“He may have started before it came on to blow like this,” said Lady Florimel.
Malcolm liked the suggestion the less because of its probability, believing, in that case, he should have arrived long ago. But he took care not to increase Florimel’s alarm.
By this time Malcolm knew the whole of the accessible inside of the roof well—better far than any one else about the house. From one part to another, over the whole of it, he now led Lady Florimel. In the big-shadowed glimmer of his one candle, all parts of the garret seemed to him frowning with knitted brows over resentful memories—as if the phantom forms of all the past joys and self-renewing sorrows, all the sins and wrongs, all the disappointments and failures of the house, had floated up, generation after generation, into that abode of helpless brooding, and there hung hovering above the fast fleeting life below, which now, in its turn, was ever sending up like fumes from heart and brain, to crowd the dim, dreary, larva-haunted, dream-wallowing chaos of half-obliterated thought and feeling. To Florimel it looked a dread waste, a region deserted and forgotten, mysterious with far-reaching nooks of darkness, and now awful with the wind raving and howling over slates and leads so close to them on all sides,—as if a flying army of demons were tearing at the roof to get in and find covert from pursuit.
At length they approached Malcolm’s own quarters, where they would have to pass the very door of the wizard’s chamber to reach a short ladder-like stair that led up into the midst of naked rafters, when, coming upon a small storm window near the end of a long passage, Lady Florimel stopped and peeped out.
“The moon is rising,” she said, and stood looking.
Malcolm glanced over her shoulder. Eastward a dim light shone up from behind the crest of a low hill. Great part of the sky was clear, but huge masses of broken cloud went sweeping across the heavens. The wind had moderated.
“Aren’t we somewhere near your friend the wizard?” said Lady Florimel, with a slight tremble in the tone of mockery with which she spoke.
Malcolm answered as if he were not quite certain.
“Isn’t your own room somewhere hereabouts?” asked the girl sharply.
“We’ll jist gang till ae ither queer place,” observed Malcolm, pretending not to have heard her, “and gien the rufe be a’ richt there, I s’ no bather my heid mair aboot it till the mornin’. It’s but a feow steps farther, an’ syne a bit stair.”