The Billow and the Rock Part 23

"But you mean it now? He had something to pardon in you."

"True. But I cannot--Do not ask me."

"Then you hope that G.o.d will. I may tell him that you hope that G.o.d will forgive him."

"That is not my affair. Kiss my Janet for me."

"I will; and all your children--What? 'Is it growing dark?' Yes, it is, to us as well as to you. What is that she says?" he inquired of Helsa, who had a younger and quicker ear.

"She says the widow is about lighting her lamp. Yes, my lady; but we are too far off to see it."

"Is she wandering?" asked the President.

"No, sir: quite sensible, I think. Did you speak, my lady?"

"My love!"

"To Annie, my lady? I will not forget."

She spoke no more. Sir Alexander contrived to keep from the knowledge of the boatmen for some hours that there was a corpse on board. When they could conceal it no longer, they forgot their fatigue in their superst.i.tion, and rowed, as for their lives, to the nearest point of land. This happened, fortunately, to be within the territories of Sir Alexander Macdonald.

In the early dawn the boat touched at Vaternish Point, and there landed the body, which, with Helsa for its attendant, was committed by Sir Alexander to a clansman who was to summon a distant minister, and see the remains interred in the church at Trunban, where they now lie.

When the President returned to his estate at Culloden; in the ensuing spring, on the final overthrow of the Jacobite cause, his first use of the re-established post was to write to Lord Ca.r.s.e, in London, tidings of his wife's death, promising all particulars if he found that his letter reached its destination in safety. The reply he received was this:--

"I most heartily thank you, my dear friend, for the notice you have given me of the death of _that person_. It would be a ridiculous untruth to pretend grief for it; but as it brings to my mind a train of various things for many years back, it gives me concern. Her retaining wit and facetiousness to the last surprises me. These qualities none found in her, no more than common sense or good nature, before she went to those parts; and of the reverse of all which if she had not been irrecoverably possessed, in an extraordinary and insufferable degree, after many years' fruitless endeavours to reclaim her, she had never seen those parts. I long for the particulars of her death, which, you are pleased to tell me, I am to have by next post."

"Hers was a singular death, at last," observed Lord Ca.r.s.e, when he put the President's second letter into the hands of his sister. "I almost wonder that they did not slip the body overboard, rather than expose themselves to danger for the sake of giving Christian burial to such a person."

"Dust to dust," said Lady Rachel, thoughtfully. "Those were the words said over her. I am glad it was so, rather than that one more was added to the tossing billows. For what was she but a billow, driven by the winds and tossed?"

When, some few years after, the steward approached the island on an autumn night, in honour of Rollo's invitation to attend the funeral of the Widow Fleming, his eye unconsciously sought the guiding light on the hill-side.

"Ah!" said he, recollecting himself, "it is gone, and we shall see it no more. Rollo will live on the main, and this side of the island will be deserted. Her light gone! We should almost as soon thought of losing a star. And she herself gone! We shall miss her, as if one of our lofty old rocks had crumbled down into the sea. She was truly, though one would not have dared to tell her so, an anchorage to people feebler than herself. She had a faith which made her spirit, tender as it was, as firm as any rock."

THE END.