IX.—'Twixt Night and Morn
They declare that if you are drowning, or otherwise at the crack o' doom, your whole life's record leaps through your mind in an instant. It may be so, Providence giving a man, however his balance-sheet stands, a last chance to square it fair and well.
Everybody being gone home, and I being alone, after our dizzy ball, I felt that I had to count up the position. It needed no effort to understand that the Black Colonel's purpose in invading me had been to meet Marget and her mother, to impress himself upon them, all in the interest of his designs. He had relied for safety upon the temporary state of neutrality which the ball carried with it, and he had come, he had seen, he had—what? So far my thoughts convoyed me. But my little room in the castle with its cell-like windows, its low ceiling, even, I would add, its sense of plain refinement, worried me, and I went out into the night and the spaciousness of earth and heaven. Oh, for freedom to breathe and think, and oh for it at that witching time when night and day hold their bridal of mating among the Highland hills.
It was the hour, in our altitudes, at which night sleeps her heaviest, as if to snatch the last wink from the breaking morn. Nature was superbly at rest, sloughing the worn trappings of yesterday, preparing the shining armour of the morrow. It was the hour of creation, the wonder-coming of a child into the world, magnified beyond imagining, a tender life, very, very beautiful. It cried to my soul, seeking the humblest companionship for its own great soul, playing upon mine with a touch of incomparable delicacy.
And yet, yet, the chief feeling was almost that of a paganism, of an earth-smell and an earth-worship, of a giant awakening from torpor, ravenous with hunger. It was all the grand savagery, the terrible strength of Mother Earth, the Great Protector, from whose loins I had sprung, but who is unspeakably awesome until you see her face in the rising sun. Then the nightmare of the darkness which empalls her with a cold sense of death, turns into a radiance as of gold and kindness.
Ah! it was worth while to be abroad among the heather and the fir-trees at dawn, for the virgin world, the pagan, freed from cerements and found in the twilight to be a god, was all my own, mine to enjoy. I think I know why primitive man, when he lived in lands where Nature was wild and the nights were long, was a resolute pagan. No light, no warmth of its torch, had he to set the fire of reverence in him burning, and reverence is the footstool of belief in God. I think I also know why the other primitive man of the south, dwelling in a land of the sun, would be a sun-worshipper: because it gave him reverence and drew it from him.
We fear endless things when it is dark, the stoutest-hearted of us, but, in the geniality of a shining sun, we have courage. The picture, in ancient Greek legend, of husband and wife, one of them about to die, taking a long farewell as the dipping sun-rays gilt Olympus at its highest peaks, has often seemed to me a fine linking of the night of paganism and the morn of sunlit faith.
Odd thoughts to run in a man's head as he walked the dew-damp heather, careless which track he took, conscious only that he sought a new morning. But you do think strange thoughts if you have in you any of the dreamy Celt and have been born and nurtured in the cradle of the hills. They infect you, I will not say with second sight, though there have been proved instances, but with their own moods, like a soft-falling foot, which, in our spiritual pilgrimage, is the Foot of Fate.
My step lightly touched the heather, but, even so, my way was marked by a disturbance of the birds and animals of the wild. A grouse ran with a flutter and took wing with a cry, half in protest at being wakened from its sleep, half in alarm at my presence. A rabbit rushed from a sheltering hole in such a hurry that, as I could tell by its clatter among the bracken, it nearly fell over itself, as rabbits clumsily do, making fluffy, woolly balls of themselves.
When there is danger about, Nature gives all her children of the open a chance to escape by instantly warning them, and, in this, alarming their instinct. My particular rabbit had scarcely run out of hearing when half a dozen others were scurrying hither and thither in the same expectant confusion. Poor little things! What a fluster they made, and their scare communicated itself to a crow in a solitary fir-tree, against which I nearly collided. He croaked, flapped his wings and sailed off heavily, blackly, also anxious for safety.