Chapter 49. Mount Pisgah

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_ CHAPTER XLIX. MOUNT PISGAH

The intercourse between Florimel and Malcolm grew gradually more familiar, until at length it was often hardly to be distinguished from such as takes place between equals, and Florimel was by degrees forgetting the present condition in the possible future of the young man. But Malcolm, on the other hand, as often as the thought of that possible future arose in her presence, flung it from him in horror, lest the wild dream of winning her should make him for a moment desire its realization.

The claim that hung over him haunted his very life, turning the currents of his thought into channels of speculation unknown before. Imagine a young fisherman meditating--as he wandered with bent head through the wilder woods on the steep banks of the burn, or the little green levels which it overflowed in winter--of all possible subjects what analogy there might be betwixt the body and the soul in respect of derivation--whether the soul was traduced as well as the body?--as his material form came from the forms of his father and mother, did his soul come from their souls? or did the Maker, as at the first he breathed his breath into the form of Adam, still, at some crisis unknown in its creation, breathe into each form the breath of individual being? If the latter theory were the true, then, be his earthly origin what it might, he had but to shuffle off this mortal coil to walk forth a clean thing, as a prince might cast off the rags of an enforced disguise, and set out for the land of his birth. If the former were the true, then the wellspring of his being was polluted, nor might he by any death fling aside his degradation, or show himself other than defiled in the eyes of the old dwellers in "those high countries," where all things seem as they are, and are as they seem.

One day when, these questions fighting in his heart, he had for the hundredth time arrived thus far, all at once it seemed as if a soundless voice in the depth of his soul replied,

"Even then--should the wellspring of thy life be polluted with vilest horrors such as, in Persian legends, the lips of the lost are doomed to drink with loathings inconceivable--the well is but the utterance of the water, not the source of its existence; the rain is its father, and comes from the sweet heavens. Thy soul, however it became known to itself is from the pure heart of God, whose thought of thee is older than thy being--is its first and eldest cause. Thy essence cannot be defiled, for in him it is eternal."

Even with the thought, the horizon of his life began to clear; a light came out on the far edge of its ocean--a dull and sombre yellow, it is true, and the clouds hung yet heavy over sea and land, while miles of vapour hid the sky; but he could now believe there might be a blue beyond, in which the sun lorded it with majesty.

He had been rambling on the waste hill in which the grounds of Lossie House, as it were, dissipated. It had a far outlook, but he had beheld neither sky or ocean. The Soutars of Cromarty had all the time sat on their stools large in his view; the hills of Sutherland had invited his gaze, rising faint and clear over the darkened water at their base, less solid than the sky in which they were set, and less a fact than the clouds that crossed their breasts; the land of Caithness had lain lowly and afar, as if, weary of great things, it had crept away in tired humility to the rigours of the north; and east and west his own rugged shore had gone lengthening out, fringed with the white burst of the dark sea; but none of all these things had he noted.

Lady Florimel suddenly encountered him on his way home, and was startled by his look.

"Where have you been, Malcolm?" she exclaimed.

"I hardly ken, my leddy: somewhaur aboot the feet o' Mount Pisgah, I 'm thinkin', if no freely upo' the heid o' 't."

"That's not the name of the hill up there!"

"Ow na; yon's the Binn."

"What have you been about? Looking at things in general, I suppose."

"Na; they've been luikin' at me, I daursay; but I didna heed them, an' they didna fash me."

"You look so strangely bright!" she said, "as if you had seen something both marvellous and beautiful!"

The words revealed a quality of insight not hitherto manifested by Florimel. In truth, Malcolm's whole being was irradiated by the flash of inward peace that had visited him--a statement intelligible and therefore credible enough to the mind accustomed to look over the battlements of the walls that clasp the fair windows of the senses. But Florimel's insight had reached its limit, and her judgment, vainly endeavouring to penetrate farther, fell floundering in the mud.

"I know!" she went on: "You've been to see your lady mother!"

Malcolm's face turned white as if blasted with leprosy. The same scourge that had maddened the poor laird fell hissing on his soul, and its knotted sting was the same word mother. He turned and walked slowly away, fighting a tyrannous impulse to thrust his fingers in his ears and run and shriek.

"Where are your manners?" cried the girl after him, but he never stayed his slow foot or turned his bowed head, and Florimel wondered.

For the moment, his new found peace had vanished. Even if the old nobility of heaven might regard him without a shadow of condescension --that self righteous form of contempt--what could he do with a mother whom he could neither honour or love? Love! If he could but cease to hate her! There was no question yet of loving.

But might she not repent? Ah, then, indeed! And might he not help her to repent?--He would not avoid her. How was it that she had never yet sought him?

As he brooded thus, on his way to Duncan's cottage, and, heedless of the sound of coming wheels, was crossing the road which went along the bottom of the glen, he was nearly run over by a carriage coming round the corner of a high bank at a fast trot Catching one glimpse of the face of its occupant, as it passed within a yard of his own, he turned and fled back through the woods, with again a horrible impulse to howl to the winds the cry of the mad laird: "I dinna ken whaur I cam frae!" When he came to himself, he found his hands pressed hard on his ears, and for a moment felt a sickening certainty that he too was a son of the lady of Gersefell.

When he returned at length to the House, Mrs Courthope informed him that Mrs Stewart had called, and seen both the marquis and Lady Florimel.

Meantime he had grown again a little anxious about the laird, but as Phemy plainly avoided him, had concluded that he had found another concealment, and that the child preferred not being questioned concerning it.

With the library of Lossie House at his disposal, and almost nothing to do, it might now have been a grand time for Malcolm's studies; but alas! he too often found it all but impossible to keep his thoughts on the track of a thought through a single sentence of any length.

The autumn now hung over the verge of its grave. Hoar frost, thick on the fields, made its mornings look as if they had turned gray with fear. But when the sun arose, grayness and fear vanished; the back thrown smile of the departing glory was enough to turn old age into a memory of youth. Summer was indeed gone, and winter was nigh with its storms and its fogs and its rotting rains and its drifting snows, but the sun was yet in the heavens, and, changed as was his manner towards her, would yet have many a half smile for the poor old earth--enough to keep her alive until he returned, bringing her youth with him. To the man who believes that the winter is but for the sake of the summer; exists only in virtue of the summer at its heart, no winter, outside or in, can be unendurable. But Malcolm sorely missed the ministrations of compulsion: he lacked labour--the most helpful and most healing of all God's holy things, of which we so often lose the heavenly benefit by labouring inordinately that we may rise above the earthly need of it. How many sighs are wasted over the toil of the sickly--a toil which perhaps lifts off half the weight of their sickness, elevates their inner life, and makes the outer pass with tenfold rapidity. Of those who honestly pity such, many would themselves be far less pitiable were they compelled to share in the toil they behold with compassion. They are unaware of the healing virtue which the thing they would not pity at all were it a matter of choice, gains from the compulsion of necessity.

All over the house big fires were glowing and blazing. Nothing pleased the marquis worse than the least appearance of stinting the consumption of coal. In the library two huge gratefuls were burning from dawn to midnight--well for the books anyhow, if their owner seldom showed his face amongst them. There were days during which, except the servant whose duty it was to attend to the fires, not a creature entered the room but Malcolm. To him it was as the cave of Aladdin to the worshipper of Mammon, and yet now he would often sit down indifferent to its hoarded splendours, and gather no jewels.

But one morning, as he sat there alone, in an oriel looking seawards, there lay on a table before him a thin folio, containing the chief works of Sir Thomas Brown--amongst the rest his well known Religio Medici, from which he had just read the following passage:

"When I take a full view and circle of myself, without this reasonable moderatour, and equall piece of justice, Death, I doe conceive my self the most miserablest person extant; were there not another life that I hoped for, all the vanities of this world should not intreat a moment's breath from me; could the Devil work my belief to imagine I could never die, I would not outlive that very thought: I have so abject a conceit of this common way of existence, this retaining to the Sun and elements, I cannot think this is to be a man, or to live according to the dignity of humanity. In expectation of a better, I can with patience embrace this life, yet in my best meditations do often desire death; I honour any man that contemnes it, nor can I highly love any that is afraid of it: this makes me naturally love a Soldier, and honour those tatter'd and contemptible Regiments that will die at the command of a Sergeant."

These words so fell in with the prevailing mood of his mind, that having gathered them, they grew upon him, and as he pondered them, he sat gazing out on the bright blowing autumn day. The sky was dimmed with a clear pallor, across which small white clouds were driving; the yellow leaves that yet cleave to the twigs were few, and the wind swept through the branches with a hiss. The far off sea was alive with multitudinous white--the rush of the jubilant oversea across the blue plain. All without was merry, healthy, radiant, strong; in his mind brooded a single haunting thought that already had almost filled his horizon, threatening by exclusion to become madness! Why should he not leave the place, and the horrors of his history with it? Then the hideous hydra might unfold itself as it pleased; he would find at least a better fortune than his birth had endowed him withal.

Lady Florimel entered in search of something to read: to her surprise, for she had heard of no arrival, in one of the windows sat a Highland gentleman, looking out on the landscape. She was on the point of retiring again, when a slight movement revealed Malcolm.

The explanation was, that the marquis, their seafaring over, had at length persuaded Malcolm to don the highland attire: it was an old custom of the house of Lossie that its lord's henchman should be thus distinguished, and the marquis himself wore the kilt when on his western estates in the summer, also as often as he went to court,--would indeed have worn it always but that he was no longer hardy enough. He would not have succeeded with Malcolm, however, but for the youth's love to Duncan, the fervent heat of which vaporized the dark heavy stone of obligation into the purple vapour of gratitude, and enhanced the desire of pleasing him until it became almost a passion. Obligation is a ponderous roll of canvas which Love spreads aloft into a tent wherein he delights to dwell.

This was his first appearance in the garments of Duncan's race.

It was no little trial to him to assume them in the changed aspect of his circumstances; for alas! he wore them in right of service only, not of birth, and the tartan of his lord's family was all he could claim.

He had not heard Lady Florimel enter. She went softly up behind him, and laid her hand on his shoulder. He started to his feet.

"A penny for your thoughts," she said, retreating a step or two.

"I wad gie twa to be rid o' them," he returned, shaking his bushy head as if to scare the invisible ravens hovering about it.

"How fine you are!" Florimel went on, regarding him with an approbation too open to be altogether gratifying. "The dress suits you thoroughly. I didn't know you at first. I thought it must be some friend of papa's. Now I remember he said once you must wear the proper dress for a henchman. How do you like it?"

"It's a' ane to me," said Malcolm. "I dinna care what I weir.-- Gien only I had a richt till 't!" he added with a sigh.

"It is too bad of you, Malcolm!" rejoined Florimel in a tone of rebuke. "The moment fortune offers you favour, you fall out with her--won't give her a single smile. You don't deserve your good luck."

Malcolm was silent.

"There's something on your mind," Florimel went on, partly from willingness to serve Mrs Stewart, partly enticed by the romance of being Malcolm's comforter, or perhaps confessor.

"Ay is there, my leddy."

"What is it? Tell me. You can trust me!"

"I could trust ye, but I canna tell ye. I daurna--I maunna."

"I see you will not trust me," said Florimel, with a half pretended, half real offence.

"I wad lay doon my life--what there is o' 't--for ye, my leddy; but the verra natur o' my trouble winna be tauld. I maun beir 't my lane."

It flashed across Lady Florimel's brain, that the cause of his misery, the thing he dared not confess, was love of herself. Now, Malcolm, standing before her in his present dress, and interpreted by the knowledge she believed she had of his history, was a very different person indeed from the former Malcolm in the guise of fisherman or sailor, and she felt as well as saw the difference: if she was the cause of his misery, why should she not comfort him a little? why should she not be kind to him? Of course anything more was out of the question; but a little confession and consolation would hurt neither of them. Besides, Mrs Stewart had begged her influence, and this would open a new channel for its exercise. Indeed, if he was unhappy through her, she ought to do what she might for him. A gentle word or two would cost her nothing, and might help to heal a broken heart! She was hardly aware, however, how little she wanted it healed--all at once.

For the potency of a thought it is perhaps even better that it should not be logically displayed to the intellect; anyhow the germ of all this, undeveloped into the definite forms I have given, sufficed to the determining of Florimel's behaviour. I do not mean that she had more than the natural tendency of womankind to enjoy the emotions of which she was the object; but besides the one in the fable, there are many women with a tendency to arousing; and the idea of deriving pleasure from the sufferings of a handsome youth was not quite so repulsive to her as it ought to have been. At the same time, as there cannot be many cats capable of understanding the agonies of the mice within reach of their waving whiskers, probably many cat women are not quite so cruel as they seem.

"Can't you trust me, Malcolm?" she said, looking in his eyes very sweetly, and bending a little towards him; "Can't you trust me?"

At the words and the look it seemed as if his frame melted to ether. He dropped on his knees, and, his heart half stifled in the confluence of the tides of love and misery, sighed out between the pulses in his throat:

"There's naething I could na tell ye 'at ever I thoucht or did i' my life, my leddy; but it's ither fowk, my leddy! It's like to burn a hole i' my hert, an' yet I daurna open my mou'."

There was a half angelic, half dog-like entreaty in his up looking hazel eyes that seemed to draw hers down into his: she must put a stop to that.

"Get up, Malcolm," she said kindly, "what would my father or Mrs Courthope think?"

"I dinna ken, an' I maist dinna care; atween ae thing an' anither, I'm near han' distrackit," answered Malcolm, rising slowly, but not taking his eyes from her face. "An' there's my daddy!" he went on, "maist won ower to the enemy--an' I daurna tell even him what for I canna bide it!--Ye haena been sayin' onything till him-- hiv ye, my leddy?"

"I don't quite understand you," returned Florimel, rather guiltily, for she had spoken on the subject to Duncan. "Saying anything to your grandfather? About what?"

"Aboot--aboot--Her, ye ken, my leddy."

"What her?" asked Florimel.

"Her 'at--The leddy o' Gersefell."

"And why? What of her? Why, Malcolm! what can have possessed you? You seem actually to dislike her!"

"I canna bide her," said Malcolm, with the calm earnestness of one who is merely stating an incontrovertible fact, and for a moment his eyes, at once troubled and solemn, kept looking wistfully in hers, as if searching for a comfort too good to be found, then slowly sank and sought the floor at her feet.

"And why?"

"I canna tell ye."

She supposed it an unreasoned antipathy.

"But that is very wrong," she said, almost as if rebuking a child. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself. What!--dislike your own mother?"

"Dinna say the word, my leddy," cried Malcolm in a tone of agony, "or ye'll gar me skirl an' rin like the mad laird. He's no a hair madder nor I wad be wi' sic a mither."

He would have passed her to leave the room.

But Lady Florimel could not bear defeat. In any contest she must win or be shamed in her own eyes, and was she to gain absolutely nothing in such a passage with a fisher lad? Was the billow of her persuasion to fall back from such a rock, self beaten into poorest foam? She would, she must subdue him! Perhaps she did not know how much the sides of her intent were pricked by the nettling discovery that she was not the cause of his unhappiness.

"You 're not going to leave me so!" she exclaimed, in a tone of injury.

"I 'll gang or bide as ye wull, my leddy," answered Malcolm resignedly.

"Bide then," she returned. "I haven't half done with you yet."

"Ye mauna jist tear my hert oot," he rejoined--with a sad half smile, and another of his dog-like looks.

"That's what you would do to your mother!" said Florimel severely.

"Say nae ill o' my mither!" cried Malcolm, suddenly changing almost to fierceness.

"Why, Malcolm!" said Florimel, bewildered, "what ill was I saying of her?"

"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 passed 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 impassable 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 assumed. 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 hell. 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 glassy 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.

Half way to the point of Scaurnose, he came round on the other tack, and stood for the Death Head.

Glancing from the wallowing floor beneath him, and the one wing that bore him skimming over its million deaths, away to the House of Lossie, where it stood steady in its woods, he distinguished the very window whence, hardly an hour ago, from the centre of the calm companionship of books, he had gazed out upon the wind swept waste as upon a dream.

"How strange," he thought, "to find myself now in the midst of what I then but saw! This reeling ocean was but a picture to me then-- a picture framed in the window; it is now alive and I toss like a toy on its wild commotion. Then I but saw from afar the flashing of the white out of the blue water, and the blue sky overhead, which no winds can rend into pallid pains; now I have to keep eye and hand together in one consent to shun death; I meet wind and wave on their own terms, and humour the one into an evasion of the other. The wind that then revealed itself only in white blots and streaks now lashes my hair into my eyes, and only the lift of my bows is betwixt me and the throat that swallows the whales and the krakens.

"Will it be so with death? It looks strange and far off now, but it draws nigh noiselessly, and one day I meet it face to face in the grapple: shall I rejoice in that wrestle as I rejoice in this? Will not my heart grow sick within me? Shall I not be faint and fearful? And yet I could almost wish it were at hand!

"I wonder how death and this wan water here look to God! To him is it like a dream--a picture? Water cannot wet him; death cannot touch him. Yet Jesus could have let the water wet him; and he granted power to death when he bowed his head and gave up the ghost. God knows how things look to us both far off and near; he also can see them so when he pleases. What they look to him is what they are: we cannot see them so, but we see them as he meant us to see them, therefore truly, according to the measure of the created. Made in the image of God, we see things in the image of his sight."

Thoughts like these, only in yet cruder forms, swept through the mind of Malcolm as he tossed on that autumn sea. But what we call crude forms are often in reality germinal forms; and one or other of these flowered at once into the practical conclusion that God must know all his trouble, and would work for him a worthy peace. Ere he turned again towards the harbour, he had reascended the cloud haunted Pisgah whence the words of Lady Florimel had hurled him. _

Read next: Chapter 50. Lizzy Findlay

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