Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 132.djvu/406

400 give it up — would not — only intended by-and-by to let it go, and meantime gave — occasionally — pretty free flutter to the half-grown wings of her fancy.

Her liking for the painter had therefore, not unnaturally, its fits. It was subject in a measure to the nature of the engagements she had — that is, to the degree of pleasure she expected from them: it was subject, as we have seen, to skilful battery from the guns of her chaperone's intrenchment; and more than to either was it subject to those delicate changes of condition which in the microcosm are as frequent and as varied both in kind and degree as in the macrocosm. The spirit has its risings and settings of sun and moon, its clouds and stars, its seasons, its solstices, its tides, its winds, its storms, its earthquakes — infinite vitality in endless fluctuation. To rule these changes Florimel had neither the power that comes of love nor the strength that comes of obedience. What of conscience she had was not yet conscience toward God, which is the guide to freedom, but conscience toward society, which is the slave of a fool. It was no wonder then that Lenorme, believing, hoping, she loved him, should find her hard to understand. He said hard, but sometimes he meant impossible. He loved as a man loves who has thought seriously, speculated, tried to understand — whose love, therefore, is consistent with itself, harmonious with his nature and history, changing only in form and growth, never in substance and character. Hence, the idea of Florimel became in his mind the centre of perplexing thought; the unrest of her being, metamorphosed on the way, passed over into his, and troubled him sorely. Neither was his mind altogether free of the dread of reproach. For self-reproach he could find little or no ground, seeing that to pity her much for the loss of consideration her marriage with him would involve would be to undervalue the honesty of his love and the worth of his art; and indeed her position was so independently based that she could not lose it even by marrying one who had not the social standing of a brewer or a stockbroker; but his pride was uneasy under the foreseen criticism that his selfishness had taken advantage of her youth and inexperience to work on the mind of an ignorant girl — criticism not likely to be the less indignant that those who passed it would, without a shadow of compunction, have handed her over, body, soul and goods, to one of their own order had he belonged to the very canaille of the race.

The painter was not merely in love with Florimel: he loved her. I will not say that he was in no degree dazzled by her rank, or that he felt no triumph, as a social nomad camping on the no-man's-land of society, at the thought of the justification of the human against the conventional, in his scaling of the giddy heights of superiority, and, on one of its topmost peaks, taking from her nest that rare bird in the earth, a landed and titled marchioness. But such thoughts were only changing hues on the feathers of his love, which itself was a mighty bird with great and yet growing wings.

A day or two passed before Florimel went again to the studio, accompanied, notwithstanding Lenorme's warning and her own doubt, yet again by her maid, a woman, unhappily, of Lady Bellair's finding. At Lossie House, Malcolm had felt a repugnance to her, both moral and physical. When first he heard her name, one of the servants speaking of her as Miss Caley, he took it for Scaley, and if that was not her name, yet scaly was her nature.

This time Florimel rode to Chelsea with Malcolm, having directed Caley to meet her there; and, the one designing to be a little early, and the other to be a little late, two results naturally followed — first, that the lovers had a few minutes alone; and second, that when Caley crept in, noiseless and unannounced as a cat, she had her desire, and saw the painter's arm round Florimel's waist and her head on his bosom. Still more to her contentment, not hearing, they did not see her, and she crept out again quietly as she had entered; it would of course be to her advantage to let them know that she had seen, and that they were in her power, but it might be still more to her advantage to conceal the fact so long as there was a chance of additional discovery in the same direction. Through the success of her trick it came about that Malcolm, chancing to look up from Honor's back to the room where he always breakfasted with his new friend, saw in one of the windows, as in a picture, a face radiant with such an expression as that of the woman-headed snake might have worn when he saw Adam take the apple from the hand of Eve.

Caley was of the common class of servants in this, that she considered service servitude, and took her amends in selfishness; she was unlike them in this, that while false to her employers she made no common cause with her fellows against them — regarded and sought none but