"That is a very proper question. It looks dreadful, and must look dreadful, to everyone who cannot see in it that which alone makes life not dreadful. If you saw a great dark cloak coming along the road as if it were round somebody, but n.o.body inside it, you would be frightened--would you not?"

"Indeed I should. It would be awful!"

"It would. But if you spied inside the cloak, and making it come towards you, the most beautiful loving face you ever saw--of a man carrying in his arms a little child--and saw the child clinging to him, and looking in his face with a blessed smile, would you be frightened at the black cloak?"

"No; that would be silly."

"You have your answer! The thing that makes death look so fearful is that we do not see inside it. Those who see only the black cloak, and think it is moving along of itself, may well be frightened; but those who see the face inside the cloak, would be fools indeed to be frightened! Before Jesus came, people lived in great misery about death; but after he rose again, those who believed in him always talked of dying as falling asleep; and I daresay the story of Lazarus, though it was not such a great thing after the rising of the Lord himself, had a large share in enabling them to think that way about it."

When they went home, Davie, running up to lady Arctura's room, recounted to her as well as he could the conversation he had just had with Mr. Grant.

"Oh, Arkie!" he said, "to hear him talk, you would think Death hadn't a leg to stand upon!"

Arctura smiled; but it was a smile through a cloud of unshed tears.

Lovely as death might be, she would like to get the good of this world before going to the next!--As if G.o.d would deny us any good!--At one time she had been willing to go, she thought, but she was not now!--The world had of late grown very beautiful to her!

CHAPTER LXI.

THE BUREAU.

On the Monday night Donal again went down into the hidden parts of the castle. Arctura had come to the schoolroom, but seemed ill able for her work, and he did not tell her what he was doing farther.

They were rather the ghosts of fears than fears themselves that had a.s.sailed him, and this time they hardly came near him as he wrought.

With his new file he made better work than before, and soon finished cutting through the top of the staple. Trying it then with a poker as a lever, he broke the bottom part across; so there was nothing to hold the bolt, and with a creaking noise of rusty hinges the door slowly opened to his steady pull. Nothing appeared but a wall of plank! He gave it a push; it yielded: another door, close-fitting, and without any fastening, flew open, revealing a small closet or press, and on the opposite side of it a third door. This he could not at once open. It was secured, however, with a common lock, which cost him scarcely any trouble. It opened on a little room, of about nine feet by seven. He went in. It contained nothing but an old-fashioned secretary or bureau, and a seat like a low music-stool.

"It may have been a vestry for the priest!" thought Donal; "but it must have been used later than the chapel, for this desk is not older than the one at The Mains, which mistress Jean said was made for her grandmother!"

Then how did it get into the place? There was no other door! Above the bureau was a small window, or what seemed a window doubtful with dirt; but door there was not! It was not too large to enter by the oak door, but it could not have got to it along any of the pa.s.sages he had come through! It followed that there must, and that not so very long ago, have been another entrance to the place in which he stood!

He turned to look at the way he had himself come: it was through a common press of painted deal, filling the end of the little room, there narrowed to about five feet. When the door in the back of it was shut, it looked merely a part of the back of the press.

He turned again to the bureau, with a strange feeling at his heart. The cover was down, and on it lay some sheets of paper, discoloured with dust and age. A pen lay with them, and beside was an ink-bottle of the commonest type, the ink in powder and flakes. He took up one of the sheets. It had a great stain on it. The bottle must have been overturned! But was it ink? No; it stood too thick on the paper. With a gruesome shiver Donal wetted his finger and tried the surface of it: a little came off, a tinge of suspicious brown. There was writing on the paper! What was it? He held the faded lines close to the candle. They were not difficult to decipher. He sat down on the stool, and read thus--his reading broken by the stain: there was no date:--

"My husband for such I will--blot--are in the sight of G.o.d--blot--men why are you so cruel what--blot--deserve these terrors--blot--in thought have I--blot--hard upon me to think of another."

Here the writing came below the blot, and went on unbroken.

"My little one is gone and I am left lonely oh so lonely. I cannot but think that if you had loved me as you once did I should yet be clasping my little one to my bosom and you would have a daughter to comfort you after I am gone. I feel sure I cannot long survive this--ah there my hand has burst out bleeding again, but do not think I mind it, I know it was only an accident, you never meant to do it, though you teased me by refusing to say so--besides it is nothing. You might draw ever drop of blood from my body and I would not care if only you would not make my heart bleed so. Oh, it is gone all over my paper and you will think I have done it to let you see how it bleeds--but I cannot write it all over again it is too great a labour and too painful to write, so you must see it just as it is. I dare not think where my baby is, for if I should be doomed never to see her because of the love I have borne to you and consented to be as you wished if I am cast out from G.o.d because I loved you more than him I shall never see you again--for to be where I could see you would never be punishment enough for my sins."

Here the writing stopped: the bleeding of the hand had probably brought it to a close. The letter had never been folded, but lying there, had lain there. He looked if he could find a date; there was none. He held the sheet up to the light, and saw a paper mark; while close by lay another sheet with merely a date--in the same hand, as if the writer had been about to commence another in lieu of the letter spoiled.

"Strange!" thought Donal with himself; "an old withered grief looks almost as pitiful as an old withered joy!--But who is to say either is withered? Those who look upon death as an evil, yet regard it as the healer of sorrows! Is it such? No one can tell how long a grief may last unwithered! Surely till the life heals it! He is a coward who would be cured of his sorrow by mere lapse of time, by the mere forgetting of a brain that grows musty with age. It is G.o.d alone who can heal--the G.o.d of the dead and of the living! and the dead must find him, or be miserable for evermore!"

He had not a doubt that the letter he had read was in the writing of the mother of the present earl's children.

What was he to do? He had thought he was looking into matters much older--things over which the permission of lady Arctura extended; and in truth what he had discovered, or seen corroborated, was a thing she had a right to know! but whether he ought to tell her at once he did not yet see. He took up his candle, and with a feeling of helpless dismay, withdrew to his chamber. But when he reached the door of it, yielding to a sudden impulse, he turned away, and went farther up the stair, and out upon the bartizan.

It was a frosty night, and the stars were brilliant. He looked up and said,

"Oh Saviour of men, thy house is vaulted with light; thy secret places are secret from excess of light; in thee is no darkness at all; thou hast no terrible crypts and built-up places; thy light is the terror of those who love the darkness! Fill my heart with thy light; let me never hunger or thirst after anything but thy will--that I may walk in the light, and light not darkness may go forth from me."

As he turned to go in, came a faint chord from the aeolian harp.

"It sings, brooding over the very nest of evil deeds!" he thought. "The light eternal, with keen arrows of radiant victory, will yet at last rout from the souls of his creatures the demons that haunt them!

"But if there be creatures of G.o.d that have turned to demons, may not human souls themselves turn to demons? Would they then be victorious over G.o.d, too strong for him to overcome--beyond the reach of repentance?

"How would they live? By their own power? Then were they G.o.ds!--But they did not make themselves, and could not live of themselves. If not, then they must live by G.o.d's power. How then should they be beyond his reach?

"If the demons can never be brought back, then the life of G.o.d, the all-pure, goes out to keep alive, in and for evil, that which is essentially bad; for that which is irredeemable is essentially bad."

Thus reasoned Donal with himself, and his reasoning, instead of troubling his faith, caused him to cling the more to the only One, the sole hope and saviour of the hearts of his men and women, without whom the whole universe were but a charnel house in which the ghosts of the dead went about crying, not over the life that was gone from them, but its sorrows.

He stood and gazed out over the cold sea. And as he gazed, a shivering surge of doubt, a chill wave of negation, came rolling over him. He knew that in a moment he would strike out with the energy of a strong swimmer, and rise to the top of it; but now it was tumbling him about at its evil will. He stood and gazed--with a dull sense that he was waiting for his will. Suddenly came the consciousness that he and his will were one; that he had not to wait for his will, but had to wake--to will, that is, and do, and so be. And therewith he said to himself:--

"It is neither time, nor eternity, nor human consolation, nor everlasting sleep, nor the satisfied judgment, nor attained ambition, even in love itself, that is the cure for things; it is the heart, the will, the being of the Father. While that remains, the irremediable, the irredeemable cannot be. If there arose a grief in the heart of one of his creatures not otherwise to be destroyed, he would take it into himself, there consume it in his own creative fire--himself bearing the grief, carrying the sorrow. Christ died--and would die again rather than leave one heart-ache in the realms of his love--that is, of his creation. 'Blessed are they who have not seen and yet have believed!'"

Over his head the sky was full of shining worlds--mansions in the Father's house, built or building.

"We are not at the end of things," he thought, "but in the beginnings and on the threshold of creation! The Father is as young as when first the stars of the morning sang--the Ancient of Days who can never grow old! He who has ever filled the dull unbelieving nations with food and gladness, has a splendour of delight for the souls that believe, ever as by their obedience they become capable of receiving it."

CHAPTER LXII.

THE CRYPT.

"When are you going down again to the chapel, Mr. Grant?" said lady Arctura: she was better now, and able to work.

"I was down last night, and want to go again this evening by myself--if you don't mind, my lady," he answered. "I am sure it will be better for you not to go down till you are ready to give your orders to have everything cleared away for the light and air to enter. The damp and closeness of the place are too much for you."

"I think it was rather the want of sleep that made me ill," she answered; "but you can do just as you please."

"I thank you for your confidence, my lady," returned Donal. "I do not think you will repent it."

"I know I shall not."

Having some things to do first, it was late before Donal went down--intent on learning the former main entrance, and verifying the position of the chapel in the castle.

He betook himself to the end of the pa.s.sage under the little gallery, and there examined the signs he had observed: those must be the outer ends of two of the steps of the great staircase! they came through, resting on the wall. That end of the chapel, then, adjoined the main stair. Evidently, too, a door had been built up in the process of constructing the stair. The chapel then had not been entered from that level since the building of the stair. Originally there had, most likely, been an outside stair to this door, in an open court.

After a little more examination, partial of necessity, from lack of light, he was on his way out, and already near the top of the mural stair, thinking of the fresh observations he would take outside in the morning, when behind, overtaking him from the regions he had left, came a blast of air, and blew out his candle. He shivered--not with the cold of it, though it did breathe of underground damps and doubtful growths, but from a feeling of its having been sent after him to make him go down again--for did it not indicate some opening to the outer air? He relighted his candle and descended, carefully guarding it with one hand. The cold sigh seemed to linger about him as he went--gruesome as from a closed depth, the secret bosom of the castle, into which the light never entered. But, wherever it came from last, however earthy and fearful, it came first from the open regions of life, and had but pa.s.sed through a gloom that life itself must pa.s.s! Could it have been a draught down the pipe of the music-chords? No, for they would have loosed some light-winged messenger with it! He must search till he found its entrance below!

He crossed the little gallery, descended, and went again into the chapel: it lay as still as the tomb which it was no more. He seemed to miss the presence of the dead, and feel the place deserted. All round its walls, as far as he could reach or see, he searched carefully, but could perceive no sign of possible entrance for the messenger blast. It came again!--plainly through the open door under the windows. He went again into the pa.s.sage outside the wall, and the moment he turned into it, the draught seemed to come from beneath, blowing upwards. He stooped to examine; his candle was again extinguished. Once more he relighted it. Searching then along the floor and the foot of the walls, he presently found, in the wall of the chapel itself, close to the ground, a narrow horizontal opening: it must pa.s.s under the floor of the chapel! All he saw was a mere slit, but the opening might be larger, and partially covered by the flooring-slab, which went all the length of the slit! He would try to raise it! That would want a crowbar! but having got so far, he would not rest till he knew more! It must be very late and the domestics all in bed; but what hour it was he could not tell, for he had left his watch in his room. It might be midnight and he burrowing like a mole about the roots of the old house, or like an evil thing in the heart of a man! No matter! he would follow up his search--after what, he did not know.