THE RIDE HOME.
Florimel was offended with Malcolm: he had put her confidence in him
to shame, speaking of things to which he ought not once to have even
alluded. But Clementina was not only older than Florimel, but in her
loving endeavours for her kind, had heard many a pitiful story, and was
now saddened by the tale, not shocked at the teller. Indeed, Malcolm’s
mode of acquainting her with the grounds of the feeling she had
challenged pleased both her heart and her sense of what was becoming;
while, as a partisan of women, finding a man also of their part, she
was ready to offer him the gratitude of all womankind--in her one
typical self.
“What a rough diamond is here!” she thought.
“Rough!” echoed her heart: “how is he rough? What fault could the
most fastidious find with his manners? True, he speaks as a servant
--and where would be his manners if he did not? But neither in tone,
expression, nor way of thinking, is he in the smallest degree servile.
He is like a great pearl, clean out of the sea--bred, it is true, in
the midst of strange surroundings, but pure as the moonlight; and if
a man, so environed, yet has grown so grand, what might he not become
with such privileges as----!”
Good Clementina--what did she mean? Did she imagine that such mere
gifts as she might give him, could do more for him than the great sea,
with the torment and conquest of its winds and tempests? more than his
own ministrations of love, and victories over passion and pride? What
the final touches of the shark-skin are to the marble that stands lord
of the flaming bow, that only can wealth and position be to the man
who has yielded neither to the judgments of the world nor the drawing
of his own inclinations, and so has submitted himself to the chisel
and mallet of his maker. Society is the barber who trims a man’s hair,
often very badly too--and pretends he made it grow. If her owner should
take her, body and soul, and make of her being a gift to his--ah, then,
indeed! But Clementina was not yet capable of perceiving that, while
what she had in her thought to offer _might_ hurt him, it _could_ do
him little good. Her feeling concerning him, however, was all the time
far indeed from folly. Not for a moment did she imagine him in love
with her. Possibly she admired him too much to attribute to him such
an intolerable and insolent presumption as that would have appeared to
her own inferior self. Still, she was far indeed from certain, were
she, as befits the woman so immeasurably beyond even the aspiration of
the man, to make him offer implicit of hand and havings, that he would
reach out his to take them. And certainly that she was not going to
do--in which determination, whether she knew it or not, there was as
much modesty and gracious doubt of her own worth as there was pride and
maidenly recoil. In one resolve she was confident, that her behaviour
towards him should be such as to keep him just where he was, affording
him no smallest excuse for taking one step nearer: and they would soon
be in London, where she would see nothing, or next to nothing more of
him. But should she ever cease to thank God, that was, if ever she came
to find him, that in this groom he had shown her what he could do in
the way of making a man! Heartily she wished she knew a nobleman or two
like him. In the meantime she meant to enjoy--with carefulness --the
ride to London, after which things should be as before.
The morning arrived; they finished breakfast; the horses came round
and stood at the door--all but Kelpie. The ladies mounted. Ah, what a
morning to leave the country and go back to London! The sun shone clear
on the dark pine-woods; the birds were radiant in song; all under the
trees the ferns were unrolling each its mystery of ever generating
life; the soul of the summer was there whose mere idea sends the heart
into the eyes, while itself flits mocking from the cage of words. A
gracious mystery it was--in the air, in the sun, in the earth, in their
own hearts. The lights of heaven mingled and played with the shadows
of the earth, which looked like the souls of the trees that had been
out wandering all night, and had been overtaken by the sun ere they
could re-enter their dark cells. Every motion of the horses under them
was like a throb of the heart of the earth, every bound like a sigh
of her bliss. Florimel shouted almost like a boy with ecstasy, and
Clementina’s moonlight went very near changing into sunlight as she
gazed, and breathed, and knew that she was alive.
They started without Malcolm, for he must always put his mistress up,
and then go back to the stable for Kelpie. In a moment they were in the
wood, crossing its shadows. It was like swimming their horses through
a sea of shadows. Then came a little stream and the horses splashed it
about like children from very gamesomeness. Half a mile more and there
was a saw-mill, with a mossy wheel, a pond behind, dappled with sun and
shade, a dark rush of water along a brown trough, and the air full of
the sweet smell of sawn wood. Clementina had not once looked behind,
and did not know whether Malcolm had yet joined them or not. All at
once the wild vitality of Kelpie filled the space beside her, and the
voice of Malcolm was in her ears. She turned her head. He was looking
very solemn.
“Will you let me tell you, my lady, what this always makes me think
of?” he said.
“What in particular do you mean?” returned Clementina coldly.
“This smell of new-sawn wood that fills the air, my lady.”
She bowed her head.
“It makes me think of Jesus in his father’s workshop,” said Malcolm
“--how he must have smelled the same sweet scent of the trees of the
world broken for the uses of men, that is now so sweet to me. Oh, my
lady! it makes the earth very holy and very lovely to think that as
we are in the world, so was he in the world. Oh, my lady! think:--if
God should be so nearly one with us that it was nothing strange to him
thus to visit his people! that we are not the offspring of the soulless
tyranny of law that knows not even its own self, but the children of an
unfathomable wonder, of which science gathers only the foambells on the
shore--children in the house of a living Father, so entirely our Father
that he cares even to death that we should understand and love him!”
He reined Kelpie back, and as she passed on, his eyes caught a glimmer
of emotion in Clementina’s. He fell behind, and all that day did not
come near her again.
Florimel asked her what he had been saying, and she compelled herself
to repeat a part of it.
“He is always saying such odd out-of-the-way things!” remarked
Florimel. “I used sometimes, like you, to fancy him a little astray,
but I soon found I was wrong. I wish you could have heard him tell a
story he once told my father and me. It was one of the wildest you ever
heard. I can’t tell to this day whether he believed it himself or not.
He told it quite as if he did.”
“Could you not make him tell it again, as we ride along? It would
shorten the way.”
“Do you want the way shortened?--I don’t. But indeed it would not do to
tell it so. It ought to be heard just where I heard it--at the foot of
the ruined castle where the dreadful things in it took place. You must
come and see me at Lossie House in the autumn, and then he shall tell
it you. Besides, it ought to be told in Scotch, and there you will soon
learn enough to follow it: half the charm depends on that.”
Although Malcolm did not again approach Clementina that day, he
watched almost her every motion as she rode. Her lithe graceful back
and shoulders--for she was a rebel against the fashion of the day in
dress as well as in morals, and, believing in the natural stay of the
muscles, had found them responsive to her trust-- the noble poise of
her head, and the motions of her arms, easy yet decided, were ever
present to him, though sometimes he could hardly have told whether his
sight or his mind--now in the radiance of the sun, now in the shadow of
the wood, now against the green of the meadow, now against the blue of
the sky, and now in the faint moonlight, through which he followed, as
a ghost in the realms of Hades might follow the ever flitting phantom
of his love. Day glided after day. Adventure came not near them. Soft
and lovely as a dream the morning dawned, the noon flowed past, the
evening came and the death that followed was yet sweeter than the life
that had gone before. Through it all, day-dream and nightly trance,
radiant air and moony mist, before him glode the shape of Clementina,
its every motion a charm. After that shape he could have been content,
oh, how content! to ride on and on through the ever unfolding vistas of
an eternal succession. Occasionally his mistress would call him to her,
and then he would have one glance of the day-side of the wondrous world
he had been following. Somewhere within it must be the word of the
living One. Little he thought that all the time she was thinking more
of him who had spoken that word in her hearing. That he was the object
of her thoughts not a suspicion crossed the mind of the simple youth.
How could he imagine a lady like her taking a fancy to what, for all
his marquisate, he was still in his own eyes, a raw young fisherman,
only just learning how to behave himself decently! No doubt, ever since
she began to listen to reason, the idea of her had been spreading like
a sweet odour in his heart, but not because she had listened to _him_.
The very fulness of his admiration had made him wrathful with the
intellectual dishonesty--for in her it could not be stupidity--that
quenched his worship, and the first dawning sign of a _reasonable_
soul drew him to her feet, where, like Pygmalion before his statue, he
could have poured out his heart in thanks, that she consented to be a
woman. But even the intellectual phantom, nay, even the very phrase
of being in love with her, had never risen upon the dimmest verge of
his consciousness--and that although her being had now become to him
of all but absorbing interest. I say _all but_, because Malcolm knew
something of One whose idea she was, who had uttered her from the
immortal depths of his imagination. The man to whom no window into the
treasures of the Godhead has yet been opened, may well scoff at the
notion of such a love, for he has this advantage, that, while one like
Malcolm can never cease to love, he, gifted being, can love to-day and
forget to-morrow--or next year--where is the difference? Malcolm’s
main thought was--what a grand thing it would be to rouse a woman like
Clementina to lift her head into the
regions mild of calm and serene air,
Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot
Which men call Earth.
If anyone think that love has no right to talk religion, I answer for
Malcolm at least, asking, Whereof shall a man speak, if not out of the
abundance of his heart? That man knows little either of love or of
religion who imagines they ought to be kept apart. Of what sort, I ask,
is either, if unfit to approach the other? Has God decreed, created a
love that must separate from himself? Is Love then divided? Or shall
not love to the heart created, lift up the heart to the Heart creating?
Alas for the love that is not treasured in heaven! for the moth and the
rust will devour it. Ah, these pitiful old moth-eaten loves!
All the journey then Malcolm was thinking how to urge the beautiful
lady into finding for herself whether she had a father in heaven or
not. A pupil of Mr Graham, he placed little value in argument that ran
in any groove but that of persuasion, or any value in persuasion that
had any end but action.
On the second day of the journey, he rode up to his mistress, and told
her, taking care that Lady Clementina should hear, that Mr Graham
was now preaching in London, adding that for his part he had never
before heard anything fit to call preaching. Florimel did not show
much interest, but asked where, and Malcolm fancied he could see Lady
Clementina make a mental note of the place.
“If only,” he thought, “she would let the power of that man’s faith
have a chance of influencing her, all would be well.”
The ladies talked a good deal, but Florimel was not in earnest about
anything, and for Clementina to have turned the conversation upon those
possibilities, dim-dawning through the chaos of her world, which had
begun to interest her, would have been absurd--especially since such
was her confusion and uncertainty, that she could not tell whether
they were clouds or mountains, shadows or continents. Besides, why
give a child sovereigns to play with when counters or dominoes would
do as well? Clementina’s thoughts could not have passed into Florimel,
and become her thoughts. Their hearts, their natures must come nearer
first. Advise Florimel to disregard rank, and marry the man she loved!
As well counsel the child to give away the cake he would cry for with
intensified selfishness the moment he had parted with it! Still, there
was that in her feeling for Malcolm which rendered her doubtful in
Florimel’s presence.
Between the grooms little passed. Griffith’s contempt for Malcolm found
its least offensive expression in silence, its most offensive in the
shape of his countenance. He could not make him the simplest reply
without a sneer. Malcolm was driven to keep mostly behind. If by any
chance he got in front of his fellow-groom, Griffith would instantly
cross his direction and ride between him and the ladies. His look
seemed to say he had to protect them.