When Caley returned to her mistress after giving Malcolm the message that she did not require his services, and reported the condition of his face, Florimel informed her of the chastisement he had received from Liftore, and desired her to find out for her how he was, for she was anxious about him. Somehow Florimel felt sorrier for him than she could well understand, seeing he was but a groom —a great lumbering fellow, all his life used to hard knocks, which probably never hurt him. That her mistress should care so much about him added yet an acrid touch to Caley’s spite; but she put on her bonnet and went to the mews, to confer with the wife of his lordship’s groom, who, although an honest woman, had not yet come within her dislike. She went to make her inquiries, however, full of grave doubt as to his lordship’s statement to her mistress; and the result of them was a conviction that, beyond his facial bruises, of which Mrs Merton had heard no explanation, Malcolm had had no hurt. This confirmed her suspicion that his lordship had received what he professed to have given: from a window she had seen him mount his horse; and her woman’s-fancy for him; while it added to her hate of Malcolm, did not prevent her from thinking of the advantage the discovery might bring in the prosecution of her own schemes. But now she began to fear Malcolm a little as well as hate him. And indeed he was rather a dangerous person to have about, where all but himself had secrets more or less bad, and one at least had dangerous ones—as Caley’s conscience, or what poor monkey-rudiment in her did duty for one, in private asserted. Notwithstanding her hold upon her mistress, she would not have felt it quite safe to let her know all her secrets. She would not have liked to say, for instance, how often she woke suddenly with a little feeble wail sounding in the ears that fingers cannot stop, or to confess that it cried out against a double injustice, that of life and that of death: she had crossed the border of the region of horror, and went about with a worm coiled in her heart, like a centipede in the stone of a peach.
“Merton’s wife knows nothing, my lady,” she said on her return. “I saw the fellow in the yard going about much as usual. He will stand a good deal of punishing, I fancy, my lady—like that brute of a horse he makes such a fuss with. I can’t help wishing, for your ladyship’s sake, we had never set eyes on him. He’ll do us all a mischief yet before we get rid of him. I’ve had a hinstinc’ of it, my lady, from the first moment I set eyes on him;”—Caley’s speech was never classic. When she was excited it was low.—“And when I ’ave a hinstinc’ of anythink, he’s not a dog as barks for nothink. Mark my words—and I’m sure I beg your pardon, my lady —but that man will bring shame on the house. He’s that arrergant an’ interferin’ as is certain sure to bring your ladyship into public speech an’ a scandal: things will come to be spoke, my lady, that hadn’t ought to be mentioned. Why, my lady, he must ha’ struck his lordship, afore he’d ha’ give him two such black eyes as them! And him that good-natured an’ condescendin’!—I’m sure I don’t know what’s to come on it, but your ladyship might cast a thought on the rest of us females as can’t take the liberties of born ladies without sufferin’ for it. Think what the world will say of us. It’s hard, my lady, on the likes of us.”
But Florimel was not one to be talked into doing what she did not choose. Neither would she to her maid render her reasons for not choosing. She had repaired her fortifications, strengthened herself with Liftore, and was confident.
“The fact is, Caley,” she said, “I have fallen in love with Kelpie, and never mean to part with her—at least till I can ride her —or she kills me. So I can’t do without MacPhail. And I hope she won’t kill him before he has persuaded her to let me mount her. The man must go with the mare. Besides, he is such a strange fellow, if I turned him away I should quite expect him to poison her before he left.”
The maid’s face grew darker. That her mistress had the slightest intention of ever mounting that mare she did not find herself fool enough to believe, but of other reasons she could spy plenty behind. And such there truly were, though none of the sort which Caley’s imagination, swift to evil, now supplied. The kind of confidence she reposed in her groom, Caley had no faculty for understanding, and was the last person to whom her mistress could impart the fact of her father’s leaving her in charge to his young henchman. To the memory of her father she clung, and so far faithfully that, even now when Malcolm had begun to occasion her a feeling of awe and rebuke, she did not the less confidently regard him as her good genius that he was in danger of becoming an unpleasant one.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
CONJUNCTIONS.
As the days passed on, and Florimel heard nothing of Lenorme, the uneasiness that came with the thought of him gradually diminished, and all the associations of opposite complexion returned. Untrammelled by fear, the path into a scaring future seeming to be cut off, her imagination began to work in the quarry of her late experience, shaping its dazzling material into gorgeous castles, with foundations deep-dug in the air, wherein lorded the person and gifts and devotion of the painter. When lost in such blissful reveries, not seldom moments arrived in which she imagined herself—even felt as if she were capable, if not of marrying Lenorme in the flushed face of outraged society, yet of fleeing with him from the judgment of the all but all-potent divinity to the friendly bosom of some blessed isle of the southern seas, whose empty luxuriance they might change into luxury, and there living a long harmonious idyll of wedded love, in which old age and death should be provided against by never taking them into account. This mere fancy, which, poor in courage as it was in invention, she was far from capable of carrying into effect, yet seemed to herself the outcome and sign of a whole world of devotion in her bosom. If one of the meanest of human conditions is conscious heroism, paltrier yet is heroism before the fact, incapable of self-realization! But even the poorest dreaming has its influences, and the result of hers was that the attentions of Liftore became again distasteful to her. And no wonder, for indeed his lordship’s presence in the actual world made a poor show beside that of the painter in the ideal world of the woman who, if she could not with truth be said to love him, yet certainly had a powerful fancy for him: the mean phrase is good enough, even although the phantom of Lenorme roused in her all the twilight poetry of her nature, and the presence of Liftore set her whole consciousness in the perpendicular shadowless gas-light of prudence and self-protection.
The pleasure of her castle-building was but seldom interrupted by any thought of the shamefulness of her behaviour to him. That did not matter much! She could so easily make up for all he had suffered! Her selfishness closed her eyes to her own falsehood. Had she meant it truly she would have been right both for him and for herself. To have repented and become as noble a creature as Lenorme was capable of imagining her—not to say as God had designed her, would indeed have been to make up for all he had suffered. But the poor blandishment she contemplated as amends, could render him blessed only while its intoxication blinded him to the fact that it meant nothing of what it ought to mean, that behind it was no entire, heart-filled woman. Meantime, as the past, with its delightful imprudences, its trembling joys, glided away, swiftly widening the space between her and her false fears and shames, and seeming to draw with it the very facts themselves, promising to obliterate at length all traces of them, she gathered courage; and as the feeling of exposure that had made the covert of Liftore’s attentions acceptable, began to yield, her variableness began to re-appear, and his lordship to find her uncertain as ever. Assuredly, as his aunt said, she was yet but a girl incapable of knowing her own mind, and he must not press his suit. Nor had he the spur of jealousy or fear to urge him: society regarded her as his; and the shadowy repute of the bold-faced countess intercepted some favourable rays which would otherwise have fallen upon the young and beautiful marchioness from fairer luminaries even than Liftore.
But there was one good process, by herself little regarded, going on in Florimel: notwithstanding the moral discomfort oftener than once occasioned her by Malcolm, her confidence in him was increasing; and now that the kind of danger threatening her seemed altered, she leaned her mind upon him not a little—and more than she could well have accounted for to herself on the only grounds she could have adduced—namely that he was an attendant authorized by her father, and, like herself loyal to his memory and will; and that, faithful as a dog, he would fly at the throat of anyone who dared touch her—of which she had had late proof, supplemented by his silent endurance of consequent suffering. Demon sometimes looked angry—when she teased him—had even gone so far as to bare his teeth; but Malcolm had never shown temper. In a matter of imagined duty, he might presume—but that was a small thing beside the sense of safety his very presence brought with it. She shuddered indeed at the remembrance of one look he had given her, but that had been for no behaviour to himself; and now that the painter was gone, she was clear of all temptation to the sort of thing that had caused it; and never, never more would she permit herself to be drawn into circumstances the least equivocal!—If only Lenorme would come back, and allow her to be his friend—his best friend —his only young lady friend, leaving her at perfect liberty to do just as she liked, then all would be well—absolutely comfortable! In the meantime, life was endurable without him—and would be, provided Liftore did not make himself disagreeable. If he did, there were other gentlemen who might be induced to keep him in check: she would punish him—she knew how. She liked him better, however, than any of those.
It was out of pure kindness to Malcolm, upon Liftore’s representation of how he had punished him, that for the rest of the week she dispensed with his attendance upon herself. But he, unaware of the lies Liftore had told her, and knowing nothing, therefore, of her reason for doing so, supposed she resented the liberty he had taken in warning her against Caley, feared the breach would go on widening, and went about, if not quite downcast, yet less hopeful still. Everything seemed going counter to his desires. A whole world of work lay before him:—a harbour to build; a numerous fisher-clan to house as they ought to be housed; justice to do on all sides; righteous servants to appoint in place of oppressors; and, all over, to show the heavens more just than his family had in the past allowed them to appear; he had mortgages and other debts to pay off—clearing his feet from fetters and his hands from manacles, that he might be the true lord of his people; he had Miss Horn to thank, and the schoolmaster to restore to the souls and hearts of Portlossie; and, next of all to his sister, he had old Duncan, his first friend and father, to find and minister to. Not a day passed, not a night did he lay down his head, without thinking of him. But the old man, whatever his hardships, and even the fishermen, with no harbour to run home to from the wild elements, were in no dangers to compare with such as threatened his sister. To set her free was his first business, and that business as yet refused to be done. Hence he was hemmed in, shut up, incarcerated in stubborn circumstance, from a long-reaching range of duties, calling aloud upon his conscience and heart to hasten with the first, that he might reach the second. What rendered it the more disheartening was, that, having discovered, as he hoped, how to compass his first end, the whole possibility had by his sister’s behaviour, and the consequent disappearance of Lenorme, been swept from him, leaving him more resourceless than ever.