Anyhow he must do something; and the first rational
movement would clearly be to find out quietly for
himself whether the woman was actually missing or
not.
Tired as he was he set out at once for the burgh,
and the first person he saw was Mrs Catanach standing
on her doorstep and shading her eyes with her hand,
as she looked away out to the horizon over the roofs
of the Seaton. He went no farther.
In the evening he found an opportunity of telling
his master how the room was strangely closed; but
his lordship pooh poohed, and said something must
have gone wrong with the clumsy old lock.
With vague foresight, Malcolm took its key from the
bunch, and, watching his opportunity, unseen hung
the rest on their proper nail in the housekeeper’s
room. Then, having made sure that the door of
the wizard’s chamber was locked, he laid the
key away in his own chest.
The religious movement amongst the fisher folk was
still going on. Their meeting was now held often
during the week, and at the same hour on the Sunday
as other people met at church. Nor was it any
wonder that, having participated in the fervour which
pervaded their gatherings in the cave, they should
have come to feel the so called divine service in
the churches of their respective parishes a dull,
cold, lifeless, and therefore unhelpful ordinance,
and at length regarding it as composed of beggarly
elements, breathing of bondage, to fill the Baillies’
Barn three times every Sunday—a reverential
and eager congregation.
Now, had they confined their prayers and exhortations
to those which, from an ecclesiastical point of view,
constitute the unholy days of the week, Mr Cairns
would have neither condescended nor presumed to take
any notice of them; but when the bird’s eye view
from his pulpit began to show patches of bare board
where human forms had wont to appear; and when these
plague spots had not only lasted through successive
Sundays, but had begun to spread more rapidly, he
began to think it time to put a stop to such fanatical
aberrations—the result of pride and spiritual
presumption— hostile towards God, and rebellious
towards their lawful rulers and instructors.
For what an absurdity it was that the spirit of truth
should have anything to communicate to illiterate
and vulgar persons except through the mouths of those
to whom had been committed the dispensation of the
means of grace! Whatever wind might blow, except
from their bellows, was, to Mr Cairns at least, not
even of doubtful origin. Indeed the priests of
every religion, taken in class, have been the slowest
to recognize the wind of the spirit, and the quickest
to tell whence the blowing came and whither it went—even
should it have blown first on their side of the hedge.
And how could it be otherwise? How should they
recognize as a revival the motions of life unfelt
