Donal Grant Part 34

There was no one in the room when Donal entered, but after about ten minutes a door opened at the further end, and lord Morven appearing from his bedroom, shook hands with him with some faint show of kindness. Almost the same moment the butler entered from a third door, and said dinner waited. The earl walked on, and Donal followed. This room also was a small one. The meal was laid on a little round table.

There were but two covers, and Simmons alone was in waiting.

While they ate and drank, which his lordship did sparingly, not a word was spoken. Donal would have found it embarra.s.sing had he not been prepared for the peculiar. His lordship took no notice of his guest, leaving him to the care of the butler. He looked very white and worn--Donal thought a good deal worse than when he saw him first. His cheeks were more sunken, his hair more gray, and his eyes more weary--with a consuming fire in them that had no longer much fuel and was burning remnants. He stooped over his plate as if to hide the operation of eating, and drank his wine with a trembling hand. Every movement indicated indifference to both his food and his drink.

At length the more solid part of the meal was removed, and they were left alone, fruit upon the table, and two wine-decanters. From one of them the earl helped himself, then pa.s.sed it to Donal, saying,

"You are very good to my little Davie, Mr. Grant! He is full of your kindness to him. There is n.o.body like you!"

"A little goes a long way with Davie, my lord," answered Donal.

"Then much must go a longer way!" said the earl.

There was nothing remarkable in the words, yet he spoke them with the difficulty a man accustomed to speak, and to weigh his words, might find in clothing a new thought to his satisfaction. The effort seemed to have tried him, and he took a sip of wine. This, however, he did after every briefest sentence he uttered: a sip only he took, nothing like a mouthful.

Donal told him that Davie, of all the boys he had known, was far the quickest, and that just because he was morally the most teachable.

"You greatly gratify me, Mr. Grant," said the earl. "I have long wished such a man as you for Davie. If only I had known you when Forgue was preparing for college!"

"I must have been at that time only at college myself, my lord!"

"True! true!"

"But for Davie, it is a privilege to teach him!"

"If only it might last a while!" returned the earl. "But of course you have the church in your eye!"

"My lord, I have not."

"What!" cried his lordship almost eagerly; "you intend giving your life to teaching?"

"My lord," returned Donal, "I never trouble myself about my life. Why should we burden the mule of the present with the camel-load of the future. I take what comes--what is sent me, that is."

"You are right, Mr. Grant! If I were in your position, I should think just as you do. But, alas, I have never had any choice!"

"Perhaps your lordship has not chosen to choose!" Donal was on the point of saying, but bethought himself in time not to hazard the remark.

"If I were a rich man, Mr. Grant," the earl continued, "I would secure your services for a time indefinite; but, as every one knows, not an acre of the property belongs to me, or goes with the t.i.tle. Davie, dear boy, will have nothing but a thousand or two. The marriage I have in view for lord Forgue will arrange a future for him."

"I hope there will be some love in the marriage!" said Donal uneasily, with a vague thought of Eppy.

"I had no intention," returned his lordship with cold politeness, "of troubling you concerning lord Forgue!"

"I beg your pardon, my lord," said Donal.

"--Davie, poor boy--he is my anxiety!" resumed the earl, in his former condescendingly friendly, half sleepy tone. "What to do with him, I have not yet succeeded in determining. If the church of Scotland were episcopal now, we might put him into that: he would be an honour to it!

But as it has no dignities to confer, it is not the place for one of his birth and social position. A few shabby hundreds a year, and the a.s.sociations he would necessarily be thrown into!--However honourable the profession in itself!" he added, with a bow to Donal, apparently unable to get it out of his head that he had an embryo-clergyman before him.

"Davie is not quite a man yet," said Donal; "and by the time he begins to think of a profession, he will, I trust, be fit to make a choice: the boy has a great deal of common sense. If your lordship will pardon me, I cannot help thinking there is no need to trouble about him."

"It is very well for one in your position to think in that way, Mr.

Grant! Men like you are free to choose; you may make your bread as you please. But men in our position are greatly limited in their choice; the paths open to them are few. Tradition oppresses us. We are slaves to the dead and buried. I could well wish I had been born in your humbler but in truth less contracted sphere. Certain roles are not open to you, to be sure; but your life in the open air, following your sheep, and dreaming all things beautiful and grand in the world beyond you, is entrancing. It is the life to make a poet!"

"Or a king!" thought Donal. "But the earl would have made a discontented shepherd!"

The man who is not content where he is, would never have been content somewhere else, though he might have complained less.

"Take another gla.s.s of wine, Mr. Grant," said his lordship, filling his own from the other decanter. "Try this; I believe you will like it better."

"In truth, my lord," answered Donal, "I have drunk so little wine that I do not know one sort from another."

"You know whisky better, I daresay! Would you like some now? Touch the bell behind you."

"No, thank you, my lord; I know as little about whisky: my mother would never let us even taste it, and I have never tasted it."

"A new taste is a gain to the being."

"I suspect, however, a new appet.i.te can only be a loss."

As he said this, Donal, half mechanically, filled a gla.s.s from the decanter his host had pushed towards him.

"I should like you, though," resumed his lordship, after a short pause, "to keep your eyes open to the fact that Davie must do something for himself. You would then be able to let me know by and by what you think him fit for!"

"I will with pleasure, my lord. Tastes may not be infallible guides to what is fit for us, but they may lead us to the knowledge of what we are fit for."

"Extremely well said!" returned the earl.

I do not think he understood in the least what Donal meant.

"Shall I try how he takes to trigonometry? He might care to learn land-surveying! Gentlemen now, not unfrequently, take charge of the properties of their more favoured relatives. There is Mr. Graeme, your own factor, my lord--a relative, I understand!"

"A distant one," answered his lordship with marked coldness, "--the degree of relationship hardly to be counted."

"In the lowlands, my lord, you do not care to count kin as we do in the highlands! My heart warms to the word kinsman."

"You have not found kinship so awkward as I, possibly!" said his lordship, with a watery smile. "The man in humble position may allow the claim of kin to any extent: he has nothing, therefore nothing can be taken from him! But the man who has would be the poorest of the clan if he gave to every needy relation."

"I never knew the man so poor," answered Donal, "that he had nothing to give. But the things of the poor are hardly to the purpose of the predatory relative."

"'Predatory relative!'--a good phrase!" said his lordship, with a sleepy laugh, though his eyes were wide open. His lips did not seem to care to move, yet he looked pleased. "To tell you the truth," he began again, "at one period of my history I gave and gave till I was tired of giving! Ingrat.i.tude was the sole return. At one period I had large possessions--larger than I like to think of now: if I had the tenth part of what I have given away, I should not be uneasy concerning Davie."

"There is no fear of Davie, my lord, so long as he is brought up with the idea that he must work for his bread."

His lordship made no answer, and his look reminded Donal of that he wore when he came to his chamber. A moment, and he rose and began to pace the room. An indescribable suggestion of an invisible yet luminous cloud hovered about his forehead and eyes--which latter, if not fixed on very vacancy, seemed to have got somewhere near it. At the fourth or fifth turn he opened the door by which he had entered, continuing a remark he had begun to Donal--of which, although he heard every word and seemed on the point of understanding something, he had not caught the sense when his lordship disappeared, still talking. Donal thought it therefore his part to follow him, and found himself in his lordship's bedroom. But out of this his lordship had already gone, through an opposite door, and Donal still following entered an old picture-gallery, of which he had heard Davie speak, but which the earl kept private for his exercise indoors. It was a long, narrow place, hardly more than a wide corridor, and appeared nowhere to afford distance enough for seeing a picture. But Donal could ill judge, for the sole light in the place came from the fires and candles in the rooms whose doors they had left open behind them, with just a faint glimmer from the vapour-buried moon, sufficing to show the outline of window after window, and revealing something of the great length of the gallery.

By the time Donal overtook the earl, he was some distance down, holding straight on into the long dusk, and still talking.

"This is my favourite promenade," he said, as if brought to himself by the sound of Donal's overtaking steps. "After dinner always, Mr. Grant, wet weather or dry, still or stormy, I walk here. What do I care for the weather! It will be time when I am old to consult the barometer!"

Donal wondered a little: there seemed no great hardihood in the worst of weather to go pacing a picture-gallery, where the fiercest storm that ever blew could send in only little threads of air through the c.h.i.n.ks of windows and doors!