When they reached Andalusia Cottage, the first thing they saw was a strange workman from Sherrington painting out the name which in his early love-days for his Spanish bride Sebastian Dundas had put up in bold letters across the gate-posts. The original name of the place had been Ford House, but the old had had to give place to the new in those days as in these, and Ford House had been rechristened Andalusia Cottage as a testimony and an homage. Mrs. Corfield questioned the man in her keen inquisitorial way as to what he was about; and when he told her that the posts were to show "Virginia" now instead of "Andalusia," her great disgust, to judge by the sharp things which she said to him, seemed as if it took in the innocent hand as well as the peccant head. "I do think Sebastian Dundas is bewitched," she said disdainfully to her son as they drove up to the house. "Did any one ever hear of such a lunatic? Changing the name of his house with his wives in this manner, and expecting us to remember all his absurdities! Such a man as that to be a father! Lord of the creation, indeed! He is no better than a court fool." Which last scornful ejaculation brought the trap to the front door and into the presence of Leam.

Standing on the lawn bareheaded in the morning sunshine, doing nothing and apparently seeing nothing, dressed in the deepest mourning she could make for herself, and with her high comb and mantilla as in olden days, her eyes fixed on the ground and her hands clasped in each other, her wan face set and rigid, her whole attitude one of mute, unfathomable despair,—for the instant even Mrs. Corfield, with all her constitutional contempt for youth, felt hushed, as in the presence of some deep human tragedy, at the sight of this poor sorrowful child, this miserable mourner of fifteen. Instead of speaking in her usual quick manner, the sharp-faced little woman, poor Pepita's "crooked stick," went up to the girl quietly and softly touched her arm.

Leam slowly raised her eyes. She did not start or cry out as a creature naturally would if startled, but she seemed as if she gradually and with difficulty awakened from sleep, or from something even more profound than sleep. "Yes?" she said in answer to the touch. "What do you want?"

It was an odd question, and Leam's grave intensity made it all the more odd. But Mrs, Corfield was not easily disconcerted, and it was "only Leam" at the worst.

"I want you," she answered briskly, "Tell the maid to pack up your box, take off that lace thing on your head, and come home with me for a day or two. You need not stay longer than you like, but it will be better for you than moping here, thinking of all sorts of things you had better not think of."

"Why do my thoughts vex you?" asked Learn gravely. "I was not thinking of you."

Mrs. Corfield laughed a little confusedly. "I don't suppose you were," she said, "but you see I did think of you. But whether you were thinking of me or not, you certainly look as if you would be the better for a little rousing. You were standing there like a statue when we came up."

"I was listening to mamma," said Leam with an air of grave rebuke.

Mrs. Corfield rubbed her nose vigorously. "You would do better to come and talk to me instead," she said.

Learn transfixed her with her eyes. "I like mamma's company best," she said in the stony way which she had when stiffening herself against outside influence.

"But if you come to us, you can listen to her as much as you like," said Alick soothingly. "We will not hinder you; and, as my mother says, it is not good for you to be here alone."

"I like it," said Leam.

"Nonsense! then you should not like it. It is not natural for a girl of your age to like it. Come with us," cried Mrs. Corfield: "why not?"

"I have something to do," Leam answered solemnly.

"What can a chit of a thing like you have to do? Come with us, I tell you." Mrs. Corfield said this heartily rather than roughly, though really she could not be bothered, as she said to herself, to stand there wasting her time in arguing with a girl like Leam. It was too ridiculous.

Leam looked at her with mingled tragedy and contempt, and disdained to answer.

"What have you got to do?" again asked Mrs. Corfield.

"I shall not tell you," answered Leam, holding her head very high.

How, indeed, should she tell this little sharp-faced woman that she was thinking how she could prevent madame from coming here as her home? The saints had deserted her; she had prayed to them, threatened them, coaxed, entreated, but they had not heard her; and now she had nothing but herself, only her poor little frail hands and bewildered brain, to protect her mother's memory from insult and revenge her wrongs. The fever in her veins had given her mamma's face sorrowful and weeping, meeting her wherever she turned—mamma's voice, faint as the softest summer breeze in the trees, whispering to her, "Little Leama, I am unhappy. Sweet heart, do not let me be unhappy." For five days this fancy had haunted her, but it had not become distinct enough for guidance. She was listening now, as she was listening always, for mamma to tell her what to do. She was sure she would show her in time how to prevent that wicked woman from living here, bearing her name, taking her place: mamma could trust her to take care of her, now that she could not take care of herself. As she had said to papa, if all the world, the saints, and God himself deserted hers she, her child, would not.

She would not tell these thoughts, even to Alick. They were a secret, sacred between her and mamma, and no one must share them. If, then, she went with this bird-like, insistent woman, she would talk to her and not let her think: she and Alick would stand between herself and mamma's spirit, and then mamma would perhaps leave her again, and go back to heaven angry with her. No, she would not go, and she lifted up her eyes to say so.

As she looked up Alick whispered softly, "Come."

Feverish, excited, her brain clouded by her false fancies, Leam did not recognize his voice. To her it was her mother sighing through the sunny stillness, bidding her go with them, perhaps to find some method of hinderance or revenge which she could not devise for herself. They were clever and knew more than she did; perhaps her mother and the saints had sent them as her helpers.

It seemed almost an eternity during which these thoughts passed through her brain, while she stood looking at Mrs. Corfield so intently that the little woman was obliged to lower her eyes. Not that Leam saw her. She was thinking, listening, but not seeing, though her tragic eyes seemed searching Mrs. Corfield's very soul. Then, glancing upward to the sky, she said with an air of self-surrender, which Alick understood if his mother did not, "Yes, I will go with you: mamma says I may."

"It is my belief, Alick," said Mrs. Corfield, when she had left them to prepare for her visit, "that poor child is going crazy, if she is not so already. She always was queer, but she is certainly not in her right mind now. What a shame of Sebastian Dundas to bring her up as he has done, and now to leave her like this! How glad I am I thought of having her at Steel's Corner!"

"Yes, mother, it was a good thing. Just like you, though," said Alick affectionately.

"You must help me with her, Alick," answered his mother. "I have done what I know I ought to do, but she will be an awful nuisance all the same. She is so odd and cold and impertinent, one does not know how to take her."

Alick flushed and turned away his head. "I will take her off your hands as much as I can," he said in a constrained voice.

"That's my dear boy—do," was his mother's unsuspecting rejoinder as Leam came down stairs ready to go.

Steel's Corner was a place of unresting intellectual energies. Dr. Corfield, a man shut up in his laboratory with piles of extracts, notes, arguments, never used, but always to be used, an experimentalist deep in many of the toughest problems of chemical analysis, but neither ambitious nor communicative, was the one peaceable element in the house. To be sure, Alick would have been both broader in his aims and more concentrated in his objects had he been left to himself. As it was, the incessant demands made on him by his mother kept him too in a state of intellectual nomadism; and no one could weary of monotony where Mrs. Corfield set the pattern, unless it was of the monotony of unrest. This perpetual taking up of new subjects, new occupations, made thoroughness the one thing unattainable. Mrs. Corfield was a woman who went in for everything. She was by turns scientific and artistic, a student and a teacher, but she was too discursive to be accurate, and she was satisfied with a proficiency far below perfection. In philosophy she was what might be called a woman of antepenultimates, referring all the more intricate moral and intellectual phenomena to mind and spirit; but she was intolerant of any attempt to determine the causation of her favorite causes, and she derided the modern doctrines of evolution and inherent force as atheistic because materialistic. The two words meant the same thing with her; and the more shadowy and unintelligible people made the causa causarum the more she believed in their knowledge and their piety. The bitterest quarrel she had ever had was with an old friend, an unimaginative anatomist, who one day gravely proved to her that spirits must be mere filmy bags, pear-shaped, if indeed they had any visual existence at all. Bit by bit he eliminated all the characteristics and circumstances of the human form on the principle of the non-survival of the useless and unadaptable. For of what use are shapes and appliances if you have nothing for them to do?—if you have no need to walk, to grasp, nor yet to sit? Of what use organs of sense when you have no brain to which they lead?—when you are substantially all brain and the result independent of the method? Hence he abolished by logical and anatomical necessity, as well as the human form, the human face with eyes, ears, nose and mouth, and by the inexorable necessities of the case came down to a transparent bag, pear-shaped, for the better passage of his angels through the air.

"A fulfillment of the old proverb that extremes meet," he said by way of conclusion. "The beginning of man an ascidian—his ultimate development as an angel, a pear-shaped, transparent bag."

Mrs. Corfield never forgave her old friend, and even now if any one began a conversation on the theory of development and evolution she invariably lost her temper and permitted herself to say rude things. Her idea of angels and souls in bliss was the good orthodox notion of men and women with exactly the same features and identity as they had when in the flesh, but infinitely more beautiful; retaining the Ego, but the Ego refined and purified out of all trace of human weakness, all characteristic passions, tempers and proclivities; and the pear-shaped bag was as far removed from the truth, as she held it, on the one side as Leam's materialistic conception was on the other. The character and condition of departed souls was one of the subjects on which she was very positive and very aggressive, and Leam had a hard fight of it when her hostess came to discuss her mother's present personality and whereabouts, and wanted to convince her of her transformation.

All the same, the little woman was kind-hearted and conscientious, but she was not always pleasant. She wanted the grace and sweetness known genetically as womanliness, as do most women who hold the doctrine of feminine moral supremacy, with base man, tyrant, enemy and inferior, holding down the superior being by force of brute strength and responsible for all her faults. And she wanted the smoothness of manner known as good breeding. Though a gentlewoman by birth, she gave one the impression of a pert chambermaid matured into a tyrannical landlady.

But she meant kindly by Leam when she took her from the loneliness of her father's house, and her very sharpness and prickly spiritualism were for the child's enduring good. Her attempts, however, to make Leam regard mamma in heaven as in any wise different from mamma on earth were utterly abortive. Leam's imagination could not compass the thaumaturgy tried to be inculcated. Mamma, if mamma at all, was mamma as she had known her; and if as she had known her, then she was unhappy and desolate, seeing what a wicked thing this was that papa had done. She clung to this point as tenaciously as she clung to her love; and nothing that Mrs. Corfield, or even Alick, could say weakened by one line her belief in mamma's angry sorrow and the saints' potent and sometimes peccant humanity.

Among other scientific appliances at Steel's Corner was a small off-kind of laboratory for Alick and his mother, to prevent their troubling the doctor and to enable them to help him when necessary: it was an auxiliary fitted up in what was rightfully the stick-house. The sticks had had to make way for retorts and crucibles, and as yet no harm had come of it, though the servants said they lived in terror of their lives, and the neighbors expected daily to hear that the inmates of Steel's Corner had been blown into the air. Into this evil-smelling and unbeautiful place Leam was introduced with infinite reluctance on her own part. The bad smell made her sick, she said, turning round disdainfully on Alick, and she did not wonder now at anything he might say or do if he could bear to live in such a horrid place as this.

When he showed off a few simple experiments to amuse her—made crystal trees, a shower of snow, a heavy stone out of two empty-looking bottles, spilt mercury and set her to gather it up again, showed her prisms, and made her look through a bit of tourmaline, and in every way conceivable to him strewed the path of learning with flowers—then she began to feel a little interest in the place and left off making wry faces at the dirt and the smells.

One day when she was there her eye caught a very small phial with a few letters like a snake running spirally round it.

"What is that funny little bottle?" she asked, pointing it out. "What does it say?"

"Poison," said Alick.

"What is poison?" she asked.

"Do you mean what it is? or what it does?" he returned.

"Both. You are stupid," said Leam.

"What it does is to kill people, but I cannot tell you all in a breath what it is, for it is so many things."

"How does it kill people?" At her question Leam turned suddenly round on him, her eyes full of a strange light.

"Some poisons kill in one way and some in another," answered Alick.

Leam pondered for a few moments; then she asked, "How much poison is there in the world?"

"An immense deal," said Alick: "I cannot possibly tell you how much."

"And it all kills?"

"Yes, it all kills, else it is not poison."

"And every one?"

"Yes, every one if enough is taken."

"What is enough?" she asked, still so serious, so intent.

Alick laughed. "That depends on the material," he said. "One grain of some and twenty of others."

"Don't laugh," said Leam with her Spanish dignity: "I am serious. You should not laugh when I am serious."

"I did not mean to offend you," faltered Alick humbly. "Will you forgive me?"

"Yes," said Leam superbly, "if you will not laugh again. Tell me about poison."

"What can I tell you? I scarcely know what it is you want to hear."

"What is poison?"

"Strychnine, opium, prussic acid, belladonna, aconite—oh, thousands of things."

"How do they kill?"

"Well, strychnine gives awful pain and convulsions—makes the back into an arch; opium sends you to sleep; prussic acid stops the action of the heart; and so on."

"What is that?" asked Leam, pointing to the small phial with its snake-like spiral label.

"Prussic acid—awfully strong. Two drops of that would kill the strongest man in a moment."

"In a moment?" asked Learn.

"Yes: he would fall dead directly."

"Would it be painful?"

"No, not at all, I believe."

"Show it me," said Learn.

He took the bottle from the shelf. It was a sixty-minim bottle, quite full, stoppered and secured.

She held out her hand for it, and he gave it to her. "Two drops!" mused Leam.

"Yes, two drops," returned Alick.

"How many drops are here?"

"Sixty."

"Is it nasty?"

"No—like very strong bitter almonds or cherry-water; only in excess," he said. "Here is some cherry-water. Will you have a little in some water? It is not nasty, and it will not hurt you."

"No," said Leam with an offended air: "I do not want your horrid stuff."

"It would not hurt you, and it is really rather nice," returned Alick apologetically.

"It is horrid," said Learn.

"Well, perhaps you are better without it," Alick answered, quietly taking the bottle of prussic acid from her hands and replacing it on the shelf, well barricaded by phials and pots.

"You should not have taken it till I gave it you," said Leam proudly. "You are rude."

From this time the laboratory had the strangest fascination for Leam. She was never tired of going there, never tired of asking questions, all bearing on the subject of poisons, which seemed to have possessed her. Alick, unsuspecting, glad to teach, glad to see her interest awakened in anything he did or knew, in his own honest simplicity utterly unable to imagine that things could turn wrong on such a matter, told her all she asked and a great deal more; and still Leam's eyes wandered ever to the shelf where the little phial of thirty deaths was enclosed within its barricades.

One day while they were there Mrs. Corfield called Alick.

"Wait for me, I shall not be long," he said to Leam, and went out to his mother.

As he turned Learnm's eyes went again to that small phial of death on the shelf.

"Take it, Leama! take it, my heart!" she heard her mother whisper.

"Yes, mamma," she said aloud; and leaping like a young panther on the bench, reached to the shelf and thrust the little bottle in her hair. She did not know why she took it: she had no motive, no object. It was mamma who told her—so her unconscious desire translated itself—but she had no clear understanding why. It was instinct, vague but powerful, lying at the back of her mind, unknown to herself that it was there; and all of which she was conscious was a desire to possess that bottle of poison, and not to let them know here that she had taken it.

This was on the afternoon of her last day at the Corfields. She was to go home to-night in preparation for the arrival of her father and madame to-morrow, and in a few hours she would be away. She did not want Alick to come back to the laboratory. She was afraid that he would miss the bottle which she had secured so almost automatically if so superstitiously: Alick must not come back. She must keep that bottle. She hurried across the old-time stick-house, locked the door and took the key with her, then met Alick coming back to finish his lesson on the crystallization of alum, and said, "I am tired of your colored doll's jewelry. Come and tell me about flowers," leading the way to the garden.

Doubt and suspicion were qualities unknown to Alick Corfield. It never occurred to him that his young queen was playing a part to hide the truth, befooling him for the better concealment of her misdeeds. He was only too happy that she condescended to suggest how he should amuse her; so he went with her into the garden, where she sat on the rustic chair, and he brought her flowers and told her the names and the properties as if he had been a professor.