Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/410

404 home would, she said to herself, set everything right: and if Malcolm had now repented and put about, she would instantly have ordered him to hold on for Lossie. But it was mortifying that she should have come at the will of Malcolm, and not by her own — worse than mortifying that perhaps she would have to say so. If she were going to say so she must turn him away as soon as she arrived. There was no help for it. She dared not keep him after that in the face of society. But she might take the bold, and perhaps a little dangerous, measure of adopting the flight as altogether her own madcap idea. Her thoughts went floundering in the bog of expediency until she was tired, and declined from thought to reverie. Then, dawning out of the dreamland of her past, appeared the image of Lenorme. Pure pleasure, glorious delight, such as she now felt, could not long possess her mind without raising in its charmed circle the vision of the only man except her father whom she had ever something like loved. Her behavior to him had not yet roused in her shame or sorrow or sense of wrong. She had driven him from her; she was ashamed of her relation to him; she had caused him bitter suffering; she had all but promised to marry another man; yet she had not the slightest wish for that man's company there and then: with no one of her acquaintance but Lenorme could she have shared this conscious splendor of life. "Would to God he had been born a gentleman instead of a painter!" she said to herself when her imagination had brought him from the past and set him in the midst of the present. "Rank," she said, "I am above caring about. In that he might be ever so far my inferior and welcome, if only he had been o£ a good family, a gentleman born." She was generosity, magnanimity itself, in her own eyes. Yet he was of far better family than she knew, for she had never taken the trouble to inquire into his history. And now she was so much easier in her mind since she had so cruelly broken with him that she felt positively virtuous because she had done it and he was not at that moment by her side. And yet if he had that moment stepped from behind the mainsail she would in all probability have thrown herself into his arms.

The day passed on. Florimel grew tired and went to sleep; woke and had her dinner; took a volume of the "Arabian Nights" and read herself again to sleep; woke again; went on deck; saw the sun growing weary in the west. And still the unwearied wind blew, and still the Psyche danced on, as unwearied as the wind.

The sunset was rather an assumption than a decease, a reception of him out of their sight into an eternity of gold and crimson; and when he was gone, and the gorgeous bliss had withered into a dove-hued grief, then the cool, soft twilight, thoughtful of the past and its love, crept out of the western caves over the breast of the water, and filled the dome, and made of itself a great lens royal, through which the stars and their motions were visible; and the ghost of Aurora with both hands lifted her shroud above her head, and made a dawn for the moon on the verge of the watery horizon — a dawn as of the past, the hour of inverted hope. Not a word all day had been uttered between Malcolm and his mistress: when the moon appeared, with the waves sweeping up against her face, he approached Florimel where she sat in the stern. Davy was steering. "Will your ladyship come forward and see how the Psyche goes?" he said. "At the stern you can see only the passive part of her motion. It is quite another thing to see the will of her at work in the bows."

At first she was going to refuse, but she changed her mind, or her mind changed her: she was not much more of a living and acting creature yet than the Psyche herself. She said nothing, but rose and permitted Malcolm to help her forward.

It was the moon's turn now to be level with the water, and as Florimel stood on the larboard side, leaning over and gazing down, she saw her shine through the little feather of spray the cutwater sent curling up before it and turn it into pearls and semi-opals.

"She's got a bone in her mouth, you see, my lady," said old Travers.

"Go' aft till I call you, Travers," said Malcolm.

Rose was in Florimel's cabin, and they were now quite alone.

"My lady," said Malcolm, "I can't bear to have you angry with me."

"Then you ought not to deserve it," returned Florimel.

"My lady, if you knew all, you would not say I deserved it."

"Tell me all, then, and let me judge."

"I cannot tell you all yet, but I will tell you something which may perhaps incline you to feel merciful. Did your ladyship ever think what could make me so much attached to your father?"

"No, indeed. I never saw anything 