Donal Grant

He lifted his bonnet, and would have passed on.

"One word, Mr. Grant," said Miss Carmichael. "—No man holding such doctrines could with honesty become a clergyman of the church of Scotland."

"Very likely," replied Donal, "Good afternoon."

"Thank you, Mr. Grant!" said Arctura. "I hope you are right."

When he was gone, the ladies resumed their walk in silence. At length Miss Carmichael spoke.

"Well, I must say, of all the conceited young men I have had the misfortune to meet, your Mr. Grant bears the palm! Such self-assurance! such presumption! such forwardness!"

"Are you certain, Sophia," rejoined Arctura, "that it is self-assurance, and not conviction that gives him his courage?"

"He is a teacher of lies! He goes dead against all that good men say and believe! The thing is as clear as daylight: he is altogether wrong!"

"What if God be sending fresh light into the minds of his people?"

"The old light is good enough for me!"

"But it may not be good enough for God! What if Mr. Grant should be his messenger to you and me!"

"A likely thing! A raw student from the hills of Daurside!"

"I cherish a profound hope that he may be in the right. Much good, you know, did come out of Galilee! Every place and every person is despised by somebody!"

"Arctura! He has infected you with his frightful irreverence!"

"If he be a messenger of Jesus Christ," said Arctura, quietly, "he has had from you the reception he would expect, for the disciple must be as his master."

Miss Carmichael stood still abruptly. Her face was in a flame, but her words came cold and hard.

"I am sorry," she said, "our friendship should come to so harsh a conclusion, lady Arctura; but it is time it should end when you speak so to one who has been doing her best for so long to enlighten you! If this be the first result of your new gospel—well! Remember who said, 'If an angel from heaven preach any other gospel to you than I have preached, let him be accursed!"

She turned back.

"Oh, Sophia, do not leave me so!" cried Arctura.

But she was already yards away, her skirt making a small whirlwind that went after her through the withered leaves. Arctura burst into tears, and sat down at the foot of one of the great beeches. Miss Carmichael never looked behind her. She met Donal again, for he too had turned: he uncovered, but she took no heed. She had done with him! Her poor Arctura.

Donal was walking gently on, thinking, with closed book, when the wind bore to his ear a low sob from Arctura. He looked up, and saw her: she sat weeping like one rejected. He could not pass or turn and leave her thus! She heard his steps in the withered leaves, glanced up, dropped her head for a moment, then rose with a feeble attempt at a smile. Donal understood the smile: she would not have him troubled because of what had taken place!

"Mr. Grant," she said, coming towards him, "St. Paul laid a curse upon even an angel from heaven if he preached any other gospel than his! It is terrible!"

"It is terrible, and I say amen to it with all my heart," returned Donal. "But the gospel you have received is not the gospel of Paul; it is one substituted for it—and that by no angel from heaven, but by men with hide-bound souls, who, in order to get them into their own intellectual pockets, melted down the ingots of the kingdom, and re-cast them in moulds of wretched legalism, borrowed of the Romans who crucified their master. Grand, childlike, heavenly things they must explain, forsooth, after vulgar worldly notions of law and right! But they meant well, seeking to justify the ways of God to men, therefore the curse of the apostle does not fall, I think, upon them. They sought a way out of their difficulties, and thought they had found one, when in reality it was their faith in God himself that alone got them out of the prison of their theories. But gladly would I see discomfited such as, receiving those inventions at the hundredth hand, and moved by none of the fervour with which they were first promulgated, lay, as the word and will of God, lumps of iron and heaps of dust upon live, beating, longing hearts that cry out after their God!"

"Oh, I do hope what you say is true!" panted Arctura. "I think I shall die if I find it is not!"

"If you find what I tell you untrue, it will only be that it is not grand and free and bounteous enough. To think anything too good to be true, is to deny God—to say the untrue may be better than the true—that there might be a greater God than he. Remember, Christ is in the world still, and within our call."

"I will think of what you tell me," said Arctura, holding out her hand.

"If anything in particular troubles you," said Donal, "I shall be most glad to help you if I can; but it is better there should not be much talking. The thing lies between you and your Father."

With these words he left her. Arctura followed slowly to the house, and went straight to her room, her mind filling as she went with slow-reviving strength and a great hope. No doubt some of her relief came from the departure of her incubus friend; but that must soon have vanished in fresh sorrow, save for the hope and strength to which this departure yielded the room. She trusted that by the time she saw her again she would be more firmly grounded concerning many things, and able to set them forth aright. She was not yet free of the notion that you must be able to defend your convictions; she scarce felt at liberty to say she believed a thing, so long as she knew an argument against it which she could not show to be false. Alas for our beliefs if they go no farther than the poor horizon of our experience or our logic, or any possible wording of the beliefs themselves! Alas for ourselves if our beliefs are not what we shape our lives, our actions, our aspirations, our hopes, our repentances by!

Donal was glad indeed to hope that now at length an open door stood before the poor girl. He had been growing much interested in her, as one on whom life lay heavy, one who seemed ripe for the kingdom of heaven, yet in whose way stood one who would neither enter herself, nor allow her to enter that would. She was indeed fit for nothing but the kingdom of heaven, so much was she already the child of him whom, longing after him, she had not yet dared to call her father. His regard for her was that of the gentle strong towards the weak he would help; and now that she seemed fairly started on the path of life, the path, namely, to the knowledge of him who is the life, his care over her grew the more tender. It is the part of the strong to serve the weak, to minister that whereby they too may grow strong. But he rather than otherwise avoided meeting her, and for a good many days they did not so much as see each other.

CHAPTER XLVI.

A HORRIBLE STORY

The health of the earl remained fluctuating. Its condition depended much on the special indulgence. There was hardly any sort of narcotic with which he did not at least make experiment, if he did not indulge in it. He made no pretence even to himself of seeking therein the furtherance of knowledge; he wanted solely to find how this or that, thus or thus modified or combined, would contribute to his living a life such as he would have it, and other quite than that ordered for him by a power which least of all powers he chose to acknowledge. The power of certain drugs he was eager to understand: the living source of him and them and their correlations, he scarcely recognized. This came of no hostility to religion other than the worst hostility of all—that of a life irresponsive to its claims. He believed neither like saint nor devil; he believed and did not obey, he believed and did not yet tremble.

The one day he was better, the other worse, according, as I say, to the character and degree of his indulgence. At one time it much affected his temper, taking from him all mastery of himself; at another made him so dull and stupid, that he resented nothing except any attempt to rouse him from his hebetude. Of these differences he took unfailing note; but the worst influence of all was a constant one, and of it he made no account: however the drugs might vary in their operations upon him, to one thing they all tended—the destruction of his moral nature.

Urged more or less all his life by a sort of innate rebellion against social law, he had done great wrongs—whether also committed what are called crimes, I cannot tell: no repentance had followed the remorse their consequences had sometimes occasioned. And now the possibility of remorse even was gradually forsaking him. Such a man belongs rather to the kind demoniacal than the kind human; yet so long as nothing occurs giving to his possible an occasion to embody itself in the actual, he may live honoured, and die respected. There is always, not the less, the danger of his real nature, or rather unnature, breaking out in this way or that diabolical.

Although he went so little out of the house, and apparently never beyond the grounds, he yet learned a good deal at times of things going on in the neighbourhood: Davie brought him news; so did Simmons; and now and then he would have an interview with his half acknowledged relative, the factor.

One morning before he was up, he sent for Donal, and requested him to give Davie a half-holiday, and do something for him instead.

"You know, or perhaps you don't know, that I have a house in the town," he said, "—the only house, indeed, now belonging to the earldom—a not very attractive house which you must have seen—on the main street, a little before you come to the Morven Arms."

"I believe I know the house, my lord," answered Donal, "with strong iron stanchions to the lower windows, and—?"

"Yes, that is the house; and I daresay you have heard the story of it—I mean how it fell into its present disgrace! The thing happened more than a hundred years ago. But I have spent some nights in it myself notwithstanding."

"I should like to hear it, my lord," said Donal.

"You may as well have it from myself as from another! It does not touch any of us, for the family was not then represented by the same branch as now; I might else be thin-skinned about it. No mere legend, mind you, but a very dreadful fact, which resulted in the abandonment of the house! I think it time, for my part, that it should be forgotten and the house let. It was before the castle and the title parted company: that is a tale worth telling too! there was little fair play in either! but I will not trouble you with it now.

"Into the generation then above ground," the earl began, assuming a book-tone the instant he began to narrate, "by one of those freaks of nature specially strange and more inexplicable than the rest, had been born an original savage. You know that the old type, after so many modifications have been wrought upon it, will sometimes reappear in its ancient crudity amidst the latest development of the race, animal and vegetable too, I suppose!—well, so it was now: I use no figure of speech when I say that the apparition, the phenomenon, was a savage. I do not mean that he was an exceptionally rough man for his position, but for any position in the Scotland of that age. No doubt he was regarded as a madman, and used as a madman; but my opinion is the more philosophical—that, by an arrest of development, into the middle of the ladies and gentlemen of the family came a veritable savage, and one out of no darkest age of history, but from beyond all record—out of the awful prehistoric times."

His lordship visibly and involuntarily shuddered, as at the memory of something he had seen: into that region he had probably wandered in his visions.

"He was a fierce and furious savage—worse than anything you can imagine. The only sign of any influence of civilization upon him was that he was cowed by the eye of his keeper. Never, except by rarest chance, was he left alone and awake: no one could tell what he might not do!

"He was of gigantic size, with coarse black hair—the brawniest fellow and the ugliest, they say—for you may suppose my description is but legendary: there is no portrait of him on our walls!—with a huge, shapeless, cruel, greedy mouth,"—

As his lordship said the words, Donal, with involuntary insight, saw both cruelty and greed in the mouth that spoke, though it was neither huge nor shapeless.

–"lips hideously red and large, with the whitest teeth inside them.—I give you the description," said his lordship, who evidently lingered not without pleasure on the details of his recital, "just as I used to hear it from my old nurse, who had been all her life in the family, and had it from her mother who was in it at the time.—His great passion, his keenest delight, was animal food. He ate enormously—more, it was said, than three hearty men. An hour after he had gorged himself, he was ready to gorge again. Roast meat was his main delight, but he was fond of broth also.—He must have been more like Mrs. Shelley's creation in Frankenstein than any other. All the time I read that story, I had the vision of my far-off cousin constantly before me, as I saw him in my mind's eye when my nurse described him; and often I wondered whether Mrs. Shelley could have heard of him.—In an earlier age and more practical, they would have got rid of him by readier and more thorough means, if only for shame of having brought such a being into the world, but they sent him with his keeper, a little man with a powerful eye, to that same house down in the town there: in an altogether solitary place they could persuade no man to live with him. At night he was always secured to his bed, otherwise his keeper would not have had courage to sleep, for he was as cunning as he was hideous. When he slept during the day, which he did frequently after a meal, his attendant contented himself with locking his door, and keeping his ears awake. At such times only did he venture to look on the world: he would step just outside the street-door, but would neither leave it, nor shut it behind him, lest the savage should perhaps escape from his room, bar it, and set the house on fire.

"One beautiful Sunday morning, the brute, after a good breakfast, had fallen asleep on his bed, and the keeper had gone down stairs, and was standing in the street with the door open behind him. All the people were at church, and the street was empty as a desert. He stood there for some time, enjoying the sweet air and the scent of the flowers, went in and got a light to his pipe, put coals on the fire, saw that the hugh cauldron of broth which the cook had left in his charge when he went to church—it was to serve for dinner and supper both—was boiling beautifully, went back, and again took his station in front of the open door. Presently came a neighbour woman from her house, leading by the hand a little girl too young to go to church. She stood talking with him for some time.

"Suddenly she cried, 'Good Lord! what's come o' the bairn?' The same instant came one piercing shriek—from some distance it seemed. The mother darted down the neighbouring close. But the keeper saw that the door behind him was shut, and was filled with horrible dismay. He darted to an entrance in the close, of which he always kept the key about him, and went straight to the kitchen. There by the fire stood the savage, gazing with a fixed fishy eye of rapture at the cauldron, which the steam, issuing in little sharp jets from under the lid, showed to be boiling furiously, with grand prophecy of broth. Ghastly horror in his very bones, the keeper lifted the lid—and there, beside the beef, with the broth bubbling in waves over her, lay the child! The demon had torn off her frock, and thrust her into the boiling liquid!

"There rose such an outcry that they were compelled to put him in chains and carry him no one knew whither; but nurse said he lived to old age. Ever since, the house has been uninhabited, with, of course, the reputation of being haunted. If you happen to be in its neighbourhood when it begins to grow dark, you may see the children hurry past it in silence, now and then glancing back in dread, lest something should have opened the never-opened door, and be stealing after them. They call that something The Red Etin,—only this ogre was black, I am sorry to say; red was the proper colour for him."

"It is a horrible story!" said Donal.

"I want you to go to the house for me: you do not mind going, do you?"

"Not in the least," answered Donal.

"I want you to search a certain bureau there for some papers.—By the way, have you any news to give me about Forgue?"

"No, my lord," answered Donal. "I do not even know whether or not they meet, but I am afraid."

"Oh, I daresay," rejoined his lordship, "the whim is wearing off! One pellet drives out another. Behind the love in the popgun came the conviction that it would be simple ruin! But we Graemes are stiff-necked both to God and man, and I don't trust him much."

"He gave you no promise, if you remember, my lord."

"I remember very well; why the deuce should I not remember? I am not in the way of forgetting things! No, by God! nor forgiving them either! Where there's anything to forgive there's no fear of my forgetting!"

He followed the utterance with a laugh, as if he would have it pass for a joke, but there was no ring in the laugh.

He then gave Donal detailed instructions as to where the bureau stood, how he was to open it with a curious key which he told him where to find in the room, how also to open the secret part of the bureau in which the papers lay.

"Forget!" he echoed, turning and sweeping back on his trail; "I have not been in that house for twenty years: you can judge whether I forget!—No!" he added with an oath, "if I found myself forgetting I should think it time to look out; but there is no sign of that yet, thank God! There! take the keys, and be off! Simmons will give you the key of the house. You had better take that of the door in the close: it is easier to open."

Donal went away wondering at the pleasure his frightful tale afforded the earl: he had seemed positively to gloat over the details of it! These were much worse than I have recorded: he showed special delight in narrating how the mother took the body of her child out of the pot!

He sought Simmons and asked him for the key. The butler went to find it, but returned saying he could not lay his hands upon it; there was, however, the key of the front door: it might prove stiff! Donal took it, and having oiled it well, set out for Morven House. But on his way he turned aside to see the Comins.

Andrew looked worse, and he thought he must be sinking. The moment he saw Donal he requested they might be left alone for a few minutes.

"My yoong freen'," he said, "the Lord has fauvoured me greatly in grantin' my last days the licht o' your coontenance. I hae learnt a heap frae ye 'at I kenna hoo I could hae come at wantin' ye."

"Eh, An'rew!" interrupted Donal, "I dinna weel ken hoo that can be, for it aye seemt to me ye had a' the knowledge 'at was gaein'!"

"The man can ill taich wha's no gaein' on learnin'; an' maybe whiles he learns mair frae his scholar nor the scholar learns frae him. But it's a' frae the Lord; the Lord is that speerit—an' first o' a' the speerit o' obeddience, wi'oot which there's no learnin'. Still, my son, it may comfort ye a wee i' the time to come, to think the auld cobbler Anerew Comin gaed intil the new warl' fitter company for the help ye gied him afore he gaed. May the Lord mak a sicht o' use o' ye! Fowk say a heap aboot savin' sowls, but ower aften, I doobt, they help to tak frae them the sense o' hoo sair they're in want o' savin'. Surely a man sud ken in himsel' mair an' mair the need o' bein' saved, till he cries oot an' shoots, 'I am saved, for there's nane in h'aven but thee, an' there's nane upo' the earth I desire besides thee! Man, wuman, child, an' live cratur, is but a portion o' thee, whauron to lat the love o' thee rin ower!' Whan a man can say that, he's saved; an' no till than, though for lang years he may hae been aye comin' nearer to that goal o' a' houp, the hert o' the father o' me, an' you, an' Doory, an' Eppy, an' a' the nations o' the earth!"

He stopped weary, but his eyes, fixed on Donal, went on where his voice had ended, and for a time Donal seemed to hear what his soul was saying, and to hearken with content. But suddenly their light went out, the old man gave a sigh, and said:—

"It's ower for this warl', my freen'. It's comin'—the hoor o' darkness. But the thing 'at's true whan the licht shines, is as true i' the dark: ye canna work, that's a'. God 'ill gie me grace to lie still. It's a' ane. I wud lie jist as I used to sit, i' the days whan I men'it fowk's shune, an' Doory happent to tak awa' the licht for a moment;—I wud sit aye luikin' doon throuw the mirk at my wark, though I couldna see a stime o' 't, the alison (awl) i' my han' ready to put in the neist steek the moment the licht fell upo' the spot whaur it was to gang. That's hoo I wud lie whan I'm deein', jist waitin' for the licht, no for the dark, an' makin' an incense-offerin' o' my patience whan I hae naething ither to offer, naither thoucht nor glaidness nor sorrow, naething but patience burnin' in pain. He'll accep' that; for, my son, the maister's jist as easy to please as he's ill to saitisfee. Ye hae seen a mither ower her wee lassie's sampler? She'll praise an' praise 't, an' be richt pleast wi' 't; but wow gien she was to be content wi' the thing in her han'! the lassie's man, whan she cam to hae ane, wud hae an ill time o' 't wi' his hose an' his sarks! But noo I hae a fauvour to beg o' ye—no for my sake but for hers: gien ye hae the warnin', ye'll be wi' me whan I gang? It may be a comfort to mysel'—I dinna ken—nane can tell 'at hasna dee'd afore—nor even than, for deiths are sae different!—doobtless Lazarus's twa deiths war far frae alike!—but it'll be a great comfort to Doory—I'm clear upo' that. She winna fin' hersel' sae lanesome like, losin' sicht o' her auld man, gien the freen' o' his hert be aside her whan he gangs."

"Please God, I'll be at yer comman'," said Donal.

"Noo cry upo' Doory, for I wudna see less o' her nor I may. It may be years 'afore I get a sicht o' her lo'in' face again! But the same Lord 's in her an' i' me, an' we canna far be sun'ert, hooever lang the time 'afore we meet again."

Donal called Doory, and took his leave.

CHAPTER XLVII.

MORVEN HOUSE

Opposite Morven House was a building which had at one time been the stables to it, but was now part of a brewery; a high wall shut it off from the street; it was dinner-time with the humbler people of the town, and there was not a soul visible, when Donal put the key in the lock of the front door, opened it, and went in: he had timed his entrance so, desiring to avoid idle curiosity, and bring no gathering feet about the house. Almost on tiptoe he entered the lofty hall, high above the first story. The dust lay thick on a large marble table—but what was that?—a streak across it, brushed sharply through the middle of the dust! It was strange! But he would not wait to speculate on the agent! The room to which the earl had directed him was on the first floor, and he ascended to it at once—by the great oak staircase which went up the sides of the hall.

The house had not been dismantled, although things had at different times been taken from it, and when Donal opened a leaf of shutter, he saw tables and chairs and cabinets inlaid with silver and ivory. The room looked stately, but everything was deep in dust; carpets and curtains were thick with the deserted sepulchres of moths; and the air somehow suggested a tomb: Donal thought of the tombs of the kings of Egypt before ravaging conquerors broke into them, when they were yet full of all such gorgeous furniture as great kings desired, against the time when the souls should return to reanimate the bodies so carefully spiced and stored to welcome them, and the great kings would be themselves again, with the added wisdom of the dead and judged. Conscious of a curious timidity, feeling a kind of awesomeness about every form in the room, he stepped softly to the bureau, applied its key, and following carefully the directions the earl had given him, for the lock was Italian, with more than one quip and crank and wanton wile about it, succeeded in opening it. He had no difficulty in finding its secret place, nor the packet concealed in it; but just as he laid his hands on it, he was aware of a swift passage along the floor without, past the door of the room, and apparently up the next stair. There was nothing he could distinguish as footsteps, or as the rustle of a dress; it seemed as if he had heard but a disembodied motion! He darted to the door, which he had by habit closed behind him, and opened it noiselessly. The stairs above as below were covered with thick carpet: any light human foot might pass without a sound; only haste would murmur the secret to the troubled air.