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."
CHAPTER XXVI.
THE SCHOOLMASTER.
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 favorable to the development of what genius, rare and shy, might lurk among the students. He had labored 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.
The custom of the time as to preaching was a sort of compromise between reading a sermon and speaking extempore, a mode morally as well as artistically false; the preacher learned his sermon by rote, and repeated it — as much like the man he therein was not, and as little like the parrot he was, as he could. It is no wonder, in such an attempt, either that memory should fail a shy man or assurance an honest man. In Mr. Graham's case it was probably the former: the practice was universal, and he could hardly yet have begun to question it, so as to have had any conscience of evil. Blessedly, however, for his dawning truth and well-being, he failed — failed utterly, pitifully. His tongue clave to the roof of his mouth; his lips moved, but shaped no sound; a deathly dew bathed his forehead; his knees shook; and he sank at last to the bottom of the chamber of his torture, whence, while his mother wept below and his father clenched hands of despair beneath the tails of his Sunday coat, he was half led, half dragged down the steps by the bedral, shrunken together like one caught in a shameful deed, and with the ghastly look of him who has but just revived from the faint supervening on the agonies of the rack. Home they crept together, speechless and hopeless, all three, to be thenceforth the contempt, and not the envy, of their fellow-parishioners. For if the vulgar feeling toward the home-born prophet is superciliousness, what must the sentence upon failure be in ungenerous natures, to which every downfall of another is an uplifting of themselves! But Mr. Graham's worth had gained him friends in the presbytery, and he was that same week appointed to the vacant school of another parish.
There it was not long before he made the acquaintance of Griselda Campbell, who was governess in the great house of the neigborhood, and a love, not the less true that it was hopeless from the first, soon began to consume the chagrin of his failure, and substitute for it a more elevating sorrow; for how could an embodied failure, to offer whose miserable self would be an insult, dare speak of love to one before whom his whole being sank worshipping? Silence was the sole armor of his privilege. So long as he was silent the terrible arrow would never part from the bow of those sweet lips: he might love on, love ever, nor be grudged the bliss of such visions as, to him seated on its outer steps, might come from any chance opening of the heavenly gate. And Miss Campbell thought of him more kindly than he knew. But before long she accepted
