“Good morning, my lady! What a good morning it is!” As in all his address to his mistress, the freedom of the words did not infect the tone; that was resonant of essential honour. “Strange to think,” he went on, “that the sun himself there is only a great fire, and knows nothing about it! There must be a sun to that sun, or the whole thing is a vain show. There must be one to whom each is itself, yet the all makes a whole—one who is at once both centre and circumference to all.”
Florimel cast on him a scornful look. For not merely was he talking his usual unintelligible rubbish of poetry, but he had the impertinence to speak as if he had done nothing amiss, and she had no ground for being offended with him. She made him no answer. A cloud came over Malcolm’s face; and until she went again below, he gave his attention to his steering.
In the meantime Rose, who happily had turned out as good a sailor as her new mistress, had tidied the little cabin; and Florimel found, if not quite such a sumptuous breakfast laid as at Portland Place, yet a far better appetite than usual to meet what there was; and when she had finished, her temper was better, and she was inclined to think less indignantly of Malcolm’s share in causing her so great a pleasure. She was not yet quite spoiled. She was still such a lover of the visible world and of personal freedom, that the thought of returning to London and its leaden-footed hours, would now have been unendurable. At this moment she could have imagined no better thing than thus to go tearing through the water—home to her home. For although she had spent little of her life at Lossie House, she could not but prefer it unspeakably to the schools in which she had passed almost the whole of the preceding portion of it. There was little or nothing in the affair she could have wished otherwise except its origin. She was mischievous enough to enjoy even the thought of the consternation it would cause at Portland Place. She did not realize all its awkwardness. A letter to Lady Bellair when she reached home would, she said to herself, set everything right; and if Malcolm had now repented and put about, she would instantly have ordered him to hold on for Lossie. But it was mortifying that she should have come at the will of Malcolm, and not by her own—worse than mortifying that perhaps she would have to say so. If she were going to say so, she must turn him away as soon as she arrived. There was no help for it. She dared not keep him after that in the face of society. But she might take the bold, and perhaps a little dangerous measure of adopting the flight as altogether her own madcap idea. Her thoughts went floundering in the bog of expediency, until she was tired, and declined from thought to reverie.
Then dawning out of the dreamland of her past, appeared the image of Lenorme. Pure pleasure, glorious delight, such as she now felt, could not long possess her mind, without raising in its charmed circle the vision of the only man except her father whom she had ever—something like loved. Her behaviour to him had not yet roused in her shame or sorrow or sense of wrong. She had driven him from her; she was ashamed of her relation to him; she had caused him bitter suffering; she had all but promised to marry another man; yet she had not the slightest wish for that man’s company there and then: with no one of her acquaintance but Lenorme could she have shared this conscious splendour of life.
“Would to God he had been born a gentleman instead of a painter!” she said to herself when her imagination had brought him from the past, and set him in the midst of the present.
“Rank,” she said, “I am above caring about. In that he might be ever so far my inferior, and welcome, if only he had been of a good family, a gentleman born!”
She was generosity, magnanimity itself in her own eyes! Yet he was of far better family than she knew, for she had never taken the trouble to inquire into his history. And now she was so much easier in her mind since she had so cruelly broken with him, that she felt positively virtuous because she had done it, and he was not at that moment by her side. And yet if he had that moment stepped from behind the main-sail, she would in all probability have thrown herself into his arms.
The day passed on: Florimel grew tired and went to sleep; woke and had her dinner; took a volume of the “Arabian Nights,” and read herself again to sleep; woke again; went on deck; saw the sun growing weary in the west. And still the unwearied wind blew, and still the Psyche danced on, as unwearied as the wind.
The sun-set was rather an assumption than a decease, a reception of him out of their sight into an eternity of gold and crimson; and when he was gone, and the gorgeous bliss had withered into a dove-hued grief, then the cool, soft twilight, thoughtful of the past and its love, crept out of the western caves over the breast of the water, and filled the dome and made of itself a great lens royal, through which the stars and their motions were visible; and the ghost of Aurora with both hands lifted her shroud above her head and made a dawn for the moon on the verge of the watery horizon— a dawn as of the past, the hour of inverted hope.
Not a word all day had been uttered between Malcolm and his mistress: when the moon appeared, with the waves sweeping up against her face, he approached Florimel where she sat in the stern. Davy was steering.