“Yes,” said Lenorme, “I but took the diamond casket that held my bliss, and now I could dare the angel Gabriel to match happinesses with me.”
Poor Florimel, for all her worldly ways, was but a child. Bad associates had filled her with worldly maxims and words and thoughts and judgments. She had never loved Liftore, she had only taken delight in his flatteries. And now had come the shock of a terrible disclosure, whose significance she read in remembered looks and tones and behaviours of the world. Her insolence to Malcolm when she supposed his the nameless fate, had recoiled in lurid interpretation of her own. She was a pariah—without root, without descent, without fathers to whom to be gathered. She was nobody. From the courted and flattered and high-seated and powerful, she was a nobody! Then suddenly to this poor houseless, wind-beaten, rain-wet nobody, a house—no, a home she had once looked into with longing, had opened, and received her to its heart, that it might be fulfilled which was written of old, “A man shall be as an hiding-place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest.” Knowing herself a nobody, she now first began to be a somebody. She had been dreaming pleasant but bad dreams: she woke, and here was a lovely, unspeakably blessed and good reality, which had been waiting for her all the time on the threshold of her sleep! She was baptized into it with the tears of sorrow and shame. She had been a fool, but now she knew it, and was going to be wise.
“Will you come to your brother, Florimel?” said Malcolm tenderly, holding out his arms.
Lenorme raised her. She went softly to him, and laid herself on his bosom.
“Forgive me, brother,” she said, and held up her face.
He kissed her forehead and lips, took her in his arms, and laid her again on Lenorme’s knees.
“I give her to you,” he said, “for you are good.”
With that he left them, and sought Mr Morrison and Mr Soutar, who were waiting him over a glass of wine after their lunch. An hour of business followed, in which, amongst other matters, they talked about the needful arrangements for a dinner to his people, fishers and farmers and all.
After the gentlemen took their leave, nobody saw him for hours. Till sunset approached he remained alone, shut up in the Wizard’s Chamber, the room in which he was born. Part of the time he occupied in writing to Mr Graham.
As the sun’s orbed furnace fell behind the tumbling waters, Malcolm turned his face inland from the wet strip of shining shore on which he had been pacing, and ascended the sandhill.