Donal Grant

In the heart of the earth-caveLay the king.Through chancel and choir and naveThe bells ring.Said the worm at his side,Sweet fool,Turn to thy bride;Is the night so cool?Wouldst thou lie like a stone till the aching mornOut of the dark be born?Heavily pressed the night enorm,But he heard the voice of the worm,Like the sound of a muttered thunder low,In the realms where no feet go.And he said, I will rise,I will will myself glad;I will open my eyes,And no more sleep sad.For who is a godBut the man who can springUp from the sod,And be his own king?I will model my gladness,Dig my despair—And let goodness or badnessBe folly's own care!I will be content,And the world shall spin roundTill its force be outspent.It shall dropLike a topSpun by a boy,While I sit in my tent,In a featureless joy—Sit without sound,And toss up my world,Till it burst and be drownedIn the blackness upcurledFrom the deep hell-ground.The dreams of a godAre the worlds of his slaves:I will be my own god,And rule my own knaves!

He went on in this way for some minutes; then the rimes grew less perfect, and the utterance sank into measured prose. The tone of the speaker showed that he took the stuff for glowing verse, and regarded it as embodying his own present consciousness. One might have thought the worm would have a word to say in rejoinder; but no; the worm had vanished, and the buried dreamer had made himself a god—his own god! Donal stole up softly behind him, and peeped at the open book: it was the Novum Organum!

They glided out of the room, and left the dreamer to his dreams.

"Do you think," said Donal, "I ought to tell Simmons?"

"It would be better. Do you know where to find him?"

"I do not."

"I will show you a bell that rings in his room. He will think his lordship has rung it."

They went and rang the bell. In a minute or two they heard the steps of the faithful servant seeking his master, and bade each other good-night.

CHAPTER XL.

A RELIGION-LESSON

In the morning Donal learned from Simmons that his master was very ill—could not raise his head.

"The way he do moan and cry!" said Simmons. "You would think sure he was either out of his mind, or had something heavy upon it! All the years I known him, he been like that every now an' then, and back to his old self again, little the worse! Only the fits do come oftener."

Towards the close of school, as Donal was beginning to give his lesson in religion, lady Arctura entered, and sat down beside Davie.

"What would you think of me, Davie," Donal was saying, "if I were angry with you because you did not know something I had never taught you?"

Davie only laughed. It was to him a grotesque, an impossible supposition.

"If," Donal resumed, "I were to show you a proposition of Euclid which you had never seen before, and say to you, 'Now, Davie, this is one of the most beautiful of all Euclid's propositions, and you must immediately admire it, and admire Euclid for constructing it!'—what would you say?"

Davie thought, and looked puzzled.

"But you wouldn't do it, sir!" he said. "—I know you wouldn't do it!" he added, after a moment.

"Why should I not?"

"It isn't your way, sir."

"But suppose I were to take that way?"

"You would not then be like yourself, sir!"

"Tell me how I should be unlike myself. Think."

"You would not be reasonable."

"What would you say to me?"

"I should say, 'Please, sir, let me learn the proposition first, and then I shall be able to admire it. I don't know it yet!'"

"Very good!—Now again, suppose, when you tried to learn it, you were not able to do so, and therefore could see no beauty in it—should I blame you?"

"No, sir; I am sure you would not—because I should not be to blame, and it would not be fair; and you never do what is not fair!"

"I am glad you think so: I try to be fair.—That looks as if you believed in me, Davie!"

"Of course I do, sir!"

"Why?"

"Just because you are fair."

"Suppose, Davie, I said to you, 'Here is a very beautiful thing I should like you to learn,' and you, after you had partly learned it, were to say 'I don't see anything beautiful in this: I am afraid I never shall!'—would that be to believe in me?"

"No, surely, sir! for you know best what I am able for."

"Suppose you said, 'I daresay it is all as good as you say, but I don't care to take so much trouble about it,'—what would that be?"

"Not to believe in you, sir. You would not want me to learn a thing that was not worth my trouble, or a thing I should not be glad of knowing when I did know it."

"Suppose you said, 'Sir, I don't doubt what you say, but I am so tired, I don't mean to do anything more you tell me,'—would you then be believing in me?"

"No. That might be to believe your word, but it would not be to trust you. It would be to think my thinks better than your thinks, and that would be no faith at all."

Davie had at times an oddly childish way of putting things.

"Suppose you were to say nothing, but go away and do nothing of what I told you—what would that be?"

"Worse and worse; it would be sneaking."

"One question more: what is faith—the big faith I mean—not the little faith between equals—the big faith we put in one above us?"

"It is to go at once and do the thing he tells us to do."

"If we don't, then we haven't faith in him?"

"No; certainly not."

"But might not that be his fault?"

"Yes—if he was not good—and so I could not trust him. If he said I was to do one kind of thing, and he did another kind of thing himself, then of course I could not have faith in him."

"And yet you might feel you must do what he told you!"

"Yes."

"Would that be faith in him?"

"No."

"Would you always do what he told you?"

"Not if he told me to do what it would be wrong to do."

"Now tell me, Davie, what is the biggest faith of all—the faith to put in the one only altogether good person."

"You mean God, Mr. Grant?"

"Whom else could I mean?"

"You might mean Jesus."

"They are one; they mean always the same thing, do always the same thing, always agree. There is only one thing they don't do the same in—they do not love the same person."

"What do you mean, Mr. Grant?" interrupted Arctura.

She had been listening intently: was the cloven foot of Mr. Grant's heresy now at last about to appear plainly?

"I mean this," answered Donal, with a smile that seemed to Arctura such a light as she had never seen on human face, "—that God loves Jesus, not God; and Jesus loves God, not Jesus. We love one another, not ourselves—don't we, Davie?"

"You do, Mr. Grant," answered Davie modestly.

"Now tell me, Davie, what is the great big faith of all—that which we have to put in the Father of us, who is as good not only as thought can think, but as good as heart can wish—infinitely better than anybody but Jesus Christ can think—what is the faith to put in him?"

"Oh, it is everything!" answered Davie.

"But what first?" asked Donal.

"First, it is to do what he tells us."

"Yes, Davie: it is to learn his problems by going and doing his will; not trying to understand things first, but trying first to do things. We must spread out our arms to him as a child does to his mother when he wants her to take him; then when he sets us down, saying, 'Go and do this or that,' we must make all the haste in us to go and do it. And when we get hungry to see him, we must look at his picture."

"Where is that, sir?"

"Ah, Davie, Davie! don't you know that yet? Don't you know that, besides being himself, and just because he is himself, Jesus is the living picture of God?"

"I know, sir! We have to go and read about him in the book."

"May I ask you a question, Mr. Grant?" said Arctura.

"With perfect freedom," answered Donal. "I only hope I may be able to answer it."

"When we read about Jesus, we have to draw for ourselves his likeness from words, and you know what kind of a likeness the best artist would make that way, who had never seen with his own eyes the person whose portrait he had to paint!"

"I understand you quite," returned Donal. "Some go to other men to draw it for them; and some go to others to hear from them what they must draw—thus getting all their blunders in addition to those they must make for themselves. But the nearest likeness you can see of him, is the one drawn by yourself while doing what he tells you. He has promised to come into those who keep his word. He will then be much nearer to them than in bodily presence; and such may well be able to draw for themselves the likeness of God.—But first of all, and before everything else, mind, Davie, OBEDIENCE!"

"Yes, Mr. Grant; I know," said Davie.

"Then off with you! Only think sometimes it is God who gave you your game."

"I'm going to fly my kite, Mr. Grant."

"Do. God likes to see you fly your kite, and it is all in his March wind it flies. It could not go up a foot but for that."

Davie went.

"You have heard that my uncle is very ill to-day!" said Arctura.

"I have. Poor man!" replied Donal.

"He must be in a very peculiar condition."

"Of body and mind both. He greatly perplexes me."

"You would be quite as much perplexed if you had known him as long as I have! Never since my father's death, which seems a century ago, have I felt safe; never in my uncle's presence at ease. I get no nearer to him. It seems to me, Mr. Grant, that the cause of discomfort and strife is never that we are too near others, but that we are not near enough."

This was a remark after Donal's own heart.

"I understand you," he said, "and entirely agree with you."

"I never feel that my uncle cares for me except as one of the family, and the holder of its chief property. He would have liked me better, perhaps, if I had been dependent on him."

"How long will he be your guardian?" asked Donal.

"He is no longer my guardian legally. The time set by my father's will ended last year. I am three and twenty, and my own mistress. But of course it is much better to have the head of the house with me. I wish he were a little more like other people!—But tell me about the ghost-music: we had not time to talk of it last night!"

"I got pretty near the place it came from. But the wind blew so, and it was so dark, that I could do nothing more then."

"You will try again?"

"I shall indeed."

"I am afraid, if you find a natural cause for it, I shall be a little sorry."

"How can there be any other than a natural cause, my lady? God and Nature are one. God is the causing Nature.—Tell me, is not the music heard only in stormy nights, or at least nights with a good deal of wind?"

"I have heard it in the daytime!"

"On a still day?"

"I think not. I think too I never heard it on a still summer night."

"Do you think it comes in all storms?"

"I think not."

"Then perhaps it has something to do not merely with the wind, but with the direction of the wind!"

"Perhaps. I cannot say."

"That might account for the uncertainty of its visits! The instrument may be accessible, yet its converse with the operating power so rare that it has not yet been discovered. It is a case in which experiment is not permitted us: we cannot make a wind blow, neither can we vary the direction of the wind blowing; observation alone is left us, and that can be only at such times when the sound is heard."

"Then you can do nothing till the music comes again?"

"I think I can do something now; for, last night I seemed so near the place whence the sounds were coming, that the eye may now be able to supplement the ear, and find the music-bird silent on her nest. If the wind fall, as I think it will in the afternoon, I shall go again and see whether I can find anything. I noticed last night that simultaneously with the sound came a change in the wind—towards the south, I think.—What a night it was after I left you!"

"I think," said Arctura, "the wind has something to do with my uncle's fits. Was there anything very strange about it last night? When the wind blows so angrily, I always think of that passage about the prince of the power of the air being the spirit that works in the children of disobedience. Tell me what it means."

"I do not know what it means," answered Donal; "but I suppose the epithet involves a symbol of the difference between the wind of God that inspires the spiritual true self of man, and the wind of the world that works by thousands of impulses and influences in the lower, the selfish self of children that will not obey. I will look at the passage and see what I can make out of it. Only the spiritual and the natural blend so that we may one day be astonished!—Would you like to join the music-hunt, my lady?"

"Do you mean, go on the roof? Should I be able?"

"I would not have you go in the night, and the wind blowing," said Donal with a laugh; "but you can come and see, and judge for yourself. The bartizan is the only anxious place, but as I mean to take Davie with me, you may think I do not count it very dangerous!"

"Will it be safe for Davie?"

"I can venture more with Davie than with another: he obeys in a moment."

"I will obey too if you will take me," said Arctura.

"Then, please, come to the schoolroom at four o'clock. But we shall not go except the wind be fallen."

When Davie heard what his tutor proposed, he was filled with the restlessness of anticipation. Often while helping Donal with his fuel, he had gazed up at him on the roof with longing eyes, but Donal had never let him go upon it.

CHAPTER XLI.

THE MUSIC-NEST

The hour came, and with the very stroke of the clock, lady Arctura and Davie were in the schoolroom. A moment more, and they set out to climb the spiral of Baliol's tower.

But what a different lady was Arctura this afternoon! She was cheerful, even merry—with Davie, almost jolly. Her soul had many alternating lights and glooms, but it was seldom or never now so clouded as when first Donal saw her. In the solitude of her chamber, where most the simple soul should be conscious of life as a blessedness, she was yet often haunted by ghastly shapes of fear; but there also other forms had begun to draw nigh to her; sweetest rays of hope would ever and anon break through the clouds, and mock the darkness from her presence. Perhaps God might mean as thoroughly well by her as even her imagination could wish!

Does a dull reader remark that hers was a diseased state of mind?—I answer, The more she needed to be saved from it with the only real deliverance from any ill! But her misery, however diseased, was infinitely more reasonable than the healthy joy of such as trouble themselves about nothing. Some sicknesses are better than any but the true health.

"I never thought you were like this, Arkie!" said Davie. "You are just as if you had come to school to Mr. Grant! You would soon know how much happier it is to have somebody you must mind!"

"If having me, Davie," said Donal, "doesn't help you to be happy without me, there will not have been much good done. What I want most to teach you is, to leave the door always on the latch, for some one—you know whom I mean—to come in."

"Race me up the stair, Arkie," said Davie, when they came to the foot of the spiral.

"Very well," assented his cousin.

"Which side will you have—the broad or the narrow?"

"The broad."

"Well then—one, two, three, and away we go!"

Davie mounted like a clever goat, his hand and arm on the newel, and slipping lightly round it. Arctura's ascent was easier but slower: she found her garments in her way, therefore yielded the race, and waited for Donal. Davie, thinking he heard her footsteps behind him all the time, flew up shrieking with the sweet terror of love's pursuit.

"What a darling the boy has grown!" said Arctura when Donal overtook her.

"Yes," answered Donal; "one would think such a child might run straight into the kingdom of heaven; but I suppose he must have his temptations and trials first: out of the storm alone comes the true peace."

"Will peace come out of all storms?"

"I trust so. Every pain and every fear, every doubt is a cry after God. What mother refuses to go to her child because he is only crying—not calling her by name!"

"Oh, if I could but believe so about God! For if it be all right with God—I mean if God be such a God as to be loved with the heart and soul of loving, then all is well. Is it not, Mr. Grant?"

"Indeed it is!—And you are not far from the kingdom of heaven," he was on the point of saying, but did not—because she was in it already, only unable yet to verify the things around her, like the man who had but half-way received his sight.

When they reached the top, he took them past his door, and higher up the stair to the next, opening on the bartizan. Here he said lady Arctura must come with him first, and Davie must wait till he came back for him. When he had them both safe on the roof, he told Davie to keep close to his cousin or himself all the time. He showed them first his stores of fuel—his ammunition, he said, for fighting the winter. Next he pointed out where he stood when first he heard the music the night before, and set down his bucket to follow it; and where he found the bucket, blown thither by the wind, when he came back to feel for it in the dark. Then he began to lead them, as nearly as he could, the way he had then gone, but with some, for Arctura's sake, desirable detours: over one steep-sloping roof they had to cross, he found a little stair up the middle, and down the other side.

They came to a part where he was not quite sure about the way. As he stopped to bethink himself, they turned and looked eastward. The sea was shining in the sun, and the flat wet country between was so bright that they could not tell where the land ended and the sea began. But as they gazed a great cloud came over the sun, the sea turned cold and gray as death—a true March sea, and the land lay low and desolate between. The spring was gone and the winter was there. A gust of wind, full of keen hail, drove sharp in their faces.

"Ah, that settles the question!" said Donal. "The music-bird must wait. We will call upon her another day.—It is funny, isn't it, Davie, to go a bird's-nesting after music on the roof of a house?"

"Hark!" said Arctura; "I think I heard the music-bird!—She wants us to find her nest! I really don't think we ought to go back for a little blast of wind, and a few pellets of hail! What do you think, Davie?"

"Oh, for me, I wouldn't turn for ever so big a storm!" said Davie; "but you know, Arkie, it's not you or me, Arkie! Mr. Grant is the captain of this expedition, and we must do as he bids us."

"Oh, surely, Davie! I never meant to dispute that. Only Mr. Grant is not a tyrant; he will let a lady say what she thinks!"

"Oh, yes, or a boy either! He likes me to say what I think! He says we can't get at each other without. And do you know—he obeys me sometimes!"

Arctura glanced a keen question at the boy.

"It is quite true!" said Davie, while Donal listened smiling. "Last winter, for days together—not all day, you know: I had to obey him most of the time! but at certain times, I was as sure of Mr. Grant doing as I told him, as he is now of me doing as he tells me."

"What times were those?" asked Arctura, thinking to hear of some odd pedagogic device.

"When I was teaching him to skate!" answered Davie, in a triumph of remembrance. "He said I knew better than he there, and so he would obey me. You wouldn't believe how splendidly he did it, Arkie—out and out!" concluded Davie, in a tone almost of awe.

"Oh, yes, I would believe it—perfectly!" said Arctura.

Donal suddenly threw an arm round each of them, and pulled them down sitting. The same instant a fierce blast burst upon the roof. He had seen the squall whitening the sea, and looking nearer home saw the tops of the trees between streaming level towards the castle. But seated they were in no danger.

"Hark!" said Arctura again; "there it is!"

They all heard the wailing cry of the ghost-music. But while the blast continued they dared not pursue their hunt. It kept on in fits and gusts till the squall ceased—as suddenly almost as it had burst. The sky cleared, and the sun shone as a March sun can. But the blundering blasts and the swan-shot of the flying hail were all about still.

"When the storm is upon us," remarked Donal, as they rose from their crouching position, "it seems as if there never could be sunshine more; but our hopelessness does not keep back the sun when his hour to shine is come."

"I understand!" said Arctura: "when one is miserable, misery seems the law of being; and in the midst of it dwells some thought which nothing can ever set right! All at once it is gone, broken up and gone, like that hail-cloud. It just looks its own foolishness and vanishes."

"Do you know why things so often come right?" said Donal. "—I would say always come right, but that is matter of faith, not sight."

Arctura did not answer at once.

"I think I know what you are thinking," she said, "but I want to hear you answer your own question."

"Why do things come right so often, do you think, Davie?" repeated Donal.

"Is it," returned Davie, "because they were made right to begin with?"

"There is much in that, Davie; but there is a better reason than that. It is because things are alive, and the life at the heart of them, that which keeps them going, is the great, beautiful God. So the sun for ever returns after the clouds. A doubting man, like him who wrote the book of Ecclesiasties, puts the evil last, and says 'the clouds return after the rain;' but the Christian knows that

               One has masteryWho makes the joy the last in every song."

"You speak like one who has suffered!" said Arctura, with a kind look in his face.

"Who has not that lives?"

"It is how you are able to help others!"

"Am I able to help others? I am very glad to hear it. My ambition would be to help, if I had any ambition. But if I am able, it is because I have been helped myself, not because I have suffered."

"Will you tell me what you mean by saying you have no ambition?"

"Where your work is laid out for you, there is no room for ambition: you have got your work to do!—But give me your hand, my lady; put your other hand on my shoulder. You stop there, Davie, and don't move till I come to you. Now, my lady—a little jump! That's it! Now you are safe!—You were not afraid, were you?"

"Not in the least. But did you come here in the dark?"

"Yes. There is this advantage in the dark: you do not see how dangerous the way is. We take the darkness about us for the source of our difficulties: it is a great mistake. Christian would hardly have dared go through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, had he not had the shield of the darkness all about him."

"Can the darkness be a shield? Is it not the evil thing?"

"Yes, the dark that is within us—the dark of distrust and unwillingness, but not the outside dark of mere human ignorance. Where we do not see, we are protected. Where we are most ignorant and most in danger, is in those things that affect the life of God in us: there the Father is every moment watching his child. If he were not constantly pardoning and punishing our sins, what would become of us! We must learn to trust him about our faults as much as about everything else!"

In the earnestness of his talk he had stopped, but now turned and went on.

"There is my land-, or roof-mark rather!" he said, "—that chimney-stack! Close by it I heard the music very near me indeed—when all at once the darkness and the wind came together so thick that I could do nothing more. We shall do better now in the daylight—and three of us instead of one!"

"What a huge block of chimneys!" said Arctura.

"Is it not!" returned Donal. "It indicates the hugeness of the building below us, of which we can see so little. Like the volcanoes of the world, it tells us how much fire is necessary to keep our dwelling warm."

"I thought it was the sun that kept the earth warm," said Davie.

"So it is, but not the sun alone. The earth is like a man: the great glowing fire is God in the heart of the earth, and the great sun is God in the sky, keeping it warm on the other side. Our gladness and pleasure, our trouble when we do wrong, our love for all about us, that is God inside us; and the beautiful things and lovable people, and all the lessons of life in history and poetry, in the Bible, and in whatever comes to us, is God outside of us. Every life is between two great fires of the love of God. So long as we do not give ourselves up heartily to him, we fear his fire will burn us. And burn us it does when we go against its flames and not with them, refusing to burn with the fire with which God is always burning. When we try to put it out, or oppose it, or get away from it, then indeed it burns!"