Donal Grant, George MacDonald [classic novels for teens txt] 📗

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 title. 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 associations 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 rôles 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 glass 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 appetite can only be a loss."

As he said this, Donal, half mechanically, filled a glass 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! Ingratitude 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 chinks of windows and doors!

"Yes," his lordship went on, "I taught myself hardship in my boyhood, and I reap the fruits of it in my prime!-Come up here: I will show you a prospect unequalled."

He stopped in front of a large picture, and began to talk as if expatiating on the points of a landscape outspread before him. His remarks belonged to something magnificent; but whether they were applicable to the picture Donal could not tell; there was light enough only to give a faint gleam to its gilded frame.

"Reach beyond reach!" said his lordship; "endless! infinite! How would not poor Maldon, with his ever fresh ambition after the unattainable, have gloated on such a scene! In Nature alone you front success! She does what she means! She alone does what she means!"

"If," said Donal, more for the sake of confirming the earl's impression that he had a listener, than from any idea that he would listen-"if you mean the object of Nature is to present us with perfection, I cannot allow she does what she intends: you rarely see her produce anything she would herself call perfect. But if her object be to make us behold perfection with the inner eye, this object she certainly does gain, and that just by stopping short of-"

He did not finish the sentence. A sudden change was upon him, absorbing him so that he did not even try to account for it: something seemed to give way in his head-as if a bubble burst in his brain; and from that moment whatever the earl said, and whatever arose in his own mind, seemed to have outward existence as well. He heard and knew the voice of his host, but seemed also in some inexplicable way, which at the time occasioned him no surprise, to see the things which had their origin in the brain of the earl. Whether he went in very deed out with him into the night, he did not know-he felt as if he had gone, and thought he had not-but when he woke the next morning in his bed at the top of the tower, which he had no recollection of climbing, he was as weary as if he had been walking the night through.


CHAPTER XXXI.

BEWILDERMENT.

His first thought was of a long and delightful journey he had made on horseback with the earl-through scenes of entrancing interest and variety,-with the present result of a strange weariness, almost misery. What had befallen him? Was the thing a fact or a fancy? If a fancy, how was he so weary? If a fact, how could it have been? Had he in any way been the earl's companion through such a long night as it seemed? Could they have visited all the places whose remembrance lingered in his brain? He was so confused, so bewildered, so haunted with a shadowy uneasiness almost like remorse, that he even dreaded the discovery of the