“I wouldna wonder!” responded mistress Brookes, thoughtfully.
“Where shall we bury them?” asked Donal.
“In Englan’,” said the housekeeper, “I used to hear a heap aboot consecrated ground; but to my min’ it was the bodies o’ God’s handiwark, no the bishop, that consecrated the ground. Whaur the Lord lays doon what he has dune wi’, wad aye be a sacred place to me. I daursay Moses, whan he cam upo’ ’t again i’ the desert, luikit upo’ the ground whaur stood the buss that had burned, as a sacred place though the fire was lang oot!—Thinkna ye, Mr. Grant?”
“I do,” answered Donal. “But I do not believe the Lord Jesus thought one spot on the face of the earth more holy than another: every dust of it was his father’s, neither more nor less, existing only by the thought of that father! and I think that is what we must come to.—But where shall we bury them?—where they lie, or in the garden?”
“Some wud doobtless hae dist laid to dist i’ the kirkyard; but I wudna wullin’ly raise a clash i’ the country-side. Them that did it was yer ain forbeirs, my leddy; an’ sic things are weel forgotten. An’ syne what wud the earl say? It micht upset him mair nor a bit! I’ll consider o’ ’t.”
Donal accompanied them to the door of the chamber which again they shared, and then betook himself to his own high nest. There more than once in what remained of the night, he woke, fancying he heard the ghost-music sounding its coronach over the dead below.
CHAPTER LVIII.
A SOUL DISEASED.
“Papa is very ill to-day, Simmons tells me,” said Davie, as Donal entered the schoolroom. “He says he has never seen him so ill. Oh, Mr. Grant, I hope he is not going to die!”
“I hope not,” returned Donal—not very sure, he saw when he thought about it, what he meant; for if there was so little hope of his becoming a true man on this side of some awful doom, why should he hope for his life here?
“I wish you would talk to him as you do to me, Mr. Grant!” resumed Davie, who thought what had been good for himself must be good for everybody.