Love that thinks you loftiest, noblest—love that worships in you its type of grace and high perfection, its embodiment of dreams and longings—rejoice in it, oh youth! But if you ever come to know a love that is disenchanted—a love that with its clear and anxious sight has found you out and read your heart—knowing not the highest part alone, but, in so far as human creature can, all that is written there—yet still is love; if you rejoice no longer, pause at least, and tremble. Light is the blind love of the old poets—frail, and in constant peril. Heaven help those to whom is given the love that sees as nothing else can see—It struck to the heart of Randall Home.
Through secrets of his being, which himself had never guessed, this lightened eye had pierced like a sunbeam. Unwitting of its insight, nought could it say in words of its discovery, but unconsciously they came to light under the artist-hand. Menie Laurie—Menie Laurie!—little you wist when your pencil touched so dreamily these faces, which were but so many shadows of one face in your heart—little you wist how strange a revelation they would carry to another soul.
“Something has happened to Randall—he will not hear me,” said July to her husband when the guests went away. “He makes me no answer—he never hears me speak, but stands yonder steadfast at the mirror, looking in his own face.”
CHAPTER XXXIV.
The sun has struck on Criffel’s sullen shoulder. Look you how it besets him, with a glorious burst of laughter and triumph over his gloom. And now a clown no longer, but some grand shepherd baron, he draws his purple cloak about him, and lifts his cloudy head into the sky. Marshal your men-at-arms, Warder of the Border! Keep your profound unbroken watch upon the liege valleys and homes at your feet—for the sun is setting in a stormy glory, and the winds are gathering wild in their battalions in the hollows of the hills.
Travelling with his face towards the east, is one wayfarer on this lonely road. He knows the way, but it is long to his unaccustomed feet; and he is like to be benighted, whatever speed he makes. The sky before him is cold and clear, the sky of an autumn night, gleaming itself with an intense pale lustre, while great mountain-heaps of clouds, flung upon it, stand out round and full against its glittering chilly light; and with a wild rush the wind comes down upon the trees, seizing them in a sudden convulsion. The road ascends a little, and looks from this point as if it went abruptly into the skies; and on either side lies the low breadth of a peat-moss, on which it is too dark now to distinguish the purple patches of heather, or anything but the moorland burn and deep drain full of black clear water, from which is thrown back again, in long flying glimmers of reflection, the pale light of the sky.
There is not a house in sight. Here and there a doddered oak or thorn, or stunted willows trailing their branches into the pools, give a kind of edge, interrupted and broken, to the moorland road; and now and then on a little homely bridge—one arch of stone, or it may be only two or three planks—it crosses a burn. With every gust of wind a shower of leaves comes rustling down from the occasional trees we pass, and the same cold breath persuades this traveller very soon to regret that his breast is not guarded by the natural defence—the grey plaid of the Border hills.
He does not lift his foot high and cumbrously from the ground, as the men of this quarter, used to wading through the moss and heather, are wont to do; nor does he oppose to this wild wind the broad expanded chest and weather-beaten face of rural strength; but he knows the way along which he walks so smartly—pauses now and then to recognise some ancient landmark—and pushes forward without hesitation, very well aware where he is going to, nor fearing to choose that shorter way across the moss, like one to the manner born.
A narrower path, broken in upon here and there by young sapling trees, self-sown willows, and bushes, which are scattered over all the moss. Suddenly—it may be but a parcel of stones, a little heap of peats—but there is something on the edge of the way.
Going forward, the traveller finds seated on the fallen trunk of a tree two children—a little girl drawing in to her side the uncovered flaxen head of a still younger boy, and holding him firmly with her arm. The little fellow, with open mouth and close shut eyes, is fast asleep, and his young guardian’s head droops on her breast. You can see she watched long before she yielded to it; but she too has dropped asleep.