My story has not to do with city-life, in which occur frequent shocks,
changes, and recombinations, but with the life of a country region; and
is, therefore, "to a lingering motion bound," like the day, like the
ripening of the harvest, like the growth of all good things. But clouds
and rainbows will come in the quietest skies; adventures and
coincidences in the quietest village.
As Kate and Alec walked along the street, on their way to the castle,
one of the coaches from the county-town drove up with its four
thorough-breds.
"What a handsome fellow the driver is!" said Kate.
Alec looked up at the box. There sat Beauchamp, with the ribbons in his
grasp, handling his horses with composure and skill. Beside him sat the
owner of the coach, a _laird_ of the neighbourhood.
Certainly Beauchamp was a handsome fellow. But a sting went through
Alec's heart. It was the first time that he thought of his own person
in comparison with another. That she should admire Beauchamp, though he
was handsome!
The memory even of that moment made him writhe on his bed years after;
for a mental and bodily wound are alike in this, that after there is
but the scar of either left, bad weather will revive the torture. His
face fell. Kate saw it, and did him some injustice. They walked on in
silence, in the shadow of a high wall. Kate looked up at the top of the
wall and stopped. Alec looked at her. Her face was as full of light as
a diamond in the sun. He forgot all his jealousy. The fresh tide of his
love swept it away, or at least covered it. On the top of the wall, in
the sun, grew one wild scarlet poppy, a delicate transparent glory,
through which the sunlight shone, staining itself red, and almost
dissolving the poppy.
The red light melted away the mist between them, and they walked in it
up to the ruined walls. Long grass grew about them, close to the very
door, which was locked, that if old Time could not be kept out, younger
destroyers might. Other walls stood around, vitrified by fire--the
remnants of an older castle still, about which Jamblichus might have
spied the lingering phantoms of many a terrible deed.
They entered by the door in the great tower, under the spiky remnants
of the spiral stair projecting from the huge circular wall. To the
right, a steep descent, once a stair, led down to the cellars and the
dungeon; a terrible place, the visible negations of which are horrid,
and need no popular legends such as Alec had been telling Kate, of a
walled-up door and a lost room, to add to their influence. It was no
wonder that when he held out his hand to lead her down into the
darkness and through winding ways to the mouth of the far-off beehive
dungeon--it was no wonder, I say, that she should shrink and draw back.
A few rays came through the decayed planks of the door which Alec had
pushed to behind them, and fell upon the rubbish of centuries sloping
in the brown light and damp air down into the abyss. One larger ray
from the keyhole fell upon Kate's face, and showed it blanched with
fear, and her eyes distended with the effort to see through the gloom.
At that moment, a sweet, low voice came from somewhere, out of the
darkness, saying:
"Dinna be feared, mem, to gang whaur Alec wants ye to gang. Ye can
lippen (trust) to _him_."
Staring in the direction of the sound, Kate saw the pale face of a
slender--half child, half maiden, glimmering across the gulf that led
to the dungeon. She stood in the midst of a sepulchral light, whose
faintness differed from mere obscuration, inasmuch as it told how
bright it was out of doors in the sun. Annie, I say, stood in this
dimness--a dusky and yet radiant creature, seeming to throw off from
her a faint brown light--a lovely, earth-stained ghost.
"Oh! Annie, is that you?" said Alec.
"Ay is't, Alec," Annie answered.
"This is an old schoolfellow of mine," he said, turning to Kate, who
was looking haughtily at the girl.
"Oh! is it?" said Kate, condescending.
Between the two, each looking ghostly to the other, lay a dark
cavern-mouth that seemed to go down to Hades.
"Wonna ye gang doon, mem?" said Annie.
"No, thank you," answered Kate, decisively.
"Alec'll tak' guid care o' ye, mem."
"Oh! yes, I daresay; but I had rather not."
Alec said nothing. Kate would not trust him then! He would not have
thought much of it, however, but for what had passed before. Would she
have gone with Beauchamp if he had asked her? Ah! if he had asked
Annie, she too would have turned pale, but she would have laid her hand
in his, and gone with him.
"Gin ye want to gang up, than," she said, "I'll lat ye see the easiest
road. It's roun' this way."
And she pointed to a narrow ledge between the descent and the circular
wall, by which they could cross to where she stood. But Alec, who had
no desire for Annie's company, declined her guidance, and took Kate up
a nearer though more difficult ascent to the higher level. Here all the
floors of the castle lay in dust beneath their feet, mingled with
fragments of chimney-piece and battlement. The whole central space lay
open to the sky.
Annie remained standing on the edge of the dungeon-slope.
She had been on her way to see Tibbie, when she caught a glimpse of
Kate and Alec as they passed. Since watching them in the boat the
evening before, she had been longing to speak to Alec, longing to see
Kate nearer: perhaps the beautiful lady would let her love her. She
guessed where they were going, and across the fields she bounded like a
fawn, straight as the crows flew home to the precincts of that "ancient
rest," and reached it before them. She did not need to fetch the key,
for she knew a hole on the level of the grass, wide enough to let her
creep through the two yards of wall. So she crept in and took her place
near the door.
After they had rambled over the lower part of the building, Alec took
Kate up a small winding stair, past a succession of empty doorways like
eyeless sockets, leading nowhither because the floors had fallen. Kate
was so frightened by coming suddenly upon one after another of these
defenceless openings, that by the time she reached the broad platform,
which ran, all bare of parapet or battlement, around the top of the
tower, she felt faint; and when Alec scampered off like a goat to reach
the bartizan at the other side, she sank in an agony of fear upon the
landing of the stair.
Looking down upon her from the top of the little turret, Alec saw that
she was ill, and returning instantly in great dismay, comforted her as
well as he could, and got her by degrees to the bottom. There was a
spot of grass inside the walls, on which he made her rest; and as the
sun shone upon her through one of the ruined windows, he stood so that
his shadow should fall across her eyes. While he stood thus a strange
fancy seized him. The sun became in his eyes a fiery dragon, which
having devoured half of the building, having eaten the inside out of
it, having torn and gnawed it everywhere, and having at length reached
its kernel, the sleeping beauty, whose bed had, in the long years,
mouldered away, and been replaced by the living grass, would swallow
her up anon, if he were not there to stand between and defend her. When
he looked at her next, she had indeed become the sleeping beauty he had
fancied her; and sleep had already restored the colour to her cheeks.
Turning his eyes up to the tower from which they had just descended, he
saw, looking down upon them from one of the isolated doorways, the pale
face of Patrick Beauchamp. Alec bounded to the stair, rushed to the top
and round the platform, but found nobody. Beginning to doubt his eyes,
his next glance showed him Beauchamp standing over the sleeping girl.
He darted down the screw of the stair, but when he reached the bottom
Beauchamp had again disappeared.
The same moment Kate began to wake. Her first movement brought Alec to
his senses: why should he follow Beauchamp? He returned to her side,
and they left the place, locked the door behind them, took the key to
the lodge, and went home.
After tea, Alec, believing he had locked Beauchamp into the castle,
returned and searched the building from top to bottom, even got a
candle and a ladder, and went down into the dungeon, found no one, and
went home bewildered.
While Alec was searching the vacant ruin, Beauchamp was comfortably
seated on the box of the Spitfire, tooling it halfway home--namely, as
far as the house of its owner, the laird above mentioned, who was a
relative of his mother, and whom he was then visiting. He had seen Kate
and Alec take the way to the castle, and had followed them, and found
the door unlocked. Watching them about the place, he ascended the stair
from another approach. The moment Alec looked up at him, he ran down
again, and had just dropped into a sort of well-like place which the
stair had used to fill on its way to a lower level, when he heard
Alec's feet thundering up over his head. Determined then to see what
the lady was like, for he had never seen her close, or without her
bonnet, which now lay beside her on the grass, he scrambled out, and,
approaching her cautiously, had a few moments to contemplate her before
he saw--for he kept a watch on the tower--that Alec had again caught
sight of him, when he immediately fled to his former refuge, which
communicated with a low-pitched story lying between the open level and
the vaults.
The sound of the ponderous and rusty bolt reached him across the
cavernous space. He had not expected their immediate departure, and was
rather alarmed. His first impulse was to try whether he could not shoot
the bolt from the inside. This he soon found to be impossible. He next
turned to the windows in the front, but there the ground fell away so
suddenly that he was many feet from it--an altogether dangerous leap.
He was beginning to feel seriously concerned, when he heard a voice:
"Do ye want to win oot, sir? They hae lockit the door."
He turned but could see no one. Approaching the door again, he spied
Annie, in the dark twilight, standing on the edge of the descent to the
vaults. He had passed the spot not a minute before, and she was
certainly not there then. She looked as if she had just glided up that
slope from a region so dark that a spectre might haunt it all day long.
But Beauchamp was not of a fanciful disposition, and instead of taking
her for a spectre, he accosted her with easy insolence!
"Tell me how to get out, my pretty girl, and I'll give you a kiss."
Seized with a terror she did not understand, Annie darted into the
cavern between them, and sped down its steep into the darkness which
lay there like a lurking beast. A few yards down, however, she turned
aside, through a low doorway, into a vault. Beauchamp rushed after her,
passed her, and fell over a great stone lying in the middle of the way.
Annie heard him fall, sprung forth again, and, flying to the upper
light, found her way out, and left the discourteous knight a safe
captive, fallen upon that horrible stair.--A horrible stair it was: up
and down those steps, then steep and worn, now massed into an incline
of beaten earth, had swarmed, for months together, a multitude of naked
children, orphaned and captive by the sword, to and from the troughs at
which they fed like pigs, amidst the laughter of the lord of the castle
and his guests; while he who passed down them to the dungeon beyond,
had little chance of ever retracing his steps upward to the light.
Annie told the keeper that there was a gentleman shut into the castle,
and then ran a mile and a half to Tibbie's cottage, without stopping.
But she did not say a word to Tibbie about her adventure.