CHAPTER L
There is a quaintly pious inscription in Dunvegan graveyard, chiseled as if by a hand that trembled, upon the gray tombstone farthest back of all those by the side of the Little Church in Under the Oaks. It reads:
ERVIN McARTHUR,
From Whom the Daemon Was Cast Out.
A General in the Army of God.
It was only the last line which was not so directed to be inscribed by the will of him who lies beneath it.
The visitor smiles as he reads until he hears of the prowess of the youth who won fame and honor and glory in the city by the sea and meditates upon how great his after life must have been to have merited so pleasant a comparison. The story is still easy to hear in Dunvegan, where his name is often coupled with Dr. Allerton’s, but not to the curious and gossiping. One must first have left the parlor and have become a boon companion of the living-room—and one must be a lover of Dunvegan. Then if the night be dark, so dark that Tawiskara may seem to have come back to Attacoa, the story is his, the story of Ervin McArthur, out of whom the Daemon was cast.
They say in Dunvegan that somewhere in the heart of every man there dwells Tawiskara, the Daemon of Darkness. According to his own way and in his own time, he manifests his power. To one he suggests, to another he promises, and the third he compels—and he must needs go whom the Daemon drives. At the wrong moment, the psychological moment of weakness, he takes hold of a man and a deed is done, a tiny indiscretion or a horrible crime, as the Daemon wills.
They believe in Dunvegan that McArthur was but a type of all men, that the evil heritage of the Shadow of the Attacoa came upon him in exaggerated form because it was needful that the works of God might be manifested in him. They still speak with such pious quaintness in the dreamy village. And they tell their child who shows the evil heart of how Ervin McArthur fought in his awful death-struggle on Attacoa with Tawiskara, the Dark One, and endured unto blood, striving against his sin; of how he, as all men may do, in the strength of Ioskeha, cast the Daemon out.
It is thus that they apologize for the horror with which his life-story was laden, it being in their eyes like the black, ill-odored ink of the press which is yet needful to make the page of each story perfect. They shudder in the telling of it, as the reader must have shuddered in hearing—these are they who hear the mutterings of Tawiskara in their own hearts. And there must be those who dwell in Dunvegan who call the story precious because that through it they have been delivered from much tribulation and anguish of spirit which comes to all those who would perfect the light of their souls by exorcising the Daemons that infest it. These consider that in the horror of the story lies its true meaning and value, and they discountenance the softer versions which have sprung up with the newer generation in the village. If their souls have known deeper night than that of Ervin McArthur, let them love the parable of how they were delivered.
So there are pilgrims who sometimes visit the little graveyard where the shadows are dense at noonday, and where Ervin McArthur lies. They tread lightly upon the blue periwinkle, and there are those who loose reverently the sandals from their feet for fear that God may be near in some wayside bush.
The End.