INVESTIGATION.
The autumn brought terrible storms. Many fishing boats came to grief.
Of some, the crews lost everything: of others, the loss of their lives
delivered their crews from smaller losses. There were many bereaved in
the village, and Donal went about among them, doing what he could, and
getting help for them where his own ability would not reach their
necessity. Lady Arctura wanted no persuasion to go with him in some of
his visits; and the intercourse she thus gained with humanity in its
simpler forms, of which she had not had enough for the health of her
own nature, was of high service to her. Perhaps nothing helps so much
to believe in the Father, as the active practical love of the brother.
If he who loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, can ill love God
whom he hath not seen, then he who loves his brother must surely find
it the easier to love God! Arctura found that to visit the widow and
the fatherless in their afflictions; to look on and know them as her
kind; to enter into their sorrows, and share the elevating influence of
grief genuine and simple, the same in every human soul, was to draw
near to God. She met him in his children. For to honour, love, and be
just to our neighbour, is religion; and he who does these things will
soon find that he cannot live without the higher part of religion, the
love of God. If that do not follow, the other will sooner or later die
away, leaving the man the worse for having had it. She found her way to
God easier through the crowd of her fellows; while their troubles took
her off her own, set them at a little distance from her, and so put it
in her power to understand them better.
One day after the fishing boats had gone out, rose a terrible storm.
Some of them made for the harbour again--such as it was; others kept
out to sea; Stephen Kennedy’s boat came ashore bottom upward. His body
was cast on the sands close to the spot where Donal dragged the net
from the waves. There was sorrow afresh through the village: Kennedy
was a favourite; and his mother was left childless. No son would any
more come sauntering in with his long slouch in the gloamin’; and
whether she would ever see him again--_to know him_--who could tell! For
the common belief does not go much farther than paganism in yielding
comfort to those whose living loves have disappeared--the fault not of
Christianity, but of Christians.
The effect of the news upon Forgue I have some ground for conjecturing:
I believe it made him care a little less about marrying the girl, now
that he knew no rival ready to take her; and feel also that he had one
enemy the less, one danger the less, in the path he would like to take.
Within a week after, he left the castle, and if his father knew where
he went, he was the only one who did. He had been pressing him to show
some appearance of interest in his cousin; Forgue had professed himself
unequal to the task at present: if he might go away for a while, he
said, he would doubtless find it easier when he returned.
The storms were over, the hedges and hidden roots had begun to dream of
spring, and Arctura had returned to her own room to sleep, when one
afternoon she came to the schoolroom and told Donal she had had the
terrible dream again.
“This time,” she said, “I came out, in my dream, on the great stair,
and went up to my room, and into bed, before I waked. But I dare not
ask mistress Brookes whether she saw me--”
“You do not imagine you were out of the room?” said Donal.
“I cannot tell. I hope not. If I were to find I had been, it would
drive me out of my senses! I was thinking all day about the lost room:
I fancy it had something to do with that.”
“We must find the room, and have done with it!” said Donal.
“Are you so sure we can?” she asked, her face brightening.
“If there be one, and you will help me, I think we can,” he answered.
“I will help you.”
“Then first we will try the shaft of the music-chimney. That it has
never smoked, at least since those wires were put there, makes it
something to question--though the draught across it might doubtless
have prevented it from being used. It may be the chimney to the very
room. But we will first try to find out whether it belongs to any room
we know. I will get a weight and a cord: the wires will be a plague,
but I think we can pass them. Then we shall see how far the weight goes
down, and shall know on what floor it is arrested. That will be
something gained: the plane of inquiry will be determined. Only there
may be a turn in the chimney, preventing the weight from going to the
bottom.”
“When shall we set about it?” said Arctura, almost eagerly.
“At once,” replied Donal.
She went to get a shawl.
Donal went to the gardener’s tool-house, and found a suitable cord.
There was a seven-pound weight, but that would not pass the wires! He
remembered an old eight-day clock on a back stair, which was never
going. He got out its heavier weight, and carried it, with the cord and
the ladder, to his own stair--at the foot of which was lady
Arctura--waiting for him.
There was that in being thus associated with the lovely lady; in
knowing that peace had begun to visit her through him, that she trusted
him implicitly, looking to him for help and even protection; in knowing
that nothing but wrong to her could be looked for from uncle or cousin,
and that he held what might be a means of protecting her, should undue
influence be brought to bear upon her--there was that in all this, I
say, that stirred to its depth the devotion of Donal’s nature. With the
help of God he would foil her enemies, and leave her a free woman--a
thing well worth a man’s life! Many an angel has been sent on a smaller
errand!
Such were his thoughts as he followed Arctura up the stair, she
carrying the weight and the cord, he the ladder, which it was not easy
to get round the screw of the stair. Arctura trembled with excitement
as she ascended, grew frightened as often as she found she had
outstripped him, waited till the end of the ladder came poking round,
and started again before the bearer appeared.
Her dreams had disquieted her more than she had yet confessed: had she
been taking a way of her own, and choosing a guide instead of receiving
instruction in the way of understanding? Were these things sent for her
warning, to show her into what an abyss of death her conduct was
leading her?--But the moment she found herself in the open air of
Donal’s company, her doubts and fears vanished for the time. Such a one
as he must surely know better than those others the way of the Spirit!
Was he not more childlike, more straightforward, more simple, and, she
could not but think, more obedient than those? Mr. Carmichael was
older, and might be more experienced; but did his light shine clearer
than Donal’s? He might be a priest in the temple; but was there not a
Samuel in the temple as well as an Eli? It the young, strong, ruddy
shepherd, the defender of his flock, who was sent by God to kill the
giant! He was too little to wear Saul’s armour; but he could kill a man
too big to wear it! Thus meditated Arctura as she climbed the stair,
and her hope and courage grew.
A delicate conscience, sensitive feelings, and keen faculties,
subjected to the rough rasping of coarse, self-satisfied, unspiritual
natures, had almost lost their equilibrium. As to natural condition, no
one was sounder than she; yet even now when she had more than begun to
see its falsehood, a headache would suffice to bring her afresh under
the influence of the hideous system she had been taught, and wake in
her all kinds of deranging doubts and consciousnesses. Subjugated so
long to the untrue, she required to be for a time, until her spiritual
being should be somewhat individualized, under the genial influences of
one who was not afraid to believe, one who knew the master. Nor was
there danger to either so long as he sought no end of his own, so long
as he desired only His will, so long as he could say, “Whom is there in
heaven but thee! and there is none upon earth that I desire besides
thee!”
By the time she reached the top she was radiantly joyous in the
prospect of a quiet hour with him whose presence and words always gave
her strength, who made the world look less mournful, and the will of
God altogether beautiful; who taught her that the glory of the Father’s
love lay in the inexorability of its demands, that it is of his deep
mercy that no one can get out until he has paid the uttermost farthing.
They stepped upon the roof and into the gorgeous afterglow of an autumn
sunset. The whole country, like another sea, was flowing from that
well of colour, in tidal waves of an ever advancing creation. Its more
etherial part, rushing on above, broke on the old roofs and chimneys
and splashed its many tinted foam all over them; while through it and
folded in it came a cold thin wind that told of coming death. Arctura
breathed a deep breath, and her joy grew. It is wonderful how small a
physical elevation, lifting us into a slightly thinner air, serves to
raise the human spirits! We are like barometers, only work the other
way; the higher we go, the higher goes our mercury.
They stood for a moment in deep enjoyment, then simultaneously turned
to each other.
“My lady,” said Donal, “with such a sky as that out there, it hardly
seems as if there could be such a thing as our search to-night! Hollow
places, hidden away for evil cause, do not go with it at all! There is
the story of gracious invention and glorious gift; here the story of
greedy gathering and self-seeking, which all concealment involves!”
“But there may be nothing, you know, Mr. Grant!” said Arctura, troubled
for the house.
“There may be nothing. But if there is such a room, you may be sure it
has some relation with terrible wrong--what, we may never find out, or
even the traces of it.”
“I shall not be afraid,” she said, as if speaking with herself. “It is
the terrible dreaming that makes me weak. In the morning I tremble as
if I had been in the hands of some evil power.”
Donal turned his eyes upon her. How thin she looked in the last of the
sunlight! A pang went through him at the thought that one day he might
be alone with Davie in the huge castle, untended by the consciousness
that a living light and loveliness flitted somewhere about its gloomy
and ungenial walls. But he would not think the thought! How that dismal
Miss Carmichael must have worried her! When the very hope of the
creature in his creator is attacked in the name of religion; when his
longing after a living God is met with the offer of a paltry escape
from hell, how is the creature to live! It is God we want, not heaven;
his righteousness, not an imputed one, for our own possession;
remission, not letting off; love, not endurance for the sake of
another, even if that other be the one loveliest of all.
They turned from the sunset and made their way to the chimney-stack.
There once more Donal set up his ladder. He tied the clock-weight to
the end of his cord, dropped it in, and with a little management got it
through the wires. It went down and down, gently lowered, till the cord
was all out, and still it would go.
“Do run and get some more,” said Arctura.
“You do not mind being left alone?”
“No--if you will not be long.”
“I will run,” he said--and run he did, for she had scarcely begun to
feel the loneliness when he returned panting.
He took the end she had been holding, tied on the fresh cord he had
brought, and again lowered away. As he was beginning to fear that after
all he had not brought enough, the weight stopped, resting, and drew no
more.
“If only we had eyes in that weight,” said Arctura, “like the snails at
the end of their horns!”
“We might have greased the bottom of the weight,” said Donal, “as they
do the lead when they want to know what kind of bottom there is to the
sea: it might have brought up ashes. If it will not go any farther, I
will mark the string at the mouth, and draw it up.”
He moved the weight up and down a little; it rested still, and he drew
it up.
“Now we must mark off it the height of the chimney above the parapet
wall,” he said; “and then I will lower the weight towards the court
below, until this last knot comes to the wall: the weight will then
show us on the outside how far down the house it went inside.--Ah, I
thought so!” he went on, looking over after the weight; “--only to the
first floor, or thereabouts!--No, I think it is lower!--But anyhow, my
lady, as you can see, the place with which the chimney, if chimney it
be, communicates, must be somewhere about the middle of the house, and
perhaps is on the first floor; we can’t judge very well looking down
from here, and against a spot where are no windows. Can you imagine
what place it might be?”
“I cannot,” answered Arctura; “but I could go into every room on that
floor without anyone seeing me.”
“Then I will let the weight down the chimney again, and leave it for
you to see, if you can, below. If you find it, we must do something
else.”
It was done, and they descended together. Donal went back to the
schoolroom, not expecting to see her again till the next day. But in
half an hour she came to him, saying she had been into every room on
that floor, both where she thought it might be, and where she knew it
could not be, and had not seen the weight.
“The probability then is,” replied Donal, “that thereabout
somewhere--there, or farther down in that neighbourhood--lies the
secret; but we cannot be sure, for the weight may not have reached the
bottom of the shaft. Let us think what we shall do next.”
He placed a chair for her by the fire. They had the room to themselves.