Warlock o Glenwarlock | Page 5

it gathered and gathered, nobody could think
how--not coming from anywhere else, but beginning just there, and
nowhere beyond. When, later on, he had to shift its source, and carry it
back to the great sky, it was no less marvellous, and more lovely; it was
a closer binding together of the gentle earth and the awful withdrawing
heavens. These were a region of endless hopes, and ever recurrent
despairs: that his beloved, an earthly finite thing, should rise there, was
added joy, and gave a mighty hope with respect to the unknown and
appalling. But from the sky, he was sent back to the earth in further
pursuit; for, whence came the rain, his books told him, but from the sea?
That sea he had read of, though never yet beheld, and he knew it was
magnificent in its might; gladly would he have hailed it as an
intermediate betwixt the sky and the earth--so to have the sky come
first! but, alas! the ocean came first in order. And then, worse and
worse! how was the ocean fed but from his loved torrent? How was the
sky fed but from the sea? How was the dark fountain fed but from the
sky? How was the torrent fed but from the fountain? As he sat in the
hot garden, with his back against the old gray wall, the nest of his
family for countless generations, with the scent of the flowers in his
nostrils, and the sound of the bees in his ears, it had begun to dawn
upon him that he had lost the stream of his childhood, the mysterious,
infinite idea of endless, inexplicable, original birth, of outflowing
because of essential existence within! There was no production any
more, nothing but a mere rushing around, like the ring-sea of Saturn, in
a never ending circle of formal change! Like a great dish, the mighty
ocean was skimmed in particles invisible, which were gathered aloft
into sponges all water and no sponge; and from this, through many an
airy, many an earthy channel, deflowered of its mystery, his ancient,
self-producing fountain to a holy merry river, was FED--only FED! He
grew very sad, and well he might. Moved by the spring eternal in
himself, of which the love in his heart was but a river-shape, he turned
away from the deathened stream, and without knowing why, sought the
human elements about the place.

CHAPTER II
.
THE KITCHEN.
He entered the wide kitchen, paved with large slabs of slate. One
brilliant gray-blue spot of sunlight lay on the floor. It came through a
small window to the east, and made the peat-fire glow red by the
contrast. Over the fire, from a great chain, hung a three-legged pot, in
which something was slowly cooking. Between the fire and the
sun-spot lay a cat, content with fate and the world. At the corner of the
fire sat an old lady, in a chair high-backed, thick-padded, and covered
with striped stuff. She had her back to the window that looked into the
court, and was knitting without regarding her needles. This was
Cosmo's grandmother. The daughter of a small laird in the next parish,
she had started in life with an overweening sense of her own
importance through that of her family, nor had she lived long enough to
get rid of it. I fancy she had clung to it the more that from the time of
her marriage nothing had seemed to go well with the family into which
she had married. She and her husband had struggled and striven, but to
no seeming purpose; poverty had drawn its meshes closer and closer
around them. They had but one son, the present laird, and he had
succeeded to an estate yet smaller and more heavily encumbered. To all
appearance he must leave it to Cosmo, if indeed he left it, in no better
condition. From the growing fear of its final loss, he loved the place
more than any of his ancestors had loved it, and his attachment to it had
descended yet stronger to his son.
But although Cosmo the elder wrestled and fought against encroaching
poverty, and with little success, he had never forgot small rights in
anxiety to be rid of large claims. What man could he did to keep his
poverty from bearing hard on his dependents, and never master or
landlord was more beloved. Such being his character and the condition
of his affairs, it is not very surprising that he should have passed middle
age before thinking seriously of marriage. Nor did he then fall in love,
in the ordinary sense of the phrase; he reflected with himself that it
would be cowardice so far to fear poverty as to run the boat of