Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/159

Rh the worse of the two. There may be some respect in hate."

Here he paused, for here was a chance that was not likely to recur. He might say before two ladies what he could not say before one. If he could but rouse Florimel's indignation! Then at any suitable time only a word more would be needful to direct it upon the villain. Clementina's eyes continued fixed upon him. At length he spoke: "I will try to make two pictures in your mind, my lady, if you will help me to paint them. In my mind they are not painted pictures. — A long seacoast, my lady, and a stormy night; the sea-horses rushing in from the northeast, and the snowflakes beginning to fall. On the margin of the sea a long dune or sandbank, and on the top of it, her head bare and her thin cotton dress nearly torn from her by the wind, a young woman, worn and white, with an old faded tartan shawl tight about her shoulders, and the shape of a baby inside it upon her arm."

"Oh, she doesn't mind the cold," said Florimel. "When I was there I didn't mind it a bit."

"She does not mind the cold," answered Malcolm: "she is far too miserable for that."

"But she has no business to take the baby out on such a night," continued Florimel, carelessly critical. "You ought to have painted her by the fireside. They have all of them firesides to sit at. I have seen them through the windows many a time."

"Shame or cruelty had driven her from it," said Malcolm, "and there she was."

"Do you mean you saw her yourself wandering about?" asked Clementina.

"Twenty times, my lady."

Clementina was silent.

"Well, what comes next?" said Florimel.

"Next comes a young gentleman — but this is a picture in another frame, although of the same night — a young gentleman in evening dress, sipping his madeira, warm and comfortable, in the bland temper that should follow the best of dinners, his face beaming with satisfaction after some boast concerning himself, or with silent success in the concoction of one or two compliments to have at hand when he joins the ladies in the drawing-room."

"Nobody can help such differences," said Florimel. "If there were nobody rich, who would there be to do anything for the poor? It's not the young gentleman's fault that he is better born and has more money than the poor girl."

"No," said Malcolm; "but what if the poor girl has the young gentleman's child to carry about from morning to night?"

"Oh, well, I suppose she's paid for it," said Florimel, whose innocence must surely have been supplemented by some stupidity born of her flippancy.

"Do be quiet, Florimel," said Clementina: "you don't know what you are talking about."

Her face was in a glow, and one glance at it set Florimel's in a flame. She rose without a word, but with a look of mingled confusion and offence, and walked away. Clementina gathered her work together. But ere she followed her she turned to Malcolm, looked him calmly in the face, and said, "No one can blame you for hating such a man."

"Indeed, my lady, but some one would — the only One for whose praise or blame we ought to care more than a straw or two. He tells us we are neither to judge nor to hate. But ——"

"I cannot stay and talk with you." said Clementina. "You must pardon me if I follow your mistress."

Another moment and he would have told her all, in the hope of her warning Florimel. But she was gone.

 

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 endeavors 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, 