Malcolm

“ Most of the men recognized the marquis; some near the entrance saw only Malcolm clearing the way: marquis or fisher, it was all the same when souls were at stake: they crowded with one consent to oppose their exit: yet another chance they must have, whether they would or not. These men were in the mood to give—not their own —but those other men’s bodies to be burnt on the poorest chance of saving their souls from the everlasting burnings.
Malcolm would have been ready enough for a fight, had he and the marquis been alone, but the presence of Lady Florimel put it out of the question. ”

“ Malcolm went from him—
like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn.
Here was trouble upon trouble! But what had befallen him compared with what had come upon the schoolmaster! A man like him to be so treated! How gladly he would work for him all the rest of his days! And how welcome his grandfather would make him to his cottage! Lord Lossie would be the last to object. But he knew it was a baseless castle while he built it, for Mr Graham would assuredly provide for himself, if it were by breaking stones on the road and saying the Lord’s Prayer. ”

“ In the enforced quiescence, and under the excitements of pain and fever, Malcolm first became aware how much the idea of Lady Florimel had at length possessed him. But even in his own thought he never once came upon the phrase, in love, as representing his condition in regard of her: he only knew that he worshipped her, and would be overjoyed to die for her. The youth had about as little vanity as could well consist with individual coherence; if he was vain at all, it was neither of his intellectual nor personal endowments, but of the few tunes he could play on his grandfather’s pipes. ”

“ While Malcolm gazed, trying to think what his master would have him think, the latter resumed.
“If he is risen—if the sun is up, Malcolm—then the morning and not the evening is the season for the place of tombs; the morning when the shadows are shortening and separating, not the evening when they are growing all into one. ”

“ On Sundays, Malcolm was always more or less annoyed by the obtrusive presence of his arms and legs, accompanied by a vague feeling that, at any moment, and no warning given, they might, with some insane and irrepressible flourish, break the Sabbath on their own account, and degrade him in the eyes of his fellow-townsmen, who seemed all silently watching how he bore the restraints of the holy day. ”

“ Malcolm could not rest. He was feverish with the shock of grief and awe, and absorbed in the thought which had mastered him, and which was much dwelt on in the middle ages:—the monastic path, going towards heaven straight as a sunbeam; the secular, twining its way through a tortuous difficult course—the ‘broad way,’ tending downward to the abyss. ”

“ His wrath gradually died away, until at last he begged his boy to take his pipes, that he might give him a lesson. Malcolm made the attempt, but found it impossible to fill the bag with his swollen and cut lips, and had to beg his grandfather to play to him instead. He gladly consented, and played until bed-time; when, having tucked him up, Malcolm went quietly to his own room, avoiding supper and the eyes of Mrs Courthope together. He fell asleep in a moment, and spent a night of perfect oblivion, dreamless of wizard lord or witch lady. ”

“ As the trees thinned away, and his feet sank deeper in the looser sand, and the sea broke blue out of the infinite, talking quietly to itself of its own solemn swell into being out of the infinite thought unseen, Malcolm felt as if the world with its loveliness and splendour were sinking behind him, and the cool entrancing sweetness of the eternal dreamland of the soul, where the dreams are more real than any sights of the world, were opening wide before his entering feet. ”

“ The marquis, looking very pale, for he could never endure the cry of a woman even in a play, rose, and taking Florimel by the arm, turned to leave the place. Malcolm hurried to the front to make way for them. But the preacher caught sight of the movement, and, filled with a fury which seemed to him sacred, rushed to the rescue of souls.
“Stop!” he shouted. “Go not hence, I charge you. On your lives I charge you! Turn ye, turn ye: why will ye die? There is no fleeing from Satan. You must resist the devil. He that flies is lost. ”

“ Malcolm lifted Lady Florimel in his great arms and bore her tenderly to her own apartment. There he left her to the care of her women and returned to the chamber of death.
Meantime, Mr. Graham and Mr. Soutar had come. When Malcolm re-entered the schoolmaster took him kindly by the arm and said, "Malcolm, there can be neither place nor moment fitter for the solemn communication I am commissioned to make to you: I have, as in the presence of your dead father, to inform you that you are now marquis of Lossie; and God forbid you should be less worthy as marquis than you have been as fisherman!" ”

“ He sat down in the mouth of the cave, and looked out on the still, half-waking world of ocean and sky before him—a leaden ocean, and a dull misty sky; and as he gazed, a sadness came stealing over him, and a sense of the endlessness of labour—labour ever returning on itself and making no progress. The mad laird was always lamenting his ignorance of his origin: Malcolm thought he knew whence he came—and yet what was the much good of life? Where was the end to it all? People so seldom got what they desired! To be sure his life was a happy one, or had been—but there was the poor laird! ”

“ The rusted iron cross on the eastern gable of the old church stood glowing lustreless in the westering sun; while the gilded vane, whose business was the wind, creaked radiantly this way and that, in the flaws from the region of the sunset: its shadow flickered soft on the new grave, where the grass of the wounded sod was drooping. Again seated on a neighbour stone, Malcolm found his friend.
“See,” said the schoolmaster as the fisherman sat down beside him, “how the shadow from one grave stretches like an arm to embrace another! ”

“ By a winding carriage-drive, through trees whose growth was stunted by the sea-winds, which had cut off their tops as with a keen razor, Malcolm made a slow descent, yet was soon shadowed by timber of a more prosperous growth, rising as from a lake of the loveliest green, spangled with starry daisies. The air was full of sweet odours uplifted with the ascending dew, and trembled with a hundred songs at once, for here was a very paradise for birds. ”

“ The whole feeling was as if something had been finished in heaven, and the outmost ripples of the following rest had overflowed and were now pulsing faintly and dreamily across the bosom of the labouring earth, with feeblest suggestion of the mighty peace beyond. Alas, words can do so little! even such a night is infinite.
“Ay,” answered the laird; “but it maks me dowfart (melancholy) like, i’ the inside.”
“Some o’ the best things does that,” said Malcolm. “I think a kiss frae my mither wad gar me greet.” ”

“ The sense of infinitude which comes to the soul when it is in harmony with the peace of nature, arose and spread itself abroad in Malcolm’s being, and he felt with the Galilæans of old, when they forsook their nets and followed him who called them, that catching fish was not the end of his being, although it was the work his hands had found to do. ”

“ There is no plainer sign of the need of a God, than the possible fate of love. The celestial Cupido may soar aloft on seraph wings that assert his origin, or fall down on the belly of a snake and creep to hell.
But Malcolm was not of the stuff of which coxcombs are made, and had not begun to think even of the abyss that separated Lady Florimel and himself—an abyss like that between star and star, across which stretches no mediating air—a blank and blind space. He felt her presence only as that of a being to be worshipped, to be heard with rapture, and yet addressed without fear. ”

“ Seized occasionally by the might of the thoughts which arose in him,—thoughts which would, to him, have lost all their splendour as well as worth, had he imagined them the offspring of his own faculty, meteors of his own atmosphere instead of phenomena of the heavenly region manifesting themselves on the hollow side of the celestial sphere of human vision,—he would break forth in grand poetic speech that roused to aspiration Malcolm’s whole being, while in the same instant calming him with the summer peace of profoundest faith. ”

“ I have no fancy for being made ashamed of myself. The fact is I’m not fit for such company, and I don’t believe there is any such place. But if there be, I trust in God there isn’t any other, or it will go badly with your poor master, Malcolm. It doesn’t look like true—now does it? Only such a multitude of things I thought I had done with for ever, keep coming up and grinning at me! It nearly drives me mad, Malcolm—and I would fain die like a gentleman, with a cool bow and a sharp face-about.”
“Wadna ye hae a word wi’ somebody ’at kens, my lord?” said Malcolm, scarcely able to reply. ”

“ Haven't you any other friends in London to whom she could have gone?"
"None--except an old servant of Achree who lives somewhere about the Edgeware Road," said Malcolm with a sudden flash of remembrance. "Don't wear such a worried look, old chap, and don't forget that Isla is twenty-six years of age and more capable than either of us of looking after herself."
"But, hang it all, she's a woman, Malcolm, and--and your sister ought not to be adrift like that!"
"She isn't adrift," said Malcolm cheerily. "And, anyway, what can we do? ”

“ As their heads rose over the top, and the sky-night above and the sea-night beneath rolled themselves out and rushed silently together, Malcolm said, as if thinking aloud:
“Thus shall we meet death and the unknown, and the new that breaks from the bosom of the invisible will be better than the old upon which the gates close behind us. The Son of man is content with my future, and I am content.”
There was a peace in the words that troubled Clementina: he wanted no more than he had—this cold, imperturbable, devout fisherman! ”

“ Malcolm had been a favourite pupil, and the relation of master and scholar did not cease when the latter saw that he ought to do something to lighten the burden of his grandfather, and so left the school and betook himself to the life of a fisherman—with the slow leave of Duncan, who had set his heart on making a scholar of him, and would never, indeed, had Gaelic been amongst his studies, have been won by the most laboursome petition. ”

“ Was this the reading of Esclairmonde’s riddle? suddenly thought Malcolm. Was the true search for heavenly Light, then, to consist in holding up to his countrymen the lamp he was kindling for himself? Must true wisdom consist in treasuring knowledge, not for his own honour among learned men, or the delectation of his own mind, but to scatter it among these rude northern souls? Must the vision of learned research and scholarly calm vanish, as cloistral peace, and chivalrous love and glory, had vanished before? and was the lot of a hard-working secular priest that which called him? ”

“ The words of the boy pleased Malcolm more than he judged it wise to manifest. He looked hard at Davy. There was little to he seen in his face except the best and only thing — truth. It shone from his found pale-blue eyes; it conquered the self-assertion of his unhappy nose; it seemed to glow in every freckle of his sunburnt cheeks as earnestly he returned Malcolm's gaze.
"But," said Malcolm, almost satisfied, "how is this, Travers? I never gave you any instructions about the boy." ”

“ The laird was wandering in the thorny thickets and slimy marshes which, haunted by the thousand mis-shapen horrors of delirium, beset the gates of life. That one so near the light, and slowly drifting into it, should lie tossing in hopeless darkness! Is it that the delirium falls, a veil of love, to hide other and more real terrors?
His eyes would now and then meet those of Malcolm, as they gazed tenderly upon him, but the living thing that looked out of the windows was darkened, and saw him not. ”

“ The air and the light seemed one, and Malcolm felt as if his soul were breathing the light into its very depths, while his body was drinking the soft spicy wind. For Kelpie, she was as full of life as if she had been meant for a winged horse, but by some accident of nature the wing-cases had never opened, and the wing-life was forever trying to get out at her feet. The consequent restlessness, where there was plenty of space as here, caused Malcolm no more discomposure than, in his old fishing-days, a gale with plenty of sea-room. ”

“ Malcolm thought all slept. He did not see how Clementina’s eyes shone back to the heavens—no star in them to be named beside those eyes. She knew that Malcolm was near her, but she would not speak; she would not break the peace of the presence. A minute or two passed. Then softly woke a murmur of sound, that strengthened and grew, and swelled at last into a song. She feared to stir lest she should interrupt its flow. And thus it flowed:
The stars are steady abune;
I’ the water they flichter an’ flee;
But steady aye luikin’ doon,
They ken themsels i’ the sea. ”

“ But as Malcolm uttered her name, his heart sank within him, for their talk the night he had sought her hospitality for the laird, came back to his memory, burning like an acrid poison.
“You can’t do better,” said Mr Graham. “The report itself may be false—or true, and the lady mistaken.”
“She’ll hae to pruv ’t weel afore I say haud,” rejoined Malcolm.
“And suppose she does?”
“In that case,” said Malcolm, with a composure almost ghastly, “a man maun tak what mither it pleases God to gie him. But faith! she winna du wi’ me as wi’ the puir laird. ”