I flang aff my butes to rin efter a
freen', an' that's hoo ye didna hear me come up. I'm gaein' efter
them noo, to gang hame i' them. Guid nicht, my lord. Guid nicht,
my leddy."
He turned and pursued his way; but Florimel's face, glimmering
through the night, went with him as he ran.
He told his grandfather how he had left the mad laird lying on his
face, on the sands between the bored craig and the rocks of the
promontory, and said he would like to go back to him.
"He'll be hafing a fit, poor man," said Duncan. "Yes, my son, you
must co to him and to your pest for him. After such an honour as
we 'fe had this day, we mustn't pe forgetting our poor neighpours.
Will you pe taking to him a trop of uisgebeatha?"
"He taks naething o' that kin'," said Malcolm.
He could not tell him that the madman, as men called him, lay
wrestling in prayer with the Father of lights. The old highlander
was not irreverent, but the thing would have been unintelligible
to him. He could readily have believed that the supposed lunatic
might be favoured beyond ordinary mortals; that at that very moment,
lost in his fit, he might be rapt in a vision of the future--a
wave of time, far off as yet from the souls of other men, even now
rolling over his; but that a soul should seek after vital content by
contact with its maker, was an idea belonging to a region which,
in the highlander's being, lay as yet an unwatered desert, an
undiscovered land, whence even no faintest odour had been wafted
across the still air of surprised contemplation.
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