Malcolm, so far as human companionship went, found it dull, for Lady Clementina's groom regarded him with the contempt of superior age — the most contemptible contempt of all, seeing years are not the wisdom they ought to bring, and the first sign of that is modesty. Again and again his remarks tempted Malcolm to incite him to ride Kelpie, but conscience, the thought of the man's family, and the remembrance that it required all his youthful strength, and that it would therefore be the challenge of the strong to the weak, saved him from the sin, and he schooled himself to the endurance of middle-aged arrogance. For the learning of the lesson he had practice enough: they rode every day, and Griffith did not thaw; but the one thundering gallop he had every morning along the sands upon Kelpie — whom[1] no ordinary day's work was enough to save from the heart-burning ferment of repressed activity — was both preparation and amends for the annoyance.
When his mistress mentioned the proposal of her friend with regard to the new novel, he at once expressed his willingness to attempt compliance, fearing only, he said, that his English would prove offensive and his Scotch unintelligible. The task was nowise alarming to him, for he had read aloud much to the schoolmaster, who had also insisted that he should read aloud when alone, especially verse, in order that he might get all the good of its outside as well as inside — its sound as well as thought, the one being the ethereal body of the other. And he had the best primary qualifications for the art — namely, a delight in the sounds of human speech, a value for the true embodiment of thought, and a good ear, mental as well as vocal, for the assimilation of sound to sense. After these came the quite secondary yet valuable gift of a pleasant voice, manageable for inflection; and with such an outfit the peculiarities of his country's utterance, the long-drawn vowels and the outbreak of feeling in chant-like tones and modulations, might be forgiven, and certainly were forgiven by Lady Clementina, who even in his presence took his part against the objections of his mistress. On the whole, they were so much pleased with his first reading, which took place the very day the box arrived, that they concluded to restrain the curiosity of their interest in persons and events for the sake of the pleasure of meeting them always in the final fulness of local color afforded them by his utterance. While he read they busied their fingers with their embroidery, for as yet that graceful work, so lovelily described by Cowper in his "Task," had not begun to vanish before the crude colors and mechanical vulgarity of Berlin wool, now happily in its turn vanishing like a dry dust-cloud into the limbo of the art universe.
The well-depicted flower,
Wrought patiently into the snowy lawn,
Unfolds its bosom: buds, and leaves, and sprigs,
And curling tendrils, gracefully disposed,
Follow the nimble finger of the fair —
A wreath, that cannot fade, of flowers that blow
With most success when all besides decay.[2]
There was not much of a garden about the place, but there was a little lawn amongst the pines, in the midst of which stood a huge old patriarch with red stem and grotesquely contorted branches: beneath it was a bench, and there, after their return from their two hours' ride, the ladies sat, while the sun was at its warmest, on the mornings of their first and second readings: Malcolm sat on a wheelbarrow. After lunch on the second day, which they had agreed from the first, as ladies so often do when free of the more devouring sex, should be their dinner, and after due visits paid to a multitude of animals, the desire awoke simultaneously in them for another portion of "St. Ronan's Well." They resolved, therefore, to send for their reader as soon as they had had tea. But when they sent, he was nowhere to be found, and they concluded on a stroll.
Anticipating no further requirement of his service that day, Malcolm had gone out. Drawn by the sea, he took his way through the dim, solemn, boughless wood, as if to keep a moonlight tryst with his early love. But the sun was not yet down, and among the dark trees, shot through by the level radiance, he wandered, his heart swelling in his bosom with the glory and the mystery. Again the sun was in the wood, its burning centre, the marvel of the home which he left in the morning only to return thither at night, and it was now a temple of red light, more gorgeous, more dream-woven, than in the morning. How he glowed on the red stems of the bare pines, fit pillars for that which seemed temple and rite, organ and anthem in one — the worship of the earth uplifted to its
