Then, on the other side--the side of
anticipation--take the scene outside the closed door of the vanished Dr.
Jekyll, in Mr. Stevenson's well-known apologue:
They are waiting on the threshold of the chamber whence the doctor has
disappeared--the chamber tenanted by what? A voice comes from the room.
"Sir," said Poole, looking Mr. Utterson in the eyes, "was that my
master's voice?"
A friend, a man of affairs, and a person never accused of being fanciful,
told me that he read through the book to that point in a lonely Highland
chateau, at night, and that he did not think it well to finish the story
till next morning, but rushed to bed. So the passage seems "well-found"
and successful by dint of suggestion. On the other side, perhaps, only
Scotsmen brought up in country places, familiar from childhood with the
terrors of Cameronian myth, and from childhood apt to haunt the lonely
churchyards, never stirred since the year of the great Plague choked the
soil with the dead, perhaps _they_ only know how much shudder may be
found in Mr. Stevenson's "Thrawn Janet." The black smouldering heat in
the hills and glens that are commonly so fresh, the aspect of the Man,
the Tempter of the Brethren, we know them, and we have enough of the old
blood in us to be thrilled by that masterpiece of the described
supernatural. It may be only a local success, it may not much affect the
English reader, but it is of sure appeal to the lowland Scot.
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