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CHAPTER XXXVI: CONJUNCTIONS
As the days passed on, and Florimel heard nothing of Lenorme, the
uneasiness that came with the thought of him gradually diminished,
and all the associations of opposite complexion returned. Untrammelled
by fear, the path into a scaring future seeming to be cut off, her
imagination began to work in the quarry of her late experience,
shaping its dazzling material into gorgeous castles, with foundations
deep dug in the air, wherein lorded the person and gifts and
devotion of the painter. When lost in such blissful reveries, not
seldom moments arrived in which she imagined herself--even felt
as if she were capable, if not of marrying Lenorme in the flushed
face of outraged society, yet of fleeing with him from the judgment
of the all but all potent divinity to the friendly bosom of some
blessed isle of the southern seas, whose empty luxuriance they
might change into luxury, and there living a long harmonious idyll
of wedded love, in which old age and death should be provided
against by never taking them into account. This mere fancy, which,
poor in courage as it was in invention, she was far from capable
of carrying into effect, yet seemed to herself the outcome and sign
of a whole world of devotion in her bosom. If one of the meanest
of human conditions is conscious heroism, paltrier yet is heroism
before the fact, incapable of self realization! But even the poorest
dreaming has its influences, and the result of hers was that the
attentions of Liftore became again distasteful to her. And no wonder,
for indeed his lordship's presence in the actual world made a poor
show beside that of the painter in the ideal world of the woman
who, if she could not with truth be said to love him, yet certainly
had a powerful fancy for him: the mean phrase is good enough, even
although the phantom of Lenorme roused in her all the twilight
poetry of her nature, and the presence of Liftore set her whole
consciousness in the perpendicular shadowless gaslight of prudence
and self protection.
The pleasure of her castle building was but seldom interrupted by
any thought of the shamefulness of her behaviour to him. That did
not matter much! She could so easily make up for all he had suffered!
Her selfishness closed her eyes to her own falsehood. Had she meant
it truly she would have been right both for him and for herself.
To have repented and become as noble a creature as Lenorme was
capable of imagining her--not to say as God had designed her, would
indeed have been to make up for all he had suffered. But the poor
blandishment she contemplated as amends, could render him blessed
only while its intoxication blinded him to the fact that it meant
nothing of what it ought to mean, that behind it was no entire,
heart filled woman. Meantime, as the past, with its delightful
imprudences, its trembling joys, glided away, swiftly widening the
space between her and her false fears and shames, and seeming to
draw with it the very facts themselves, promising to obliterate at
length all traces of them, she gathered courage; and as the feeling
of exposure that had made the covert of Liftore's attentions
acceptable, began to yield, her variableness began to re-appear,
and his lordship to find her uncertain as ever. Assuredly, as his
aunt said, she was yet but a girl incapable of knowing her own mind,
and he must not press his suit. Nor had he the spur of jealousy
or fear to urge him: society regarded her as his; and the shadowy
repute of the bold faced countess intercepted some favourable rays
which would otherwise have fallen upon the young, and beautiful
marchioness from fairer luminaries even than Liftore.
But there was one good process, by herself little regarded, going
on in Florimel: notwithstanding the moral discomfort oftener than
once occasioned her by Malcolm, her confidence in him was increasing;
and now that the kind of danger threatening her seemed altered, she
leaned her mind upon him not a little--and more than she could
well have accounted for to herself on the only grounds she could
have adduced--namely that he was an attendant authorized by her
father, and, like herself loyal to his memory and will; and that,
faithful as a dog, he would fly at the throat of anyone who dared
touch her--of which she had had late proof, supplemented by his
silent endurance of consequent suffering. Demon sometimes looked
angry--when she teased him--had even gone so far as to bare his
teeth; but Malcolm had never shown temper. In a matter of imagined
duty, he might presume--but that was a small thing beside the
sense of safety his very presence brought with it. She shuddered
indeed at the remembrance of one look he had given her, but that
had been for no behaviour to himself; and now that the painter was
gone, she was clear of all temptation to the sort of thing that
had caused it; and never, never more would she permit herself to
be drawn into circumstances the least equivocal--If only Lenorme
would come back, and allow her to be his friend--his best friend
--his only young lady friend, leaving her at perfect liberty to do
just as she liked, then all would be well--absolutely comfortable!
In the meantime, life was endurable without him--and would be,
provided Liftore did not make himself disagreeable. If he did, there
were other gentlemen who might be induced to keep him in check: she
would punish him--she knew how. She liked him better, however,
than any of those.
It was out of pure kindness to Malcolm, upon Liftore's representation
of how he had punished him, that for the rest of the week she
dispensed with his attendance upon herself. But he, unaware of
the lies Liftore had told her, and knowing nothing, therefore, of
her reason for doing so, supposed she resented the liberty he had
taken in warning her against Caley, feared the breach would go on
widening, and went about, if not quite downcast, yet less hopeful
still. Everything seemed going counter to his desires. A whole world
of work lay before him:--a harbour to build; a numerous fisher
clan to house as they ought to be housed; justice to do on all
sides; righteous servants to appoint in place of oppressors; and,
all over, to show the heavens more just than his family had in
the past allowed them to appear; he had mortgages and other debts
to pay off--clearing his feet from fetters and his hands from
manacles, that he might be the true lord of his people; he had
Miss Horn to thank, and the schoolmaster to restore to the souls
and hearts of Portlossie; and, next of all to his sister, he had
old Duncan, his first friend and father, to find and minister to.
Not a day passed, not a night did he lay down his head, without
thinking of him. But the old man, whatever his hardships, and
even the fishermen, with no harbour to run home to from the wild
elements, were in no dangers to compare with such as threatened his
sister. To set her free was his first business, and that business
as yet refused to be done. Hence he was hemmed in, shut up,
incarcerated in stubborn circumstance, from a long reaching range
of duties, calling aloud upon his conscience and heart to hasten
with the first, that he might reach the second. What rendered it
the more disheartening was, that, having discovered, as he hoped,
how to compass his first end, the whole possibility had by his
sister's behaviour, and the consequent disappearance of Lenorme,
been swept from him, leaving him more resourceless than ever.
When Sunday evening came, he found his way to Hope Chapel, and
walking in, was shown to a seat by a grimy faced pew opener. It
was with strange feelings he sat there, thinking of the past, and
looking for the appearance of his friend on the pulpit stair. But
his feelings would have been stranger still had he seen who sat
immediately in the pew behind him, watching him like a cat watching
a mouse, or rather like a half grown kitten watching a rat, for
she was a little frightened at him, even while resolved to have
him. But how could she doubt her final success, when her plans
were already affording her so much more than she had expected? Who
would have looked for the great red stag himself to come browsing
so soon about the scarecrow! He was too large game, however, to be
stalked without due foresight.
When the congregation was dismissed, after a sermon the power of
whose utterance astonished Malcolm, accustomed as he was to the
schoolmaster's best moods, he waited until the preacher was at
liberty from the unwelcome attentions and vulgar congratulations
of the richer and more forward of his hearers, and then joined him
to walk home with him.--He was followed to the schoolmaster's
lodging, and thence, an hour after, to his own, by a little boy
far too little to excite suspicion, the grandson of Mrs Catanach's
friend, the herb doctor.
Until now the woman had not known that Malcolm was in London. When
she learned that he was lodged so near Portland Place, she concluded
that he was watching his sister, and chuckled over the idea of his
being watched in turn by herself.
Every day for weeks after her declaration concerning the birth of
Malcolm, had the mind of Mrs Catanach been exercised to the utmost
to invent some mode of undoing her own testimony. She would have
had no scruples, no sense of moral disgust, in eating every one of
her words; but a magistrate and a lawyer had both been present at
the uttering of them, and she feared the risk. Malcolm's behaviour
to her after his father's death had embittered the unfriendly
feelings she had cherished towards him for many years. While she
believed him base born, and was even ignorant as to his father,
she had thought to secure power over him for the annoyance of the
blind old man to whom she had committed him, and whom she hated
with the hatred of a wife with whom for the best of reasons he
had refused to live; but she had found in the boy a rectitude over
which although she had assailed it from his childhood, she could
gain no influence. Either a blind repugnance in Malcolm's soul, or
a childish instinct of and revulsion from embodied evil, had held
them apart. Even then it had added to her vile indignation that she
regarded him as owing her gratitude for not having murdered him at
the instigation of his uncle; and when at length, to her endless
chagrin, she had herself unwittingly supplied the only lacking
link in the testimony that should raise him to rank and wealth,
she imagined, that by making affidavit to the facts she had already
divulged, she enlarged the obligation infinitely, and might henceforth
hold him in her hand a tool for further operations. When, therefore,
he banished her from Lossie House, and sought to bind her to silence
as to his rank by the conditional promise of a small annuity, she
hated him with her whole huge power of hating. And now she must make
speed, for his incognito in a great city afforded a thousandfold
facility for doing him a mischief. And first she must draw closer
a certain loose tie she had already looped betwixt herself and
the household of Lady Bellair. This tie was the conjunction of her
lying influence with the credulous confidence of a certain very
ignorant and rather wickedly romantic scullery maid with whom,
having in espial seen her come from the house she had scraped
acquaintance, and to whom, for the securing of power over her through
her imagination, she had made the strangest and most appalling
disclosures. Amongst other secret favours, she had promised to
compound for her a horrible mixture--some of whose disgusting
ingredients, as potent as hard to procure, she named in her awe
stricken hearing--which, administered under certain conditions
and with certain precautions, one of which was absolute secrecy in
regard to the person who provided it, must infallibly secure for
her the affections of any man on whom she might cast a loving eye,
and whom she could either with or without his consent, contrive to
cause partake of the same. This girl she now sought, and from her
learned all she knew about Malcolm. Pursuing her enquiries into
the nature and composition of the household, however, Mrs Catanach
soon discovered a far more capable and indeed less scrupulous
associate and instrument in Caley. I will not introduce my reader
to any of their evil councils, although, for the sake of my own
credit, it might be well to be less considerate, seeing that many,
notwithstanding the superabundant evidence of history, find it all
but impossible to believe in the existence of such moral abandonment
as theirs. I will merely state concerning them, and all the relations
of the two women, that Mrs Catanach assumed and retained the upper
hand, in virtue of her superior knowledge, invention, and experience,
gathering from Caley, as she had hoped much valuable information,
full of reactions, and tending to organic development of scheme in
the brain of the arch plotter. But their designs were so mutually
favourable as to promise from the first a final coalescence in some
common plan for their attainment.
Those who knew that Miss Campbell, as Portlossie regarded her, had
been in reality Lady Lossie, and was the mother of Malcolm, knew as
well that Florimel had no legal title even to the family cognomen;
but if his mother, and therefore the time of his mother's death,
remained unknown, the legitimacy of his sister would remain
unsuspected even upon his appearance as the heir. Now there were
but three besides Mrs Catanach and Malcolm who did know who was his
mother, namely, Miss Horn, Mr Graham, and a certain Mr Morrison, a
laird and magistrate near Portlossie, an elderly man, and of late
in feeble health. The lawyers the marquis had employed on his death
bed did not know: he had, for Florimel's sake taken care that they
should not. Upon what she knew and what she guessed of these facts
regarded in all their relations according to her own theories of
human nature the midwife would found a scheme of action.
Doubtless she saw, and prepared for it, that after a certain point
should be reached the very similarity of their designs must cause
a rupture between her and Caley; neither could expect the other to
endure such a rival near her hidden throne of influence; for the
aim of both was power in a great family, with consequent money, and
consideration, and midnight councils, and the wielding of all the
weapons of hint and threat and insinuation. There was one difference,
indeed, that in Caley's eye money was the chief thing, while power
itself was the Swedenborgian hell of the midwife's bliss.
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