The Marquis of Lossie Part 45

"Oh! I think I understand. You must mean the chapel where this gentleman was preaching."

"That is my meaning," a.s.sented Mrs Marshal.

"I went there tonight," said Clementina, turning with some timidity to Mr Graham. "That I did not find you there, sir, will, I hope, explain--"Here she paused, and turned again to Mrs Marshal. "I see you think with me, ma'am, that a true teacher is worth following."

As she said this she turned once more to Mr Graham, who sat listening with a queer, amused, but right courteous smile.

"I hope you will pardon me," she continued, "for venturing to call upon you, and, as I have the misfortune to find you occupied, allow me to call another day. If you would set me a time, I should be more obliged than I can tell you," she concluded, her voice trembling a little.

"Stay now, if you will, madam," returned the schoolmaster, with a bow of oldest fashioned courtesy. "This lady has done laying her commands upon me, I believe."

"As you think proper to call them commands, Mr Graham, I conclude you intend to obey them," said Mrs Marshal, with a forced smile and an attempt at pleasantry.

"Not for the world, madam," he answered. "Your son is acting the part of a gentleman--yes, I make bold to say, of one who is very nigh the kingdom of heaven, if not indeed within its gate, and before I would check him I would be burnt at the stake--even were your displeasure the fire, madam," he added, with a kindly bow. "Your son is a line fellow."

"He would be, if he were left to himself. Good evening, Mr Graham.

Goodbye, rather, for I think we are not likely to meet again."

"In heaven, I hope, madam; for by that time we shall be able to understand each other," said the schoolmaster, still kindly.

Mrs Marshal made no answer beyond a facial flash as she turned to Clementina.

"Good evening, ma'am," she said. "To pay court to the earthen vessel because of the treasure it may happen to hold, is to be a respecter of persons as bad as any."

An answering flash broke from Clementina's blue orbs, but her speech was more than calm as she returned,

"I learned something of that lesson last Sunday evening, I hope, ma'am. But you have left me far behind, for you seem to have learned disrespect even to the worthiest of persons. Good evening, ma'am."

She looked the angry matron full in the face, with an icy regard, from which, as from the Gorgon eye, she fled.

The victor turned to the schoolmaster.

"I beg your pardon, sir," she said, "for presuming to take your part, but a gentleman is helpless with a vulgar woman."

"I thank you, madam. I hope the sharpness of your rebuke--but indeed the poor woman can hardly help her rudeness, for she is very worldly, and believes herself very pious. It is the old story-- hard for the rich."

Clementina was struck.

"I too am rich and worldly," she said. "But I know that I am not pious, and if you would but satisfy me that religion is common sense, I would try to be religious with all my heart and soul."

"I willingly undertake the task. But let us know each other a little first. And lest I should afterwards seem to have taken an advantage of you, I hope you have no wish to be nameless to me, for my friend Malcolm MacPhail had so described you that I recognized your ladyship at once."

Clementina said that, on the contrary, she had given her name to the woman who opened the door.

"It is because of what Malcolm said of you that I ventured to come to you," she added.

"Have you seen Malcolm lately?" he asked, his brow clouding a little. "It is more than a week since he has been to me."

Thereupon, with embarra.s.sment, such as she would never have felt except in the presence of pure simplicity, she told of his disappearance with his mistress.

"And you think they have run away together?" said the schoolmaster, his face beaming with what, to Clementina's surprise, looked almost like merriment.

"Yes, I think so," she answered. "Why not, if they choose?"

"I will say this for my friend Malcolm," returned Mr Graham composedly, "that whatever he did I should expect to find not only all right in intention, but prudent and well devised also. The present may well seem a rash, ill considered affair for both of them, but--"

"I see no necessity either for explanation or excuse," said Clementina, too eager to mark that she interrupted Mr Graham. "In making up her mind to marry him, Lady Lossie has shown greater wisdom and courage than, I confess, I had given her credit for."

"And Malcolm?" rejoined the schoolmaster softly. "Should you say of him that he showed equal wisdom?"

"I decline to give an opinion upon the gentleman's part in the business," answered Clementina, laughing, but glad there was so little light in the room, for she was painfully conscious of the burning of her cheeks. "Besides, I have no measure to apply to Malcolm," she went on, a little hurriedly. "He is like no one else I have ever talked with, and I confess there is something about him I cannot understand. Indeed, he is beyond me altogether."

"Perhaps, having known him from infancy, I might be able to explain him," returned Mr Graham, in a tone that invited questioning.

"Perhaps, then," said Clementina, "I may be permitted, in jealousy for the teaching I have received of him, to confess my bewilderment that one so young should be capable of dealing with such things as he delights in. The youth of the prophet makes me doubt his prophecy."

"At least," rejoined Mr Graham, "the phenomenon coincides with what the master of these things said of them--that they were revealed to babes and not to the wise and prudent. As to Malcolm's wonderful facility in giving them form and utterance, that depends so immediately on the clear sight of them, that, granted a little of the gift poetic, developed through reading and talk, we need not wonder much at it."

"You consider your friend a genius?" suggested Clementina.

"I consider him possessed of a kind of heavenly common sense, equally at home in the truths of divine relation, and the facts of the human struggle with nature and her forces. I should never have discovered my own ignorance in certain points of the mathematics but for the questions that boy put to me before he was twelve years of age. A thing not understood lay in his mind like a fretting foreign body. But there is a far more important factor concerned than this exceptional degree of insight. Understanding is the reward of obedience. Peter says 'the Holy Ghost, whom G.o.d hath given them that obey him.' Obedience is the key to every door. I am perplexed at the stupidity of the ordinary religious being. In the most practical of all matters, he will talk, and speculate, and try to feel, but he will not set himself to do. It is different with Malcolm. From the first he has been trying to obey. Nor do I see why it should be strange that even a child should understand these things, if they are the very elements of the region for which we were created and to which our being holds essential relations, as a bird to the air, or a fish to the sea. If a man may not understand the things of G.o.d whence he came, what shall he understand?"

"How, then, is it that so few do understand?"

"Because where they know, so few obey. This boy, I say, did. If you had seen, as I have, the almost superhuman struggles of his will to master the fierce temper his ancestors gave him, you would marvel less at what he has so early become. I have seen him, white with pa.s.sion, cast himself on his face on the sh.o.r.e, and cling with his hands to the earth as if in a paroxysm of bodily suffering; then after a few moments rise and do a service to the man who had wronged him. Were it any wonder if the light should have soon gone up in a soul like that? When I was a younger man I used to go out with the fishing boats now and then, drawn chiefly by my love for the boy, who earned his own bread that way before he was in his teens. One night we were caught in a terrible storm, and had to stand out to sea in the pitch dark. He was then not fourteen. 'Can you let a boy like that steer?' I said to the captain of the boat.

'Yes; just a boy like that,' he answered. 'Ma'colm 'ill steer as straucht's a porpus.' When he was relieved, he crept over the thwarts to where I sat. 'Is there any true definition of a straight line, sir?' he said. 'I can't take the one in my Euclid.'--'So you're not afraid, Malcolm?' I returned, heedless of his question, for I wanted to see what he would answer. 'Afraid, sir!' he rejoined with some surprise, 'I wad ill like to hear the Lord say, O thou o' little faith!'--'But,' I persisted, 'G.o.d may mean to drown you!'--'An' what for no?' he returned. 'Gien ye war to tell me 'at I micht be droon't ohn him meant it, I wad be fleyt eneuch.'

I see your ladyship does not understand: I will interpret the dark saying: 'And why should he not drown me? If you were to tell me I might be drowned without his meaning it, I should be frightened enough.' Believe me, my lady, the right way is simple to find, though only they that seek it first can find it. But I have allowed myself," concluded the schoolmaster, "to be carried adrift in my laudation of Malcolm. You did not come to hear praises of him, my lady."

"I owe him much," said Clementina. "--But tell me then, Mr Graham, how is it that you know there is a G.o.d, and one--one--fit to be trusted as you trust him?"

"In no way that I can bring to bear on the reason of another so as to produce conviction."

"Then what is to become of me?"

"I can do for you what is far better. I can persuade you to look and see whether before your own door stands not a gate--lies not a path to walk in. Entering by that gate, walking in that path, you shall yourself arrive at the conviction, which no man can give you, that there is a living Love and Truth at the heart of your being, and pervading all that surrounds you. The man who seeks the truth in any other manner will never find it. Listen to me a moment, my lady. I loved that boy's mother. Naturally she did not love me--how could she? I was very unhappy. I sought comfort from the unknown source of my life. He gave me to understand his Son, and so I understood himself, knew that I came of G.o.d, and was comforted."

"But how do you know that it was not all a delusion--the product of your own fervid imagination? Do not mistake me; I want to find it true."

"It is a right and honest question, my lady. I will tell you.

"Not to mention the conviction which a truth beheld must carry with itself and concerning which there can be no argument either with him who does or him who does not see it, this experience goes far with me, and would with you if you had it, as you may--namely, that all my difficulties and confusions have gone on clearing themselves up ever since I set out to walk in that way. My consciousness of life is threefold what it was; my perception of what is lovely around me, and my delight in it, threefold; my power of understanding things and of ordering my way, threefold also; the same with my hope and my courage, my love to my kind, my power of forgiveness.

In short, I cannot but believe that my whole being and its whole world are in process of rectification for me. Is not that something to set against the doubt born of the eye and ear, and the questions of an intellect that can neither grasp nor disprove? I say nothing of better things still. To the man who receives such as I mean, they are the heart of life; to the man who does not, they exist not. But I say--if I thus find my whole being enlightened and redeemed, and know that therein I fare according to the word of the man of whom the old story tells: if I find that his word, and the result of action founded upon that word, correspond and agree, opening a heaven within and beyond me, in which I see myself delivered from all that now in myself is to myself despicable and unlovely; if I can reasonably--reasonably to myself not to another --cherish hopes of a glory of conscious being, divinely better than all my imagination when most daring could invent--a glory springing from absolute unity with my creator, and therefore with my neighbour; if the Lord of the ancient tale, I say, has thus held word with me, am I likely to doubt much or long whether there be such a lord or no?"

"What, then, is the way that lies before my own door? Help me to see it."

"It is just the old way--as old as the conscience--that of obedience to any and every law of personal duty. But if you have ever seen the Lord, if only from afar--if you have any vaguest suspicion that the Jew Jesus, who professed to have come from G.o.d, was a better man than other men, one of your first duties must be to open your ears to his words, and see whether they commend themselves to you as true; then, if they do, to obey them with your whole strength and might, upheld by the hope of the vision promised in them to the obedient. This is the way of life, which will lead a man out of the miseries of the nineteenth century, as it led Paul out of the miseries of the first."

There followed a little pause, and then a long talk about what the schoolmaster had called the old story; in which he spoke with such fervid delight of this and that point in the tale; removing this and that stumbling-block by giving the true reading--or the right interpretation; showing the what and why and how--the very intent of our Lord in the thing he said or did, that, for the first time in her life, Clementina began to feel as if such a man must really have lived, that his blessed feet must really have walked over the acres of Palestine, that his human heart must indeed have thought and felt, worshipped and borne, right humanly. Even in the presence of her new teacher, and with his words in her ears, she began to desire her own chamber that she might sit down with the neglected story and read for herself.