Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/161

Rh 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 foam-bells 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 to 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-fitting 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 at the dayside 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 still was 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 odor in his heart, but not because she had listened to him. The very fullness 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 tomorrow — 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