‘What’s the matter—what do you look at?’ he exclaimed with anxiety and alarm.
‘I thought it was Walkinshaw’s uncle,’ said she with a profound and heavy sigh, as if her very spirit was respiring from a trance.
‘It was nobody,’ replied the minister thoughtfully.
‘It was his wraith,’ said Mrs. Eadie.
The tone in which this was expressed curdled his very blood, and he was obliged to own to himself, in despite of the convictions of his understanding, that there are more things in the heavens and the earth than philosophy can yet explain; and he repeated the quotation from Hamlet, partly to remove the impression which his levity had made.
‘I am glad to hear you allow so much,’ rejoined Mrs. Eadie; ‘and I think you must admit that of late I have given you many proofs in confirmation. Did I not tell you when the cock crowed on the roof of our friend’s cottage, that we should soon hear of some cheerful change in the lot of the inmates? and next day came Walkinshaw from Glasgow with the news of the happy separation from his uncle. On the evening before I received my letter from Glengael, you may well remember the glittering star that announced it in the candle. As sure as the omen in the crowing of the cock, and the shining of that star, were fulfilled, will the auguries which I have noted be found the harbingers of events.’
Distressing as these shadows and gleams of lunacy were to those by whom Mrs. Eadie was justly beloved and venerated, to herself they afforded a high and holy delight. Her mind, during the time the passion lasted, was to others obscure and oracular. It might be compared to the moon in the misty air when she is surrounded with a halo, and her light loses its silveryness, and invests the landscape with a shroudy paleness and solemnity. But Mrs. Eadie felt herself as it were ensphered in the region of spirits, and moving amidst marvels and mysteries sublimer than the faculties of ordinary mortals could explore.
The minister conducted his wife to the house of Walkinshaw’s mother, where she went to communicate the agreeable intelligence, as she thought, of the favourable aspect of the moon, as it had appeared to her Highland astrology. But he was so distressed by the evident increase of her malady, that he did not himself immediately go in. Indeed, it was impossible for him not to acknowledge, even to the most delicate suggestions of his own mind towards her, that she was daily becoming more and more fascinated by her visionary contemplations; and in consequence, after taking two or three turns in the village, he determined to advise her to go with Walkinshaw to Glengael, in the hope that the change of circumstances, and the interest that she might take once more in the scenes of her youth, would draw her mind from its wild and wonderful imaginings, and fix her attention again on objects calculated to inspire more sober, but not less affecting, feelings.