The Standard Bearer

“Wherefore?” she cried, sharply. “You are not his minister.”

“No,” said I, “but I am more. I am both his friend and yours.”

“Do you mean to reprove him?” she asked.

“It is my duty – in part,” said I, for the thought of mine office had come upon me, and I feared that for this girl’s sake I might even be ready ignominiously to demit and decline my plain duty.

“For that wherein he has given the unrighteous cause to speak reproachfully, I will reprove him,” I said. “For the rest, I will aid, support, and succour him in all that one man may do to another. By confession of his fault, such as it has been, he may yet keep the Cause from being spoken against.”

“Ah, you do not know my father, to speak thus of him,” Mary Gordon cried, clasping her hands. “When he is in his fury he cares for neither man nor beast. He might do you a hurt, even to the touching of your life. Ah, do not go to him.” (Here she clasped her hands, and looked at me with such sweet, petitionary graciousness that my heart became as wax within me.) “Let him come to himself. What are reproof and hard words, besides the shame that comes when such a man as my father sits face to face with the sins of his own heart?”

Almost I had given way, but the thought of the dread excommunication, and the danger which his children must also incur, compelled me.

“Hear me, Mary,” I said, “I must speak to him. For all our sakes – yours as well – I must go instantly to Alexander Gordon.”

She waved her hand impatiently.

“Do not go,” she said. “Can you not trust me? I thought you – you once told me that you loved me. And if you had loved me, I do not know, I might – ”

She paused. A wild hope – warm, tender, gloriously insurgent, rose-coloured – welled up triumphantly in my heart. My blood hummed in my ears.

“She would love me; she would give herself to me. I cannot offend her. This alone is my happiness. This only is life. What matters all else?”

And I was about to give way. If I had so much as looked in her face, or met her eyes, I must have fallen from my intent.

But I called to mind the path by which I had been led, the oath that had been laid upon me to speak faithfully. The lonely way of a man – a sinful man trying to do the right – gripped me like a vice, and compelled me against my will.

“Mary,” I said, solemnly, “I love you more than life – more, perchance, than I love God. But I cannot lay aside, nor yet shut out the doing of my duty.”

She thrust her hand out suddenly, passionately, from her, as if casting me out of her sight for ever. She set her kerchief to her eyes.

“You have chosen!” she cried. “Go, then!”

“Mary,” I said, turning to follow her.

All suddenly she turned upon me and stamped her foot.

“I dare you to speak with me!” she cried, her eyes flashing with anger. “I thought you were a man, and you are no better than a machine. You love! You know not the A B C of it. You have never passed the hornbook. I doubt not that you broke that poor lassie’s heart down there in the farm by the water-side. She loved a stone and she died. Now you tell me that you love me, and the first thing I ask of you you refuse, though it is for my own father, and I entreat you with tears!”

“Mary,” I began to say quietly, “you do me great wrong. Let me tell you – ”

But she turned away down the path. I followed after, and at the parting of the ways to house and stable she turned on me again like a lioness. “Oh, go, I tell you! Go!” she cried. “Do your precious duty. But from this day forth never, never dare to utter word to Mary Gordon again!”

CHAPTER XXXIII

THE DEMONIAC IN THE GARRET

As all may understand, it was with bowed head and crushed heart that I bent my steps towards the grey tower, sitting so stilly among the leafage of the wood above the water.

Duty is doubtless noble, and virtue its own reward. But when there is a lass in the case – why, it is somewhat harder to go against her will than to counter all the law and the prophets.

I went up the bank towards the tower of Earlstoun, and as I came near methought there was a strange and impressive silence over everything – like a Sabbath-day that was yet no common or canny Sabbath.

At the angle of the outer wall one Hugh Halliday, an old servant of the Gordons, came running toward me.

“Minister, minister,” he cried, “ye mauna come here. The maister has gotten the possession by evil spirits. He swears that if ever a minister come near him he will brain him, and he has taken his sword and pistols up into the garret under the roof, and he cries out constantly that if any man stirs him, he shall surely die the death.”

“But,” I answered, “he will not kill me, who have had no hand in the matter – me who have also been persecuted by the Presbytery and by them deposed.”

“Ah, laddie,” said the old man, shaking his palsied hand warningly at me, “ye little ken the laird, if ye think that when the power o’ evil comes ower him, he bides to think. He lets drive richt and left, and a’ that remains to be done is but to sinder the dead frae the leevin’, or to gather up the fragments that remain in baskets and corn-bags and sic-like.

“For instance, in the auld persecutin’ days there was Gleg Toshie, the carrier, that was counted a great man o’ his hands, and at the Carlin’s Cairn Sandy – the laird I mean – cam’ on Toshie spyin’ on him, or so he thocht. And oor Maister near ended him when he laid hand on him.

“‘Haud aff,’ cried Peter Pearson the curate, ‘Wad ye kill the man, Earlstoun?’

“‘I would kill him and eat him too!’ cries the laird, as he gied him aye the ither drive wi’ his neive. O he’s far frae canny when he’s raised.”

“Nevertheless I will see him,” said I; “I have a message to deliver.”

“Then I hope and trust ye hae made your peace wi’ your Maker, for ye will come doon frae that laft a dead stiff corp and that ye’ll leeve to see.”

By the gate the Lady of Earlstoun was walking to and fro, wringing her hands and praying aloud.

“Wrath, wrath, and dismay hath fallen on this house!” she cried. “The five vials are poured out. And there yet remains the sixth vial. O Sandy, my ain man, that it should come to this! That ye should tak’ the roofs like a pelican in the desert and six charges o’ pooder in yon flask, forbye swords and pistols. And then the swearin’ – nae minced oaths, but as braid as the back o’ Cairnsmuir. Waes me for Sandy, the man o’ my choice! A carnal man was Sandy a’ the days o’ him, a man no to be ruled nor yet spoken to, but rather like a lion to be withstood face to face. But then a little while and his spirit would come to him like the spirit of a little child.”

We could hear as we walked and communed a growling somewhere far above like the baffled raging of a caged wild beast.

“It is the spirit of the demoniac that is come to rend him,” she said. “Hear to him, there he is; he is hard at it, cursing the Presbytery and a’ ministers. He is sorest upon them that he has liked best, as, indeed, the possessed ever are. He says that he knows not why he is restrained from braining me – me that have been his wife these many sorrowful years. But thus far he hath been kept from doing any great injury. Even the servant man that brought the message from his master, William Boyd, summoning Alexander to appear before the Presbytery, he cast by main force into the well, and if the man had not caught at the rope, and so gone more slowly to the bottom, he would surely have been dashed to pieces.”

“But how long has he been thus?” I said. For as we listened, quaking, the noise waxed and grew louder. Then anon it would diminish almost like the howling or whimpering of a beaten dog, most horrid and uncanny to hear.

“Ever since yesterday at the hour when he gat the summons from the Presbytery,” said the lady of Earlstoun.

“And have none been near him since that time?”

“Only Mary,” she said; “she took up to him a bowl of broth. For he never lifted his hand to her in his life. He bade her begone quickly, because he was no fit company for human kind any more. She asked him very gently to come to his own chamber and lie down in peace. But he cried out that the ministers were coming, and that she must not stand in the way. For he was about to shoot them all dead, like the black hoodie-craws that pyke the young lambs’ e’en!

“‘And a bonny bit lamb ye are, faither,’ said Mary, trying to jest with him to divert his mind; ‘a bonny lamb, indeed, with that great muckle heather besom of a beard,’

“But instead of laughing, as was his wont, he cursed her for an impudent wench, and told her to begone, that she was no daughter of his.”

“Has he been oftentimes taken with this seizure?” I asked.

“It has come to him once or twice since he was threatened with torture before the lords of the Privy Council, and brake out upon them all as has often been told – but never before like this.”

“I will go to him,” I said, “and adjure him to return to himself. And I will exorcise the demon, if power be granted me of the Lord.”

“I pray you do not!” she cried, catching me and looking at me even more earnestly than her daughter had done, though, perhaps, somewhat less movingly. “Let not your blood also be upon this doomed house of Earlstoun.”