Donal Grant, George MacDonald [classic novels for teens txt] 📗

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But now to get up through the opening into the passage above-stopped with a heavy slab! He sprang at the steep slope of the window-sill, but there was no hold, and as often as he sprang he slipped down again. He tried and tried until he was worn out and almost in despair. She might be dying! he was close to her! he could not reach her! He stood still for a moment to think. To his mind came the word, "He that believeth shall not make haste." He thought with himself, "God cannot help men with wisdom when their minds are in too great a tumult to hear what he says!" He tried to lift up his heart and make a silence in his soul.

As he stood he seemed to see, through the dark, the gloomy place as it first appeared when he threw in the lighted letter. All at once he started from his quiescence, dropped on his hands and knees, and crawled until he found the flat stone like a gravestone. Out came his knife, and he dug away the earth at one end, until he could get both hands under it. Then he heaved it from the floor, and shifting it along, got it under the opening in the wall.


CHAPTER LXXIV.

A MORAL FUNGUS.

Spiritual insanity, cupidity, cruelty, and possibly immediate demoniacal temptation had long been working in and on a mind that had now ceased almost to distinguish between the real and the unreal. Every man who bends the energies of an immortal spirit to further the ends and objects of his lower being, fails so to distinguish; but with the earl the blindness had wrought outward as well as inwardly, so that he was even unable, during considerable portions of his life, to tell whether things took place outside or inside him. Nor did this trouble him-he was past caring. He would argue that what equally affected him had an equal right to be by him regarded as existent. He paid no heed to the different natures of the two kinds of existence, their different laws, and the different demands they made upon the two consciousnesses; he had in fact, by a long course of disobedience growing to utter disuse of conscience, arrived nearly at non-individuality. In regard to what was outside him he was but a mirror, in regard to what was inside him a mere vessel of imperfectly interacting forces. And now his capacities and incapacities together had culminated in a hideous plot, in which it would be hard to say whether the folly, the crime, or the cunning predominated: he had made up his mind that, if the daughter of his brother refused to wed her cousin, and so carry out what he asserted to have been the declared wish of her father, she should go after her father, and leave her property to the next heir, so that if not in one way then in another the law of nature might be fulfilled, and title and property united without the intervention of a marriage. As to any evil that therein might be imagined to befall his niece, he quoted the words of Hamlet-"Since no man has ought of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes?"-she would be no worse than she must have been when the few years of her natural pilgrimage were of necessity over: the difference to her was not worth thinking of beside the difference to the family! At the same time perhaps a scare might serve, and she would consent to marry Forgue to escape a frightful end!

The moment Donal was gone, he sent Forgue to London, and set himself to overcome the distrust of him which he could not but see had for some time been growing in her. With the sweet prejudices of a loving nature to assist him, he soon prevailed so far that, without much entreaty, she consented to accompany him to London-for a month or so, he said, while Davie was gone. The proposal had charms for her: she had been there with her father when a mere child, and never since. She wrote to Donal to let him know: how it was that her letter never reached him, it is hardly needful to inquire.

The earl, in order, he said, to show his recognition of her sweet compliance, made arrangements for posting it all the way. He would take her by the road he used to travel himself when he was a young man: she should judge whether more had not been lost than gained by rapidity! Whatever shortened any natural process, he said, simply shortened life itself. Simmons should go before, and find a suitable place for them!

They were hardly gone when Mrs. Brookes received a letter pretendedly from the clergyman of the parish, in a remote part of the south, where her mother, now a very old woman, lived, saying she was at the point of death, and could not die in peace without seeing her daughter. She went at once.

The scheme was a madman's, excellently contrived for the instant object, but with no outlook for immediately resulting perils.

After the first night on the road, he turned across country, and a little towards home; after the next night, he drove straight back, but as it was by a different road, Arctura suspected nothing. When they came within a few hours of the castle, they stopped at a little inn for tea; there he contrived to give her a certain dose. At the next place where they stopped, he represented her as his daughter taken suddenly ill: he must go straight home with her, however late they might be. Giving an imaginary name to their destination, and keeping on the last post-boy who knew nothing of the country, he directed him so as completely to bewilder him, with the result that he set them down at the castle supposing it a different place, and in a different part of the country. The thing was after the earl's own heart; he delighted in making a fool of a fellow-mortal. He sent him away so as not to enter the town: it was of importance his return should not be known.

It is a marvel he could effect what followed; but he had the remnants of great strength, and when under influences he knew too well how to manage, was for the time almost as powerful as ever: he got his victim to his room on the stair, and thence through the oak door.


CHAPTER LXXV.

THE PORCH OF HADES.

When Arctura woke from her unnatural sleep, she lay a while without thought, then began to localize herself. The last place she recalled was the inn where they had tea: she must have been there taken ill, she thought, and was now in a room of the same. It was quite dark: they might have left a light by her! She lay comfortably enough, but had a suspicion that the place was not over clean, and was glad to find herself not undrest. She turned on her side: something pulled her by the wrist. She must have a bracelet on, and it was entangled in the coverlet! She tried to unclasp it, but could not: which of her bracelets could it be? There was something attached to it!-a chain-a thick chain! How odd! What could it mean? She lay quiet, slowly waking to fuller consciousness.-Was there not a strange air, a dull odour in the room? Undefined as it was, she had smelt it before, and not long since!-It was the smell of the lost chapel!-But that was at home in the castle! she had left it two days before! Was she going out of her mind?

The dew of agony burst from her forehead. She would have started up, but was pulled hard by the wrist! She cried on God.-Yes, she was lying on the very spot where that heap of woman-dust had lain! she was manacled with the same ring from which that woman's arm had wasted-the decay of centuries her slow redeemer! Her being recoiled so wildly from the horror, that for a moment she seemed on the edge of madness. But madness is not the sole refuge from terror! Where the door of the spirit has once been opened wide to God, there is he, the present help in time of trouble! With him in the house, it is not only that we need fear nothing, but that is there which in its own being and nature casts out fear. God and fear cannot be together. It is a God far off that causes fear. "In thy presence is fulness of joy." Such a sense of absolute helplessness overwhelmed Arctura that she felt awake in her an endless claim upon the protection of her original, the source of her being. And what sooner would any father have of his children than action on such claim! God is always calling us as his children, and when we call him as our father, then, and not till then, does he begin to be satisfied. And with that there fell upon Arctura a kind of sleep, which yet was not sleep; it was a repose such as perhaps is the sleep of a spirit.

Again the external began to intrude. She pictured to herself what the darkness was hiding. Her feelings when first she came down into the place returned on her memory. The tide of terror began again to rise. It rose and rose, and threatened to become monstrous. She reasoned with herself: had she not been brought in safety through its first and most dangerous inroad?-but reason could not outface terror. It was fear, the most terrible of all terrors, that she feared. Then again woke her faith: if the night hideth not from him, neither does the darkness of fear!

It began to thunder, first with a low distant muttering roll, then with a loud and near bellowing. Was it God coming to her? Some are strangely terrified at thunder; Arctura had the child's feeling that it was God that thundered: it comforted her as with the assurance that God was near. As she lay and heard the great organ of the heavens, its voice seemed to grow articulate; God was calling to her, and saying, "Here I am, my child! be not afraid!"

Then she began to reason with herself that the worst that could happen to her was to lie there till she died of hunger, and that could not be so very bad! And therewith across the muttering thunder came a wail of the ghost-music. She started: had she not heard it a hundred times before, as she lay there in the dark alone? Was she only now for the first time waking up to it-she, the lady they had shut up there to die-where she had lain for ages, with every now and then that sound of the angels singing, far above her in the blue sky?

She was beginning to wander. She reasoned with herself, and dismissed the fancy; but it came and came again, mingled with real memories, mostly of the roof, and Donal.

By and by she fell asleep, and woke in a terror which seemed to have been growing in her sleep. She sat up, and stared into the dark. >From where stood the altar, seemed to rise and approach her a form of deeper darkness. She heard nothing, saw nothing, but something was there. It came nearer. It was but a fancy; she knew it; but the fancy assumed to be: the moment she gave way, and acknowledged it, that moment it would have the reality it had been waiting for, and clasp her in its skeleton-arms! She cried