Part 71 (2/2)

”It's naething less than an insult to my mither to ca' yon wuman by her name,” he replied with set teeth.

It was to him an offence against the idea of motherhood--against the mother he had so often imagined luminous against the dull blank of memory, to call such a woman his mother.

”She's a very ladylike, handsome woman--handsome enough to be your mother even, Mr Malcolm Stewart.”

Florimel could not have dared the words but for the distance between them; but, then, neither would she have said them while the distance was greater! They were lost on Malcolm though, for never in his life having started the question whether he was handsome or not, he merely supposed her making game of him, and drew himself together in silence, with the air of one bracing himself to hear and endure the worst.

”Even if she should not be your mother,” his tormentor resumed, ”to show such a dislike to any woman is nothing less than cruelty.”

”She maun pruv' 't,” murmured Malcolm--not the less emphatically that the words were but just audible.

”Of course she will not do that; she has abundance of proof. She gave me a whole hour of proof.”

”Lang's no strang,” returned Malcolm ”there's comfort i' that! Gang on my leddy.”

”Poor woman! it was hard enough to lose her son; but to find him again such as you seem likely to turn out, I should think ten times worse.”

”Nae doobt! nae doobt!--But there's ae thing waur.”

”What is that?”

”To come upon a mither 'at--”

He stopped abruptly; his eyes went wandering about the room, and the muscles of his face worked convulsively.

Florimel saw that she had been driving against a stone wall. She paused a moment, and then resumed.

”Anyhow, if she is your mother,” she said, ”nothing you can do will alter it.”

”She maun pruv' 't,” was all Malcolm's dogged reply.

”Just so; and if she can't,” said Florimel, ”you'll be no worse than you were before--and no better,” she added with a sigh.

Malcolm lifted his questioning to her searching eyes.

”Don't you .see,” she went on, very softly, and lowering her look, from the half conscious shame of half unconscious falseness, ”I can't be all my life here at Lossie? We shall have to say goodbye to each other--never to meet again most likely. But if you should turn out to be of good family, you know,--”

Florimel saw neither the paling of his brown cheek nor the great surge of red that followed, but, glancing up to spy the effect of her argument, did see the lightning that broke from the darkened hazel of his eyes, and again cast down her own.

”--then there might be some chance,” she went on, ”of our meeting somewhere--in London, or perhaps in Edinburgh, and I could ask you to my house--after I was married you know.”

Heaven and earth seemed to close with a snap around his brain.

The next moment, they had receded an immeasurable distance, and in limitless wastes of exhausted being he stood alone. What time had pa.s.sed when he came to himself he had not an idea; it might have been hours for anything his consciousness was able to tell him.

But, although he recalled nothing of what she had been urging, he grew aware that Lady Florimel's voice, which was now in his ears, had been sounding in them all the time. He was standing before her like a marble statue with a dumb thrill in its helpless heart of stone. He must end this! Parting was bad enough, but an endless parting was unendurable! To know that measureless impa.s.sable leagues lay between them, and yet to be for ever in the shroud of a cold leave taking! To look in her eyes, and know that she was not there!

A parting that never broke the bodily presence--that was the form of agony which the infinite moment a.s.sumed. As to the possibility she would bribe him with--it was not even the promise of a glimpse of Abraham's bosom from the heart of h.e.l.l. With such an effort as breaks the bonds of a nightmare dream, he turned from her, and, heedless of her recall, went slowly, steadily, out of the house.

While she was talking, his eyes had been resting with gla.s.sy gaze upon the far off waters: the moment he stepped into the open air, and felt the wind on his face, he knew that their turmoil was the travailing of sympathy, and that the ocean had been drawing him all the time. He walked straight to his little boat, lying dead on the sands of the harbour, launched it alive on the smooth water within the piers, rove his halliard, stepped his mast, hoisted a few inches of sail, pulled beyond the sheltering sea walls, and was tossing amidst the torn waters whose jagged edges were twisted in the loose flying threads of the northern gale. A moment more, and he was sitting on the windward gunwale of his spoon of a boat, with the tiller in one hand and the sheet in the other, as she danced like a cork over the broken tops of the waves. For help in his sore need, instinct had led him to danger.

<script>