A LADY.
The next morning, Malcolm took Kelpie into the park, and gave her a
good breathing. He had thought to jump the rails, and let her have her
head, but he found there were too many park-keepers and police about:
he saw he could do little for her that way. He was turning home with
her again when one of her evil fits came upon her, this time taking
its first form in a sudden stiffening of every muscle: she stood stock
still with flaming eyes. I suspect we human beings know but little of
the fierceness with which the vortices of passion rage in the more
purely animal natures. This beginning he knew well would end in a wild
paroxysm of rearing and plunging. He had more than once tried the
exorcism of patience, sitting sedate upon her back until she chose to
move; but on these occasions the tempest that followed had been of the
very worst description; so that he had concluded it better to bring
on the crisis, thereby sure at least to save time; and after he had
adopted this mode with her, attacks of the sort, if no less violent,
had certainly become fewer. The moment therefore that symptoms of
an approaching fit showed themselves, he used his spiked heels with
vigour. Upon this occasion he had a stiff tussle with her, but as usual
gained the victory, and was riding slowly along the Row, Kelpie tossing
up now her head now her heels in indignant protest against obedience in
general and enforced obedience in particular, when a lady on horseback,
who had come galloping from the opposite direction, with her groom
behind her, pulled up, and lifted her hand with imperative grace: she
had seen something of what had been going on. Malcolm reined in. But
Kelpie, after her nature, was now as unwilling to stop as she had been
before to proceed, and the fight began again, with some difference of
movement and aspect, but the spurs once more playing a free part.
“Man! man!” cried the lady, in most musical reproof, “do you know what
you are about?”
“It would be a bad job for her and me too if I did not, my lady,” said
Malcolm, whom her appearance and manner impressed with a conviction
of rank, and as he spoke he smiled in the midst of the struggle: he
seldom got angry with Kelpie. But the smile instead of taking from the
apparent roughness of his speech, only made his conduct appear in the
lady’s eyes more cruel.
“How is it possible you can treat the poor animal so unkindly --and in
cold blood too?” she said, and an indescribable tone of pleading ran
through the rebuke. “Why, her poor sides are actually----” A shudder,
and look of personal distress completed the sentence.
“You don’t know what she is, my lady, or you would not think it
necessary to intercede for her.”
“But if she is naughty, is that any reason why you should be cruel?”
“No, my lady; but it is the best reason why I should try to make her
good.”
“You will never make her good that way.”
“Improvement gives ground for hope,” said Malcolm.
“But you must not treat a poor dumb animal as you would a responsible
human being.”
“She’s not so very poor, my lady. She has all she wants, and does
nothing to earn it--nothing to speak of; and nothing at all with good
will. For her dumbness, that’s a mercy. If she could speak she wouldn’t
be fit to live among decent people. But for that matter, if some one
hadn’t taken her in hand, dumb as she is, she would have been shot long
ago.”
“Better that than live with such usage.”
“I don’t think she would agree with you, my lady. My fear is that, for
as cruel as it looks to your ladyship, take it altogether, she enjoys
the fight. In any case, I am certain she has more regard for me than
any other being in the universe.”
“Who _can_ have any regard for you,” said the lady very gently, in
utter mistake of his meaning, “if you have no command of your temper?
You must learn to rule yourself first.”
“That’s true, my lady; and so long as my mare is not able to be a law
to herself, I must be a law to her too.”
“But have you never heard of the law of kindness? You could do so much
more without the severity.”
“With some natures I grant you, my lady, but not with such as she.
Horse or man--they never show kindness till they have learned fear.
Kelpie would have torn me to pieces before now if I had taken your
way with her. But except I can do a great deal more with her yet she
will be nothing better than a natural brute beast made to be taken and
destroyed.”
“The Bible again!” murmured the lady to herself. “Of how much cruelty
has not that book to bear the blame!”
All this time Kelpie was trying hard to get at the lady’s horse to bite
him. But she did not see that. She was much too distressed-- and was
growing more and more so.
“I wish you would let my groom try her,” she said, after a pitiful
pause. “He’s an older and more experienced man than you. He has
children. He would show you what can be done by gentleness.”
From Malcolm’s words she had scarcely gathered even a false meaning
--not a glimmer of his nature--not even a suspicion that he meant
something. To her he was but a handsome, brutal young groom. From the
world of thought and reasoning that lay behind his words, not an echo
had reached her.
“It would be a great satisfaction to my old Adam to let him try her,”
said Malcolm.
“The Bible again!” said the lady to herself.
“But it would be murder,” he added, “not knowing myself what experience
he has had.”
“I see,” said the lady to herself; but loud enough for Malcolm to hear,
for her tender-heartedness had made her both angry and unjust, “his
self-conceit is equal to his cruelty--just what I might have expected!”
With the words she turned her horse’s head and rode away, leaving a
lump in Malcolm’s throat.
“I wuss fowk”--he still spoke in Scotch in his own chamber-- “wad du as
they’re tell’t, an’ no jeedge ane anither. I’m sure it’s Kelpie’s best
chance o’ salvation ’at I gang on wi’ her. Stable-men wad ha’e had her
brocken doon a’thegither by this time; an’ life wad ha’e had little
relish left.”
It added hugely to the bitterness of being thus rebuked, that he had
never in his life seen such a radiance of beauty’s softest light as
shone from the face and form of the reproving angel.-- “Only she canna
be an angel,” he said to himself; “or she wad ha’e ken’t better.”
She was young--not more than twenty, tall and graceful, with a touch
of the matronly, which she must have had even in childhood, for it
belonged to her--so staid, so stately was she in all her grace. With
her brown hair, her lily complexion, her blue-gray eyes, she was all
of the moonlight and its shadows--even now, in the early morning, and
angry. Her nose was so nearly perfect that one never thought of it.
Her mouth was rather large, but had gained in value of shape, and in
the expression of indwelling sweetness, with every line that carried
it beyond the measure of smallness. Most little mouths are pretty,
some even lovely, but not one have I seen beautiful. Her forehead was
the sweetest of half-moons. Of those who knew her best some absolutely
believed that a radiance resembling moonlight shimmered from its
precious expanse.
“Be ye angry and sin not,” had always been a puzzle to Malcolm, who
had, as I have said, inherited a certain Celtic fierceness; but now,
even while he knew himself the object of the anger, he understood the
word. It tried him sorely, however, that such gentleness and beauty
should be unreasonable. Could it be that he should never have a chance
of convincing her how mistaken she was concerning his treatment of
Kelpie! What a celestial rosy red her face had glowed! and what summer
lightnings had flashed up in her eyes, as if they had been the horizons
of heavenly worlds up which flew the dreams that broke from the brain
of a young sleeping goddess, to make the worlds glad also in the night
of their slumber.
Something like this Malcolm felt: whoever saw her must feel as he had
never felt before. He gazed after her long and earnestly.
“It’s an awfu’ thing to ha’e a wuman like that angert at ye!” he said
to himself when at length she had disappeared, “--as bonny as she is
angry! God be praised ’at he kens a’thing, an’ ’s no angert wi’ ye for
the luik o’ a thing! But the wheel may come roon’ again--wha kens? Ony
gait I s’ mak the best o’ Kelpie I can.-- I won’er gien she kens Leddy
Florimel! She’s a heap mair boontifu’ like in her beauty nor her. The
man micht haud ’s ain wi’ an archangel ’at had a wuman like that to
the wife o’ ’m.--Hoots! I’ll be wussin’ I had had anither upbringin’,
’at I micht ha’ won a step nearer to the hem o’ her garment! an’ that
wad be to deny him ’at made an’ ordeen’t me. I wull not du that. But
I maun hae a crack wi’ Maister Graham, anent things twa or three,
jist to haud me straucht, for I’m jist girnin’ at bein’ sae regairdit
by sic a Revelation. Gien she had been an auld wife, I wad ha’e only
lauchen: what for ’s that? I doobt I’m no muckle mair rizzonable nor
hersel’! The thing was this, I fancy it was sae clear she spak frae no
ill-natur’, only frae pure humanity. She’s a gran’ ane yon, only some
saft, I doobt.”
For the lady, she rode away sadly strengthened in her doubts whether
there could be a God in the world--not because there were in it such
men as she took Malcolm for, but because such a lovely animal had
fallen into his hands.
“It’s a sair thing to be misjeedged,” said Malcolm to himself as he
put the demoness in her stall; “but it’s no more than the Macker o’ ’s
pits up wi’ ilka hoor o’ the day, an’ says na a word. Eh, but God’s
unco quaiet! Sae lang as he kens till himsel’ ’at he’s a’ richt, he
lats fowk think ’at they like--till he has time to lat them ken better.
Lord, mak clean my hert within me, an’ syne I’ll care little for ony
jeedgement but thine.”