From the other side Clementina, but a moment later, ascended also. On the top they met, in the red light of the sunset. They clasped each the other’s hand, and stood for a moment in silence.
“Ah, my lord!” said the lady, “how shall I thank you that you kept your secret from me! But my heart is sore to lose my fisherman.”
“My lady,” returned Malcolm, “you have not lost your fisherman; you have only found your groom.”
And the sun went down, and the twilight came, and the night followed, and the world of sea and land and wind and vapour was around them, and the universe of stars and spaces over and under them, and eternity within them, and the heart of each for a chamber to the other, and God filling all—nay, nay—God’s heart containing, infolding, cherishing all—saving all, from height to height of intensest being, by the bliss of that love whose absolute devotion could utter itself only in death.
CHAPTER LXXI.
THE ASSEMBLY.
That same evening, Duncan, in full dress, claymore and dirk at his sides, and carrying the great Lossie pipes, marched first through the streets of the upper, then through the closes of the lower town, followed by the bellman who had been appointed crier upon his disappearance. At the proper stations, Duncan blew a rousing pibroch, after which the bellman, who, for the dignity of his calling, insisted on a prelude of three strokes of his clapper, proclaimed aloud that Malcolm, Marquis of Lossie, desired the presence of each and every of his tenants in the royal burgh of Portlossie, Newton and Seaton, in the town-hall of the same, at seven of the clock upon the evening next following. The proclamation ended, the piper sounded one note three times, and they passed to the next station. When they had gone through the Seaton, they entered a carriage waiting for them at the sea-gate, and were driven to Scaurnose, and thence again to the several other villages on the coast belonging to the marquis, making at each in like manner the same announcement.
Portlossie was in a ferment of wonder, satisfaction, and pleasure. There were few in it who were not glad at the accession of Malcolm, and with every one of those few the cause lay in himself. In the shops, among the nets, in the curing-sheds, in the houses and cottages, nothing else was talked about; and stories and reminiscences innumerable were brought out, chiefly to prove that Malcolm had always appeared likely to turn out somebody, the narrator not seldom modestly hinting at a glimmering foresight on his own part of what had now been at length revealed to the world. His friends were jubilant as revellers. For Meg Partan, she ran from house to house like a maniac, laughing and crying. It was as if the whole Seaton had suddenly been translated. The men came crowding about Duncan, congratulating him and asking him a hundred questions. But the old man maintained a reticence whose dignity was strangely mingled of pomp and grace; sat calm and stately as feeling the glow of reflected honour; would not, by word, gesture, tone, or exclamation, confess to any surprise; behaved as if he had known it all the time; made no pretence however of having known it, merely treated the fact as not a whit more than might have been looked for by one who had known Malcolm as he had known him.
Davy, in his yacht uniform, was the next morning appointed the marquis’s personal attendant, and a running time he had of it for a fortnight.
Almost the first thing that fell to him in his office was to show into the room on the ground floor where his master sat—the same in which for ages the lords of Lossie had been wont to transact what little business any of them ever attended to—a pale, feeble man, bowed by the weight of a huge brass-clasped volume under each arm. His lordship rose and met him with out-stretched hand.
“I am glad indeed to see you, Mr Crathie,” he said, “but I fear you are out too soon.”