“I beg your pardon, Miss Graeme; I have been trying to persuade you of nothing.”
“What! not to believe in ghosts and necromancy and witchcraft and the evil eye and ghouls and vampyres, and I don’t know what all out of nursery stories and old annuals?”
“I give you my word, Mr. Graeme,” returned Donal, laughing, “I have not been persuading your sister of any of these things! I am certain she could be persuaded of nothing of which she did not first see the common sense. What I did dwell upon, without a doubt she would accept it, was the evident fact that writing and printing have done more to bring us into personal relations with the great dead, than necromancy, granting the magician the power he claimed, could ever do. For do we not come into contact with the being of a man when we hear him pour forth his thoughts of the things he likes best to think about, into the ear of the universe? In such a position does the book of a great man place us!—That was what I meant to convey to your sister.”
“And,” said Mr. Graeme, “she was not such a goose as to fail of understanding you, however she may have chosen to put on the garb of stupidity.”
“I am sure,” persisted Kate, “Mr. Grant talked so as to make me think he believed in necromancy and all that sort of thing!”
“That may be,” said Donal; “but I did not try to persuade you to believe.”
“Oh, if you hold me to the letter!” cried Miss Graeme, colouring a little.—“It would be impossible to get on with such a man,” she thought, “for he not only preached when you had no pulpit to protect you from him, but stuck so to his text that there was no amusement to be got out of the business!”
She did not know that if she could have met him, breaking the ocean-tide of his thoughts with fitting opposition, his answers would have come short and sharp as the flashes of waves on rocks.
“If Mr. Grant believes in such things,” said Mr. Graeme, “he must find himself at home in the castle, every room of which may well be the haunt of some weary ghost!”
“I do not believe,” said Donal, “that any work of man’s hands, however awful with crime done in it, can have nearly such an influence for belief in the marvellous, as the still presence of live Nature. I never saw an old castle before—at least not to make any close acquaintance with it, but there is not an aspect of the grim old survival up there, interesting as every corner of it is, that moves me like the mere thought of a hill-side with the veil of the twilight coming down over it, making of it the last step of a stair for the descending foot of the Lord.”