Things had gone on in this way for months, growing worse and worse every day, when Invereshie, oppressed by that gloom which now clung more frequently and more closely to him, set out one morning very early to join some of his neighbours in a distant chase of the deer. He was that day more than usually successful; and his attendants having been left behind to bring home the spoils, he was compelled to return in the evening alone. The sun was getting low as he came down into the upper part of his own deep and precipitous Glen Feshie, and the shaggy faces of its eastern mountains were broadly lighted up by its rays, thus rendering the crags on its western side, and the shadows they threw across the wooded bottom, doubly obscured by the blazing contrast. As the laird advanced, he came suddenly in view of a cottage perched on the summit of a little knoll, and sheltered by one huge twisted and scathed pine alone, the bared limbs of which permitted the spot to be gladdened by a lingering sunbeam, to which the dense forest that surrounded it forbade all entrance elsewhere. This was the habitation of his nurse, whose strange appearance has been already described. She and the old crone her sister, who was believed to be scarcely less gifted than herself, were seated on settles at the door, availing themselves of what yet remained of the glowing light to twine a thrifty thread with distaff and spindle. The laird seldom passed this way without visiting old Elspeth; and on this occasion he turned from his direct path the more readily, because his conscience accused him that he had somewhat neglected her of late. The continual round of dissipation in which he had been for some time whirled, had not permitted him once to see her since that accidental glance he had had of her on the day she appeared at his marriage pageant. On that occasion, too, he felt that she should have been a guest at that table where his humbler friends were entertained; but he remembered that although she had been invited, she did not appear. The recollection of that joyous day shot across his mind like the gleaming lightning of a summer night, only to be succeeded by a deeper gloom, arising from the recurrence of all that had passed since. Unperceived by the frail owners of the cottage, he wound his way towards it with a sinking heart. In approaching it, he was compelled by the nature of the ground to make a half circuit around the knoll, which thus brought him up in rear of it; and he was about to discover himself to the two old women, by turning the angle of the gable of the little building, when his steps were almost unconsciously arrested by hearing his own name pronounced, and he halted for a moment. It was his nurse who was speaking to her sister emphatically and energetically in Gaelic; and that which he heard might have been nearly interpreted thus:—
“Och hone, Invereshie!” exclaimed she in a shrill tone of lament, as if she had been apostrophising him in his own presence. “Och hone! what but the black art of hell itself could have so cast the glamour o’er thee, my bonny bairn, that thou shouldst sit and see thy newly-chartered hills and glens melt from thy grasp as calmly and silently as yonder pine-clad rock beholds the sunshine creep away from its bosom, and never once come to seek counsel, as thou wert wont, from these lips which never lied to thine ear.”
“Witchcraft!” muttered her sister; “wicked witchcraft is at work with him.”
“Witchcraft!” cried the nurse with an emotion so violent as fearfully to agitate her whole frame; “witchcraft, said ye? The prince of darkness is himself at work with him. The foul fiend, in a woman’s form, is linked to him. Bethink thee of her moonlight wanderings by the waters,—her unhallowed midnight orgies among the graves of the dead, where they say she is still seen to walk while he is sleeping,—her sudden death, for death it was, on that ill-starred morning which proclaimed their union,—the strange reanimation of the corpse by the foul fiend that now possesses it,—the momentary sinking, and terror, and confusion of that wicked spirit when he quailed before the gaze of mine own gifted eye, shot from beneath the shade of the spell-dispersing rowan-tree;—bethink thee of these things, sister Marion, and wonder not that mine unwilling lips should have been urged to mutter a curse where my heart would have fain poured forth a blessing.”
“I saw, I saw,” replied the other crone, “thine eye was, indeed, then most potently gifted, sister, and thy will was not thine own.”
“Och hone, och hone!” wailed out the nurse again, “that I should live to see my soul’s darling thus rent away from the care of Heaven, handed over to the powers of hell, and doomed to destruction both here and hereafter! Och hone, willingly would I give my worthless life if I could yet save him! Och hone, if I could but pour my burning words into his ear, so that his eyes might be opened, and that he might stent his heart-strings to the stern work of his own salvation.”
The unhappy laird had already heard enough. He felt as if the deadly juice of upas had found its way into his veins. His whole frame was, as it were, paralysed. He leaned against the gable of the cottage for some moments, during which he was almost unconscious of thought or of existence; and then, with his limbs failing under him, he staggered, giddy and confused, down the side of the knoll into the pathway below, and sank exhausted upon a mossy bank, where he lay for a time in a state nearly approaching to insensibility. Starting up at last with an unnatural effort which he had no reason left to guide, and regardless of all pathway, he hurried along by the brink of the stream with a fury as wild as that which impelled its rushing waters. Slackening his pace by degrees, as his bewildered recollection began to return to him, he at length stopped, and resting against a rock, his scattered thoughts returned thickly upon him. At first he resolved to go back to hold converse with his nurse, but ere he had well conceived this idea, he rejected it as an idle waste of time; for the fresh recurrence to his recollection of all she had uttered flashed conviction too strongly on his mind to render any further question necessary. Those dark and mysterious doubts which had so long tortured him from time to time during his moody musings, now reared themselves into one gigantic, horrible, and overwhelming certainty, to dwell on which, even for an instant, filled him with an agony that brought large drops of cold perspiration to his brow. His jaws chattered against each other, and a cold shudder ran through his whole system, like that which precedes the last shiver of death. Again, a burning fever seized his brain, and he struck his forehead with the palm of his hand, and he wept and groaned aloud. Relieved by this sudden burst of affliction, he started from his resting-place, and knocking violently on his breast, as if to summon up all of man that was yet left within him,—
“Invereshie!” cried he, addressing himself in unconscious soliloquy, “Invereshie! where is thy boasted resolution? Whither hath thy courage fled? But it shall come to thee now!” said he, setting his teeth together, and clenching his hands. “Hah! nor mortal nor demon shall keep me in this unhallowed state of enchantment, if it be in the power of fire or of water to break the spell. Let me think,” said he again, striking his forehead, as if to rouse up his sharpest intellect; and then after a pause, during which he strode for a few turns backwards and forwards beneath the deep shadow of the rock, “I have it!” he exclaimed, and he urged on his steps with reckless haste towards his home.
The distant murmurs of its mirth and its revelry came on his ears whilst he was yet above a bowshot off,—an arrow itself could not have rent his heart more cruelly. He flew forward, and brushing almost unnoticed through the crowd of serving-men in gay attire that obstructed his entrance, he sought a lonely chamber, where, in darkness and in silence, he sat brooding over his misery, and nursing the terrible purpose that possessed him. Every now and then his soul was stung to madness by the shouts of mirth, the music, and the other sounds of jollity which, from time to time, arose from the festal hall below, until, unable longer to bear the torture he suffered, he rushed forth again into the woods. There he wandered for some hours to and fro, torn by his contending passions; for love was still powerful within him, and would, even yet, often rise up for a time to wrestle hard with the wizard Superstition, who had now so irrecoverably entangled and bemeshed his judgment. But ever as the recurrence of the tender emotion was felt within him, he summoned up his sterner nature to exorcise it forth as something unholy. At length the broad moon arose, lighted up the bold front of the lofty Craigmigavie, spread its beams over the far-stretched surface of Loch Inch, shed a pale lustre on the distant Craigou, the Macpherson’s watch-hill, and fully illuminated the wild scenery and the sparkling waters of the Feshie, and the noble birches that wept over its roaring rapids, and its deep and pellucid pools.
It is not for me to say what were these mysterious associations which came over the mind of Invereshie as he beheld the ample disc of the glorious luminary arise over the mountain top, and launch itself upward to hold its silent and undisturbed way through the immensity of ethereal space. They seemed to bring an artificial calm to his bosom. But it was the calm of a mind irrevocably wound up to a determined purpose. And now, with his arms folded with convulsive tightness over his breast, as if to prevent the possibility of that purpose escaping thence, he stalked with a steady and resolute step towards the house.