But as if she heard neither of them, Arctura went on,

"If it were but true!" she moaned. "It would set right everything on the face of the earth!"

"You mean far more than that, my lady!" said Donal. "You mean everything in the human heart, which will to all eternity keep moaning and crying out for the Father of it, until it is one with its one relation!"

He lifted his bonnet, and would have pa.s.sed on.

"One word, Mr. Grant," said Miss Carmichael. "--No man holding such doctrines could with honesty become a clergyman of the church of Scotland."

"Very likely," replied Donal, "Good afternoon."

"Thank you, Mr. Grant!" said Arctura. "I hope you are right."

When he was gone, the ladies resumed their walk in silence. At length Miss Carmichael spoke.

"Well, I must say, of all the conceited young men I have had the misfortune to meet, your Mr. Grant bears the palm! Such self-a.s.surance!

such presumption! such forwardness!"

"Are you certain, Sophia," rejoined Arctura, "that it is self-a.s.surance, and not conviction that gives him his courage?"

"He is a teacher of lies! He goes dead against all that good men say and believe! The thing is as clear as daylight: he is altogether wrong!"

"What if G.o.d be sending fresh light into the minds of his people?"

"The old light is good enough for me!"

"But it may not be good enough for G.o.d! What if Mr. Grant should be his messenger to you and me!"

"A likely thing! A raw student from the hills of Daurside!"

"I cherish a profound hope that he may be in the right. Much good, you know, did come out of Galilee! Every place and every person is despised by somebody!"

"Arctura! He has infected you with his frightful irreverence!"

"If he be a messenger of Jesus Christ," said Arctura, quietly, "he has had from you the reception he would expect, for the disciple must be as his master."

Miss Carmichael stood still abruptly. Her face was in a flame, but her words came cold and hard.

"I am sorry," she said, "our friendship should come to so harsh a conclusion, lady Arctura; but it is time it should end when you speak so to one who has been doing her best for so long to enlighten you! If this be the first result of your new gospel--well! Remember who said, 'If an angel from heaven preach any other gospel to you than I have preached, let him be accursed!"

She turned back.

"Oh, Sophia, do not leave me so!" cried Arctura.

But she was already yards away, her skirt making a small whirlwind that went after her through the withered leaves. Arctura burst into tears, and sat down at the foot of one of the great beeches. Miss Carmichael never looked behind her. She met Donal again, for he too had turned: he uncovered, but she took no heed. She had done with him! Her poor Arctura.

Donal was walking gently on, thinking, with closed book, when the wind bore to his ear a low sob from Arctura. He looked up, and saw her: she sat weeping like one rejected. He could not pa.s.s or turn and leave her thus! She heard his steps in the withered leaves, glanced up, dropped her head for a moment, then rose with a feeble attempt at a smile.

Donal understood the smile: she would not have him troubled because of what had taken place!

"Mr. Grant," she said, coming towards him, "St. Paul laid a curse upon even an angel from heaven if he preached any other gospel than his! It is terrible!"

"It is terrible, and I say amen to it with all my heart," returned Donal. "But the gospel you have received is not the gospel of Paul; it is one subst.i.tuted for it--and that by no angel from heaven, but by men with hide-bound souls, who, in order to get them into their own intellectual pockets, melted down the ingots of the kingdom, and re-cast them in moulds of wretched legalism, borrowed of the Romans who crucified their master. Grand, childlike, heavenly things they must explain, forsooth, after vulgar worldly notions of law and right! But they meant well, seeking to justify the ways of G.o.d to men, therefore the curse of the apostle does not fall, I think, upon them. They sought a way out of their difficulties, and thought they had found one, when in reality it was their faith in G.o.d himself that alone got them out of the prison of their theories. But gladly would I see discomfited such as, receiving those inventions at the hundredth hand, and moved by none of the fervour with which they were first promulgated, lay, as the word and will of G.o.d, lumps of iron and heaps of dust upon live, beating, longing hearts that cry out after their G.o.d!"

"Oh, I do hope what you say is true!" panted Arctura. "I think I shall die if I find it is not!"

"If you find what I tell you untrue, it will only be that it is not grand and free and bounteous enough. To think anything too good to be true, is to deny G.o.d--to say the untrue may be better than the true--that there might be a greater G.o.d than he. Remember, Christ is in the world still, and within our call."

"I will think of what you tell me," said Arctura, holding out her hand.

"If anything in particular troubles you," said Donal, "I shall be most glad to help you if I can; but it is better there should not be much talking. The thing lies between you and your Father."

With these words he left her. Arctura followed slowly to the house, and went straight to her room, her mind filling as she went with slow-reviving strength and a great hope. No doubt some of her relief came from the departure of her incubus friend; but that must soon have vanished in fresh sorrow, save for the hope and strength to which this departure yielded the room. She trusted that by the time she saw her again she would be more firmly grounded concerning many things, and able to set them forth aright. She was not yet free of the notion that you must be able to defend your convictions; she scarce felt at liberty to say she believed a thing, so long as she knew an argument against it which she could not show to be false. Alas for our beliefs if they go no farther than the poor horizon of our experience or our logic, or any possible wording of the beliefs themselves! Alas for ourselves if our beliefs are not what we shape our lives, our actions, our aspirations, our hopes, our repentances by!

Donal was glad indeed to hope that now at length an open door stood before the poor girl. He had been growing much interested in her, as one on whom life lay heavy, one who seemed ripe for the kingdom of heaven, yet in whose way stood one who would neither enter herself, nor allow her to enter that would. She was indeed fit for nothing but the kingdom of heaven, so much was she already the child of him whom, longing after him, she had not yet dared to call her father. His regard for her was that of the gentle strong towards the weak he would help; and now that she seemed fairly started on the path of life, the path, namely, to the knowledge of him who is the life, his care over her grew the more tender. It is the part of the strong to serve the weak, to minister that whereby they too may grow strong. But he rather than otherwise avoided meeting her, and for a good many days they did not so much as see each other.

CHAPTER XLVI.

A HORRIBLE STORY.

The health of the earl remained fluctuating. Its condition depended much on the special indulgence. There was hardly any sort of narcotic with which he did not at least make experiment, if he did not indulge in it. He made no pretence even to himself of seeking therein the furtherance of knowledge; he wanted solely to find how this or that, thus or thus modified or combined, would contribute to his living a life such as he would have it, and other quite than that ordered for him by a power which least of all powers he chose to acknowledge. The power of certain drugs he was eager to understand: the living source of him and them and their correlations, he scarcely recognized. This came of no hostility to religion other than the worst hostility of all--that of a life irresponsive to its claims. He believed neither like saint nor devil; he believed and did not obey, he believed and did not yet tremble.

The one day he was better, the other worse, according, as I say, to the character and degree of his indulgence. At one time it much affected his temper, taking from him all mastery of himself; at another made him so dull and stupid, that he resented nothing except any attempt to rouse him from his hebetude. Of these differences he took unfailing note; but the worst influence of all was a constant one, and of it he made no account: however the drugs might vary in their operations upon him, to one thing they all tended--the destruction of his moral nature.

Urged more or less all his life by a sort of innate rebellion against social law, he had done great wrongs--whether also committed what are called crimes, I cannot tell: no repentance had followed the remorse their consequences had sometimes occasioned. And now the possibility of remorse even was gradually forsaking him. Such a man belongs rather to the kind demoniacal than the kind human; yet so long as nothing occurs giving to his possible an occasion to embody itself in the actual, he may live honoured, and die respected. There is always, not the less, the danger of his real nature, or rather unnature, breaking out in this way or that diabolical.

Although he went so little out of the house, and apparently never beyond the grounds, he yet learned a good deal at times of things going on in the neighbourhood: Davie brought him news; so did Simmons; and now and then he would have an interview with his half acknowledged relative, the factor.

One morning before he was up, he sent for Donal, and requested him to give Davie a half-holiday, and do something for him instead.

"You know, or perhaps you don't know, that I have a house in the town,"

he said, "--the only house, indeed, now belonging to the earldom--a not very attractive house which you must have seen--on the main street, a little before you come to the Morven Arms."

"I believe I know the house, my lord," answered Donal, "with strong iron stanchions to the lower windows, and--?"

"Yes, that is the house; and I daresay you have heard the story of it--I mean how it fell into its present disgrace! The thing happened more than a hundred years ago. But I have spent some nights in it myself notwithstanding."

"I should like to hear it, my lord," said Donal.

"You may as well have it from myself as from another! It does not touch any of us, for the family was not then represented by the same branch as now; I might else be thin-skinned about it. No mere legend, mind you, but a very dreadful fact, which resulted in the abandonment of the house! I think it time, for my part, that it should be forgotten and the house let. It was before the castle and the t.i.tle parted company: that is a tale worth telling too! there was little fair play in either!

but I will not trouble you with it now.

"Into the generation then above ground," the earl began, a.s.suming a book-tone the instant he began to narrate, "by one of those freaks of nature specially strange and more inexplicable than the rest, had been born an original savage. You know that the old type, after so many modifications have been wrought upon it, will sometimes reappear in its ancient crudity amidst the latest development of the race, animal and vegetable too, I suppose!--well, so it was now: I use no figure of speech when I say that the apparition, the phenomenon, was a savage. I do not mean that he was an exceptionally rough man for his position, but for any position in the Scotland of that age. No doubt he was regarded as a madman, and used as a madman; but my opinion is the more philosophical--that, by an arrest of development, into the middle of the ladies and gentlemen of the family came a veritable savage, and one out of no darkest age of history, but from beyond all record--out of the awful prehistoric times."

His lordship visibly and involuntarily shuddered, as at the memory of something he had seen: into that region he had probably wandered in his visions.

"He was a fierce and furious savage--worse than anything you can imagine. The only sign of any influence of civilization upon him was that he was cowed by the eye of his keeper. Never, except by rarest chance, was he left alone and awake: no one could tell what he might not do!