“Then you may laugh at me if you will, but as surely as my name is Ninian I have been called this night to that work, and perhaps to more also.”
“I had thought,” said Gervase, “you had forgot these idle dreams and warnings.”
“Though I am a man of prayer,” he went on, disregarding the interruption, “I am not gifted with the vision, but twice before I have heard the same voice, and twice my life was put in grievous jeopardy. When I heard it before, it spoke as if in anger, but to-night it was sweet and soft like his voice that was my friend. You see I was sitting there on the bastion figuring out how I might reach the ships, and reproaching myself for my backwardness in desiring to make the venture, when I heard a voice as if a great way off coming from up the river yonder. I listened attentively but there was a deep silence, and I began to think that it was a mere trick of fancy. Then it came again, sounding nearer, till I heard the words of his voice.”
“Whose voice?” said Gervase, wonderingly.
Macpherson turned towards him with a white face. “The voice of my old friend--him that I told you of. But, thank God, I know his spirit is at peace with mine, and I can die content. I could see him before me with my mortal eyes, as I heard that familiar voice that has not sounded in mine ears for twenty years. He has called me and I am going yonder.”
There was no trace of excitement in his manner or in his speech, but he spoke with the calm deliberateness of a man who has fully made up his mind and cannot be shaken in his opinion. Gervase knew that it was useless to attempt to reason with him; and indeed, if the truth must be told, he himself was not a little impressed by the tale he had heard. The supernatural played a large part in the lives of the people among whom he lived, and it was not curious that his own mind should have been touched by the prevailing spirit. But to Macpherson it was a fact that required no explanation and hardly seemed to call for wonder.
“And were you not afraid to hear that disembodied voice?” Gervase asked, “if it be that it was not more than your fancy?”
“Wherefore should I be afraid? was it not the voice of my friend who spoke to me no longer in anger? I know that my sin is forgiven. Some day, my lad,” he continued, with the kindly and almost caressing tone he had adopted towards Gervase, “some day you will understand what I mean, but not yet. Now forget what I have spoken and help me with your young and nimble wits.”
“It is madness for you to dream of it,” Gervase answered. “No man could reach the ships by the water alone, and to land would be certain death.”
“When we were campaigning on the Danube I swam further than that and was none the worse for it, while the Janissaries were potting at us from their flat-bottomed boat a good part of the way. But this is an old story now.”