The Marquis of Lossie, George MacDonald [freda ebook reader .TXT] 📗

me be your servant."

As she spoke, she rose, and walking softly up to him where he sat kneeled at his knees, and held out suppliantly a little bag of white silk, tied with crimson.

"Take it-father," she said, hesitating, and bringing the word out with an effort; "take your daughter's offering-a poor thing to show her love, but something to ease her heart."

He took it, and weighed it up and down in his hand with an amused smile, but his eyes full of tears. It was heavy. He opened it. A chair was within his reach, he emptied it on the seat of it, and laughed with merry delight as its contents came tumbling out.

"I never saw so much gold in my life, if it were all taken together," he said. "What beautiful stuff it is! But I don't want it, my dear. It would but trouble me." And as he spoke, he began to put it in the bag again. "You will want it for your journey," he said.

"I have plenty in my reticule," she answered. "That is a mere nothing to what I could have tomorrow morning for writing a cheque. I am afraid I am very rich. It is such a shame! But I can't well help it. You must teach me how to become poor.-Tell me true: how much money have you?"

She said this with such an earnest look of simple love that the schoolmaster made haste to rise, that he might conceal his growing emotion.

"Rise, my dear lady," he said, as he rose himself, "and I will show you."

He gave her his hand, and she obeyed, but troubled and disappointed, and so stood looking after him, while he went to a drawer. Thence, searching in a corner of it, he brought a half sovereign, a few shillings, and some coppers, and held them out to her on his hand, with the smile of one who has proved his point.

"There!" he said; "do you think Paul would have stopped preaching to make a tent so long as he had as much as that in his pocket? I shall have more on Saturday, and I always carry a month's rent in my good old watch, for which I never had much use, and now have less than ever."

Clementina had been struggling with herself; now she burst into tears.

"Why, what a misspending of precious sorrow!" exclaimed the schoolmaster. "Do you think because a man has not a gold mine he must die of hunger? I once heard of a sparrow that never had a worm left for the morrow, and died a happy death notwithstanding."

As he spoke he took her handkerchief from her hand and dried her tears with it. But he had enough ado to keep his own back.

"Because I won't take a bagful of gold from you when I don't want it," he went on, "do you think I should let myself starve without coming to you? I promise you I will let you know-come to you if I can, the moment I get too hungry to do my work well, and have no money left. Should I think it a disgrace to take money from you? That would show a poverty of spirit such as I hope never to fall into. My sole reason for refusing it now is that I do not need it."

But for all his loving words and assurances Clementina could not stay her tears. She was not ready to weep, but now her eyes were as a fountain.

"See, then, for your tears are hard to bear, my daughter," he said, "I will take one of these golden ministers, and if it has flown from me ere you come, seeing that, like the raven, it will not return if once I let it go, I will ask you for another. It may be God's will that you should feed me for a time."

"Like one of Elijah's ravens," said Clementina, with an attempted laugh that was really a sob.

"Like a dove whose wings are covered with silver, and her feathers with yellow gold," said the schoolmaster.

A moment of silence followed, broken only by Clementina's failures in quieting herself.

"To me," he resumed, "the sweetest fountain of money is the hand of love, but a man has no right to take it from that fountain except he is in want of it. I am not. True, I go somewhat bare, my lady; but what is that when my Lord would have it so?"

He opened again the bag, and slowly, reverentially indeed, drew from it one of the new sovereigns with which it was filled. He put it into a waistcoat pocket, and laid the bag on the table.

"But your clothes are shabby, sir," said Clementina, looking at him with a sad little shake of the head.

"Are they?" he returned, and looked down at his lower garments, reddening and anxious. "-I did not think they were more than a little rubbed, but they shine somewhat," he said. "-They are indeed polished by use," he went on, with a troubled little laugh; "but they have no holes yet-at least none that are visible," he corrected. "If you tell me, my lady, if you honestly tell me that my garments"-and he looked at the sleeve of his coat, drawing back his head from it to see it better-"are unsightly, I will take of your money and buy me a new suit."

Over his coat sleeve he regarded her, questioning.

"Everything about you is beautiful!" she burst out "You want nothing but a body that lets the light through!"

She took the hand still raised in his survey of his sleeve, pressed it to her lips, and walked, with even more than her wonted state, slowly from the room. He took the bag of gold from the table, and followed her down the stair. Her chariot was waiting her at the door. He handed her in, and laid the bag on the little seat in front.

"Will you tell him to drive home," she said, with a firm voice, and a smile which if anyone care to understand, let him read Spenser's fortieth sonnet. And so they parted. The coachman took the queer shabby un-London-like man for a fortune teller his lady was in the habit of consulting, and paid homage to his power with the handle of his whip as he drove away. The schoolmaster returned to his room, not to his Plato, not even to Saul of Tarsus, but to the Lord himself.


CHAPTER LXI: THOUGHTS


When Malcolm took Kelpie to her stall the night of the arrival of Lady Bellair and her nephew, he was rushed upon by Demon, and nearly prostrated between his immoderate welcome and the startled rearing of the mare. The hound had arrived a couple of hours before, while Malcolm was out. He wondered he had not seen him with the carriage he had passed, never suspecting he had had another conductress, or dreaming what his presence there signified for him.

I have not said much concerning Malcolm's feelings with regard to Lady Clementina, but all this time the sense of her existence had been like an atmosphere surrounding and pervading his thought. He saw in her the promise of all he could desire to see in woman. His love was not of the blind little boy sort, but of a deeper, more exacting, keen eyed kind, that sees faults where even a true mother will not, so jealous is it of the perfection of the beloved.

But one thing was plain even to this seraphic dragon that dwelt sleepless in him, and there was eternal content in the thought, that such a woman, once started on the right way, would soon leave fault and weakness behind her, and become as one of the grand women of old, whose religion was simply what religion is-life -neither more nor less than life. She would be a saint without knowing it, the only grand kind of sainthood.

Whoever can think of religion as an addition to life, however glorious -a starry crown, say, set upon the head of humanity, is not yet the least in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever thinks of life as a something that could be without religion, is in deathly ignorance of both. Life and religion are one, or neither is anything: I will not say neither is growing to be anything. Religion is no way of life, no show of life, no observance of any sort. It is neither the food nor the medicine of being. It is life essential. To think otherwise is as if a man should pride himself on his honesty, or his parental kindness, or hold up his head amongst men because he never killed one: were he less than honest or kind or free from blood, he would yet think something of himself! The man to whom virtue is but the ornament of character, something over and above, not essential to it, is not yet a man.

If I say then, that Malcolm was always thinking about Lady Clementina when he was not thinking about something he had to think about, have I not said nearly enough on the matter? Should I ever dream of attempting to set forth what love is, in such a man for such a woman? There are comparatively few that have more than the glimmer of a notion of what love means. God only knows how grandly, how passionately yet how calmly, how divinely the man and the woman he has made, might, may, shall love each other. One thing only I will dare to say: that the love that belonged to Malcolm's nature was one through the very nerves of which the love of God must rise and flow and return, as its essential life. If any man think that such a love could no longer be the love of the man for the woman, he knows his own nature, and that of the woman he pretends or thinks he adores, but in the darkest of glasses.

Malcolm's lowly idea of himself did not at all interfere with his loving Clementina, for at first his love was entirely dissociated from any thought of hers. When the idea-the mere idea of her loving him presented itself, from whatever quarter suggested, he turned from it with shame and self reproof: the thought was in its own nature too unfit! That splendour regard him!

From a social point of view there was of course little presumption in it. The Marquis of Lossie bore a name that might pair itself with any in the land; but Malcolm did not yet feel that the title made much difference to the fisherman. He was what he was, and that was something very lowly indeed. Yet the thought would at times dawn up from somewhere in the infinite matrix of thought, that perhaps, if he went to college, and graduated, and dressed like a gentleman, and did everything as gentlemen do, in short, claimed his rank, and lived as a marquis should, as well as a fisherman might,-then -then-was it not-might it not be within the bounds of possibility-just within them-that the great hearted, generous, liberty loving Lady Clementina, groom as he had been, menial as he had heard himself called, and as, ere yet he knew his birth, he had laughed to hear, knowing that his service was true,-that she, who despised nothing human, would be neither disgusted nor contemptuous nor wrathful, if, from a great way off, at an awful remove of humility and worship, he were to wake in her a surmise that he dared