"A good story, and well told," said the marquis kindly. "Don't you think so, Florimel?"
"Yes, papa," Lady Florimel answered; "only he kept us waiting too long for the end of it."
"Some fowk, my leddy," said Malcolm, "wad aye be at the hin'er en' o' a'thing. But for mysel', the mair pleased I was to be gaein' ony gait, the mair I wad spin oot the ro'd till 't."
"How much of the story may be your own invention now?" said the marquis.
"Ow, nae that muckle, my lord; jist a feow extras an' partic'lars 'at micht weel hae been, wi' an adjective, or an adverb, or sic like, here an' there. I made ae mistak' though; gien 't was you hole yonner, they bude till hae gane doon an' no up the stair to their chaumer."
His lordship laughed, and, again commending the tale, rose: it was time to re-embark—an operation less arduous than before, for in the present state of the tide it was easy to bring the cutter so close to a low rock that even Lady Florimel could step on board.
As they had now to beat to windward, Malcolm kept the tiller in his own hand. But indeed, Lady Florimel did not want to steer; she was so much occupied with her thoughts that her hands must remain idle.
Partly to turn them away from the more terrible portion of her adventure, she began to reflect upon her interview with Mrs Catanach—if interview it could be called, where she had seen no one. At first she was sorry that she had not told her father of it, and had the ruin searched; but when she thought of the communication the woman had made to her, she came to the conclusion that it was, for various reasons—not to mention the probability that he would have set it all down to the workings of an unavoidably excited nervous condition—better that she should mention it to no one but Duncan MacPhail.
When they arrived at the harbour quay, they found the carriage waiting, but neither the marquis nor Lady Florimel thought of Malcolm's foot, and he was left to limp painfully home. As he passed Mrs Catanach's cottage, he looked up: there were the blinds still drawn down; the door was shut, and the place was silent as the grave. By the time he reached Lossie House, his foot was very much swollen. When Mrs Courthope saw it, she sent him to bed at once, and applied a poultice.
CHAPTER XLII: DUNCAN'S DISCLOSURE
The night long Malcolm kept dreaming of his fall; and his dreams were worse than the reality, inasmuch as they invariably sent him sliding out of the breach, to receive the cut on the rocks below. Very oddly this catastrophe was always occasioned by the grasp of a hand on his ankle. Invariably also, just as he slipped, the face of the Prince appeared in the breach, but it was at the same time the face of Mrs Catanach.
The next morning, Mrs Courthope found him feverish, and insisted on his remaining in bed—no small trial to one who had never been an hour ill in his life; but he was suffering so much that he made little resistance.
In the enforced quiescence, and under the excitements of pain and fever, Malcolm first became aware how much the idea of Lady Florimel had at length possessed him. But even in his own thought he never once came upon the phrase, in love, as representing his condition in regard of her: he only knew that he worshipped her, and would be overjoyed to die for her. The youth had about as little vanity as could well consist with individual coherence; if he was vain at all, it was neither of his intellectual nor personal endowments, but of the few tunes he could play on his grandfather's pipes. He could run and swim, rare accomplishments amongst the fishermen, and was said to be the best dancer of them all; but he never thought of such comparison himself. The rescue of Lady Florimel made him very happy: he had been of service to her; but so far was he from cherishing a shadow of presumption, that as he lay there he felt it would be utter content to live serving her for ever, even when he was old and wrinkled and gray like his grandfather: he never dreamed of her growing old and wrinkled and gray.
A single sudden thought sufficed to scatter—not the devotion, but its peace. Of course she would marry some day, and what then? He looked the inevitable in the face; but as he looked, that face grew an ugly one. He broke into a laugh: his soul had settled like a brooding cloud over the gulf that lay between a fisher lad and the daughter of a peer! But although he was no coxcomb, neither had fed himself on romances, as Lady Florimel had been doing of late, and although the laugh was quite honestly laughed at himself, it was nevertheless a bitter one. For again came the question: Why should an absurdity be a possibility? It was absurd, and yet possible: there was the point. In mathematics it was not so: there, of two opposites to prove one an absurdity, was to prove the other a fact. Neither in metaphysics was it so: there also an impossibility and an absurdity were one and the same thing. But here, in a region of infinitely more import to the human life than an eternity of mathematical truth, there was at least one absurdity which was yet inevitable—an absurdity—yet with a villainous attendance of direst heat, marrow freezing cold, faintings, and ravings, and demoniacal laughter.
Had it been a purely logical question he was dealing with, he might not have been quite puzzled; but to apply logic here, as he was attempting to do, was like—not like attacking a fortification with a penknife, for a penknife might win its way through the granite ribs of Cronstadt—it was like attacking an eclipse with a broomstick: there was a solution to the difficulty; but as the difficulty itself was deeper than he knew, so the answer to it lay higher than he could reach—was in fact at once grander and finer than he was yet capable of understanding.
His disjointed meditations were interrupted quite by the entrance of the man to whom alone of all men he could at the time have given a hearty welcome. The schoolmaster seated himself by his bedside, and they had a long talk. I had set down this talk, but came to the conclusion I had better not print it: ranging both high and wide, and touching on points of vital importance, it was yet so odd, that it would have been to too many of my readers but a Chimera tumbling in a vacuum—as they will readily allow when I tell them that it started from the question—which had arisen in Malcolm's mind so long ago, but which he had not hitherto propounded to his friend—as to the consequences of a man's marrying a mermaid; and that Malcolm, reversing its relations, proposed next, the consequences of a man's being in love with a ghost or an angel.
" dreidfu' tired o' lyin' here i' my bed," said Malcolm at length when, neither desiring to carry the conversation further, a pause had intervened. "I dinna ken what I want. Whiles I think its the sun, whiles the win', and whiles the watter. But I canna rist. Haena ye a bit ballant ye could say till me Mr Graham? There's naething wad quaiet me like a ballant."