Then with a shaking voice I read the mighty words before me: "When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy".... But when I came to the verse which says: "Have the gates of death been opened unto thee? Or hast thou seen the doors of the shadow of death?" I saw the Stickit Minister nod his head three times very slightly, and a strange subtle smile came over his face as though he could have answered: "Yea, Lord, verily I have seen them—they have been opened to me!"
And as the lads and lasses filed out in a kind of wondering silence after Robert Fraser had prayed—not kneeling down, but sitting erect in his chair and looking out before him with wide-open eyes—we in the little sitting-room became conscious of a low knocking, persistent and remote, somewhere about the house of Dullarg. We could hear Bell Gregory open and then immediately close the kitchen door, having evidently found no one there. The knocking still continued.
"I believe it is somebody at the front door," I said, turning in that direction.
And then the Stickit Minister cried out in a curious excited voice: "Open to them—open, Alec! Quick, man!"
And his voice went through me with a kind of thrill, for I knew not who it was he expected to enter, whether sheriff's officer or angry creditor—or as it might be the Angel of the Presence Himself come to summon his soul to follow.
Nevertheless, with quaking heart enough, and resolving in future to be a more religious man, I made bold to undo the door.
The woman I had seen in the lane stood before me, as it were, projected out of the dense darkness behind, her shawl fallen back from her face, and her features all pale and changeful in the flicker of the candle I had snatched up to take with me into the little hall. For the front door was only used on state occasions, as when the parish minister came to call, and at funerals.
"He has not come—and the bairns are dying! So I had to come back!" she cried, more hoarsely and breathlessly than I had ever heard woman speak. But her eyes fairly blazed and her lips were parted wide for my answer.
"Dr. Fraser left here more than an hour ago," I stammered. "Has he not been to see the children?"
"No—no, I tell you, no. And they are choking—dying—it is the trouble in the throat. They will die if he does not come——"