The Marquis of Lossie

At this time she had been for some painful months in possession of a most important one – painful, I say, because all those months she had discovered no possibility of making use of it. The trial had been hard. Her one passion was to drive the dark horses of society, and here she had been sitting week after week on the coach box over the finest team she had ever handled, ramping and "foming tarre," unable to give them their heads because the demon grooms had disappeared and left the looped traces dangling from their collars. She had followed Florimel from Portlossie – to Edinburgh, and then to London, but not yet had seen how to approach her with probable advantage. In the meantime she had renewed old relations with a certain herb doctor in Kentish Town, at whose house she was now accommodated. There she had already begun to entice the confidences of maid servants, by use of what evil knowledge she had, and pretence to more, giving herself out as a wise woman. Her faith never failed her that, if she but kept handling the fowls of circumstance, one or other of them must at length drop an egg of opportunity in her lap. When she stumbled upon the schoolmaster, preaching in a chapel near her own haunts, she felt something more like a gust of gratitude to the dark power that sat behind and pulled the strings of events – for thus she saw through her own projected phantom the heart of the universe – than she had ever yet experienced. If there were such things as special providences, here, she said, was one; if not, then it was better luck than she had looked for. The main point in it was that the dominie seemed likely after all to turn out a popular preacher; then beyond a doubt other Scotch people would gather to him; this or that person might turn up, and anyone might turn out useful; one thread might be knotted to another, until all together had made a clue to guide her straight through the labyrinth to the centre, to lay her hand on the collar of the demon of the house of Lossie. It was the biggest game of her life, and had been its game long before the opening of my narrative.

CHAPTER XXXV: THE EVIL GENIUS

When Malcolm first visited Mr Graham, the schoolmaster had already preached two or three times in the pulpit of Hope Chapel. His ministrations at the prayer meetings had led to this. For every night on which he was expected to speak, there were more people present than on the last; and when the deacons saw this, they asked him to preach on the Sundays. After two Sundays they came to him in a body, and besought him to become a candidate for the vacant pulpit, assuring him of success if he did so. He gave a decided refusal, however, nor mentioned his reasons. His friend Marshal urged him, pledging himself for his income to an amount which would have been riches to the dominie, but in vain. Thereupon the silk mercer concluded that he must have money, and, kind man as he was, grew kinder in consequence, and congratulated him on his independence.

"I depend more on the fewness of my wants than on any earthly store for supplying them," said the dominie.

Marshal's thermometer fell a little, but not his anxiety to secure services which, he insisted, would be for the glory of God and the everlasting good of perishing souls. The schoolmaster only smiled queerly and held his peace.

He consented, however, to preach the next Sunday, and on the Monday, consented to preach the next again. For several weeks the same thing occurred. But he would never promise on a Sunday, or allow the briefest advertisement to be given concerning him. All said he was feeling his way.

Neither had he, up to this time, said a word to Malcolm about the manner in which his Sundays were employed, while yet he talked much about a school he had opened in a room occupied in the evenings by a debating club, where he was teaching such children of small shopkeepers and artisans as found their way to him – in part through his connection with the chapel folk. When Malcolm had called on a Sunday, his landlady had been able to tell him nothing more than that Mr Graham had gone out at such and such an hour – she presumed to church; and when he had once or twice expressed a wish to accompany him wherever he went to worship, Mr Graham had managed somehow to let him go without having made any arrangement for his doing so.

On the evening after his encounter with Liftore, Malcolm visited the schoolmaster, and told him everything about the affair. He concluded by saying that Lizzie's wrongs had loaded the whip far more than his sister's insult; but that he was very doubtful whether he had had any right to constitute himself the avenger of either after such a fashion. Mr Graham replied that a man ought never to be carried away by wrath, as he had so often sought to impress upon him, and not without success: but that, in the present case, as the rascal deserved it so well, he did not think he need trouble himself much. At the same time he ought to remind himself that the rightness or wrongness of any particular act was of far less consequence than the rightness or wrongness of the will whence sprang the act; and that, while no man could be too anxious as to whether a contemplated action ought or ought not to be done, at the same time no man could do anything absolutely right until he was one with him whose was the only absolute self generated purity – that is, until God dwelt in him and he in God.

Before he left, the schoolmaster had acquainted him with all that portion of his London history which he had hitherto kept from him, and told him where he was preaching.

When Caley returned to her mistress after giving Malcolm the message that she did not require his services, and reported the condition of his face, Florimel informed her of the chastisement he had received from Liftore, and desired her to find out for her how he was, for she was anxious about him. Somehow Florimel felt sorrier for him than she could well understand, seeing he was but a groom – a great lumbering fellow, all his life used to hard knocks, which probably never hurt him. That her mistress should care so much about him added yet an acrid touch to Caley's spite; but she put on her bonnet and went to the mews, to confer with the wife of his lordship's groom, who, although an honest woman, had not yet come within her dislike. She went to make her inquiries, however, full of grave doubt as to his lordship's statement to her mistress; and the result of them was a conviction that, beyond his facial bruises, of which Mrs Merton had heard no explanation, Malcolm had had no hurt. This confirmed her suspicion that his lordship had received what he professed to have given: from a window she had seen him mount his horse; and her woman's fancy for him; while it added to her hate of Malcolm, did not prevent her from thinking of the advantage the discovery might bring in the prosecution of her own schemes. But now she began to fear Malcolm a little as well as hate him. And indeed he was rather a dangerous person to have about, where all but himself had secrets more or less bad, and one at least had dangerous ones – as Caley's conscience, or what poor monkey rudiment in her did duty for one, in private asserted. Notwithstanding her hold upon her mistress, she would not have felt it quite safe to let her know all her secrets. She would not have liked to say, for instance, how often she woke suddenly with a little feeble wail sounding in the ears that fingers cannot stop, or to confess that it cried out against a double injustice, that of life and that of death: she had crossed the border of the region of horror, and went about with a worm coiled in her heart, like a centipede in the stone of a peach.

"Merton's wife knows nothing, my lady," she said on her return. "I saw the fellow in the yard going about much as usual. He will stand a good deal of punishing, I fancy, my lady – like that brute of a horse he makes such a fuss with. I can't help wishing, for your ladyship's sake, we had never set eyes on him. He 'll do us all a mischief yet before we get rid of him. I've had a hinstinc' of it, my lady; from the first moment I set eyes on him," Caley's speech was never classic. When she was excited it was low. – "And when I 'ave a hinstinc' of anythink, he's not a dog as barks for nothink. Mark my words – and I'm sure I beg your pardon, my lady – but that man will bring shame on the house. He's that arrergant an' interferin' as is certain sure to bring your ladyship into public speech an' a scandal: things will come to be spoke, my lady, that hadn't ought to be mentioned. Why, my lady, he must ha' struck his lordship, afore he'd ha' give him two such black eyes as them! And him that good natured an' condescendin'! – I'm sure I don't know what's to come on it, but your ladyship might cast a thought on the rest of us females as can't take the liberties of born ladies without sufferin' for it. Think what the world will say of us. It's hard, my lady, on the likes of us."

But Florimel was not one to be talked into doing what she did not choose. Neither would she to her maid render her reasons for not choosing. She had repaired her fortifications, strengthened herself with Liftore, and was confident.

"The fact is, Caley," she said, "I have fallen in love with Kelpie, and never mean to part with her – at least till I can ride her – or she kills me. So I can't do without MacPhail. And I hope she won't kill him before he has persuaded her to let me mount her. The man must go with the mare. Besides, he is such a strange fellow, if I turned him away I should quite expect him to poison her before he left."

The maid's face grew darker. That her mistress had the slightest intention of ever mounting that mare she did not find herself fool enough to believe, but of other reasons she could spy plenty behind. And such there truly were, though none of the sort which Caley's imagination, swift to evil, now supplied. The kind of confidence she reposed in her groom, Caley had no faculty for understanding, and was the last person to whom her mistress could impart the fact of her father's leaving her in charge to his young henchman. To the memory of her father she clung, and so far faithfully that, even now when Malcolm had begun to occasion her a feeling of awe and rebuke, she did not the less confidently regard him as her good genius that he was in danger of becoming an unpleasant one.

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.

CHAPTER XXXVII: AN INNOCENT PLOT

Florimel and Lady Clementina Thornicroft, the same who in the park rebuked Malcolm for his treatment of Kelpie, had met several times during the spring, and had been mutually attracted – Florimel as to a nature larger, more developed, more self supporting than her own, and Lady Clementina as to one who, it was plain, stood in sore need of what countenance and encouragement to good and free action the friendship of one more experienced might afford her. Lady Clementina was but a few years older than Florimel, it is true, but had shown a courage which had already wrought her an unquestionable influence, and that chiefly with the best. The root of this courage was compassion. Her rare humanity of heart would, at the slightest appearance of injustice, drive her like an angel with a flaming sword against customs regarded, consciously or unconsciously, as the very buttresses of social distinction. Anything but a wise woman, she had yet so much in her of what is essential to all wisdom – love to her kind, that, if as yet she had done little but blunder, she had at least blundered beautifully. On every society that had for its declared end the setting right of wrong or the alleviation of misery, she lavished, and mostly wasted, her money. Every misery took to her the shape of a wrong. Hence to every mendicant that could trump up a plausible story, she offered herself a willing prey. Even when the barest faced imposition was brought home to one of the race parasitical, her first care was to find all possible excuse for his conduct: it was matter of pleasure to her friends when she stopped there, and made no attempt at absolute justification.

Left like Florimel an orphan, but at a yet earlier age, she had been brought up with a care that had gone over into severity, against which her nature had revolted with an energy that gathered strength from her own repression of its signs; and when she came of age, and took things into her own hands, she carried herself in its eyes so oddly, yet with such sweetness and dignity and consistency in her oddest extravagances, that society honoured her even when it laughed at her, loved her, listened to her, applauded, approved – did everything except imitate her – which indeed was just as well, for else confusion would have been worse confounded. She was always rushing to defence – with money, with indignation, with refuge. It would look like a caricature did I record the number of charities to which she belonged, and the various societies which, in the exuberance of her passionate benevolence, she had projected and of necessity abandoned. Yet still the fire burned, for her changes were from no changeableness: through them all the fundamental operation of her character remained the same. The case was that, for all her headlong passion for deliverance, she could not help discovering now and then, through an occasional self assertion of that real good sense which her rampant and unsubjected benevolence could but overlay, not finally smother, that she was either doing nothing at all, or more evil than good.

The lack of discipline in her goodness came out in this, at times amusingly, that she would always at first side with the lower or weaker or worse. If a dog had torn a child, and was going to be killed in consequence, she would not only intercede for the dog, but absolutely side with him, mentioning this and that provocation which the naughty child must have given him ere he could have been goaded to the deed. Once when the schoolmaster in her village was going to cane a boy for cruelty to a cripple, she pleaded for his pardon on the ground that it was worse to be cruel than to be a cripple, and therefore more to be pitied. Everything painful was to her cruel, and softness and indulgence, moral honey and sugar and nuts to all alike, was the panacea for human ills. She could not understand that infliction might be loving kindness. On one occasion when a boy was caught in the act of picking her pocket, she told the policeman he was doing nothing of the sort – he was only searching for a lozenge for his terrible cough; and in proof of her asserted conviction, she carried him home with her, but lost him before morning, as well as the spoon with which he had eaten his gruel.

As to her person I have already made a poor attempt at describing it. She might have been grand but for loveliness. When she drew herself up in indignation, however, she would look grand for the one moment ere the blood rose to her cheek, and the water to her eyes. She would have taken the whole world to her infinite heart, and in unwisdom coddled it into corruption. Praised be the grandeur of the God who can endure to make and see his children suffer. Thanks be to him for his north winds and his poverty, and his bitterness that falls upon the spirit that errs: let those who know him thus praise the Lord for his goodness. But Lady Clementina had not yet descried the face of the Son of Man through the mists of Mount Sinai, and she was not one to justify the ways of God to men. Not the less was it the heart of God in her that drew her to the young marchioness, over whom was cast the shadow of a tree that gave but baneful shelter. She liked her frankness, her activity, her daring, and fancied that, like herself she was at noble feud with that infernal parody of the kingdom of heaven, called Society. She did not well understand her relation to Lady Bellair, concerning whom she was in doubt whether or not she was her legal guardian, but she saw plainly enough that the countess wanted to secure her for her nephew, and this nephew had about him a certain air of perdition, which even the catholic heart of Lady Clementina could not brook. She saw too that, being a mere girl, and having no scope of choice in the limited circle of their visitors, she was in great danger of yielding without a struggle, and she longed to take her in charge like a poor little persecuted kitten, for the possession of which each of a family of children was contending. What if her father had belonged to a rowdy set, was that any reason why his innocent daughter should be devoured, body and soul and possessions, by those of the same set who had not yet perished in their sins? Lady Clementina thanked Heaven that she came herself of decent people, who paid their debts, dared acknowledge themselves in the wrong, and were as honest as if they had been born peasants; and she hoped a shred of the mantle of their good name had dropped upon her, big enough to cover also this poor little thing who had come of no such parentage. With her passion for redemption therefore, she seized every chance of improving her acquaintance with Florimel, and it was her anxiety to gain such a standing in her favour as might further her coveted ministration, that had prevented her from bringing her charge of brutality against Malcolm as soon as she discovered whose groom he was: when she had secured her footing on the peak of her friendship, she would unburden her soul, and meantime the horse must suffer for his mistress – a conclusion in itself a great step in advance, for it went dead against one of her most confidently argued principles, namely, that the pain of any animal is, in every sense, of just as much consequence as the pain of any other, human or inferior: pain is pain, she said; and equal pains are equal wherever they sting; – in which she would have been right, I think, if pain and suffering were the same thing; but, knowing well that the same degree and even the same kind of pain means two very different things in the foot and in the head, I refuse the proposition.

Happily for Florimel, she had by this time made progress enough to venture a proposal – namely, that she should accompany her to a small estate she had on the south coast, with a little ancient house upon it – a strange place altogether, she said – to spend a week or two in absolute quiet – only she must come alone – without even a maid: she would take none herself. This she said because, with the instinct, if not quite insight, of a true nature, she could not endure the woman Caley.

"Will you come with me there for a fortnight?" she concluded.

"I shall be delighted," returned Florimel, without a moment s hesitation. "I am getting quite sick of London. There's no room in it. And there's the spring all outside, and can't get in here! I shall be only too glad to go with you, you dear creature!"

"And on those hard terms – no maid, you know?" insisted Clementina.

"The only thing wanted to make the pleasure complete! I shall be charmed to be rid of her."

"I am glad to see you so independent."

"You don't imagine me such a baby as not to be able to get on without a maid! You should have seen me in Scotland! I hated having a woman about me then. And indeed I don't like it a bit better now – only everybody has one, and your clothes want looking after," added Florimel, thinking what a weight it would be off her if she could get rid of Caley altogether. "– But I should like to take my horse," she said. "I don't know what I should do in the country without Abbot."

"Of course; we must have our horses," returned Clementina. "And – yes – you had better bring your groom."

"Please. You will find him very useful. He can do anything and everything- – and is so kind and helpful!"

"Except to his horse," Clementina was on the point of saying, but thought again she would first secure the mistress, and bide her time to attack the man.

Before they parted, the two ladies had talked themselves into ecstasies over the anticipated enjoyments of their scheme. It must be carried out at once.

"Let us tell nobody," said Lady Clementina, "and set off tomorrow."

"Enchanting!" cried Florimel, in full response.

Then her brow clouded.

"There is one difficulty, though," she said. "– No man could ride Kelpie with a led horse; and if we had to employ another, Liftore would be sure to hear where we had gone."

"That would spoil all," said Clementina. "But how much better it would be to give that poor creature a rest, and bring the other I see him on sometimes!"

"And by the time we came back, there would not be a living creature, horse or man, anything bigger than a rat, about the stable. Kelpie herself would be dead of hunger, if she hadn't been shot. No, no; where Malcolm goes Kelpie must go. Besides, she's such fun – you can't think!"

"Then I'll tell you what!" cried Clementina, after a moment's pause of perplexity: "we'll ride down! It's not a hundred miles, and we can take as many days on the road as we please."

"Better and better!" cried Florimel. "We'll run away with each other. – But what will dear old Bellair say?"

"Never mind her," rejoined Clementina. "She will have nothing to say. You can write and tell her as much as will keep her from being really alarmed. Order your man to get everything ready, and I will instruct mine. He is such a staid old fellow, you know, he will be quite protection. Tomorrow morning we shall set out together for a ride in Richmond Park – that lying in our way. You can leave a letter on the breakfast table, saying you are gone with me for a little quiet. You're not in chancery – are you?"