“Well then—one, two, three, and away we go!”
Davie mounted like a clever goat, his hand and arm on the newel, and slipping lightly round it. Arctura’s ascent was easier but slower: she found her garments in her way, therefore yielded the race, and waited for Donal. Davie, thinking he heard her footsteps behind him all the time, flew up shrieking with the sweet terror of love’s pursuit.
“What a darling the boy has grown!” said Arctura when Donal overtook her.
“Yes,” answered Donal; “one would think such a child might run straight into the kingdom of heaven; but I suppose he must have his temptations and trials first: out of the storm alone comes the true peace.”
“Will peace come out of all storms?”
“I trust so. Every pain and every fear, every doubt is a cry after God. What mother refuses to go to her child because he is only crying—not calling her by name!”
“Oh, if I could but believe so about God! For if it be all right with God—I mean if God be such a God as to be loved with the heart and soul of loving, then all is well. Is it not, Mr. Grant?”
“Indeed it is!—And you are not far from the kingdom of heaven,” he was on the point of saying, but did not—because she was in it already, only unable yet to verify the things around her, like the man who had but half-way received his sight.
When they reached the top, he took them past his door, and higher up the stair to the next, opening on the bartizan. Here he said lady Arctura must come with him first, and Davie must wait till he came back for him. When he had them both safe on the roof, he told Davie to keep close to his cousin or himself all the time. He showed them first his stores of fuel—his ammunition, he said, for fighting the winter. Next he pointed out where he stood when first he heard the music the night before, and set down his bucket to follow it; and where he found the bucket, blown thither by the wind, when he came back to feel for it in the dark. Then he began to lead them, as nearly as he could, the way he had then gone, but with some, for Arctura’s sake, desirable detours: over one steep-sloping roof they had to cross, he found a little stair up the middle, and down the other side.
They came to a part where he was not quite sure about the way. As he stopped to bethink himself, they turned and looked eastward. The sea was shining in the sun, and the flat wet country between was so bright that they could not tell where the land ended and the sea began. But as they gazed, a great cloud came over the sun, the sea turned cold and gray as death—a true March sea, and the land lay low and desolate between. The spring was gone and the winter was there. A gust of wind, full of keen hail, drove sharp in their faces.