The painter was not merely in love with Florimel: he loved her. I will not say that he was in no degree dazzled by her rank, or that he felt no triumph, as a social nomad camping on the No-Man’s-Land of society, at the thought of the justification of the human against the conventional, in his scaling of the giddy heights of superiority, and, on one of its topmost peaks, taking from her nest that rare bird in the earth, a landed and titled marchioness. But such thoughts were only changing hues on the feathers of his love, which itself was a mighty bird with great and yet growing wings.
A day or two passed before Florimel went again to the studio accompanied, notwithstanding Lenorme’s warning and her own doubt, yet again by her maid, a woman, unhappily, of Lady Bellair’s finding. At Lossie House, Malcolm had felt a repugnance to her, both moral and physical. When first he heard her name, one of the servants speaking of her as Miss Caley, he took it for Scaley, and if that was not her name, yet scaly was her nature.
This time Florimel rode to Chelsea with Malcolm, having directed Caley to meet her there; and, the one designing to be a little early, and the other to be a little late, two results naturally followed —first, that the lovers had a few minutes alone; and second, that when Caley crept in, noiseless and unannounced as a cat, she had her desire, and saw the painter’s arm round Florimel’s waist, and her head on his bosom. Still more to her contentment, not hearing, they did not see her, and she crept out again quietly as she had entered: it would of course be to her advantage to let them know that she had seen, and that they were in her power, but it might be still more to her advantage to conceal the fact so long as there was a chance of additional discovery in the same direction. Through the success of her trick it came about that Malcolm, chancing to look up from Honour’s back to the room where he always breakfasted with his new friend, saw in one of the windows, as in a picture, a face radiant with such an expression as that of the woman-headed snake might have worn when he saw Adam take the apple from the hand of Eve.
Caley was of the common class of servants in this, that she considered service servitude, and took her amends in selfishness; she was unlike them in this, that while false to her employers, she made no common cause with her fellows against them—regarded and sought none but her own ends. Her one thought was to make the most of her position; for that, to gain influence with, and, if it might be, power over her mistress; and, thereto, first of all, to find out whether she had a secret: she had now discovered not merely that she had one, but the secret itself! She was clever, greedy, cunning; equally capable, according to the faculty with which she might be matched, of duping or of being duped. She rather liked her mistress, but watched her in the interests of Lady Bellair. She had a fancy for the earl, a natural dislike for Malcolm which she concealed in distant politeness, and for all the rest of the house, indifference. As to her person, she had a neat oval face, thin and sallow, in expression subacid; a lithe, rather graceful figure, and hands too long, with fingers almost too tapering—of which hands and fingers she was very careful, contemplating them in secret with a regard amounting almost to reverence: they were her sole witnesses to a descent in which she believed, but of which she had no other shadow of proof.
Caley’s face, then, with its unsaintly illumination, gave Malcolm something to think about as he sat there upon Honour, the new horse. Clearly she had had a triumph: what could it be? The nature of the woman was not altogether unknown to him even from the first, and he could not for months go on meeting her occasionally in passages and on stairs without learning to understand his own instinctive dislike: it was plain the triumph was not in good. It was plain too that it was in something which had that very moment occurred, and could hardly have to do with anyone but her mistress. Then her being in that room revealed more. They would never have sent her out of the study, and so put themselves in her power. She had gone into the house but a moment before, a minute or two behind her mistress, and he knew with what a cat-like step she went about: she had surprised them—-discovered how matters stood between her mistress and the painter! He saw everything—almost as it had taken place. She had seen without being seen, and had retreated with her prize! Florimel was then in the woman’s power: what was he to do? He must at least let her gather what warning she could from the tale of what he had seen.
Once arrived at a resolve, Malcolm never lost time. They had turned but one corner on their way home, when he rode up to her.
“Please, my lady,” he began.
But the same instant Florimel was pulling up.
“Malcolm,” she said, “I have left my pocket-handkerchief. I must go back for it.”
As she spoke, she turned her horse’s head. But Malcolm, dreading lest Caley should yet be lingering, would not allow her to expose herself to a greater danger than she knew.