As he went the desire awoke to look again into the chamber, for that night he had had neither light nor time enough to gain other than the vaguest impression of it.
But for no lifting of the latch would the door open.—How could the woman—witch she must be—have locked it? He proceeded to unlock it. He tried one key, then another. He went over the whole bunch. Mystery upon mystery!—not one of them would turn. Bethinking himself, he began to try them the other way, and soon found one to throw the bolt on. He turned it in the contrary direction, and it threw the bolt off: still the door remained immovable! It must then —awful thought!—be fast on the inside! Was the woman’s body lying there behind those check curtains? Would it lie there until it vanished, like that of the wizard,—vanished utterly—bones and all, to a little dust, which one day a housemaid might sweep up in a pan?
On the other hand, if she had got shut in, would she not have made noise enough to be heard?—he had been day and night in the next room! But it was not a spring-lock, and how could that have happened? Or would she not have been missed, and inquiry made after her? Only such an inquiry might well have never turned in the direction of Lossie House, and he might never have heard of it, if it had.
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.
CHAPTER XLV.
MR CAIRNS AND THE MARQUIS.
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.