The Elect Lady, George MacDonald [smallest ebook reader TXT] 📗

to think about that yet awhile! We're in the hands of a reconciled God."

"What I want to know," pursued Dawtie, "is how you will feel, how you will get on when you haven't got anything!"

"Not got anything, girl! Are you losing your senses? Of course we shall want nothing then! I shall have to talk to the doctor about you! We shall have you killing us in our beds to know how we like it!"

He laughed; but it was a rather scared laugh.

"What I mean," she persisted, "is-when you have no body, and no hands to take hold of your cap, what will you do without it?"

"What if I leave it to you, Dawtie!" returned the laird, with a stupid mixture of joke and avarice in his cold eye.

"Please, sir, I didn't say what you would do with it, but what would you do without it when it will neither come out of your heart nor into your hands! It must be misery to a miser to have nothing!"

"A miser, hussy!"

"A lover of things, more than a lover of God!"

"Well, perhaps you have the better of me!" he said, after a cowed pause; for he perceived there was no compromise possible with Dawtie: she knew perfectly what she meant; and he could neither escape her logic, nor change her determination, whatever that might be. "I dare say you are right! I will think what ought to be done about that cup!"

He stopped, self amazed: he had committed himself!-as much as confessed the cup genuine! But Dawtie had not been deceived, and had not been thinking about the cup. Only it was plain that, if he would consent to part with it for its money-worth, that would be a grand beginning toward the renouncing of dead things altogether, toward the turning to the living One the love that now gathered, clinging and haunting, about gold cups and graved armor, and suchlike vapors and vanishings, that pass with the sunsets and the snows. She fell on her knees, and, in the spirit of a child and of the apostle of the Gentiles, cried, laying her little red hands together and uplifting them to her master in purest entreaty.

"Oh, laird, laird, ye've been gude and kin' to me, and I lo'e ye, the Lord kens! I pray ye for Christ's sake be reconciled to God, for ye hae been servin' Mammon and no Him, and ye hae jist said we canna serve the twa, and what 'ill come o' 't God only can tell, but it maun be misery!"

Words failed her. She rose, and left the room, with her apron to her eyes.

The laird stood a moment or two like one lost, then went hurriedly into his "closet," and shut the door. Whether he went on his knees to God as did Dawtie to Him, or began again to gloat over his Cellini goblet, I do not know.

Dawtie cried herself to sleep, and came down in the morning very pale. Her duty had left her exhausted, and with a kind of nausea toward all the ornaments and books in the house. A cock crew loud under the window of the kitchen. She dropped on her knees, said "Father of lights!" not a word beside, rose and began to rouse the fire.

When breakfast-time came, and the laird appeared, he looked much as usual, only a little weary, which his daughter set down to his journey the day before. He revived, however, as soon as he had succeeded in satisfying himself that Alexa knew nothing of what had passed. How staid, discreet, and compact of common sense Alexa seemed to him beside Dawtie, whose want of education left her mind a waste swamp for the vagaries of whatever will-o'-the-wisp an overstrained religious fantasy might generate! But however much the laird might look the same as before, he could never, knowing that Dawtie knew what she knew, be again as he had been.

"You'll do a few of the books to-day, won't you, Dawtie," he said, "when you have time? I never thought I should trust any one! I would sooner have old Meg shave me than let her dust an Elzevir! Ha! ha! ha!"

Dawtie was glad that at least he left the door open between them. She said she would do a little dusting in the afternoon, and would be very careful. Then the laird rose and went out, and Dawtie perceived, with a shoot of compassion mingled with mild remorse, that he had left his breakfast almost untasted.

But after that, so far from ever beginning any sort of conversation with her, he seemed uncomfortable the moment they happened to be alone together. If he caught her eye, he would say-hurriedly, and as if acknowledging a secret between them, "By and by, Dawtie;" or, "I'm thinking about the business, Dawtie;" or, "I'm making up my mind, Dawtie!" and so leave her. On one occasion he said, "Perhaps you will be surprised some day, Dawtie!"

On her part Dawtie never felt that she had anything more to say to him. She feared at times that she had done him evil rather than good by pressing upon him a duty she had not persuaded him to perform. She spoke of this fear to Andrew, but he answered decisively:

"If you believed you ought to speak to him, and have discovered in yourself no wrong motive, you must not trouble yourself about the result. That may be a thousand years off yet. You may have sent him into a hotter purgatory, and at the same time made it shorter for him. We know nothing but that God is righteous."

Dawtie was comforted, and things went on as before. Where people know their work and do it, life has few blank spaces for ennui, and they are seldom to be pitied. Where people have not yet found their work, they may be more to be pitied than those that beg their bread. When a man knows his work and will not do it, pity him more than one who is to be hanged to-morrow.


CHAPTER XIX.


ANDREW AND ALEXA.

Andrew had occasion to call on the laird to pay his father's rent, and Alexa, who had not seen him for some time, thought him improved both in carriage and speech, and wondered. She did not take into account his intercourse with God, as with highest human minds, and his constant wakefulness to carry into action what things he learned. Thus trained in noblest fashions of freedom, it was small wonder that his bearing and manners, the natural outcome and expression of his habits of being, should grow in liberty. There was in them the change only of development. By the side of such education as this, dealing with reality and inborn dignity, what mattered any amount of ignorance as to social custom! Society may judge its own; this man was not of it, and as much surpassed its most accomplished pupils in all the essentials of breeding, as the apostle Paul was a better gentleman than Mr. Nash or Mr. Brummel. The training may be slow, but it is perfect. To him who has yielded self, all things are possible. Andrew was aware of no difference. He seemed to himself the same as when a boy.

Alexa had not again alluded to his brother's letter concerning George Crawford, fearing he might say what she would find unpleasant. But now she wanted to get a definite opinion from him in regard to certain modes of money-making, which had naturally of late occupied a good deal of her thought.

"What is your notion concerning money-lending-I mean at interest, Mr. Ingram?" she said. "I hear it is objected to nowadays by some that set up for teachers!"

"It is by no means the first time in the world's history," answered Andrew.

"I want to know what you think of it, Mr. Ingram?"

"I know little," replied Andrew, "of any matter with which I have not had to deal practically."

"But ought not one to have his ideas ready for the time when we will have to deal practically?" said Alexa.

"Mine would be pretty sure to be wrong," answered Andrew; "and there is no time to spend in gathering wrong ideas and then changing them!"

"On the contrary, they would be less warped by personal interest."

"Could circumstances arise in which it would not be my first interest to be honest?" said Andrew. "Would not my judgment be quickened by the compulsion and the danger? In no danger myself, might I not judge too leniently of things from which I should myself recoil? Selfishly smoother with regard to others, because less anxious about their honesty than my own, might I not yield them what, were I in the case, I should see at once I dared not allow to myself? I can perceive no use in making up my mind how to act in circumstances in which I am not-probably will never be. I have enough to occupy me where I find myself, and should certainly be oftener in doubt how to act, if I had bothered my brains how to think in circumstances foreign to me. In such thinking, duty is of necessity a comparatively feeble factor, being only duty imagined, not live duty, and the result is the more questionable. The Lord instructed His apostles not to be anxious what they should say when they were brought before rulers and kings: I will leave the question of duty alone until action is demanded of me. In the meantime I will do the duty now required of me, which is the only preparation for the duty that is to come."

Although Alexa had not begun to understand Andrew, she had sense enough and righteousness enough to feel that he was somehow ahead of her, and that it was not likely he and George Crawford would be of one mind in the matter that occupied her, so different were their ways of looking at things-so different indeed the things themselves they thought worth looking at.

She was silent for a moment, then said:

"You can at least tell me what you think of gambling!"

"I think it is the meanest mode of gaining or losing money a man could find."

"Why do you think so?"

"Because he desires only to gain, and can gain only by his neighbor's loss. One of the two must be the worse for his transaction with the other. Each must wish ill to his neighbor!"

"But the risk was agreed upon between them."

"True-but in what hope? Was it not, on the part of each, that he would be the gainer and the other the loser? There is no common cause, nothing but pure opposition of interest."

"Are there not many things in which one must gain and the other lose?"

"There are many things in which one gains and the other loses; but if it is essential to any transaction that only one side shall gain, the thing is not of God."

"What do you think of trading in stocks?"

"I do not know enough about it to have a right to speak."

"You can give your impression!"

"I will not give what I do not value."

"Suppose, then, you heard of a man who had made his money so, how would you behave to him?"

"I would not seek his acquaintance."

"If he sought yours?"

"It would be time to ask how he had made his money.