.

CHAPTER XXXIII.--THE BROKEN SWORD.

We went along the road two and two, M'Iver keeping company behind with
the valet, who would have stabbed me in the back in all likelihood ere
we had made half our journey, had there been no such caution. We walked
at a good pace, and fast as we walked it was not fast enough for my
eagerness, so that my long steps set the shorter ones of MacLachlan
pattering beside me in a most humorous way that annoyed him much, to
judge from the efforts he made to keep time and preserve his dignity.
Not a word, good or bad, was exchanged between us; he left the guidance
to me, and followed without a pause when, over the tip of the brae at
Tarra Dubh, I turned sharply to the left and plunged into the wood.

In this part of the wood there is a _larach_ or site of an ancient
church. No stone stands there to-day, no one lives who has known another
who has heard another say he has seen a single stone of this umquhile
house of God; but the sward lies flat and square as in a garden,
levelled, and in summer fringed with clusters of the nettle that grows
over the ruins of man with a haste that seems to mock the brevity of his
interests, and the husbandman and the forester for generations have put
no spade to its soil. A _cill_ or cell we call it in the language; and
the saying goes among the people of the neighbourhood that on the eve
of Saint Patrick bells ring in this glade in the forest, sweet, soft,
dreamy bells, muffled in a mist of years--bells whose sounds have come,
as one might fancy, at their stated interval, after pealing in a wave
about God's universe from star to star, back to the place of their first
chiming. Ah! the monk is no longer there to hear them, only the mavis
calls and the bee in its period hums where matins rose. A queer thought
this, a thought out of all keeping with my bloody mission in the wood,
which was to punish this healthy youth beside me; yet to-day, looking
back on the occasion, I do not wonder that, going a-murdering, my mind
in that glade should soften by some magic of its atmosphere. For, ever
was I a dreamer, as this my portion of history may long since have
disclosed. Ever must I be fronting the great dumb sorrow of the
universe, thinking of loves undone, of the weakness of man, poor man,
a stumbler under the stars, the sickening lapse of time, the vast and
awesome voids left by people dead, laughter quelled, eyes shut for
evermore, and scenes evanished. And