"Well," he said as he drew near, "I am glad to see you two getting on so well!"
"How do you know we are?" asked his sister, with something of the antagonistic tone which both in jest and earnest is too common between near relations.
"Because you have been talking incessantly ever since you met."
"We have been only contradicting each other."
"I could tell that too by the sound of your voices; but I took it for a good sign."
"I fear you heard mine almost only!" said Donal. "I talk too much, and I fear I have gathered the fault in a way that makes it difficult to cure."
"How was it?" asked Mr. Graeme.
"By having nobody to talk to. I learned it on the hill-side with the sheep, and in the meadows with the cattle. At college I thought I was nearly cured of it; but now, in my comparative solitude at the castle, it seems to have returned."
"Come here," said Mr. Graeme, "when you find it getting too much for you: my sister is quite equal to the task of re-curing you."
"She has not begun to use her power yet!" remarked Donal, as Miss Graeme, in hoydenish yet not ungraceful fashion, made an attempt to box the ear of her slanderous brother--a proceeding he had anticipated, and so was able to frustrate.
"When she knows you better," he said, "you will find my sister Kate more than your match."
"If I were a talker," she answered, "Mr. Grant would be too much for me: he quite bewilders me! What do you think! he has been actually trying to persuade me--"
"I beg your pardon, Miss Graeme; I have been trying to persuade you of nothing."
"What! not to believe in ghosts and necromancy and witchcraft and the evil eye and ghouls and vampyres, and I don't know what all out of nursery stories and old annuals?"
"I give you my word, Mr. Graeme," returned Donal, laughing, "I have not been persuading your sister of any of these things! I am certain she could be persuaded of nothing of which she did not first see the common sense. What I did dwell upon, without a doubt she would accept it, was the evident fact that writing and printing have done more to bring us into personal relations with the great dead, than necromancy, granting the magician the power he claimed, could ever do. For do we not come into contact with the being of a man when we hear him pour forth his thoughts of the things he likes best to think about, into the ear of the universe? In such a position does the book of a great man place us!--That was what I meant to convey to your sister."
"And," said Mr. Graeme, "she was not such a goose as to fail of understanding you, however she may have chosen to put on the garb of stupidity."
"I am sure," persisted Kate, "Mr. Grant talked so as to make me think he believed in necromancy and all that sort of thing!"
"That may be," said Donal; "but I did not try to persuade you to believe."
"Oh, if you hold me to the letter!" cried Miss Graeme, colouring a little.--"It would be impossible to get on with such a man," she thought, "for he not only preached when you had no pulpit to protect you from him, but stuck so to his text that there was no amusement to be got out of the business!"
She did not know that if she could have met him, breaking the ocean-tide of his thoughts with fitting opposition, his answers would have come short and sharp as the flashes of waves on rocks.
"If Mr. Grant believes in such things," said Mr. Graeme, "he must find himself at home in the castle, every room of which way well be the haunt of some weary ghost!"
"I do not believe," said Donal, "that any work of man's hands, however awful with crime done in it, can have nearly such an influence for belief in the marvellous, as the still presence of live Nature. I never saw an old castle before--at least not to make any close acquaintance with it, but there is not an aspect of the grim old survival up there, interesting as every corner of it is, that moves me like the mere thought of a hill-side with the veil of the twilight coming down over it, ****** of it the last step of a stair for the descending foot of the Lord."
"Surely, Mr. Grant, you do not expect such a personal advent!" said Miss Graeme.
"I should not like to say what I do or don't expect," answered Donal--and held his peace, for he saw he was but casting stumbling-blocks.
The silence grew awkward; and Mr. Graeme's good breeding called on him to say something; he supposed Donal felt himself snubbed by his sister.
"If you are fond of the marvellous, though, Mr. Grant," he said, "there are some old stories about the castle would interest you.
One of them was brought to my mind the other day in the town. It is strange how superstition seems to have its ebbs and flows! A story or legend will go to sleep, and after a time revive with fresh interest, no one knows why."
"Probably," said Donal, "it is when the tale comes to ears fitted for its reception. They are now in many counties trying to get together and store the remnants of such tales: possibly the wind of some such inquiry may have set old people recollecting, and young people inventing. That would account for a good deal--would it not?"
"Yes, but not for all, I think. There has been no such inquiry made anywhere near us, so far as I am aware. I went to the Morven Arms last night to meet a tenant, and found the tradesmen were talking, over their toddy, of various events at the castle, and especially of one, the most frightful of all. It should have been forgotten by this time, for the ratio of forgetting, increases."
"I should like much to hear it!" said Donal.
"Do tell him, Hector," said Miss Graeme, "and I will watch his hair."
"It is the hair of those who mock at such things you should watch," returned Donal. "Their imagination is so rarely excited that, when it is, it affects their nerves more than the belief of others affects theirs."
"Now I have you!" cried Miss Graeme. "There you confess yourself a believer!"
