"I thought you would not. Now I am Elspeth. I love her. I would give her gladness—serve her. She says, 'Let him alone! Do you not know that his own weird will bring him into dark countries and light countries, and where he is to go? Is your own tree to be made thwart and misshapen, that his may be reminded that there is rightness of growth? He is a tree—he is not a stone, nor will he become a stone. There is a law a little larger than your fretfulness that will take care of him! I like Glenfernie better when he is not a busybody!'"
Alexander stared at her in anger. "Differences where I thought to find likeness—likenesses where I thought to find differences! He deceived me, fooled me, played upon me as upon a pipe; took my own—"
"Ha!" said Gilian. "So you are going a-hunting for more reasons than one?—Elspeth, Elspeth! come out of it!—for Glenfernie, after all, avenges himself!"
Alexander, looking like his father, spoke slowly, with laboring breath. "Had one asked me, I should have said that you above all might understand. But you, too, betray!" With a sweep of his arms abroad, a gesture abrupt and desolate, he turned. He quitted the sunny bare space, the kirkyard and the woman sitting with her basket of marigolds and pansies.
But two nights later he came to this place alone.
The moon was full. It hung like a wonder lantern above the hill and the kirk; it made the kirkyard cloth of silver. The yews stood unreal, or with a delicate, other reality. It was neither warm nor cold. The moving air neither struck nor caressed, but there breathed a sense of coming and going, unhurried and unperplexed, from far away to far away. The laird of Glenfernie crossed long grass to where, for a hundred years, had been laid the dead from White Farm. There was a mound bare to the sunlight thrown from the moon. He saw the flowers that Gilian had brought.
The flowers were colorless in the moonlight—and yet they could be, and were, clothed with a hue of anger from himself. They lay before him purple-crimson. They were withered, but suddenly they had sap, life, fullness—but a distasteful, reminding life, a life in opposition! He took them and threw them away.
Now the mound rested bare. He lay down beside it. He stretched his arms over it. "Elspeth!"—and "Elspeth!"—and "Elspeth!" But Elspeth did not answer—only the cool sunlight thrown back from the moon.