I.—ITS LEGEND.
[As the sole return which I have it in my power to make for a friendship and a skill which have greatly alleviated my sufferings, I accede to the request of Dr. —— to commit to writing one or two passages in a history which has had more than the ordinary share of the marvellous in its composition. I write them with reluctance, yet with the feeling that I owe him the narration. It will serve, it may be, if not to explain, yet to account for some of the anomalies which he confesses have perplexed him in the treatment of my case. I leave it entirely to him to direct, by will or otherwise, what is to be the fate of these papers, after his and my decease.]
Except a few acres of arable land at its foot, a bare hill formed almost the whole of my father’s possessions. The sheep ate over it, and found it good for food; I raced and bounded over it, and thought it a kingdom. In the still autumn morning, the wide moor lay outstretched in its stillness, high uplifted towards the heaven. The dew hung on every stalk in tiny drops, which, as the sun arose, sparkled and burned with all the hues shared by the whole family of gems. Here and there a bird gave a cry: all else was silence. It is strange, but I never see the statue of the Roman youth, praying with outstretched arms, and open, empty, level palms, as if waiting to receive and hold the blessing of the gods, but that outstretched barren heath rises before me, as if it meant the same thing as the statue,—or were, at least, the fit room in the middle space of which to set the praying and expectant youth. There was one spot upon the hill, half-way between the valley and the moorland above, which was my favourite haunt. This part of the hill was covered with great blocks of stone, of all shapes and sizes—here crowded together, like the slain where the battle was fiercest; there parting asunder from a space covered with the delicate green of the sweetest, softest grass. In the centre of one of these green spots, on a steep part of the hill, were three huge rocks—two projecting out of the hill, rather than standing up from it, and one, likewise projecting from the hill, but lying across the tops of the two others, so as to form a little cave, the back of which was the side of the hill. This was my refuge, my home within a home, my study, and, in the hot noons, often my sleeping chamber, and my house of dreams. If the wind blew cold on the hill-side, a hollow of lulling warmth was there, scooped as it were out of the body of the blast, which swept around, and whistled keen and thin through the cracks and crannies of the great rocky chaos that lay all about, and in which the wind plunged, and flowed, and eddied and withdrew, as the sea-waves on the cliffy shores or the unknown rugged bottoms. When I lifted my eyes, before me lay, but at some miles’ distance, behind another hill, which on the opposite side of the valley ran parallel to mine, a great mountain; not like that on which I was seated, but a mighty thing, a chieftain of the race, seamed and scarred, featured with chasms, and precipices, and overleaning rocks, themselves huge as hills; here blackened with shade, there overspread with glory; interlaced with the silvery lines of many falling streams, which, hurrying from heaven to earth, cared not how they went, so it were downwards. Fearful stories were told of many an awful gulf, many a sullen pool, and many a dread and dizzy height upon that terror-haunted mountain. But, except in storms, when the wind roared like thunder in its caverns and along the jagged sides of its cliffs, no sound from that uplifted land—uplifted, yet secret and full of dismay—ever reached my ears. Did I say no sound? But I must not anticipate.
LEGEND OF THE PORTENT.
I will now describe that peculiarity to which I have referred. I have some reason to believe that I have inherited it from a far-off ancestor. It seemed to have its root in an unusual delicacy of hearing, which often conveyed to me sounds inaudible to those about me. This I had many opportunities of proving. It likewise, however, brought me sounds which I could never trace back to their origin; but which, notwithstanding, may have arisen from some natural operation which I had not perseverance or mental acuteness sufficient to discover. From this, or, it may be, from some deeper cause with which this was associated, arose a certain kind of fearfulness connected with the sense of hearing, of which I have never heard a corresponding instance, but which I think I can easily make you understand. Full as my mind was of the wild and sometimes fearful tales of a Highland nursery, fear never entered my mind by the eyes; nor, when I brooded over tales of terror, and fancied new and yet more frightful embodiments of horror, did I shudder at any imaginable spectacle, or tremble lest the fancy should become fact, and from behind the whin-bush or the elder-hedge should glide forth the tall swaying form of the Boneless. Indeed, when I was alone in bed, I used to lie awake, and look out into the room, peopling it with the forms of all the persons who had died within the scope of my memory and acquaintance. These fancied forms were vividly present to my imagination. I pictured them pale, with dark circles around their hollow eyes, visible by a light which glimmered within them; not the light of life, but a pale greenish phosphorescence, generated by the decay of the brain inside. Their garments were white and trailing, but torn and soiled, as if by trying often in vain to get up out of the buried coffin. So far from being terrified by these imaginings, I used to delight in them; and even, when on a long winter evening I did not happen to have any book to read that interested me sufficiently, to look forward with expectation to the hour when, laying myself straight upon my back, as if my bed were my coffin, I could call up from underground all who had passed away, and see how they fared, yea even what progress they had made towards final dissolution of form;—but, observe, all the time with my fingers pushed hard into my ears, lest any the faintest sound should invade the silent citadel of my soul. If by chance I removed one of my fingers, the agony of terror I instantly experienced was such as to be, by me at least, indescribable. I can compare it to nothing but the rushing in upon my brain of a whole churchyard of spectres. The very possibility of hearing a sound in such a mood, and at such a time, was enough to torture me. So I could scare myself in broad daylight, on the open hill-side, by imaginary unintelligible sounds; and my imagination was both original and fertile in the invention of such. But my mind was too active to be often subjected to such influences. Indeed life would have been hardly endurable, had these moods been of more than occasional occurrence. As I grew older, I almost outgrew them. Yet sometimes one awful dread would seize me—that, perhaps, the prophetic power manifest in the gift of second sight, which had belonged to several of my ancestors, according to the testimony of my old nurse, had been in my case transformed in kind, without losing its nature, and had transferred its abode from the sight to the hearing, whence resulted its keenness, and my fear and suffering.
One summer evening, I had lingered longer than usual in my rocky retreat: I had lain half-dreaming in the mouth of the cave, till the shadows of evening had fallen, and the gloaming had deepened half-way towards the night. But the night had no more terrors for me than the day. Indeed, in such regions there is a solitude, for the recognition of which there almost seems to exist a peculiar sense in the human mind, and upon which the shadows of night seem to sink with a strange relief, closing in around, and hiding from the eye the wide space which yet they throw more open to the imagination. When I lifted my head, a star here and there caught my eye; but when I looked intently into the depths of blue gray, I saw that they were crowded with twinkles. The mountain rose before me a huge mass of gloom; but its several peaks stood out against the sky with a clear, pure, sharp outline, and seemed nearer than the chaos from which they rose heavenwards. One star trembled and throbbed upon the very tip of the loftiest, the central peak, which seemed the spire of a mighty temple, where the light was worshipped—crowned, therefore, in the darkness, with the emblem of the day. This fancy was still in my thought, when I heard, clear, though faint and far away, the sound as of the iron-shod hoofs of a horse, in furious gallop along an uneven rocky surface. It was more like a distinct echo than an original sound. It seemed to come from the face of the mountain, where I knew no horse could go at that speed, even if its rider courted his certain destruction. There was a peculiarity too in the sound—a certain tinkle, or clank, which seemed only to mingle with the body of the sound, and which I fancied myself able, by auricular analysis, to separate from it, assigning to it a regular interval of recurrence. Supposing the sound to be caused by the feet of a horse, the peculiarity was just such as would result from one of the shoes being loose. A strange terror seized me, and I hastened home. The sounds gradually died away as I descended the hill. I could not account for them, except on the supposition that they were an echo from the precipice. But I knew of no road lying so that, if a horse were galloping upon it, the sounds would be reflected from the mountain to me.
The next day, in one of my rambles, I found myself near the cottage of my old foster-mother, who was distantly related to us, and was a trusted servant in the family at the time I was born. On the death of my mother, which took place almost immediately after my birth, she took the entire charge of me, and brought me up, though with difficulty; for she used to tell me I should never be either folk or fairy. For some years she had lived alone in a cottage, which lay at the bottom of a deep green circular hollow, upon which one came with a sudden surprise in walking over a heathy table-land. I was her frequent visitor. She was a tall, thin, aged woman, with eager eyes, and well-defined, clear-cut features. Her voice was harsh, but with an undertone of great tenderness. She was scrupulously careful in her attire, which was rather above her station. Altogether she had much the bearing of a gentlewoman. Her devotion to me was quite motherly. Never having had any family of her own, although she had been the wife of one of my father’s shepherds, the whole maternity of her nature was expended upon me; but this without much show of affection, compared with what would be expected in a more southern climate. She was always my first resource in any perplexity, for I was sure of all the help she could give me. And as she had much influence with my father, who was rather severe in his notions, I had now and then occasion to beg her interference in regard to some slight aberration or other from what he considered the path of strict decorum. Nothing of the sort, however, led to my visit on the present occasion.
I ran down the side of the basin and entered the little cottage. Nurse was seated on a chair by the wall, with her usual knitting, a stocking, in one hand; but her hands were motionless, and her eyes wide open and fixed. I knew that the neighbours stood rather in awe of her, on the ground that she had the second sight; but although she often told us frightful enough stories, she never alluded to such a gift as being in her possession. Now I concluded at once that she was seeing. I was confirmed in this conclusion when, seeming to come to herself suddenly, she covered her head with her plaid, and sobbed audibly, in spite of her efforts to command herself. But I did not dare to ask her any questions, nor did she attempt any excuse for her behaviour. After a few moments, she unveiled herself, rose, and welcomed me with her usual kindness; then got me some refreshment, and began to question me about matters at home. After a pause, she said suddenly: “When are you going to get your commission, Duncan, do you know?” I replied, that I had heard nothing of it; that I did not think my father had influence or money enough to procure me one, and that I feared I should have no such good chance of distinguishing myself. She did not answer, but nodded her head three times, slowly and with compressed lips, apparently as much as to say, “I know better.”
Just as I was leaving her, it occurred to me to mention that I had heard an odd sound the night before. She turned full towards me, and looked at me fixedly. “What was it like, Duncan, my dear?”
“Like a horse galloping with a loose shoe,” I replied.
“Duncan, Duncan, my darling,” she said, with a low, trembling voice, but with passionate earnestness, “you did not hear it? Tell me that you did not hear it! You only want to frighten poor old nurse: some one has been telling you the story!”
It was my turn to be frightened now; for the matter became at once associated with my fears as to the possible nature of my auricular peculiarities. I assured her that nothing was farther from my intention than to frighten her; that, on the contrary, she had rather alarmed me; and I begged her to explain. But she sat down white and trembling, and did not speak. Presently, however, she rose again, and saying, “I have known it happen sometimes without anything very bad following,” began to put away the basin and plate I had been eating and drinking from, as if she would compel herself to be calm before me. I renewed my entreaties for an explanation, but without avail; for she begged me to be content for a few days, as she was quite unable to tell the story at present. She promised, however, of her own accord, that before I left home, she would tell me all she knew about it. The next day a letter arrived announcing the death of a distant relation, by whose influence my father had had a lingering hope of obtaining an appointment for me. There was nothing left but to look out for a situation as tutor.
I was now nineteen. I had completed the usual curriculum of study at one of the Scotch universities; and, possessed of a fair knowledge of mathematics and physics, and what I considered rather more than a good foundation of classical and metaphysical acquirement, I resolved to apply for the first suitable situation that offered. But I was spared even this trouble in the matter. Through a circuitous channel, a certain Lord Hilton, an English nobleman, residing in one of the southern counties of England, having heard that one of my father’s sons was desirous of such a situation, wrote to him, offering me the post of tutor to his two boys, of the ages of ten and twelve. He had himself been partly educated at a Scotch university; and this, it may be, had prejudiced him in favour of a Scotch tutor; while an ancient alliance of the families by marriage was supposed by my nurse to be the cause of his offering me the post. Of this connection, however, my father said nothing to me, and it went for nothing in my anticipations. I was to receive a hundred pounds a year, and to hold in the family the position of a gentleman; which might mean anything or nothing, according to the disposition of the heads of the family. Preparations for my departure were immediately commenced; and I set out one evening for the cottage of my old nurse, to bid her good-bye for many months, or probably years. I was to leave the next day for Edinburgh, on my way to London, whence I had to repair by coach to my new abode—almost to me like the land beyond the grave, so little did I know about it, and so wide was the separation between it and my home. The evening was sultry when I began my walk, and before I arrived at nurse’s cottage, the clouds rising from all quarters of the horizon, and especially gathering around the peaks of the mountain, betokened the near approach of a thunder-storm. This was a great delight to me. Gladly would I take leave of my home with the memory of a last night of tumultuous magnificence, followed, probably, by a day of weeping rain, well suited to the mood of my own heart in bidding farewell to the best of parents and the dearest of homes. Besides, in common with most Scotchmen who are young and hardy enough to be unable to realize to themselves the existence of coughs and rheumatic fevers, it was a positive pleasure to me to be out in rain, hail, or snow.
“I am come to bid you good-bye, Margaret, and to hear the story which you promised to tell me before I left home: I go to-morrow.”
“Do you go so soon, my darling? Well, it will be an awful night to tell it in; but, as I promised, I suppose I must.”
At the moment, down the wide chimney fell two or three great drops of rain, with slight explosions upon the clear turf-fire, the first of the storm.
“Yes, indeed you must,” I replied; and she commenced. Of course it was all told in Gaelic; and I translate from my recollection of the Gaelic; or, perhaps, rather from the impression left upon my mind, than from any recollection of the words. We sat a little way back from the fire, which we had reason to fear would soon be put out by the falling rain.
“How old the story is, I do not know. It has come down through many generations. My grandmother told it to me, as I tell it to you; and her mother and my mother sat beside, never interrupting, but nodding their heads at every turn. Almost it ought to begin like the fairy tales, Once upon a time,—it took place so long ago; but it is too dreadful and too true to tell like a fairy tale. There were two brothers, sons of the chief of our clan, but as different in appearance and disposition, as two men could be. The elder was fair-haired and strong, much given to hunting and fishing; fighting too, upon occasion, I daresay, when they made a foray upon the Saxon, to get back a mouthful of their own. But he was gentleness itself to every one about him, and the very soul of honour in all his doings. The younger was very dark in complexion, and tall and slender compared to his brother. He was very fond of book-learning, which, they say, was an uncommon taste in those times. He did not care for any sports or bodily exercises but one, and that too, was unusual in these parts. It was horsemanship. He was a fierce rider, and seemed as much at home in the saddle as in his study chair. You may think that, so long ago, there was not much fit room for riding hereabouts; but, fit or not fit, he rode. From his reading and riding, the neighbours looked doubtfully upon him, and whispered about the black art. He usually bestrode a great powerful black horse, without a white hair on him; and people said it was either the devil himself, or a demon-horse from the devil’s own stud. What favoured this notion was, that the brute would let no other than his master go near him, in or out of the stable. Indeed no one would venture, after he had already killed two men, and grievously maimed a third, tearing him with his teeth and hoofs like a wild beast. But to his master he was obedient as a hound, and was sometimes seen to tremble in his presence.
“The youth’s temper corresponded to his habits. He was both gloomy and passionate. Prone to anger, he had never been known to forgive. Debarred from anything on which he had set his heart, he would have gone mad with longing if he had not gone mad with rage. His soul was like the night around us now, dark and sultry and silent, but lighted up by the red levin of wrath, and torn by the bellowings of thunder passion. He must have his will: hell might have his soul. Imagine then the rage and malice in his heart, when he suddenly became aware that an orphan girl, distantly related to them, who had lived with them for nearly two years, and whom he had loved for almost all that period, was loved by his elder brother, and loved him in return. He flung his right hand above his head, swore a terrible oath that if he might not his brother should not, rushed out of the house, and galloped off among the hills.
“The orphan was a beautiful girl, tall, pale, and slender, with plentiful dark hair, which, when released from the snood, rippled down below her knees. Her appearance consequently formed a strong contrast with that of her favoured lover, and of course there was some resemblance between her and the other. This fact seemed, to the fierce selfishness of the younger, to be ground for a prior claim.
“It may seem strange that a man like him should not have had instant recourse to his superior and hidden knowledge, by means of which he might have got rid of his rival with far more certainty and less risk; but I presume that for the moment his passion overwhelmed his consciousness of skill. Yet I do not suppose that he foresaw the mode in which his hatred was about to operate. At the moment when he learned their mutual attachment, probably through a domestic, the lady was on her way to meet her lover as he returned from the day’s sport. The appointed place was on the edge of a deep rocky ravine, down in whose dark bosom brawled and foamed a little mountain torrent. You know the place, Duncan, my dear, I daresay.”
(Here she gave me a minute description of the spot, with directions how to find it.)
“Whether any one saw what I am about to relate, or whether it was put together afterwards, partly from conjecture, I cannot tell. The story is like an old tree—so old that it has lost the marks of its growth. But this is how my grandmother told it to me. An evil chance led him in the right direction. The lovers, startled by the sound of the approaching horse, parted in opposite directions along a narrow mountain-path on the edge of the ravine. Into this path he struck at a point near where the lovers had met, but to opposite sides of which they had now receded; so that he was between them on the path. Turning his horse up the course of the stream, he soon came in sight of his brother on the ledge before him. With a suppressed scream of rage, he rode headlong at him, and ere he had time to make the least defence, hurled him over the precipice. The weakness of the strong man was uttered in one single despairing cry as he shot into the abyss. Then all was still. The sound of his fall could not reach the edge of the gulf. Divining in a moment that the lady, whose name was Elsie, must have fled in the opposite direction, he reined his steed on his haunches. He could touch the precipice with his bridle hand half outstretched; his sword hand outstretched would have dropped a stone to the bottom of the ravine. There was no room to wheel. One desperate practicability alone remained. Turning his horse’s head towards the edge, he compelled him by means of the powerful bit alone, to rear till he stood almost erect; and so, his body swaying over the gulf, with quivering and straining muscles to turn on his hind-legs. Having completed the half-circle, he let him drop on all fours, and urged him furiously in the opposite direction. It must have been by the devil’s own care that he was able to continue his gallop along that ledge of rock.
“He soon caught sight of the maiden, as she leaned half-fainting against the precipice. She had heard her lover’s last cry, and although it conveyed no suggestion of his voice to her ear, she trembled from head to foot, and her limbs could bear her no farther. He checked his speed, rode gently up to her, lifted her unresisting, laid her across the shoulders of his reeking horse, and riding carefully till he reached a more open path, dashed again wildly along the mountain-side. The lady’s long hair was shaken loose, and dropped trailing on the ground. The horse trampled upon it, and stumbled, half dragging her from the saddle-bow. He caught her, lifted her up, and looked at her face. She was dead. I suppose he went mad. He laid her again across the saddle before him, and rode on, reckless whither. Horse and man and maiden were found the next day, lying at the foot of a cliff, dashed to pieces. It was observed that a hind-shoe of the horse was loose and broken. Whether this had been the cause of his fall, could not be told; but ever when he races, as race he will, till the day of doom, along that mountain side, his gallop is mingled with the clank of the loose and broken shoe. For the punishment is awful like the sin: he shall carry about for ages the phantom-body of the girl, knowing that her soul is away, sitting with the soul of his brother, down in the deep ravine, or scaling with his the topmost crags of the towering mountain-peaks. There are some who see him from time to time, careening along the face of the mountain, with the lady hanging across the steed; and they say it always betokens a storm, such as this which is now raving all about us.”
I had not noticed till now, so absorbed had I been in her tale, that the storm had risen to a very ecstasy of fury.
“They say, likewise, that the lady’s hair is still growing; for, every time they see her, it is longer than before; and that now, such is its length and the headlong speed of the horse, it floats and streams out behind like one of those curved clouds that lie like a comet’s tail far up in the sky; only the cloud is white, and the hair dark as night. And they say it will go on growing till the Last Day, when the horse will falter and fall, and her hair will gather in, and twist, and twine, and wreathe itself like a mist of threads about him, and blind him to everything but her. Then the body will rise up within it, face to face with him, animated by a fiend, who, twining her arms around him, will drag him down to the bottomless pit.”
I may just mention here one little occurrence which seemed to have a strange effect on my old nurse; and which illustrates the assertion that we see around us only what is within us: marvellous things enough will show themselves to the marvellous mood. During a short lull in the storm, we heard the sound of iron-shod hoofs approaching the cottage. There was no bridleway into the glen. A knock came to the door, and, on opening it, we saw an old man seated on a horse, with a long slenderly-filled sack lying across the saddle before him. He said he had lost his way in the storm, and seeing the light, had scrambled down to inquire his way. I saw at once from the scared and mysterious look of the old woman’s eyes, that to her dying day nothing would persuade her that this appearance had not something to do with the awful rider, the terrific storm, and myself who had heard the sound of the phantom-hoofs. She looked after him as he again ascended the hill, with wide and pale but unshrinking eyes; and turning in, shut and locked the door behind her, as by a natural instinct. Then, after two or three of her significant nods, accompanied by the compression of her lips, she said:—
“He need not think to take me in, wizard as he is, with his disguises. I can see him through them all. Duncan, my dear, when you suspect anything, do not be too incredulous. This human demon is of course a wizard still; and knows how to make himself, and anything he has to do with, take quite different appearances from their real ones; only the appearances must always bear some resemblance, however distant, to the natural forms. That man you saw at the door was the phantom of which I have been telling you. What he is after now, of course I cannot tell; but you must keep a bold heart, and a firm and wary foot, as you go home to-night.”
I showed some surprise, I do not doubt, and, perhaps, some fear as well; but only said, “How do you know him, Margaret?”
“I can hardly tell you,” she replied; “but I do know him. I think he hates me. Often, of a wild night, when there is moonlight enough by fits, I see him tearing around this little valley, just on the top edge, all round; the lady’s hair and the horse’s mane and tail driving far behind, and mingling, vaporous, with the stormy clouds. About he goes, in wild careering gallop; now lost as the moon goes in, then visible far round when she looks out again—an airy, pale gray spectre, which few eyes could see but mine. There is no sound, except now and then a clank from the broken shoe. But I did not mean to tell you that I had ever seen him. I am not a bit afraid of him. He cannot do more than he may. His power is limited, else ill enough would he work, the miscreant.”
“But,” said I, “what has all this, terrible as it is, to do with the fright you were put in, by my telling you that I had heard the sound of the broken shoe? Surely you are not afraid of only a storm?”
“No, my boy; I fear no storm. But the fact is, that that sound is seldom heard, and never, as far as I know, by any of the blood of that wicked man, without betokening some ill that will happen to one of the family, and most probably to the one who hears it. But I am not quite sure about that. Only some evil it does portend, although a long time may elapse before it shows itself; and I have a hope it may mean some one else than you.”
“Do not wish that,” I replied. “I know no one better able to bear it than I am; and I will hope, whatever it may be, that I only shall have to meet it. It must surely be something serious to be so foretold—it can hardly be connected with my disappointment in being compelled to be a pedagogue instead of a soldier.”
“Do not trouble yourself about that, Duncan,” replied she; “a soldier you must be. The same day you told me of the clank of the broken horse-shoe, I saw you return wounded from battle, and, in the street of a great city, fall fainting from your horse—only fainting, thank God. But I have particular reasons for being uneasy at your hearing that boding sound. Can you tell me the day and hour of your birth?”
“No,” I replied. “It seems very odd when I think of it, but I really do not know even the day.”
“Nor any one else, which is stranger still,” she answered.
“How does that happen, nurse?”
“We were in terrible anxiety about your mother at the time. So ill was she, after you were just born, in a strange, unaccountable way, that you lay almost neglected for more than an hour. In the very act of giving birth to you, she seemed to the rest around her to be out of her mind, so wildly did she talk; but I knew better. I knew that she was fighting some evil power; and what power it was, I knew full well; for, three times, during her pains, I heard the click of the horse-shoe. But no one could help her. After her delivery, she lay as if in a trance, neither dead, nor at rest, but as if frozen to ice, and conscious of it all the while. Once more I heard the terrible sound of iron; and at the moment your mother started from her trance, screaming, ‘My child! my child!’ We suddenly became aware that no one had attended to the child; and rushed to the place where he lay, wrapped in a blanket. On uncovering him, he was black in the face, and spotted with dark spots upon the throat. I thought he was dead; but with great and almost hopeless pains, we succeeded in making him breathe, and he gradually recovered. But his mother continued dreadfully exhausted. It seemed as if she had spent her life for her child’s defence and birth. That was you, Duncan, my dear. I was in constant attendance upon her.
“About a week after your birth, as near as I can guess, just in the gloaming, I heard yet again the awful clank—only once. Nothing followed till about midnight. Your mother slept, and you lay asleep beside her. I sat by the bedside. A horror fell upon me suddenly, though I neither saw nor heard anything. Your mother started from her sleep with a cry, which sounded as if it came from far away, out of a dream, and did not belong to this world. My blood curdled with fear. She sat up in bed, with wide staring eyes, and half-open rigid lips, and, feeble as she was, thrust her arms straight out before her with great force, her hands open and lifted up, with the palms outwards. The whole action was of one violently repelling another. She began to talk wildly as she had done before you were born, but though I seemed to hear and understand it all at the time, I could not recall a word of it afterwards. It was as if I had listened to it when half-asleep. I attempted to soothe her, putting my arms round her, but she seemed quite unconscious of my presence, and my arms seemed powerless upon the fixed muscles of hers. Not that I tried to constrain her, for I knew that a battle was going on of some kind or other, and my interference might do awful mischief. All the time I was in a state of indescribable cold and suffering; whether more bodily or mental I could not tell. But at length I heard yet again the clank of the shoe. A sudden peace seemed to fall upon my mind—or was it a warm, odorous wind that filled the room? Your mother dropped her arms, and turned feebly towards her baby. She saw that he slept a blessed sleep. She smiled like a glorified spirit, and fell back exhausted on the pillow. I went to the other side of the room to get a cordial, but when I returned to the bedside, I saw at once that she was dead. Her face smiled still, with an expression of the uttermost bliss.”
Nurse ceased, trembling as if overcome by the recollection; and I was too much moved and awed to speak. At length, resuming the conversation, she said: “You see it is no wonder, Duncan, my dear, if, after all this, I should find, when I wanted to fix the date of your birth, that I could not determine the day or the hour when it took place. All was confusion in my poor brain. But it was strange that no one else could, any more than I. One thing only I can tell you about it. As I carried you across the room to lay you down, for I assisted at your birth, I happened to look up to the window, and then saw what I did not forget, although I did not think of it again till many days after,—that a bright star shone within the half-circle of the thin crescent moon.”
“Oh, then,” said I, “it will be quite easy to determine the exact day and the very hour when my birth took place.”
“See the good of book-learning,” replied she. “When you work it out, just let me know, my dear, that I may remember it.”
“That I will.”
A silence of some moments followed. Margaret resumed:
“I am afraid you will laugh at my foolish fancies, Duncan; but in thinking over all these things, as you may suppose I often do, lying awake in my lonely bed, the notion sometimes comes to me: What if my Duncan be the spirit of the youth whom his wicked brother hurled into the ravine, come again in a new body to live out yet his life on the earth, cut short by his brother’s hatred? If so, then his persecution of you, and of your mother for your sake, would be easily understood. And if so, you will never be able to rest till you find your mate, wherever she may have been born on the face of the wide earth. For born she must be, long ere now, for you to find. I misdoubt me much, however, should this be the case, whether you will find her without great conflict and suffering between, for the Powers of Darkness will be against you; though I have good hope that you will overcome at last. You must forgive the fancies of a foolish old woman, my dear.”
I will not try to describe the strange feelings, almost sensations, that arose in me while listening to these extraordinary utterances, lest it should be supposed I was ready to believe all that Margaret narrated or concluded. I could not help doubting her sanity; but no more could I help feeling very peculiarly moved by her narrative. Few more words were spoken on either side.
After receiving renewed exhortations to carefulness on my way home, I said good-bye to dear old nurse, considerably comforted, I must confess, that I was not doomed to be a tutor all my days; for I never questioned the truth of nurse’s vision and consequent prophecy. I went home in the full ecstasy of the storm, through the alternating throbs of blackness and radiance; now the possessor of no more room than what my body filled, and now isolated in world-wide space—and the thunder filled it all.
Absorbed in the story I had heard, I took my way, as I thought, homewards. The whole country was well known to me. I should have said, before that night, that I could have gone home blindfold. Whether the lightning bewildered me and made me take a false turn, I cannot tell; for the hardest thing to understand, in moral as well as physical mistakes, is how we came to go wrong. But after wandering for some time, plunged in meditation, and with no warnings whatever of the presence of inimical powers, a most brilliant lightning-flash showed me that at least I was not near home. The flash was prolonged by a slight electric pulsation, which continued for a second or two; and by that I distinguished a wide space of blackness on the ground in front of me. Once more wrapt in the folds of a thick darkness, I dared not move. Suddenly it occurred to me what the blackness was, and whither I had wandered. It was a huge quarry, of great depth, long disused, and half filled with water. I knew the place perfectly. A few more steps would have carried me over the brink. I stood still, waiting for the next flash, that I might be quite sure of the direction I was taking before I dared to move. While I stood, I fancied that I heard a single hollow plunge in the black water far below. When the lightning came, I turned, and took my way back. After walking for some time across the heath, I stumbled, and to my horror found I was falling. The fall soon became a roll, however, and down a steep declivity I went, over and over, arriving at the bottom uninjured.
Another flash soon showed me where I was—in the hollow valley, within a couple of hundred yards from nurse’s cottage. I made my way towards it. There was no light in it, except the feeblest glow from the embers. “She is in bed,” I said to myself, “and I will not disturb her; ”yet something drew me to look in at the little window. At first@ I could see nothing. At length, as I kept gazing, I saw something, indistinct in the darkness, like an outstretched human form.
By this time the storm had lulled. The moon had been up for some time, but had been quite concealed by tempestuous clouds. Now, however, these had begun to break up; and, while I looked into the cottage, they scattered away from the face of the moon, and a faint vapoury gleam of her light, entering the cottage through a window opposite that at which I stood, fell directly on the face of my old nurse, as she lay on her back outstretched upon chairs, pale as death, and with her eyes closed. A stranger to her habits would have thought she was dead; but she had so much of the same appearance as she had had in a former instance which I have described, that I concluded at once she was in one of her trances. Having often heard that persons in such a condition ought not to be disturbed, and feeling quite sure she knew best how to manage herself, I turned, though reluctantly, and left the lone cottage in the stormy night, with the death-like woman lying motionless in the midst of it. I found my way home without any further difficulty, and went to bed, where I soon fell asleep, thoroughly wearied, more by the mental excitement I had been experiencing, than by the amount of bodily exercise I had gone through.
My sleep was tormented with awful dreams; yet, strange to say, I awoke in the morning refreshed and fearless. The sun was shining through several chinks in my shutters, and making, even upon the gloomy curtains, streaks and bands of golden brilliancy. I had dressed and completed my preparations long before I heard the steps of the servant who came to call me.
What a wonderful thing waking is! The time of the ghostly moonshine—we sleep it by; and the great positive sunlight comes: it fills me with thoughts. As with a man who dreams, and knows that he is dreaming, and thinks he knows what waking is, but knows it so little that he mistakes, one after another, many a vague and dim change in his dream for an awaking, and when the true waking comes at last, is filled and overflowed with the power of its reality: so shall it be with us when we wake from this dream of life into the truer life beyond, and find all our present notions of being, thrown back as into a dim vapoury region of dreamland, where yet we thought we knew, and whence we looked forward into the present: as (to use another likeness) a who, in the night, when another is about to cause light in the room, lies trying to conceive, with all the force of his imagination, what the light will be like, is yet, when most successful, seized as by a new and unexpected thing, different from and beyond all his imagining, when the reality flames up before him, and he feels as if the darkness were cast to an infinite distance behind him. This must be what Novalis means when he says: Our life is not a dream; but it may become a dream, and perhaps ought to become one.
I left my home, and have never since revisited it. When I next heard the sound of the clanking iron, although it affected me with irresistible terror, I little anticipated the influence of the event with which it was associated. Before many years had elapsed, my foster-mother’s prevision of my fall from a horse in the street of a city, was fulfilled: this, too, was immediately preceded by the ominous sound, easily distinguishable by me from the innumerable strokes of iron-shod hoofs upon the stones around me. But both of these occasions are connected with a period of my history involving such events, that the thought of writing it makes me tremble.