CHAPTER XLI.
THE MUSIC-NEST.
The hour came, and with the very stroke of the clock, lady Arctura and Davie were in the schoolroom. A moment more, and they set out to climb the spiral of Baliol’s tower.
But what a different lady was Arctura this afternoon! She was cheerful, even merry—with Davie, almost jolly. Her soul had many alternating lights and glooms, but it was seldom or never now so clouded as when first Donal saw her. In the solitude of her chamber, where most the simple soul should be conscious of life as a blessedness, she was yet often haunted by ghastly shapes of fear; but there also other forms had begun to draw nigh to her; sweetest rays of hope would ever and anon break through the clouds, and mock the darkness from her presence. Perhaps God might mean as thoroughly well by her as even her imagination could wish!
Does a dull reader remark that hers was a diseased state of mind?—I answer, The more she needed to be saved from it with the only real deliverance from any ill! But her misery, however diseased, was infinitely more reasonable than the healthy joy of such as trouble themselves about nothing. Some sicknesses are better than any but the true health.
“I never thought you were like this, Arkie!” said Davie. “You are just as if you had come to school to Mr. Grant! You would soon know how much happier it is to have somebody you must mind!”
“If having me, Davie,” said Donal, “doesn’t help you to be happy without me, there will not have been much good done. What I want most to teach you is, to leave the door always on the latch for some one—you know whom I mean—to come in.”
“Race me up the stair, Arkie,” said Davie, when they came to the foot of the spiral.
“Very well,” assented his cousin.
“Which side will you have—the broad or the narrow?”
“The broad.”