Non-Fiction > Uncollected essays > Volumes 33-38, 1876-1878 - Cornhill magazine > Volume 37

WILL 0' THE MILL. 57
touch of fevei- in liis old limbs, Will's miud was besieged by tumultuous
and crying memories. His boyhood, the night with the fat young man,
the death of his adopted parents, the summer days with Marjarie, and
many of those small circumstances, wliich seem nothing to another, and
are yet the very gist of a man's own life to himself — things seen, words
heard, looks misconstrued — arose from their forgotten corners and
usurped his attention. The dead themselves were with him, not
merely taking part in this thin show of memory that defiled before lus
brain, but revisiting his bodily senses as they do in profound and vivid
dreams. The fat young man leaned his elbows on the table opposite ;
Marjarie came and went with an apronful of flowers between the garden
and the arbour ; he could hear the old parson knocking out his pipe or
blowing his resonant nose. The tide of his consciousness ebbed and
flowed : he was sometimes half asleep and drowned in these recollections
of the past ; and sometimes he was broad awake, wondering at himself.
But about the middle of the night, he was startled by the voice of the
dead miller calling to him out of the house as he used to do on the
arrival of custom. The hallucination was so perfect that Will sprang
from his seat and stood listening for the summons to be repeated ; and as
he listened, he became conscious of another noise besides the brawling of
the river and the ringing in his feverish ears. It was like the stir of
horses and the creaking of harness, as though a carriage with an im-
patient team had been brought up upon the road before the coui-tyard
gate. At such an hour, upon this rough and dangerous pass, the supposi-
tion was no better than absurd ; and Will dismissed it from his mind,
and resumed his seat upon the arbour chair ; and sleep closed over him
again like running water. He was once again awakened by the dead
miller's call, thinner and more spectral than before ; and once again he
heard the noise of an equipage upon the road. And so tkrice and four
times, tlie same dream, or the same fancy, presented itself to his senses ;
untU at length, smiling to himself as when one liumours a nervous child,
he proceeded towards the gate to set his uncertainty at rest.
From the arbour to the gate was no great distance ; and yet it took
Will some time ; it seemed as if the dead thickened around him in the
eoiu-t, and crossed his path at every step. For, first, he was suddenly
surpi-ised by an overpowering sweetness of heliotropes ; it was as if his
garden had been planted with this flower from end to end, and the hot,
damp night had drawn forth all then- perfumes in a breath. Now the
heliotrope had been Mai-jarie's favourite flower, and since her death not
one of them had ever been planted in Will's ground.
" I must be going crazy," he thought. '• Poor Maijarie and her
heliotropes ! "
And with that he raised his eyes towards the window that had once
been hers. If he had been bewildered before, he was now almost terrified ;
for there was a light in the room ; the window was an orange oblong as
of yore ; and the corner of the blind was lifted and let fall as on the