Can a fever change a man's whole nature, giving him powers that he never
had before? Can he go into it impotent, starved, naked, emerge from it
potent, satisfied, clothed with possibilities that are wonders, that are
miracles to him? It must be so; it is so. And yet--I must go back to
that sad autumn day when I walked beside the burn. Can I write down my
moods, my feelings of that day and of the following days? And if I can,
does that power of pinning the butterfly of my soul down upon the
board--does that power, too, bud, blossom from a soil mysteriously
fertilised by illness? Formerly, I could as easily have flown in the air
to the summit of cloud-capped Schiehallion as have set on paper even the
smallest fragment of my mind. Now--well, let me see, let me still
further know my new, my marvellous self.
Yes, that first day! It was Autumn, but only early Autumn. The leaves
were changing colour upon the birch trees, upon the rowans. At dawn,
mists stood round to shield the toilet of the rising sun. At evening,
they thronged together like a pale troop of shadowy mutes to assist at
his departure to the under world. It was a misty season, through which
the bracken upon the hillsides of my Carlounie glowed furtively in
tints of brown and of orange; and my mind, my whole being, seemed to
move in mists. I was just twenty-two, an orphan, master of my estate of
Carlounie, a Scotch laird, and my own governor. And some idiots envied
me then, as many begin to envy me now. I even remember one ghastly old
man who clapped me on the shoulder, and, with the addition of an
unnecessary oath, swore that I was "a lucky youngster." I, with my thin,
chetif body, my burning, weakly, starved, and yet ambitious soul--lucky!
I remember that I broke into a harsh laugh, and longed to kill the
babbling beast.
And it was the next day, in the afternoon, that I took that book--my
Bible--and went forth alone to the long den in which the burn hides and
cries its presence. Yes, I took Goethe's "Faust," and my own complaining
spirit, and went out into the mist with my misty, clouded mind. My
cousin Gavin wanted me to go out shooting. He laughed and rallied me
upon my ill-luck on the previous day, when I had gone out and been the
joke of my own keepers because I had missed every bird; and I turned and
railed at him, and told him to leave me to myself. And, as I went, I
heard him muttering, "That wretched little fellow! To think that he
should be owner of Carlounie!" Now, he sings another tune.
With "Faust" in my hand, and hatred in my heart, I went out into the
delicately chilly air, down the winding ways of the garden, through the
creaking iron gateway. I emerged on to the wilder land, irregular,
grass-covered ground, strewn with grey granite boulders, among which
coarse, wiry ferns grew sturdily. The blackfaced sheep whisked their
broad tails at me as I passed, then stooped their ever-greedy mouths to
their damp and eternal meal again. I heard the thin and distant cry of a
hawk, poised somewhere up in the mist. The hills, clothed in the
death-like glory of the bracken, loomed around me, like some phantom,
tricked-out procession passing through desolate places. And then I heard
the voice of the burn--that voice which is even now for ever in my ears.
To me that day it was the voice of one alive; and it is the voice of one
alive to me now. I descended the sloping hill with my lounging,
weak-kneed gait, at which the creatures who called me master had so
often looked contemptuously askance. (I was often tired at that time.) I
descended, I say, until I reached the edge of the tree-fringed den, and
the burn was noisy in my ears. I could see it now, leaping here and
there out of its hiding-place--ivory foam among the dripping larches,
and the birches with their silver stems; ivory foam among the deep brown
and flaming orange of the bracken, and in that foam a voice
calling--calling me to come down into its hiding-place, presided over by
the mists--to come down into its hiding-place, away from men: away from
the living creatures whom I hated because I envied them, because they
were stronger than I, because they could do what I could not do, say
what I could not say. Gavin, Dr Wedderburn, my tenants, the smallest
farm boy, the grooms, the little leaping peasants--I hated, I hated them
all. And then I obeyed the voice of the ivory foam, and I went down into
the hiding-place of the burn.
It ran through strange and secret places where the soft mists hung in
wet wreaths. I seemed to be in another world when I was in its lair. On
the sharply rising banks stood the sentinel trees like shadows, some of
them with tortured and tormented shapes. As I turned and looked straight
up the hill of the burn's descending course, the mountain from which it
came closed in the prospect inexorably. A soft gloom hemmed us in--me
and the burn which talked to me. We two were out of the world which I
hated and longed to have at my feet. Yes, we were in another world, full
of murmuring and of restful unrest; and now that I was right down at the
water-side, the ivory face of my friend, the ivory lips that spoke to
me, the ivory heart that beat against my heart--so sick and so
weary--were varied and were changed. As thoughts streak a mind, the
clear amber of the pools among the rocks streaked the continuous foam
that marked the incessant leaps taken by the water towards the valley.
The silence of those pools was brilliant, like the pauses for
contemplation in a great career of action; and their silence spoke to
me, mingling mysteriously with the voice of the foam. The course of the
burn is broken up, and attended by rocks that have been modelled by the
action of the running water into a hundred shapes. Some are dressed in
mosses, yellow and green, like velvet to the touch, and all covered with
drops of moisture; some are gaunt and naked and deplorable, with sharp
edges and dry faces. The burn avoids some with a cunning and almost
coquettish grace, dashes brutally against others, as if impelled by an
internal violence of emotion. Others, again, it caresses quite gently,
and would be glad to linger by, if Nature would allow the dalliance. And
this army of rocks helps to give to the burn its charm of infinite
variety, and to fill its voice with a whole gamut of expression; for the
differing shape of each boulder, against which it rushes in its long
career, gives it a different note. It flickers across the small and
round stone with the purling cry of a child. From the stone curved
inwards, and with a hollow bosom it gains a crooning, liquid melody. The
pointed and narrow colony of rocks which break it into an intricate
network of small water threads, toss it, chattering frivolously, towards
the dark pool under the birches, where the trout play like sinister
shadows and the insects dance in the sombre pomp of Autumn; and when it
gains a great slab that serves it for a spring-board, from which it
takes a mighty leap, its voice is loud and defiant, and shrieks with a
banshee of triumph--in which, too, there is surely an undercurrent of
wailing woe. Oh, the burn has many voices among the rocks, under the
ferns and the birch trees, in the brooding darkness of the mists and
shadows, between the steep walls of the green banks that hem it in! Many
voices which can sing, when they choose, one song, again and again
and--monotonously--again!
So--now on this sad Autumn day--I was with the burn in its hiding-place,
cool, damp, fretful. Carlounie sank from my sight. My garden, the wilder
land beyond, the moors on which yesterday my incompetence as a shot had
roused the contempt of my cousin and of my hirelings--all were lost to
view. I was away from all men in this narrow, tree-shrouded cleft of a
world. I sat down on a rock, and, stretching out my legs, rested my
heels on another rock. Beneath my legs the clear brown water glided
swiftly. I sat and listened to its murmur. And, just then, it did not
occur to me that water can utter words like men. The murmur was
suggestive but definitely inarticulate. I had come down here to be away
and to think. The murmur of my mind spoke to the murmur of the burn;
and, as ever, in those days, it lamented and cursed and bitterly
complained.
Why, why was I pursued by a malady of incompetence that clung to both
mind and body? (So ran my thoughts.) Why was I bruised and beaten by
Providence? Why had I been given a soul that could not express itself in
the frame of a coward, a weakling, a thin, nervous, dwarfish, almost a
deformed, creature? If my soul had corresponded exactly to my body, then
all might have been well enough. I should have been more complete,
although less, in some way, than I now was. For such a soul would have
accepted cowardice, weakness, inferiority to others as suitable to it,
as a right fate. Such a soul would never have known the meaning of the
word rebellion, would never have been able to understand its own cancer
of disease, to diagnose the symptoms of its villainous and creeping
malady. It would never have aspired like a flame, and longed in vain to
burn clearly and grandly or to flicker out for ever. Rather would such a
soul have guttered on like some cheap and ill-smelling candle, shedding
shadows rather than any light, ignorant of its own obscurity, regardless
of the possibilities that teem like waking children in the wondrous womb
of life, oblivious of the contempt of the souls around it, heedless of
ambition, of the trumpet call of success, of the lust to be something,
to do something, of the magic, of the stinging magic of achievement.
With such a soul in my hateful, pinched, meagre, pallid body--I thought,
sitting thus by the burn--I might have been content, an utterly low, and
perhaps an utterly satisfied product of the fiend creation.
But my soul was not of this kind, and so I was the most bitterly
miserable of men. God--or the Devil--had made me ill-shaped, physically
despicable, with the malign sort of countenance that so often
accompanies and illustrates a bad poor body. My limbs, without being
actually twisted, were shrunken and incompetent--they would not obey my
desires as do the limbs of other men. My legs would not grip a horse.
When I rode I was a laughing-stock. My arms had no swiftness, no
agility, no delicate and subtle certainty. When I tried to box, to
fence, I was one whirling, jigging incapacity. I had feeble sight, and
objects presented themselves to my vision so strangely that I could not
shoot straight. I, Alistair Ralston the young Laird of Carlounie! When I
walked my limbs moved heavily and awkwardly. I had no grace, no
lightness, no ordinary, quite usual competence of bodily power. And this
was bitter, yet as nothing to the Marah that lay beyond. For my body was
in a way complete. It was a wretch. But when you came to the mind you
had the real tragedy. In many decrepit flesh temples there dwells a
commanding spirit, as a great God might dwell--of mysterious choice--in
a ruinous and decaying lodge in a wilderness. And such a spirit rules,
disposes, presides, develops, has its own full and superb existence,
triumphing not merely over, but actually through the contemptible body
in which it resides, so that men even are led to worship the very
ugliness and poverty of this body, to adore it for its power to retain
such a mighty spirit within it. Such a spirit was not mine. Had it been,
I might have been happy by the burn that Autumn day. Had it been, I
might never--But I am anticipating, and I must not anticipate. I must
sit with the brown water rushing beneath the arch of my limbs, and
recall the horror of my musing.
In a manner, then, my soul matched my body. It was feeble and
incompetent too. My brain was dull and clouded. My intellect was
sluggish and inert. But--and this was the terror for me!--within the
rank nest of my soul--my spirit--lay coiled two vipers that never ceased
from biting me with their poisoned fangs--Self-consciousness and
Ambition. I knew myself, and I longed to be other than I was. I watched
my own incompetence as one who watches from a tower. I divined how
others regarded me--precisely. The blatant and comfortable egoism of a
dwarf mind in a dwarf body was never for one moment mine. I was that
terrible anomaly, an utterly incomplete and incompetent thing that
adored, with a curious wildness of passion, completeness, competence.
Nor had I a soul that could ever be satisfied with a one-sided
perfection. My desires were Gargantuan. When I was with my cousin Gavin,
a fine all-round sportsman, I longed with fury to be a good shot, to
throw a fly as he did, to have a perfect seat on a horse. I felt that I
would give up years of life to beat him once in any of his pursuits.
When I was with Dr Wedderburn, my desires, equally intense, were utterly
different. He represented in my neighbourhood Intellect--with a capital
I. A man of about fifty, minister of the parish of Carlounie, he was
astonishingly adroit as a controversialist, astonishingly eloquent as a
divine. His voice was full of music. His eyes were full of light and of
the most superb self-confidence. He rested upon his intellect as a man
may rest upon a rock. The power of his personality was calm and immense.
I felt it vehemently. I shook and trembled under it. I hated and loathed
the man for it, because I wanted and could never possess it. So, too, I
hated my cousin Gavin for his possessions, his long and sure-sighted
eyes, great and strong arms, broad chest, lithe legs, bright agility. My
body could do nothing. My soul could do nothing--except one great thing.
It could fully observe and comprehend its own impotence. It could fully
and desperately envy and pine to be what it could never be. Could never
be, do I say? Wait! Remember that is only what I thought then as I sat
upon the rock, and, with haggard young eyes, watched the clear brown
water slipping furtively past between my knees.
My disease seemed to culminate that day, I remember. I was a sick
invalid alone in the mist. Something--it might have been vitriol--was
eating into me, eating, eating its way to my very heart, to the core of
me. Oh, to be stunted and desire to be straight and tall, to be dwarf
and wish to be giant, to be stupid and long to be a genius, to be ugly
and yearn to be in face as one of the shining gods, to have no power
over men, and to pine to fascinate, hold, dominate a world of men--this
indeed is to be in hell! I was in hell that Autumn day. I clenched my
thin, weak hands together. I clenched my teeth from which the pale lips
were drawn back in a grin; and I realised all the spectral crowd of my
shortcomings. They stood before me like demons of the Brocken--yes, yes,
of the Brocken!--and I cursed God with the sound of the burn ringing and
chattering in my ears. And I devoted Gavin, Doctor Wedderburn, every man
highly placed, every lowest peasant, who could do even one of all the
things I could not do, to damnation. The paroxysm that took hold of me
was like a fit, a convulsion. I came out of it white and feeble. And,
suddenly, the voice of the burn seemed to come from a long way off. I
put out my hand, and took up from the rock on which I had laid it,
"Faust." And, scarcely knowing what I did, I began mechanically to
read--to the dim rapture of the burn--
"_Scene III.--The Study. Faust (entering, with the poodle)._" I began to
read, do I say, mechanically? Yes, it is true, but soon, very soon, the
spell of Goethe was laid upon me. I was in the lofty-arched, narrow
Gothic chamber, with that living symbol of the weariness, broken
ambition, learned despair of all the ages. I was engrossed. I heard the
poodle snarling by the stove. I heard the spirits whispering in the
corridor. Vapour rose--or was it indeed the mist from the mountains
among the birch trees?--and out of the vapour came Mephistopheles in the
garb of a travelling scholar. And then--and then the great bargain was
struck. I heard--yes, I did, I actually, and most distinctly, heard a
voice--Faust's--say, "_Let us the sensual deeps explore.... Plunge we in
Time's tumultuous dance, In the rush and roll of circumstance._" A
pause; then the Student's grave and astonished tones came to me: _Eritis
sicut Deus, scientes bonum et malum._ The cloak was spread, and on the
burning air Faust was wafted to his new life--nay, not to his new life
merely, but to life itself. He vanished with his guide in a coloured,
flower-like mist. I dropped my hand holding the book down upon the cold
rock by which the cold water splashed. It felt burning hot to my touch.
My head fell upon my breast, and I had my dreams--dreams of the life of
Faust and of its glories, gained by this bargain that he made. And
then--yes, then it was!--the voice of the burn, as from leagues away in
the bosom of this very mist, began to sing like a fairy voice, or a
voice in dreams, and in visions of the night, "_If it was so then, it
might be so now._" At first I scarcely heeded it, for I was enwrapt.
But the song grew louder, more insistent. It was travelling to me from a
far country. I heard it coming: "_If it was so then, it might be so
now_"--"_If it was so then, it might be so now._" How near it was at
last, how loud in my ears! And yet always there was something vague,
visionary about it, something of the mist, I think. At length I heard it
with the attention that is of earth. I came to myself, out of the narrow
Gothic chamber in which the genius of Goethe had prisoned me, and I
stared into the mist, which was gathering thicker as the night began to
fall. It seemed flower-like, and full of strange and mysterious colour.
I trembled. I got up. Still I heard the voice of the burn singing that
monotonous legend, on, and on, and on. Slowly I turned. I climbed the
bank of the den. The sheep scattered lethargically at my approach. I
passed through the creaking iron gate into the garden. Carlounie was
before me. There was something altered, something triumphant about its
aspect. The voice of the burn faded in a long diminuendo. Yet, even as I
gained the door of my house, and, before entering it, paused in an
attentive attitude, I heard the water chanting faintly from the
den--"_If it was so then, it might be so now._" ... As I came into the
hall, in which Gavin and Dr Wedderburn stood together talking earnestly,
I remember that I shivered. Yet my cheeks were glowing.
* * * * *
From that moment not a day passed without my visiting the burn. It
summoned me. Always it sang those words persistently. The sound of the
water can be very faintly heard from the windows of Carlounie. Each day,
at dawn, I pushed open the lattice of my bedroom and hearkened to hear
if the song had changed. Each night, at moon-rise, or in the darkness
through which the soft and small rain fell quietly, I leaned over the
sill and listened. Sometimes the wind was loud among the mountains.
Sometimes the silence was intense and awful. But in storm or in
stillness the burn sang on, ever and ever the same words. At moments I
fancied that the voice was as the voice of a man demented, repeating
with mirthless frenzy through all his years one hollow sentence. At
moments I deemed it the cry of a fair woman, a siren, a Lorelei among my
rocks in my valley. Then again I said, "It is a spirit voice, a voice
from the inner chamber of my own heart." And--why I know not--at that
last fantasy I shuddered. Even in the midnight from my window ledge I
leaned while the world slept and I heard the mystic message of the burn.
My visits to its bed were not unobserved. One morning my cousin Gavin
said to me roughly, "Why the devil are you always stealing off to that
ditch"--so he called the den that was the home of my voice--"when you
ought to be practising to conquer your infernal deficiencies? Why, the
children of your own keepers laugh at you. Try to shoot straight, man,
and be a real man instead of dreaming and idling." I stared at him and
answered, "You don't understand everything." Once Dr Wedderburn, who had
been my tutor, said to me more kindly, "Alistair, action is better for
you than thought. Leave the burn alone. You go there to brood. Try to
work, for work is the best man-maker after all."
And to him I said, "Yes, I know!" and flew with a strong wing in the
face of his advice. For the voice of the burn was more to me than the
voice of Gavin, or of Wedderburn; and the mind of the burn meant more to
me than the mind of any man. And so the Autumn died slowly, with a
lingering decadence, and shrouded perpetually in mist. I often felt ill,
even then. My body was dressed in weakness. Perhaps already the fever
was upon me. I wish I could know. Was it crawling in my veins? Was it
nestling about my heart and in my brain? Could it be that?...
Certainly during this period life seemed alien to me, and I moved as one
apart in a remote world, full of the music of the burn, and full, too,
of vague clouds. That is so. Looking back, I know it. Still, I cannot be
sure what is the truth. In the late Autumn I paid my last visit to the
burn before my illness seized me. The cold of early Winter was in the
air and a great stillness. It was afternoon when I left the house
walking slowly with my awkward gait. My face, I know, was white and
drawn, and I felt that my lips were twitching. I did not carry my volume
of Goethe in my hand; but, in its place, held an old book on
transcendental magic. The voice of the burn--yes, that alone--had led me
to study this book. So now I took it down to the burn. Why? Had I the
foolish fancy of introducing my live thing of the den to this strange
writing on the black art? Who knows? Perhaps the fever in my veins put
the book into my hand. I shivered in the damp cold as I descended the
steep ground that lay about the water, which that day seemed to roar in
my ears the sentence I had heard so many days and nights. And this time,
as I hearkened, my heart and my brain echoed the last words--"_It might
be so now._" Gaining the edge of the burn, then in heavy spate, I
watched for a while the passage of the foam from rock to rock. I peered
into the pools, clouded with flood water from the hills, and with
whirling or sinking dead leaves. And all my meagre body seemed pulsing
with those everlasting words: "Why not now?" I murmured to myself, with
a sort of silent sneer, too, at my own absurdity. I remember I glanced
furtively around as I spoke. Grey emptiness, grey loneliness, dripping
bare trees through whose branches the mist curled silently, cold rocks,
the cold flood of the swollen burn--such was the blank prospect that met
my eyes.
There was no man near me. There was no one to look at me. I was remote,
hidden in a secret place, and the early twilight was already beginning
to fall. No one could see me. I opened my old and ragged book, or,
rather, let it fall open at a certain page. Upon it I looked for the
hundredth time, and read that he who would evoke the Devil must choose a
solitary and condemned spot. The burn was solitary. The burn was
condemned surely by the despair and by the endless incapacities of the
wretched being who owned it. I had taken off my shoes and placed them
upon a rock. My feet were bare. My head was covered. I now furtively
proceeded to gather together a small heap of sticks and leaves, and to
these I set fire, after several attempts. As the flames at last crept
up, the mist gathered more closely round me and my fire, as if striving
to warm itself at the blaze. The voice of the burn mingled with the
uneasy crackle of the twigs, and a murmur of its words seemed to emanate
also from the flames, two elements uniting to imitate the utterance of
man to my brain, already surely tormented with fever. And now, with my
eyes upon my book, I proceeded to trace with the sharp point of a stick
in some sandy soil between two rocks a rough Goetic Circle of Black
evocations and pacts. From time to time I paused in my work and glanced
uneasily about me, but I saw only the mists and the waters.
At length my task was finished, and the time had arrived for the
supreme effort of my insane and childish folly. Standing at Amasarac in
the Circle, I said aloud the formula of Evocation of the Grand Grimoire,
ending with the words "Jehosua, Evam, Zariat, natmik, Come, come, come."
My voice died away in the twilight, and I stood among the grey rocks
waiting, mad creature that I surely was! But only the rippling voice of
the burn answered my adjuration. Then I repeated the words in a louder
tone, adding menaces and imprecations to my formula. And all the time
the fire I had kindled sprang up into the mist; and the twilight of the
heavy Autumn fell slowly round me. Again I paused, and again my madness
received no satisfaction, no response. But it seemed to me that I heard
the browsing sheep on the summit of the right bank of the gully scatter
as if at the approach of some one. Yet there was no stir of footsteps.
It must have been my fancy, or the animals were merely changing their
feeding ground in a troop, as they sometimes will, for no assignable
cause. And now I made one last effort, urged by the voice of the burn,
which sang so loudly the words which had mingled with my dream of Faust.
I cried aloud the supreme appellation, making an effort that brought out
the sweat on my forehead, and set the pulses leaping in my thin and
shivering body. "_Chavajoth! chavajoth! chavajoth! I command thee by the
Key of Solomon and the great name Semhamphoras._"
* * * * *
A little way up the course of the burn the dead wood cracked and
shuffled under the pressure of descending feet. Again I heard a
scattering of the sheep upon the hillside. My hair stirred on my head
under my cap, and the noise of the falling water was intolerably loud to
me. I wanted to hear plainly, to hear what was coming down to me in the
mist. The brush-wood sang nearer. In the heavy and damp air there was
the small, sharp report of a branch snapped from a tree. I heard it drop
among the ferns close to me. And then in the mist and in the twilight I
saw a slim figure standing motionless. It was vague, but less vague than
a shadow. It seemed to be a man, or a youth, clad in a grey suit that
could scarcely be differentiated from the mist. The flames of my fire,
bent by a light breeze that had sprung up, stretched themselves towards
it, as if to salute it. And now I could not hear any movement of the
sheep; evidently they had gone to a distance. At first, seized with a
strange feeling of extreme, almost unutterable fear, I neither moved nor
spoke. Then, making a strong effort to regain control of my ordinary
faculties, I cried out in the twilight--
"What is that? What is it?"
"Only a stranger who has missed his way on the mountain, and wants to go
on to Wester Denoon."
The voice that came to me from the figure beyond the fire sounded, I
remember, quite young, like the voice of a boy. It was clear and level,
and perhaps a little formal. So that was all. A tourist--that was all!
"Can you direct me on the way?" the voice said.
I gave the required direction slowly, for I was still confused, nervous,
exhausted with my insane practices in the den. But the youth--as I
supposed he was--did not move away at once.
"What are you doing by this fire?" he said. "I heard your voice calling
by the torrent among the trees when I was a very long way off."
Strangely, I did not resent the question. Still more strangely, I was
impelled to give him the true answer to it.
"Raising the Devil!" he said. "And did he come to you?"
"No; of course not. You must think me mad."
"And why do you call him?"
Suddenly a desire to confide in this stranger, whose face I could not
see now, whose shadowy form I should, in all probability, never see
again, came upon me. My usual nervousness deserted me. I let loose my
heart in a turbulent crowd of words. I explained my impotence of body
and of mind to this grey traveller in the twilight. I dwelt upon my
misery. I repeated the cry of the burn and related my insane dream of
imitating Faust, of making my poor pact with Lucifer, with the Sphinx of
mediaeval terrors. When I ceased, the boy's voice answered:--
"They say that in these modern days Satan has grown exigent. It is not
enough to dedicate to him your own soul; but you must also pay a tribute
of souls to the Caesar of hell."
"A tribute of souls?"
"Yes. You must bring, they say, the mystic number, three souls to
Satan."
Suddenly I laughed.
"I could never do that," I said. "I have no power to seduce man or
woman. I cannot win souls to heaven or to hell."
"But if you received new powers, such as you desire, would you use them
to win souls, three souls, to Lucifer?"
"Yes," I said with passionate earnestness. "I swear to you that I
would."
Suddenly the boy's voice laughed.
"_Quomodo cecidisti_, Lucifer!" he said. "When thou canst not contrive
to capture souls for thyself! But," he added, as if addressing himself
once more to me, after this strange ejaculation, "your words have,
perhaps, sealed the bond. Who knows? Words that come from the very heart
are often deeds. For, as we can never go back from things that we have
done, it may be that, sometimes, we can never go back from things that
we have said."
On the words he moved, and passed so swiftly by me into the twilight
down the glen that I never saw his face. I turned instinctively to look
after him; and, this was strange, it seemed that the wind at that very
moment must have turned with me, blowing from, instead of towards, the
mountain. This certainly was so; for the tongues of flame from my fire
bent backward on a sudden and leaned after the grey traveller, whose
steps died swiftly away among the rocks, and on the shuffling dead wood
and leaves of the birches and the oaks.
And then there came a singing in my ears, a beating of many drums in my
brain. I drooped and sank down by the fire in the mist. My fever came
upon me like a giant, and presently Gavin and Doctor Wedderburn,
searching in the night, found me in a delirium, and bore me back to
Carlounie.