By that time also he had arranged with Travers and
Davy a code of signals.
The day after Malcolm had his new hack, he rode him
behind his mistress in the park, and nothing could
be more decorous than the behaviour of both horse
and groom. It was early, and in Rotten Row, to
his delight, they met the lady of rebuke. She
and Florimel pulled up simultaneously, greeted, and
had a little talk. When they parted, and the
lady came to pass Malcolm, whom she had not suspected,
sitting a civilised horse in all serenity behind his
mistress, she cast a quick second glance at him, and
her fair face flushed with the red reflex of yesterday’s
anger. He expected her to turn at once and complain
of him to her mistress, but to his disappointment,
she rode on.
When they left the park, Florimel went down Constitution
Hill, and turning westward, rode to Chelsea.
As they approached Mr Lenorme’s house, she stopped
and said to Malcolm—“I am going to
run in and thank Mr Lenorme for the trouble he has
been at about the horse. Which is the house?”
She pulled up at the gate. Malcolm dismounted,
but before he could get near to assist her, she was
already halfway up the walk— flying, and
he was but in time to catch the rein of Abbot, already
moving off curious to know whether he was actually
trusted alone. In about five minutes she came
again, glancing about her all ways but behind, with
a scared look, Malcolm thought. But she walked
more slowly and statelily than usual down the path.
In a moment Malcolm had her in the saddle, and she
cantered away—past the hospital into Sloane
Street, and across the park home. He said to
himself, “She knows the way.”
Alexander Graham, the schoolmaster, was the son of
a grieve, or farm overseer, in the North of Scotland.
By straining every nerve, his parents had succeeded
in giving him a university education, the narrowness
of whose scope was possibly favourable to the development
of what genius, rare and shy, might lurk among the
students. He had laboured well, and had gathered
a good deal from books and lectures, but far more
from the mines they guided him to discover in his
own nature. In common with so many Scotch parents,
his had cherished the most wretched as well as hopeless
of all ambitions, seeing it presumes to work in a
region into which no ambition can enter—I
mean that of seeing their son a clergyman. In
presbyter, curate, bishop, or cardinal, ambition can
fare but as that of the creeping thing to build its
nest in the topmost boughs of the cedar. Worse
than that; my simile is a poor one; for the moment
a thought of ambition is cherished, that moment the
man is out of the kingdom. Their son with already
a few glimmering insights, which had not yet begun
to interfere with his acceptance of the doctrines
of his church, made no opposition to their wish, but
having qualified himself to the satisfaction of his
superiors, at length ascended the pulpit to preach
his first sermon.
