Donal Grant

CHAPTER XXI.

A FIRST MEETING

He took her hand, and felt it an honest one—a safe, comfortable hand.

"My brother told me he had brought you," she said. "I am glad to see you."

"You are very kind," said Donal. "How did either of you know of my existence? A few minutes back, I was not aware of yours."

Was it a rude utterance? He was silent a moment with the silence that promises speech, then added—

"Has it ever struck you how many born friends there are in the world who never meet—persons to love each other at first sight, but who never in this world have that sight?"

"No," returned Miss Graeme, with a merrier laugh than quite responded to the remark, "I certainly never had such a thought. I take the people that come, and never think of those who do not. But of course it must be so."

"To be in the world is to have a great many brothers and sisters you do not know!" said Donal.

"My mother told me," she rejoined, "of a man who had had so many wives and children that his son, whom she had met, positively did not know all his brothers and sisters."

"I suspect," said Donal, "we have to know our brothers and sisters."

"I do not understand."

"We have even got to feel a man is our brother the moment we see him," pursued Donal, enhancing his former remark.

"That sounds alarming!" said Miss Graeme, with another laugh. "My little heart feels not large enough to receive so many."

"The worst of it is," continued Donal, who once started was not ready to draw rein, "that those who chiefly advocate this extension of the family bonds, begin by loving their own immediate relations less than anybody else. Extension with them means slackening—as if any one could learn to love more by loving less, or go on to do better without doing well! He who loves his own little will not love others much."

"But how can we love those who are nothing to us?" objected Miss Graeme.

"That would be impossible. The family relations are for the sake of developing a love rooted in a far deeper though less recognized relation.—But I beg your pardon, Miss Graeme. Little Davie alone is my pupil, and I forget myself."

"I am very glad to listen to you," returned Miss Graeme. "I cannot say I am prepared to agree with you. But it is something, in this out-of-the-way corner, to hear talk from which it is even worth while to differ."

"Ah, you can have that here if you will!"

"Indeed!"

"I mean talk from which you would probably differ. There is an old man in the town who can talk better than ever I heard man before. But he is a poor man, with a despised handicraft, and none heed him. No community recognizes its great men till they are gone."

"Where is the use then of being great?" said Miss Graeme.

"To be great," answered Donal, "—to which the desire to be known of men is altogether destructive. To be great is to seem little in the eyes of men."

Miss Graeme did not answer. She was not accustomed to consider things seriously. A good girl in a certain true sense, she had never yet seen that she had to be better, or indeed to be anything. But she was able to feel, though she was far from understanding him, that Donal was in earnest, and that was much. To recognize that a man means something, is a great step towards understanding him.

"What a lovely garden this is!" remarked Donal after the sequent pause. "I have never seen anything like it."

"It is very old-fashioned," she returned. "Do you not find it very stiff and formal?"

"Stately and precise, I should rather say."

"I do not mean I can help liking it—in a way."

"Who could help liking it that took his feeling from the garden itself, not from what people said about it!"

"You cannot say it is like nature!"

"Yes; it is very like human nature. Man ought to learn of nature, but not to imitate nature. His work is, through the forms that Nature gives him, to express the idea or feeling that is in him. That is far more likely to produce things in harmony with nature, than the attempt to imitate nature upon the small human scale."

"You are too much of a philosopher for me!" said Miss Graeme. "I daresay you are quite right, but I have never read anything about art, and cannot follow you."

"You have probably read as much as I have. I am only talking out of what necessity, the necessity for understanding things, has made me think. One must get things brought together in one's thoughts, if only to be able to go on thinking."

This too was beyond Miss Graeme. The silence again fell, and Donal let it lie, waiting for her to break it this time.

CHAPTER XXII.

A TALK ABOUT GHOSTS

But again he was the first.

They had turned and gone a good way down the long garden, and had again turned towards the house.

"This place makes me feel as I never felt before," he said. "There is such a wonderful sense of vanished life about it. The whole garden seems dreaming about things of long ago—when troops of ladies, now banished into pictures, wandered about the place, each full of her own thoughts and fancies of life, each looking at everything with ways of thinking as old-fashioned as her garments. I could not be here after nightfall without feeling as if every walk were answering to unseen feet, as if every tree might be hiding some lovely form, returned to dream over old memories."

"Where is the good of fancying what is not true? I can't care for what I know to be nonsense!"

She was glad to find a spot where she could put down the foot of contradiction, for she came of a family known for what the neighbours called common sense, and in the habit of casting contempt upon everything characterized as superstition: she had now something to say for herself!

"How do you know it is nonsense?" asked Donald, looking round in her face with a bright smile.

"Not nonsense to keep imagining what nobody can see?"

"I can only imagine what I do not see."

"Nobody ever saw such creatures as you suppose in any garden! Then why fancy the dead so uncomfortable, or so ill looked after, that they come back to plague us!"

"Plainly they have never plagued you much!" rejoined Donal laughing. "But how often have you gone up and down these walks at dead of night?"

"Never once," answered Miss Graeme, not without a spark of indignation. "I never was so absurd!"

"Then there may be a whole night-world that you know nothing about. You cannot tell that the place is not then thronged with ghosts: you have never given them a chance of appearing to you. I don't say it is so, for I know nothing, or at least little, about such things. I have had no experience of the sort any more than you—and I have been out whole nights on the mountains when I was a shepherd."

"Why then should you trouble your fancy about them?"

"Perhaps just for that reason."

"I do not understand you."

"I mean, because I can come into no communication with such a world as may be about me, I therefore imagine it. If, as often as I walked abroad at night, I met and held converse with the disembodied, I should use my imagination little, but make many notes of facts. When what may be makes no show, what more natural than to imagine about it? What is the imagination here for?"

"I do not know. The less one has to do with it the better."

"Then the thing, whatever it be, should not be called a faculty, but a weakness!"

"Yes."

"But the history of the world shows it could never have made progress without suggestions upon which to ground experiments: whence may these suggestions come if not from the weakness or impediment called the imagination?"

Again there was silence. Miss Graeme began to doubt whether it was possible to hold rational converse with a man who, the moment they began upon anything, went straight aloft into some high-flying region of which she knew and for which she cared nothing. But Donal's unconscious desire was in reality to meet her upon some common plane of thought. He always wanted to meet his fellow, and hence that abundance of speech, which, however poetic the things he said, not a few called prosiness.

"I should think," resumed Miss Graeme, "if you want to work your imagination, you will find more scope for it at the castle than here! This is a poor modern place compared to that."

"It is a poor imagination," returned Donal, "that requires age or any mere accessory to rouse it. The very absence of everything external, the bareness of the mere humanity involved, may in itself be an excitement greater than any accompaniment of the antique or the picturesque. But in this old-fashioned garden, in the midst of these old-fashioned flowers, with all the gentlenesses of old-fashioned life suggested by them, it is easier to imagine the people themselves than where all is so cold, hard, severe—so much on the defensive, as in that huge, sullen pile on the hilltop."

"I am afraid you find it dull up there!" said Miss Graeme.

"Not at all," replied Donal; "I have there a most interesting pupil. But indeed one who has been used to spend day after day alone, clouds and heather and sheep and dogs his companions, does not depend much for pastime. Give me a chair and a table, fire enough to keep me from shivering, the few books I like best and writing materials, and I am absolutely content. But beyond these things I have at the castle a fine library—useless no doubt for most purposes of modern study, but full of precious old books. There I can at any moment be in the best of company! There is more of the marvellous in an old library than ever any magic could work!"

"I do not quite understand you," said the lady.

But she would have spoken nearer the truth if she had said she had not a glimmer of what he meant.

"Let me explain!" said Donal: "what could necromancy, which is one of the branches of magic, do for one at the best?"

"Well!" exclaimed Miss Graeme; "—but I suppose if you believe in ghosts, you may as well believe in raising them!"

"I did not mean to start any question about belief; I only wanted to suppose necromancy for the moment a fact, and put it at its best: suppose the magician could do for you all he professed, what would it amount to?—Only this—to bring before your eyes a shadowy resemblance of the form of flesh and blood, itself but a passing shadow, in which the man moved on the earth, and was known to his fellow-men? At best the necromancer might succeed in drawing from him some obscure utterance concerning your future, far more likely to destroy your courage than enable you to face what was before you; so that you would depart from your peep into the unknown, merely less able to encounter the duties of life."

"Whoever has a desire for such information must be made very different from me!" said Miss Graeme.

"Are you sure of that? Did you never make yourself unhappy about what might be on its way to you, and wish you could know beforehand something to guide you how to meet it?"

"I should have to think before answering that question."

"Now tell me—what can the art of writing, and its expansion, or perhaps its development rather, in printing, do in the same direction as necromancy? May not a man well long after personal communication with this or that one of the greatest who have lived before him? I grant that in respect of some it can do nothing; but in respect of others, instead of mocking you with an airy semblance of their bodily forms, and the murmur of a few doubtful words from their lips, it places in your hands a key to their inmost thoughts. Some would say this is not personal communication; but it is far more personal than the other. A man's personality does not consist in the clothes he wears; it only appears in them; no more does it consist in his body, but in him who wears it."

As he spoke, Miss Graeme kept looking him gravely in the face, manifesting, however, more respect than interest. She had been accustomed to a very different tone in young men. She had found their main ambition to amuse; to talk sense about other matters than the immediate uses of this world, was an out-of-the-way thing! I do not say Miss Graeme, even on the subject last in hand, appreciated the matter of Donal's talk. She perceived he was in earnest, and happily was able to know a deep pond from a shallow one, but her best thought concerning him was—what a strange new specimen of humanity was here!

The appearance of her brother coming down the walk, put a stop to the conversation.

CHAPTER XXIII.

A TRADITION OF THE CASTLE

"Well," he said as he drew near, "I am glad to see you two getting on so well!"

"How do you know we are?" asked his sister, with something of the antagonistic tone which both in jest and earnest is too common between near relations.

"Because you have been talking incessantly ever since you met."

"We have been only contradicting each other."

"I could tell that too by the sound of your voices; but I took it for a good sign."

"I fear you heard mine almost only!" said Donal. "I talk too much, and I fear I have gathered the fault in a way that makes it difficult to cure."

"How was it?" asked Mr. Graeme.

"By having nobody to talk to. I learned it on the hill-side with the sheep, and in the meadows with the cattle. At college I thought I was nearly cured of it; but now, in my comparative solitude at the castle, it seems to have returned."

"Come here," said Mr. Graeme, "when you find it getting too much for you: my sister is quite equal to the task of re-curing you."

"She has not begun to use her power yet!" remarked Donal, as Miss Graeme, in hoydenish yet not ungraceful fashion, made an attempt to box the ear of her slanderous brother—a proceeding he had anticipated, and so was able to frustrate.

"When she knows you better," he said, "you will find my sister Kate more than your match."

"If I were a talker," she answered, "Mr. Grant would be too much for me: he quite bewilders me! What do you think! he has been actually trying to persuade me—"

"I beg your pardon, Miss Graeme; I have been trying to persuade you of nothing."

"What! not to believe in ghosts and necromancy and witchcraft and the evil eye and ghouls and vampyres, and I don't know what all out of nursery stories and old annuals?"

"I give you my word, Mr. Graeme," returned Donal, laughing, "I have not been persuading your sister of any of these things! I am certain she could be persuaded of nothing of which she did not first see the common sense. What I did dwell upon, without a doubt she would accept it, was the evident fact that writing and printing have done more to bring us into personal relations with the great dead, than necromancy, granting the magician the power he claimed, could ever do. For do we not come into contact with the being of a man when we hear him pour forth his thoughts of the things he likes best to think about, into the ear of the universe? In such a position does the book of a great man place us!—That was what I meant to convey to your sister."

"And," said Mr. Graeme, "she was not such a goose as to fail of understanding you, however she may have chosen to put on the garb of stupidity."

"I am sure," persisted Kate, "Mr. Grant talked so as to make me think he believed in necromancy and all that sort of thing!"

"That may be," said Donal; "but I did not try to persuade you to believe."

"Oh, if you hold me to the letter!" cried Miss Graeme, colouring a little.—"It would be impossible to get on with such a man," she thought, "for he not only preached when you had no pulpit to protect you from him, but stuck so to his text that there was no amusement to be got out of the business!"

She did not know that if she could have met him, breaking the ocean-tide of his thoughts with fitting opposition, his answers would have come short and sharp as the flashes of waves on rocks.

"If Mr. Grant believes in such things," said Mr. Graeme, "he must find himself at home in the castle, every room of which way well be the haunt of some weary ghost!"

"I do not believe," said Donal, "that any work of man's hands, however awful with crime done in it, can have nearly such an influence for belief in the marvellous, as the still presence of live Nature. I never saw an old castle before—at least not to make any close acquaintance with it, but there is not an aspect of the grim old survival up there, interesting as every corner of it is, that moves me like the mere thought of a hill-side with the veil of the twilight coming down over it, making of it the last step of a stair for the descending foot of the Lord."

"Surely, Mr. Grant, you do not expect such a personal advent!" said Miss Graeme.

"I should not like to say what I do or don't expect," answered Donal—and held his peace, for he saw he was but casting stumbling-blocks.

The silence grew awkward; and Mr. Graeme's good breeding called on him to say something; he supposed Donal felt himself snubbed by his sister.

"If you are fond of the marvellous, though, Mr. Grant," he said, "there are some old stories about the castle would interest you. One of them was brought to my mind the other day in the town. It is strange how superstition seems to have its ebbs and flows! A story or legend will go to sleep, and after a time revive with fresh interest, no one knows why."

"Probably," said Donal, "it is when the tale comes to ears fitted for its reception. They are now in many counties trying to get together and store the remnants of such tales: possibly the wind of some such inquiry may have set old people recollecting, and young people inventing. That would account for a good deal—would it not?"

"Yes, but not for all, I think. There has been no such inquiry made anywhere near us, so far as I am aware. I went to the Morven Arms last night to meet a tenant, and found the tradesmen were talking, over their toddy, of various events at the castle, and especially of one, the most frightful of all. It should have been forgotten by this time, for the ratio of forgetting, increases."

"I should like much to hear it!" said Donal.

"Do tell him, Hector," said Miss Graeme, "and I will watch his hair."

"It is the hair of those who mock at such things you should watch," returned Donal. "Their imagination is so rarely excited that, when it is, it affects their nerves more than the belief of others affects theirs."

"Now I have you!" cried Miss Graeme. "There you confess yourself a believer!"

"I fear you have come to too general a conclusion. Because I believe the Bible, do I believe everything that comes from the pulpit? Some tales I should reject with a contempt that would satisfy even Miss Graeme; of others I should say—'These seem as if they might be true;' and of still others, 'These ought to be true, I think.'—But do tell me the story."

"It is not," replied Mr. Graeme, "a very peculiar one—certainly not peculiar to our castle, though unique in some of its details; a similar legend belongs to several houses in Scotland, and is to be found, I fancy, in other countries as well. There is one not far from here, around whose dark basements—or hoary battlements—who shall say which?—floats a similar tale. It is of a hidden room, whose position or entrance nobody knows. Whether it belongs to our castle by right I cannot tell."

"A species of report," said Donal, "very likely to arise by a kind of cryptogamic generation! The common people, accustomed to the narrowest dwellings, gazing on the huge proportions of the place, and upon occasion admitted, and walking through a succession of rooms and passages, to them as intricate and confused as a rabbit-warren, must be very ready, I should think, to imagine the existence within such a pile, of places unknown even to the inhabitants of it themselves!—But I beg your pardon: do tell us the story."

"Mr. Grant," said Kate, "you perplex me! I begin to doubt if you have any principles. One moment you take one side and the next the other!"

"No, no; I but love my own side too well to let any traitors into its ranks: I would have nothing to do with lies."

"They are all lies together!"

"Then I want to hear this one," said Donal.

"I daresay you have heard it before!" remarked Mr. Graeme, and began.

"It was in the earldom of a certain recklessly wicked wretch, who not only robbed his poor neighbours, and even killed them when they opposed him, but went so far as to behave as wickedly on the Sabbath as on any other day of the week. Late one Saturday night, a company were seated in the castle, playing cards, and drinking; and all the time Sunday was drawing nearer and nearer, and nobody heeding. At length one of them, seeing the hands of the clock at a quarter to twelve, made the remark that it was time to stop. He did not mention the sacred day, but all knew what he meant. The earl laughed, and said, if he was afraid of the kirk-session, he might go, and another would take his hand. But the man sat still, and said no more till the clock gave the warning. Then he spoke again, and said the day was almost out, and they ought not to go on playing into the Sabbath. And as he uttered the word, his mouth was pulled all on one side. But the earl struck his fist on the table, and swore a great oath that if any man rose he would run him through. 'What care I for the Sabbath!' he said. 'I gave you your chance to go,' he added, turning to the man who had spoken, who was dressed in black like a minister, 'and you would not take it: now you shall sit where you are.' He glared fiercely at him, and the man returned him an equally fiery stare. And now first they began to discover what, through the fumes of the whisky and the smoke of the pine-torches, they had not observed, namely, that none of them knew the man, or had ever seen him before. They looked at him, and could not turn their eyes from him, and a cold terror began to creep through their vitals. He kept his fierce scornful look fixed on the earl for a moment, and then spoke. 'And I gave you your chance,' he said, 'and you would not take it: now you shall sit still where you are, and no Sabbath shall you ever see.' The clock began to strike, and the man's mouth came straight again. But when the hammer had struck eleven times, it struck no more, and the clock stopped. 'This day twelvemonth,' said the man, 'you shall see me again; and so every year till your time is up. I hope you will enjoy your game!' The earl would have sprung to his feet, but could not stir, and the man was nowhere to be seen. He was gone, taking with him both door and windows of the room—not as Samson carried off the gates of Gaza, however, for he left not the least sign of where they had been.

From that day to this no one has been able to find the room. There the wicked earl and his companions still sit, playing with the same pack of cards, and waiting their doom. It has been said that, on that same day of the year—only, unfortunately, testimony differs as to the day—shouts of drunken laughter may be heard issuing from somewhere in the castle; but as to the direction whence they come, none can ever agree. That is the story."

"A very good one!" said Donal. "I wonder what the ground of it is! It must have had its beginning!"

"Then you don't believe it?" said Miss Graeme.

"Not quite," he replied. "But I have myself had a strange experience up there."

"What! you have seen something?" cried Miss Graeme, her eyes growing bigger.

"No; I have seen nothing," answered Donal, "—only heard something.—One night, the first I was there indeed, I heard the sound of a far-off musical instrument, faint and sweet."