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.
When Sunday evening came, he found his way to Hope Chapel, and walking
in, was shown to a seat by a grimy-faced pew-opener. It was with
strange feelings he sat there, thinking of the past, and looking for
the appearance of his friend on the pulpit-stair. But his feelings
would have been stranger still had he seen who sat immediately in
the pew behind him, watching him like a cat watching a mouse, or
rather like a half-grown kitten watching a rat, for she was a little
frightened at him, even while resolved to have him. But how could she
doubt her final success, when her plans were already affording her so
much more than she had expected? Who would have looked for the great
red stag himself to come browsing so soon about the scarecrow! He was
too large game, however, to be stalked without due foresight.
When the congregation was dismissed, after a sermon the power of
whose utterance astonished Malcolm, accustomed as he was to the
schoolmaster’s best moods, he waited until the preacher was at liberty
from the unwelcome attentions and vulgar congratulations of the richer
and more forward of his hearers, and then joined him to walk home
with him.--He was followed to the schoolmaster’s lodging, and thence,
an hour after, to his own, by a little boy far too little to excite
suspicion, the grandson of Mrs Catanach’s friend, the herb-doctor.
Until now the woman had not known that Malcolm was in London. When she
learned that he was lodged so near Portland Place, she concluded that
he was watching his sister, and chuckled over the idea of his being
watched in turn by herself.
Every day for weeks after her declaration concerning the birth of
Malcolm, had the mind of Mrs Catanach been exercised to the utmost to
invent some mode of undoing her own testimony. She would have had no
scruples, no sense of moral disgust, in eating every one of her words;
but a magistrate and a lawyer had both been present at the uttering of
them, and she feared the risk. Malcolm’s behaviour to her after his
father’s death had embittered the unfriendly feelings she had cherished
towards him for many years. While she believed him base-born, and was
even ignorant as to his father, she had thought to secure power over
him for the annoyance of the blind old man to whom she had committed
him, and whom she hated with the hatred of a wife with whom for the
best of reasons he had refused to live; but she had found in the boy a
rectitude over which although she had assailed it from his childhood,
she could gain no influence. Either a blind repugnance in Malcolm’s
soul, or a childish instinct of and revulsion from embodied evil, had
held them apart. Even then it had added to her vile indignation that
she regarded him as owing her gratitude for not having murdered him
at the instigation of his uncle; and when at length, to her endless
chagrin, she had herself unwittingly supplied the only lacking link in
the testimony that should raise him to rank and wealth, she imagined,
that by making affidavit to the facts she had already divulged, she
enlarged the obligation infinitely, and might henceforth hold him in
her hand a tool for further operations. When, therefore, he banished
her from Lossie House, and sought to bind her to silence as to his
rank by the conditional promise of a small annuity, she hated him
with her whole huge power of hating. And now she must make speed, for
his incognito in a great city afforded a thousandfold facility for
doing him a mischief. And first she must draw closer a certain loose
tie she had already looped betwixt herself and the household of Lady
Bellair. This tie was the conjunction of her lying influence with the
credulous confidence of a certain very ignorant and rather wickedly
romantic scullery-maid with whom, having in espial seen her come from
the house she had scraped acquaintance, and to whom, for the securing
of power over her through her imagination, she had made the strangest
and most appalling disclosures. Amongst other secret favours, she
had promised to compound for her a horrible mixture--some of whose
disgusting ingredients, as potent as hard to procure, she named in her
awe-stricken hearing--which, administered under certain conditions
and with certain precautions, one of which was absolute secrecy in
regard to the person who provided it, must infallibly secure for her
the affections of any man on whom she might cast a loving eye, and
whom she could, either with or without his consent, contrive to cause
partake of the same. This girl she now sought, and from her learned
all she knew about Malcolm. Pursuing her enquiries into the nature and
composition of the household, however, Mrs Catanach soon discovered a
far more capable and indeed less scrupulous associate and instrument in
Caley. I will not introduce my reader to any of their evil councils,
although, for the sake of my own credit, it might be well to be less
considerate, seeing that many, notwithstanding the super-abundant
evidence of history, find it all but impossible to believe in the
existence of such moral abandonment as theirs. I will merely state
concerning them, and all the relations of the two women, that Mrs
Catanach assumed and retained the upper hand, in virtue of her superior
knowledge, invention, and experience, gathering from Caley, as she had
hoped, much valuable information, full of reactions, and tending to
organic development of scheme in the brain of the arch-plotter. But
their designs were so mutually favourable as to promise from the first
a final coalescence in some common plan for their attainment.
Those who knew that Miss Campbell, as Portlossie regarded her, had
been in reality Lady Lossie, and was the mother of Malcolm, knew as
well that Florimel had no legal title even to the family cognomen; but
if his mother, and therefore the time of his mother’s death, remained
unknown, the legitimacy of his sister would remain unsuspected even
upon his appearance as the heir. Now there were but three besides Mrs
Catanach and Malcolm who did know who was his mother, namely, Miss
Horn, Mr Graham, and a certain Mr Morrison, a laird and magistrate near
Portlossie, an elderly man, and of late in feeble health. The lawyers
the marquis had employed on his death-bed did not know: he had, for
Florimel’s sake taken care that they should not. Upon what she knew
and what she guessed of these facts regarded in all their relations
according to her own theories of human nature the midwife would found a
scheme of action.
Doubtless she saw, and prepared for it, that after a certain point
should be reached the very similarity of their designs must cause a
rupture between her and Caley; neither could expect the other to endure
such a rival near her hidden throne of influence; for the aim of both
was power in a great family, with consequent money, and consideration,
and midnight councils, and the wielding of all the weapons of hint
and threat and insinuation. There was one difference, indeed, that
in Caley’s eye money was the chief thing, while power itself was the
Swedenborgian hell of the midwife’s bliss.