The Deemster followed him, and laid a hand on his arm.
"Remember—no violence," he said; "for the love of God, see there is no violence."
But Ewan, without a word more, without relaxing a muscle of his hard, white face, without a glance or a sign, but with bloodshot eyes and quivering nostrils, with teeth compressed and the great veins on his forehead large and dark over the scar that Dan had left there, drew himself away, and went out of the house.
CHAPTER XIX
HOW EWAN FOUND DAN
Ewan went along like a man whose reason is clogged. All his faculties were deadened. He could not see properly. He could not hear. He could not think. Try as he might to keep his faculties from wandering, his mind would not be kept steady.
Time after time he went back to the passage of Scripture which he had fixed on that morning for his next lesson and sermon. It was the story how Esau, when robbed of his birthright blessing, said in his heart, "I will slay my brother Jacob"; how Jacob fled from his brother's anger to the home of Laban; how after many years Esau married the daughter of Ishmael, and Jacob came to the country of Edom; how, in exceeding fear of Esau's wrath, Jacob sent before him a present for Esau out of the plenty with which God had blessed him; and how Jacob lifted up his eyes and beheld Esau, and ran to meet him and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept.
Ewan would see the goats and the ewes, and the rams, and the milch camels toiling along through the hot lush grass by the waters of the Jordan; then all at once these would vanish and he would find himself standing alone in the drear winter day, with the rumble of the bleak sea far in front, and close overhead the dark snow-clouds sweeping on and on.
His strong emotion paralyzed all his faculties. He could neither fix his mind on the mission on which he had set out, nor banish the thought of it. Mission! What was it? At one moment he thought he knew, and then his eyes seemed to jump from their sockets. "Am I going mad?" he asked himself, and his head turned giddy.