Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 132.djvu/735

 Either Kelpie had waked too soon, or he had overslept himself: she was kicking furiously. Hurriedly induing a portion of his clothing, he rushed down and across the yard, shouting to her as he ran, like a nurse as she runs up the stair to a screaming child. She stopped once to give an eager whinny, and then fell to again. Griffith, the groom, and the few other men about the place were looking on appalled. He darted to the corn-bin, got a great pottlefull of oats and shot into her stall. She buried her nose in them like the very demon of hunger, and he left her for the few moments of peace that would follow. He must finish dressing as fast as he could: already, after four days of travel, which with her meant anything but a straightforward, jogtrot struggle with space, she needed a good gallop. When he returned he found her just finishing her oats, and beginning to grow angry with her own nose for getting so near the bottom of the manger. While yet there was no worse sign, however, than the fidgeting of her hind quarters, and she was still busy, he made haste to saddle her. But her unusually obstinate refusal of the bit, and his difficulty in making her open her unwilling jaws, gave unmistakable indication of coming conflict. Anxiously he asked the bystanders after some open place where he might let her go — fields, or tolerably smooth heath, or sandy beach. He dared not take her through the trees, he said, while she was in such a humor: she would dash herself to pieces. They told him there was a road straight from the stables to the shore, and there miles of pure sand without a pebble. Nothing could be better. He mounted and rode away.

Florimel was yet but half dressed when the door of her room opened suddenly and Lady Clementina darted in, the lovely chaos of her night not more than half as far reduced to order as that of Florimel's. Her moonlight hair, nearly as long as that of the fabled Godiva, was flung wildly about her in heavy masses. Her eyes were wild also: she looked like a holy mænad. With a glide like the swoop of an avenging angel she pounced upon Florimel, caught her by the wrist, and pulled her toward the door. Florimel was startled, but made no resistance. She half led, half dragged her up a stair that rose from a corner of the hall-gallery to the battlements of a little square tower, whence a few yards of the beach, through a chain of slight openings amongst the pines, was visible. Upon that spot of beach a strange thing was going on, at which afresh Clementina gazed with indignant horror, but Florimel eagerly stared with the forward-borne eyes of a spectator of the Roman arena. She saw Kelpie reared on end, striking out at Malcolm with her fore hoofs and snapping with angry teeth, then upon those teeth receive such a blow from his fist that she swerved, and wheeling flung her hind hoofs at his head. But Malcolm was too quick for her: she spent her heels in the air and he had her by the bit. Again she reared, and would have struck at him, but he kept well by her side, and with the powerful bit forced her to rear to her full height. Just as she was falling backward he pushed her head from him, and, bearing her down sideways, seated himself on it the moment it touched the ground. Then first the two women turned to each other. An arch of victory bowed Florimel's lip: her eyebrows were uplifted; the blood flushed her cheek and darkened the blue in her wide-opened eyes. Lady Clementina's forehead was gathered in vertical wrinkles over her nose, and all about her eyes was contracted as if squeezing from them the flame of indignation, while her teeth and lips were firmly closed. The two made a splendid contrast. When Clementina's gaze fell on her visitor the fire in her eyes burned more angry still: her soul was stirred by the presence of wrong and cruelty, and here, her guest, and looking her straight in the eyes, was a young woman, one word from whom would stop it all, actually enjoying the sight!

"Lady Lossie, I am ashamed of you!" she said with severest reproof; and turning from her, she ran down the stair.

Florimel turned again toward the sea. Presently she caught sight of Clementina glimpsing through the pines, now in glimmer and now in gloom, as she sped swiftly to the shore, and after a few short minutes of disappearance saw her emerge upon the space of sand where sat Malcolm on the head of the demoness. But, alas! she could only see: she could hardly even hear the sound of a tide.

"MacPhail, are you a man?" cried Clementina, startling him so that in another instant the floundering mare would have been on her feet. With a right noble anger in her face and her hair flying like a wind-torn cloud, she rushed out of the wood upon him, where he sat quietly tracing a proposition of Euclid on the sand with his whip.

"Ay, and a bold one," was on Malcolm's lips for reply, but he bethought himself in time. "I am sorry what I am compelled 