The sound he heard was that of the Lossie Burn, flowing
along in the starlight through the grounds of the
House. Of this he satisfied himself afterwards;
and then it seemed to him not unlikely that in ancient
times the river had found its way to the sea along
the cave, for throughout its length the action of
water was plainly visible. But perhaps the sea
itself had used to go roaring along the great duct:
Malcolm was no geologist, and could not tell.
The weather became unsettled with the approach of
winter, and the marquis had a boat house built at
the west end of the Seaton: there the little
cutter was laid up, well wrapt in tarpaulins, like
a butterfly returned to the golden coffin of her internatal
chrysalis. A great part of his resulting leisure,
Malcolm spent with Mr Graham, to whom he had, as a
matter of course, unfolded the trouble caused him
by Duncan’s communication.
The more thoughtful a man is, and the more conscious
of what is going on within himself, the more interest
will he take in what he can know of his progenitors,
to the remotest generations; and a regard to ancestral
honours, however contemptible the forms which the
appropriation of them often assumes, is a plant rooted
in the deepest soil of humanity. The high souled
labourer will yield to none in his respect for the
dignity of his origin, and Malcolm had been as proud
of the humble descent he supposed his own, as Lord
Lossie was of his mighty ancestry. Malcolm had
indeed a loftier sense of resulting dignity than his
master.
He reverenced Duncan both for his uprightness and
for a certain grandeur of spirit, which, however ridiculous
to the common eye, would have been glorious in the
eyes of the chivalry of old; he looked up to him with
admiration because of his gifts in poetry and music;
and loved him endlessly for his unfailing goodness
and tenderness to himself. Even the hatred of
the grand old man had an element of unselfishness
in its retroaction, of power in its persistency, and
of greatness in its absolute contempt of compromise.
At the same time he was the only human being to whom
Malcolm’s heart had gone forth as to his own;
and now, with the knowledge of yet deeper cause for
loving him, he had to part with the sense of a filial
relation to him! And this involved more; for so
thoroughly had the old man come to regard the boy
as his offspring, that he had nourished in him his
own pride of family; and it added a sting of mortification
to Malcolm’s sorrow, that the greatness of the
legendary descent in which he had believed, and the
honourableness of the mournful history with which
his thoughts of himself had been so closely associated,
were swept from him utterly. Nor was this all
even yet: in losing these he had had, as it were,
to let go his hold, not of his clan merely, but of
his race: every link of kin that bound him to
