Ere all of the young springtime be flown'
he would have cried to hill and river and loch and glen, knowing that sooner or later Love Meenie would come back from Glasgow Town. But his own going away was very different—and perhaps a final thing.
By and by he rose, and begged to be excused. Maggie might stay for a while longer with Miss Douglas, if she liked; as for him, he had some matters to attend to. And so they bade him good-bye, and wished him well, and hoped to hear all good things of him. Thus they parted; and he went out by himself into the clear moonlight night.
But he did not go home. A strange unrest and longing had seized him; a desire to be alone with the silence of the night; perhaps some angry impatience that he could not make out so much as a few trivial verses for this beautiful girl-friend whom he might never see again. He could write about his dream-sweetheart easily enough; and was there to be never a word for Meenie herself? So he walked down to the river; and wandered along the winding and marshy banks—startling many wildfowl the while—until he reached the lake. There he launched one of the cobles, and pulled out to the middle of the still sheet of water; and took the oars in again. By this time the redshank and curlews and plover had quieted down once more; there was a deadly stillness all around; and he had persuaded himself that he had only come to have a last look at the hills and the loch and the moorland wastes that Meenie had made magical for him in the years now left behind; and to bid farewell to these; and carry away in his memory a beautiful picture of them.
It was a lonely and a silent world. There was not a sound save the distant murmur of a stream; no breath of wind came down from the Clebrig slopes to ruffle the broad silver sweeps of moonlight on the water; the tiny hamlet half hidden among the trees gave no sign of life. The cottage he had left—the white front of it now palely clear in the distance—seemed a ghostly thing: a small, solitary, forsaken thing, in the midst of this vast amphitheatre of hills that stood in awful commune with the stars. On such a night the wide and vacant spaces can readily become peopled; phantoms issue from the shadows of the woods and grow white in the open; an unknown wind may arise, bringing with it strange singing from the northern seas. And if he forgot the immediate purpose of the verses that he wanted; if he forgot that he must not mention the name of Meenie; if he saw only the little cottage, and the moonlit loch, and the giant bulk of Clebrig that was keeping guard over the sleeping hamlet, and watching that no sprites or spectres should work their evil charms within reach of Meenie's half-listening ear—well, it was all a fire in his blood and his brain, and he could not stay to consider. The phantom-world was revealed; the silence now was filled as with a cry from the lone seas of the far north; and, all impatient and eager and half bewildered, he seemed to press forward to seize those visions and that weird music ere both should vanish and be mute:—
The moonlight lies on Loch Naver,
And the night is strange and still;
And the stars are twinkling coldly
Above the Clebrig hill.
And there by the side of the water,