Donal Grant Part 22

"I don't know, sir."

"Then you don't know that you are wicked; you only know that Arkie told you so!"

Lady Arctura drew herself up; but Donal was too intent to perceive the offence he had given.

"I will tell you," Donal went on, "something you did wicked to-day."

Davie grew rosy red. "When we find out one wicked thing we do, it is a beginning to finding out all the wicked things we do. Some people would rather not find them out, but have them hidden from themselves and from G.o.d too. But let us find them out, everyone of them, that we may ask Jesus to take them away, and help Jesus to take them away, by fighting them with all our strength.--This morning you pulled the little pup's ears till he screamed." Davie hung his head. "You stopped a while, and then did it again! So I knew it wasn't that you didn't know. Is that a thing Jesus would have done when he was a little boy?"

"No, sir."

"Why?"

"Because it would have been wrong."

"I suspect, rather, it is because he would have loved the little pup.

He didn't have to think about its being wrong. He loves every kind of living thing. He wants to take away your sin because he loves you. He doesn't merely want to make you not cruel to the little pup, but to take away the wrong think that doesn't love him. He wants to make you love every living creature. Davie, Jesus came out of the grave to make us good."

Tears were flowing down Davie's checks.

"The lesson 's done, Davie," said Donal, and rose and went, leaving him with lady Arctura.

But ere he reached the door, he turned with sudden impulse, and said:--

"Davie, I love Jesus Christ and his Father more than I can tell you--more than I can put in words--more than I can think; and if you love me you will mind what Jesus tells you."

"What a good man you must be, Mr. Grant!--Mustn't he, Arkie?" sobbed Davie.

Donal laughed.

"What, Davie!" he exclaimed. "You think me very good for loving the only good person in the whole world! That is very odd! Why, Davie, I should be the most contemptible creature, knowing him as I do, not to love him with all my heart--yes, with all the big heart I shall have one day when he has done making me."

"Is he making you still, Mr. Grant? I thought you were grown up!"

"Well, I don't think he will make me any taller," answered Donal. "But the live part of me--the thing I love you with, the thing I think about G.o.d with, the thing I love poetry with, the thing I read the Bible with--that thing G.o.d keeps on making bigger and bigger. I do not know where it will stop, I only know where it will not stop. That thing is me, and G.o.d will keep on making it bigger to all eternity, though he has not even got it into the right shape yet."

"Why is he so long about it?"

"I don't think he is long about it; but he could do it quicker if I were as good as by this time I ought to be, with the father and mother I have, and all my long hours on the hillsides with my New Testament and the sheep. I prayed to G.o.d on the hill and in the fields, and he heard me, Davie, and made me see the foolishness of many things, and the grandeur and beauty of other things. Davie, G.o.d wants to give you the whole world, and everything in it. When you have begun to do the things Jesus tells you, then you will be my brother, and we shall both be his little brothers, and the sons of his Father G.o.d, and so the heirs of all things."

With that he turned again and went.

The tears were rolling down Arctura's face without her being aware of it.

"He is a well-meaning man," she said to herself, "but dreadfully mistaken: the Bible says believe, not do!"

The poor girl, though she read her bible regularly, was so blinded by the dust and ashes of her teaching, that she knew very little of what was actually in it. The most significant things slipped from her as if they were merest words without shadow of meaning or intent: they did not support the doctrines she had been taught, and therefore said nothing to her. The story of Christ and the appeals of those who had handled the Word of Life had another end in view than making people understand how G.o.d arranged matters to save them. G.o.d would have us live: if we live we cannot but know; all the knowledge in the universe could not make us live. Obedience is the road to all things--the only way in which to grow able to trust him. Love and faith and obedience are sides of the same prism.

Regularly after that, lady Arctura came to the lesson--always intending to object as soon as it was over. But always before the end came, Donal had said something that went so to the heart of the honest girl that she could say nothing. As if she too had been a pupil, as indeed she was, far more than either knew, she would rise when Davie rose, and go away with him. But it was to go alone into the garden, or to her room, not seldom finding herself wishing things true which yet she counted terribly dangerous: listening to them might not she as well as Davie fail miserably of escape from the wrath to come?

CHAPTER XIX.

THE FACTOR.

The old avenue of beeches, leading immediately nowhither any more, but closed at one end by a built-up gate, and at the other by a high wall, between which two points it stretched quite a mile, was a favourite resort of Donal's, partly for its beauty, partly for its solitude. The arms of the great trees crossing made of it a long aisle--its roof a broken vault of leaves, upheld by irregular pointed arches--which affected one's imagination like an ever shifting dream of architectural suggestion. Having ceased to be a way, it was now all but entirely deserted, and there was eeriness in the vanishing vista that showed nothing beyond. When the wind of the twilight sighed in gusts through its moanful crowd of fluttered leaves; or when the wind of the winter was tormenting the ancient haggard boughs, and the trees looked as if they were weary of the world, and longing after the garden of G.o.d; yet more when the snow lay heavy upon their branches, sorely trying their aged strength to support its oppression, and giving the onlooker a vague sense of what the world would be if G.o.d were gone from it--then the old avenue was a place from which one with more imagination than courage would be ready to haste away, and seek instead the abodes of men. But Donal, though he dearly loved his neighbour, and that in the fullest concrete sense, was capable of loving the loneliest spots, for in such he was never alone.

It was altogether a neglected place. Long gra.s.s grew over its floor from end to end--cut now and then for hay, or to feed such animals as had gra.s.s in their stalls. Along one border, outside the trees, went a footpath--so little used that, though not quite conquered by the turf, the long gra.s.s often met over the top of it. Finding it so lonely, Donal grew more and more fond of it. It was his outdoor study, his proseuche {Compilers note: pi, rho, omicron, sigma, epsilon upsilon, chi, eta with stress--[outdoor] place of prayer}--a little aisle of the great temple! Seldom indeed was his reading or meditation there interrupted by sight of human being.

About a month after he had taken up his abode at the castle, he was lying one day in the gra.s.s with a book-companion, under the shade of one of the largest of its beeches, when he felt through the ground ere he heard through the air the feet of an approaching horse. As they came near, he raised his head to see. His unexpected appearance startled the horse, his rider nearly lost his seat, and did lose his temper. Recovering the former, and holding the excited animal, which would have been off at full speed, he urged him towards Donal, whom he took for a tramp. He was rising--deliberately, that he might not do more mischief, and was yet hardly on his feet, when the horse, yielding to the spur, came straight at him, its rider with his whip lifted.

Donal took off his bonnet, stepped a little aside, and stood. His bearing and countenance calmed the horseman's rage; there was something in them to which no gentleman could fail of response.

The rider was plainly one who had more to do with affairs bucolic than with those of cities or courts, but withal a man of conscious dignity, socially afloat, and able to hold his own.

"What the devil--," he cried--for nothing is so irritating to a horseman as to come near losing his seat, except perhaps to lose it altogether, and indignation against the cause of an untoward accident is generally a mortal's first consciousness thereupon: however foolishly, he feels himself injured. But there, having better taken in Donal's look, he checked himself.

"I beg your pardon, sir," said Donal. "It was foolish of me to show myself so suddenly; I might have thought it would startle most horses.

I was too absorbed to have my wits about me."

The gentleman lifted his hat.

"I beg your pardon in return," he said with a smile which cleared every cloud from his face. "I took you for some one who had no business here; but I imagine you are the tutor at the castle, with as good a right as I have myself."

"You guess well, sir."

"Pardon me that I forget your name."

"My name is Donal Grant," returned Donal, with an accent on the my intending a wish to know in return that of the speaker.

"I am a Graeme," answered the other, "one of the clan, and factor to the earl. Come and see where I live. My sister will be glad to make your acquaintance. We lead rather a lonely life here, and don't see too many agreeable people."

"You call this lonely, do you!" said Donal thoughtfully. "--It is a grand place, anyhow!"

"You are right--as you see it now. But wait till winter! Then perhaps you will change your impression a little."

"Pardon me if I doubt whether you know what winter can be so well as I do. This east coast is by all accounts a bitter place, but I fancy it is only upon a great hill-side you can know the heart and soul of a snow-blast."

"I yield that," returned Mr. Graeme. "--It is bitter enough here though, and a mercy we can keep warm in-doors."

"Which is often more than we shepherd-folk can do," said Donal.

Mr. Graeme used to say afterwards he was never so immediately taken with a man. It was one of the charms of Donal's habit of being, that he never spoke as if he belonged to any other than the cla.s.s in which he had been born and brought up. This came partly of pride in his father and mother, partly of inborn dignity, and partly of religion.

To him the story of our Lord was the reality it is, and he rejoiced to know himself so nearly on the same social level of birth as the Master of his life and aspiration. It was Donal's one ambition--to give the high pa.s.sion a low name--to be free with the freedom which was his natural inheritance, and which is to be gained only by obedience to the words of the Master. From the face of this aspiration fled every kind of pretence as from the light flies the darkness. Hence he was entirely and thoroughly a gentleman. What if his clothes were not even of the next to the newest cut! What if he had not been used to what is called society! He was far above such things. If he might but attain to the manners of the "high countries," manners which appear because they exist--because they are all through the man! He did not think what he might seem in the eyes of men. Courteous, helpful, considerate, always seeking first how far he could honestly agree with any speaker, opposing never save sweetly and apologetically--except indeed some utterance flagrantly unjust were in his ears--there was no man of true breeding, in or out of society, who would not have granted that Donal was fit company for any man or woman. Mr. Graeme's eye glanced down over the tall square-shouldered form, a little stooping from lack of drill and much meditation, but instantly straightening itself upon any inward stir, and he said to himself, "This is no common man!"

They were moving slowly along the avenue, Donal by the rider's near knee, talking away like men not unlikely soon to know each other better.

"You don't make much use of this avenue!" said Donal.