“But he was my brother!”
The man quivered as though a thousand arrows had suddenly been drawn from his bosom, and then quickly came out of the shadow and took her hands. “Helen!”
With a scream of joyous surprise, because in a moment all the world had been changed, she threw her arms around his neck.
“Oh, dear God!” she cried. “It is he!”
CHAPTER L
There is a quaintly pious inscription in Dunvegan graveyard, chiseled as if by a hand that trembled, upon the gray tombstone farthest back of all those by the side of the Little Church in Under the Oaks. It reads:
ERVIN McARTHUR,
From Whom the Daemon Was Cast Out.
A General in the Army of God.
It was only the last line which was not so directed to be inscribed by the will of him who lies beneath it.
The visitor smiles as he reads until he hears of the prowess of the youth who won fame and honor and glory in the city by the sea and meditates upon how great his after life must have been to have merited so pleasant a comparison. The story is still easy to hear in Dunvegan, where his name is often coupled with Dr. Allerton’s, but not to the curious and gossiping. One must first have left the parlor and have become a boon companion of the living-room—and one must be a lover of Dunvegan. Then if the night be dark, so dark that Tawiskara may seem to have come back to Attacoa, the story is his, the story of Ervin McArthur, out of whom the Daemon was cast.
They say in Dunvegan that somewhere in the heart of every man there dwells Tawiskara, the Daemon of Darkness. According to his own way and in his own time, he manifests his power. To one he suggests, to another he promises, and the third he compels—and he must needs go whom the Daemon drives. At the wrong moment, the psychological moment of weakness, he takes hold of a man and a deed is done, a tiny indiscretion or a horrible crime, as the Daemon wills.