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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.
She knew enough of the uncertainty of life to hold by all sorts of anchorages; and though things looked safe and sweet enough now, they might drift into the shallows again, and she wished her little Fina's future to be assured by one or other of those charged with it if the stepfather failed, then to fall back on the father.
"I will go and send her nurse," said Leam, half staggering to the door. Had anything been wanting to show her the impossibility of their marriage, this incident of Fina's random but incisive words would have been enough. "Leam! not one word more?" he asked as he stood against the door, holding the handle in his hand. "No," she said hopelessly. "What words can we have together?"
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.
"Leam, save her!" she repeated; and then breaking down into helpless dismay she began to sob and scream with short, sharp hysterical shrieks as her contribution to the misery of the moment. Poor Josephine! it was all that she could do, frightened as she was at her own prancing ponies, distracted at the sight of Fina's danger, horrified at Leam's apparent apathy.
Hence she put out her strength to win Fina's love that she might hear her say, when next Major Harrowby asked her, "Yes, I love Leam." But who ever gained by conscious endeavor the love that was not given by the free sympathies of Nature?
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.
"Good heavens! what is all this about?" he cried, rushing forward to receive the disconsolate cargo, unloading one by one the whole group dank and dismal Josephine's scared face swollen with tears, white and red in the wrong places; Leam's set like a mask, blanched, rigid, tragic; Fina's now flushed and angry, now pale and frightened, with a child's swift-varying emotions; and the garments of the last two clinging like cerements and dripping small pools on the gravel.
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.
You hurt me oh, you hurt me so much!" screamed Fina, still struggling. "Come with me, then. Do as you are bid and come away," returned Leam, slightly relaxing her grasp. Though she was angry with the child, she did not want to hurt her. "I shan't. Leave me alone. You are a cross, ugly thing, and I hate you," was Fina's sobbing reply.
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