"Then a man may put off repentance as long as he pleases!"

"Certainly he may—at least as long as he can—but it is a fearful thing to try issues with God."

"I can hardly say I understand you."

"Mr. Crawford, you have questioned me in the way of kindly anxiety and reproof; that has given me the right to question you. Tell me, do you admit we are bound to do what our Lord requires?"

"Of course. How could any Christian man do otherwise?"

"Yet a man may say: 'Lord, Lord,' and be cast out! It is one thing to say we are bound to do what the Lord tells us, and another to do what He tells us! He says: 'Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness:' Mr. Crawford, are you seeking the kingdom of God first, or are you seeking money first?"

"We are sent into the world to make our living."

"Sent into the world, we have to seek our living; we are not sent into the world to seek our living, but to seek the kingdom and righteousness of God. And to seek a living is very different from seeking a fortune!"

"If you, Mr. Ingram, had a little wholesome ambition, you would be less given to judging your neighbors."

Andrew held his peace, and George concluded he had had the best of the argument—which was all he wanted; of the truth concerned he did not see enough to care about it Andrew, perceiving no good was to be done, was willing to appear defeated; he did not value any victory but the victory of the truth, and George was not yet capable of being conquered by the truth.

"No!" resumed he, "we must avoid personalities. There are certain things all respectable people have agreed to regard as right: he is a presumptuous man who refuses to regard them. Reflect on it, Mr. Ingram."

The curious smile hovered about the lip of the plow-man; when things to say did not come to him, he went nowhere to fetch them. Almost in childhood he had learned that, when one is required to meet the lie, words are given him; when they are not, silence is better. A man who does not love the truth, but disputes for victory, is the swine before whom pearls must not be cast. Andrew's smile meant that it had been a waste of his time to call upon Mr. Crawford. But he did not blame himself, for he had come out of pure friendliness. He would have risen at once, but feared to seem offended. Crawford, therefore, with the rudeness of a superior, himself rose, saying:

"Is there anything I can do for you, Mr. Ingram?"

"The only thing one man can do for another is to be at one with him," answered Andrew, rising.

"Ah, you are a socialist! That accounts for much!" said George.

"Tell me this," returned Andrew, looking him in the eyes: "Did Jesus ever ask of His Father anything His Father would not give Him?"

"Not that I remember," answered George, fearing a theological trap.

"He said once: 'I pray for them which shall believe in Me, that they all may be one, as Thou Father art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also many be one in us!' No man can be one with another, who is not one with Christ"

As he left the house, a carriage drove up, in which was Mr. Crawford the elder, home from a meeting of directors, at which a dividend had been agreed upon—to be paid from the capital, in preparation for another issue of shares.

Andrew walked home a little bewildered. "How is it," he said to himself, "that so many who would be terrified at the idea of not being Christians, and are horrified at any man who does not believe there is a God, are yet absolutely indifferent to what their Lord tells them to do if they would be His disciples? But may not I be in like case without knowing it? Do I meet God in my geometry? When I so much enjoy my Euclid, is it always God geometrizing to me? Do I feel talking with God every time I dwell upon any fact of his world of lines and circles and angles? Is it God with me, every time that the joy of life, of a wind or a sky or a lovely phrase, flashes through me? Oh, my God," he broke out in speechless prayer as he walked—and those that passed said to themselves he was mad; how, in such a world, could any but a madman wear a face of joy! "Oh, my God, Thou art all in all, and I have everything! The world is mine because it is Thine! I thank Thee, my God, that Thou hast lifted me up to see whence I came, to know to whom I belong, to know who is my Father, and makes me His heir! I am Thine, infinitely more than mine own; and Thou art mine as Thou art Christ's!"

He knew his Father in the same way that Jesus Christ knows His Father. He was at home in the universe, neither lonely, nor out-of-doors, nor afraid.



CHAPTER XII.

THE CRAWFORDS.

Through strong striving to secure his life, Mr. Crawford lost it—both in God's sense of loss and his own. He narrowly escaped being put in prison, died instead, and was put into God's prison to pay the uttermost farthing. But he had been such a good Christian that his fellow-Christians mourned over his failure and his death, not over his dishonesty! For did they not know that if, by more dishonesty, he could have managed to recover his footing, he would have paid everything? One injunction only he obeyed—he provided for his own; of all the widows concerned in his bank, his widow alone was secured from want; and she, like a dutiful wife, took care that his righteous intention should be righteously carried out; not a penny would she give up to the paupers her husband had made.

The downfall of the house of cards took place a few months after George's return to its business. Not initiated to the mysteries of his father's transactions, ignorant of what had long been threatening, it was a terrible blow to him. But he was a man of action, and at once looked to America; at home he could not hold up his head.

He had often been to Potlurg, and had been advancing in intimacy with Alexa; but he would not show himself there until he could appear as a man of decision—until he was on the point of departure. She would be the more willing to believe his innocence of complicity in the deceptions that had led to his ruin! He would thus also manifest self-denial and avoid the charge of interested motives! he could not face the suspicion of being a suitor with nothing to offer! George had always taken the grand role—that of superior, benefactor, bestower. He was powerful in condescension!

Not, therefore, until the night before he sailed did he go to Potlurg.

Alexa received him with a shade of displeasure.

"I am going away," he said, abruptly, the moment they were seated.

Her heart gave a painful throb in her throat, but she did not lose her self-possession.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"To New York," he replied. "I have got a situation there—in a not unimportant house. There at least I am taken for an honest man. From your heaven I have fallen."

"No one falls from any heaven but has himself to blame," rejoined Alexa.

"Where have I been to blame? I was not in my father's confidence. I knew nothing, positively nothing, of what was going on."

"Why then did you not come to see me?"

"A man who is neither beggar nor thief is not willing to look either."

"You would have come if you had trusted me," she said.

"You must pardon pride in a ruined man," he answered. "Now that I am starting to-morrow, I do not feel the same dread of being misunderstood!"

"It was not kind of you, George. Knowing yourself fit to be trusted, why did you not think me capable of trusting?"

"But, Alexa!—a man's own father!"

For a moment he showed signs of an emotion he had seldom had to repress.

"I beg your pardon, George!" cried Alexa. "I am both stupid and selfish! Are you really going so far?"

Her voice trembled.

"I am—but to return, I hope, in a very different position!"

"You would have me understand—"

"That I shall then be able to hold up my head."

"Why should an innocent man ever do otherwise?"

"He can not help seeing himself in other people's thoughts!"

"If we are in the right ought we to mind what people think of us?" said Alexa.

"Perhaps not. But I will make them think of me as I choose."

"How?"

"By compelling their respect."

"You mean to make a fortune?"

"Yes."

"Then it will be the fortune they respect! You will not be more worthy!"

"I shall not."

"Is such respect worth having?"

"Not in itself."

"In what then? Why lay yourself out for it?"

"Believe me, Alexa, even the real respect of such people would be worthless to me. I only want to bring them to their marrow-bones!"

The truth was, Alexa prized social position so dearly that she did not relish his regarding it as a thing at the command of money. Let George be as rich as a Jew or an American, Alexa would never regard him as her equal! George worshiped money; Alexa worshiped birth and land.

Our own way of being wrong is all right in our own eyes; our neighbor's way of being wrong is offensive to all that is good in us. We are anxious therefore, kindly anxious, to pull the mote out of his eye, never thinking of the big beam in the way of the operation. Jesus labored to show us that our immediate business is to be right ourselves. Until we are, even our righteous indignation is waste.

While he spoke, George's eyes were on the ground. His grand resolve did not give his innocence strength to look in the face of the woman he loved; he felt, without knowing why, that she was not satisfied with him. Of the paltriness of his ambition, he had no inward hint. The high resolves of a puny nature must be a laughter to the angels—the bad ones.

"If a man has no ambition," he resumed, feeling after her objection, "how is he to fulfill the end of his being! No sluggard ever made his mark! How would the world advance but for the men who have to make their fortunes! If a man find his father has not made money for him, what is he to do but make it for himself? You would not have me all my life a clerk! If I had but known, I should by this time have been well ahead!"

Alexa had nothing to answer; it all sounded very reasonable! Were not Scots boys everywhere taught it was the business of life to rise? In whatever position they were, was it not their part to get out of it? She did not see that it is in the kingdom of heaven only we are bound to rise. We are born into the world not to rise in the kingdom of Satan, but out of it And the only way to rise in the kingdom of heaven is to do the work given us to do. Whatever be intended for us, this is the only way to it We have not to promote ourselves, but to do our work. It is the master of the feast who says: "Go up." If a man go up of himself, he will find he has mistaken the head of the table.

More talk followed, but neither cast any light; neither saw the true question. George took his leave. Alexa said she would be glad to hear from him.

Alexa did not like the form of George's ambition—to gain money, and so compel the respect of persons he did not himself respect But was she clear of the money disease herself? Would she have married a poor man, to go on as hitherto? Would she not have been ashamed to have George know how she had supplied his needs while he lay in the house—that it was with the poor gains of her poultry-yard she fed him? Did it improve her moral position toward money that she regarded commerce with contempt—a rudiment of the time when nobles treated merchants as a cottager his bees?

George's situation was a subordinate one in a house of large dealings in Wall Street.



CHAPTER XIII.

DAWTIE.

Is not the Church supposed to be made up of God's elect? and yet most of my readers find it hard to believe there should be three persons, so related, who agreed to ask of God, and to ask neither riches nor love, but that God should take His own way with them, that the Father should work His will in them, that He would teach them what He wanted of them, and help them to do it! The Church is God's elect, and yet you can not believe in three holy children! Do you say: "Because they are represented as beginning to obey so young?" "Then," I answer, "there can be no principle, only an occasional and arbitrary exercise of spiritual power, in the perfecting of praise out of the mouth of babes and sucklings, or in the preference of them to the wise and prudent as the recipients of divine revelation."

Dawtie never said much, but tried the more. With heartiness she accepted what conclusions the brothers came to, so far as she understood them—and what was practical she understood as well as they; for she had in her heart the spirit of that Son of Man who chose a child to represent Him and His Father. As to what they heard at church, their minds were so set on doing what they found in the Gospel, that it passed over them without even rousing their intellect, and so vanished without doing any hurt. Tuned to the truth by obedience, no falsehood they heard from the pulpit partisans of God could make a chord vibrate in response. Dawtie indeed heard nothing but the good that was mingled with the falsehood, and shone like a lantern through a thick fog.

She was little more than a child when, to the trouble of her parents, she had to go out to service. Every half year she came home for a day or so, and neither feared nor found any relation altered. At length after several closely following changes, occasioned by no fault of hers, she was without a place. Miss Fordyce heard of it, and proposed to her parents that, until she found another, she should help Meg, who was growing old and rather blind: she would thus, she said, go on learning, and not be idling at home.

Dawtie's mother was not a little amused at the idea of any one idling in her house, not to say Dawtie, whom idleness would have tried harder than any amount of work; but, if only that Miss Fordyce might see what sort of girl Dawtie was, she judged it right to accept her offer.

She had not been at Potlurg a week before Meg began to complain that she did not leave work enough to keep her warm. No doubt it gave her time for her book, but her eyes were not so good as they used to be, and she was apt to fall asleep over it, and catch cold! But when her mistress proposed to send her away, she would not hear of it So Alexa, who had begun to take an interest in her, set her to do things she had hitherto done herself, and began to teach her other things. Before three months were over, she was a necessity in the house, and to part with Dawtie seemed impossible. A place about that time turning up, Alexa at once offered her wages, and so Dawtie became an integral portion of the laird's modest household.

The laird himself at length began to trust her as he had never trusted servant, for he taught her to dust his precious books, which hitherto he had done himself, but of late had shrunk from, finding not a few of them worse than Pandora-boxes, liberating asthma at the merest unclosing.

Dawtie was now a grown woman, bright, gentle, playful, with loving eyes, and a constant overflow of tenderness upon any creature that could receive it. She had small but decided and regular features, whose prevailing expression was confidence—not in herself, for she was scarce conscious of herself even in the act of denying herself—but in the person upon whom her trusting eyes were turned. She was in the world to help—with no political economy beyond the idea that for help and nothing else did any one exist. To be as the sun and the rain and the wind, as the flowers that lived for her and not for themselves, as the river that flowed, and the heather that bloomed lovely on the bare moor in the autumn, such was her notion of being. That she had to take care of herself was a falsehood that never entered her brain. To do what she ought, and not do what she ought not, was enough on her part, and God would do the rest! I will not say she reasoned thus; to herself she was scarce a conscious object at all. Both bodily and spiritually she was in the finest health. If illness came, she would perhaps then discover a self with which she had to fight—I can not tell; but my impression is, that she had so long done the true thing, that illness would only develop unconscious victory, perfecting the devotion of her simple righteousness. It is because we are selfish, with that worst selfishness which is incapable of recognizing itself, not to say its own loathsomeness, that we have to be made ill. That they may leave the last remnants of their selfishness, are the saints themselves over-taken by age and death. Suffering does not cause the vile thing in us—that was there all the time; it comes to develop in us the knowledge of its presence, that it may be war to the knife between us and it. It was no wonder that Dawtie grew more and more of a favorite at Potlurg.

She did not read much, but would learn by heart anything that pleased her, and then go saying or singing it to herself. She had the voice of a lark, and her song prevented many a search for her. Against that "rain of melody," not the pride of the laird, or the orderliness of the ex-school-master ever put up the umbrella of rebuke. Her singing was so true, came so clear from the fountain of joy, and so plainly from no desire to be heard, that it gave no annoyance; while such was her sympathy, that, although she had never get suffered, you would, to hear her sing "My Nannie's awa'!" have thought her in truth mourning an absent lover, and familiar with every pang of heart-privation. Her cleanliness, clean even of its own show, was a heavenly purity; while so gently was all her spiriting done, that the very idea of fuss died in the presence of her labor. To the self-centered such a person soon becomes a nobody; the more dependent they are upon her unfailing ministration, the less they think of her; but they have another way of regarding such in "the high countries." Hardly any knew her real name; she was known but by her pet name Dawtie.

Alexa, who wondered at times that she could not interest her in things she made her read, little knew how superior the girl's choice was to her own! Not knowing much of literature, what she liked was always of the best in its kind, and nothing without some best element could interest her at all. But she was not left either to her "own sweet will" or to the prejudices of her well-meaning mistress; however long the intervals that parted them, Andrew continued to influence her reading as from the first. A word now and a word then, with the books he lent or gave her, was sufficient. That Andrew liked this or that, was enough to make Dawtie set herself to find in it what Andrew liked, and it was thus she became acquainted with most of what she learned by heart.

Above two years before the time to which I have now brought my narrative, Sandy had given up farming, to pursue the development of certain inventions of his which had met the approval of a man of means who, unable himself to devise, could yet understand a device: he saw that there was use, and consequently money in them, and wisely put it in Sandy's power to perfect them. He was in consequence but little at home, and when Dawtie went to see her parents, as she could much oftener now, Andrew and she generally met without a third. However many weeks might have passed, they always met as if they had parted only the night before. There was neither shyness nor forwardness in Dawtie. Perhaps a livelier rose might tinge her sweet round cheek when she saw Andrew; perhaps a brighter spark shone in the pupil of Andrew's eye; but they met as calmly as two prophets in the secret of the universe, neither anxious nor eager. The old relation between them was the more potent that it made so little outward show.

"Have you anything for me, Andrew?" Dawtie would say, in the strong dialect which her sweet voice made so pleasant to those that loved her; whereupon Andrew, perhaps without immediate answer more than a smile, would turn into his room, and reappear with what he had got ready for her to "chew upon" till they should meet again. Milton's sonnet, for instance, to the "virgin wise and pure," had long served her aspiration; equally wise and pure, Dawtie could understand it as well as she for whom it was written. To see the delight she took in it, would have been a joy to any loving student of humanity. It had cost her more effort to learn than almost any song, and perhaps therefore it was the more precious. Andrew seldom gave her a book to learn from; in general he copied, in his clearest handwriting, whatever poem or paragraph he thought fit for Dawtie; and when they met, she would not unfrequently, if there was time, repeat unasked what she had learned, and be rewarded with his unfailing look of satisfaction.

There was a secret between them—a secret proclaimed on the house-tops, a secret hidden, the most precious of pearls, in their hearts—that the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof; that its work is the work of the Lord, whether the sowing of the field, the milking of the cow, the giving to the poor, the spending of wages, the reading of the Bible; that God is all in all, and every throb of gladness His gift; that their life came fresh every moment from His heart; that what was lacking to them would arrive the very moment He had got them ready for it. They were God's little ones in God's world—none the less their own that they did not desire to swallow it, or thrust it in their pockets.

Among poverty-stricken Christians, consumed with care to keep a hold of the world and save their souls, they were as two children of the house. By living in the presence of the living One, they had become themselves His presence—dim lanterns through which His light shone steady. Who obeys, shines.



CHAPTER XIV.

SANDY AND GEORGE.

Sandy had found it expedient to go to America, and had now been there a twelvemonth; he had devised a machine of the value of which not even his patron could be convinced—that is, he could not see the prospect of its making money fast enough to constitute it a good thing. Sandy regarded it as a discovery, a revelation for the uplifting of a certain down-trodden portion of the community; and therefore, having saved a little money, had resolved to make it known in the States, where insight into probabilities is fresher. And now Andrew had a letter from him in which he mentioned that he had come across Mr. Crawford, already of high repute in Wall Street; that he had been kind to him, and having learned his object in visiting the country, and the approximate risk in bringing out his invention, had taken the thing into consideration. But the next mail brought another letter to the effect that, having learned the nature of the business done by Mr. Crawford, he found himself unable to distinguish between it and gambling, or worse; it seemed to him a vortex whose very emptiness drew money into it. He had therefore drawn back, and declined to put the thing in Crawford's hands. This letter Andrew gave Dawtie to read, that she might see that Sandy remained a true man. He had never been anxious on the point, but was very glad that ignorance had not drawn him into an evil connection.

Dawtie took the letter with her to read at her leisure. Unable, however, to understand something Sandy said concerning Mr. Crawford's business, she asked a question or two of her mistress, which led to questions on Alexa's part. Finding what was the subject of Sandy's letter, she wished to see it. Dawtie asked leave of Andrew, and gave it her.

Alexa was both distressed and indignant becoming at once George's partisan. Her distress diminished and her indignation increased as she reflected on the airt whence the unfavorable report reached her; the brothers were such peculiar men! She recalled the strange things she had heard of their childhood; doubtless the judgment was formed on an overstrained and quixotic idea of honesty! Besides, there had always been a strong socialistic tendency in them, which explained how Sandy could malign his benefactor! George was incapable of doing anything dishonorable! She would not trouble herself about it. But she would like to know how Andrew regarded the matter.

She asked him therefore what he thought of Sandy's procedure. Andrew replied that he did not know much about business; but that the only safety must lie in having nothing to do with what was doubtful; therefore Sandy had done right. Alexa said it was too bad of him to condemn where he confessed ignorance. Andrew replied:

"Ma'am, if Mr. Crawford is wrong he is condemned; if he is right my private doubt can not hurt him. Sandy must act by his own doubt, not by Mr. Crawford's confidence."

Alexa grew more distressed, for she began to recall things George had said which at the time she had not liked, but which she had succeeded in forgetting. If he had indeed gone astray, she hoped he would forget her; she could do without him! But the judgment of such a man as Sandy could settle nothing. Of humble origin and childish simplicity, he could not see the thing as a man of experience must. George might be all right notwithstanding. At the same time there was his father—whose reputation remained under a thick cloud, whose failed character rather than his ill-success had driven George to the other continent. Breed must go for something in a question of probabilities. It was the first time Alexa's thoughts had been turned into such a channel. She clung to the poor comfort that something must have passed at the interview so kindly sought by George to set the quixotical young farmer against him. She would not utter his name to Andrew ever again!

She was right in thinking that George cherished a sincere affection for her. It was one of the spurs which drove him too eagerly after money. I doubt if any man starts with a developed love of money for its own sake—except indeed he be born of generations of mammon worshipers. George had gone into speculation with the object of retrieving the position in which he had supposed himself born, and in the hope of winning the hand of his cousin—thinking too much of himself to offer what would not in the eyes of the world be worth her acceptance. When he stepped on the inclined plane of dishonesty he believed himself only engaging in "legitimate speculation;" but he was at once affected by the atmosphere about him. Wrapped in the breath of admiration and adulation surrounding men who cared for nothing but money-making, men who were not merely dishonest, but the very serpents of dishonesty, against whom pickpockets will "stick off" as angels of light; constantly under the softly persuasive influence of low morals and extravagant appreciation of cunning, he came by rapid degrees to think less and less of right and wrong. At first he called the doings of the place dishonest; then he called them sharp practice; then he called them a little shady; then, close sailing; then he said this or that transaction was deuced clever; then, the man was more rogue than fool; then he laughed at the success of a vile trick; then he touched the pitch, and thinking all the time it was but with one finger, was presently besmeared all over—as was natural, for he who will touch is already smeared.

While Alexa was fighting his battles with herself he had thrown down his arms in the only battle worth fighting. When he wrote to her, which he did regularly, he said no more about business than that his prospects were encouraging; how much his reticence may have had to do with a sense of her disapproval I can not tell.



CHAPTER XV.

MOTHER AND DAUGHTER.

One lovely summer evening Dawtie, with a bundle in her hand, looked from the top of a grassy knoll down on her parents' turf cottage. The sun was setting behind her, and she looked as if she had stepped from it as it touched the ground on which she stood, rosy with the rosiness of the sun, but with a light in her countenance which came from a higher source, from the same nest as the sun himself. She paused but a moment, ran down the hill, and found her mother making the porridge. Mother and daughter neither embraced, nor kissed, nor even shook hands, but their faces glowed with delight, and words of joy and warmest welcome flowed between them.

"But ye haena lost yer place, hae ye, hinny?" said the mother.

"No, mother; there's no fear o' that, as lang's the laird or Miss Lexy's to the fore. They tret me—I winna say like ane o' themsel's, but as if they would hae likit me for ane o' themsel's, gien it had pleased the Lord to sen' me their way instead o' yours. They're that guid to me ye canna think!"

"Then what's broucht ye the day?"

"I beggit for a play-day. I wantit to see An'rew."

"Eh, lass! I'm feart for ye! Ye maunna set yer hert sae hie! An'rew's the best o' men, but a lass canna hae a man til hersel' jist 'cause he's the best man i' the warl'!"

"What mean ye by that, mother?" said Dawtie, looking a little scared. "Am I no' to lo'e An'rew, 'cause he's 'maist as guid's the Lord wad hae him? Wad ye hae me hate him for't? Has na he taught me to lo'e God—to lo'e Him better nor father, mither, An'rew, or onybody? I wull lo'e An'rew! What can ye mean, mother?"

"What I mean, Dawtie, is, that ye mamma think because ye lo'e him ye maun hae him; ye maunna think ye canna du wantin' An'rew!"

"It's true, mother, I kenna what I should do wantin' An'rew! Is na he aye shovin' the door o' the kingdom a wee wider to lat me see in the better? It's little ferly (marvel) I lo'e him! But as to wantin'him for my ain man, as ye hae my father!—mother, I wad be ashamet o' mysel' to think o' ony sic a thing!—clean affrontit wi' mysel' I wad be!"

"Weel, weel, bairn! Ye was aye a wise like lass, an' I maun lippen til ye! Only luik to yer hert."

"As for no' lo'ein' him, mither—me that canna luik at a blin' kittlin' ohn lo'ed it!—lo, mither! God made me sae, an didna mean me no' to lo'e An'rew!"

"Andrew!" she repeated, as if the word meant the perfection of earth's worthiest rendering the idea of appropriation too absurd.

Silence followed, but the mother was brooding.

"Ye maun bethink ye, lass, hoo far he's abune ye!" she said at length.

As the son of the farmer on whose land her husband was a cotter, Andrew seemed to her what the laird seemed to old John Ingram, and what the earl seemed to the laird, though the laird's family was ancient when the earl's had not been heard of. But Dawtie understood Andrew better than did her mother.

"You and me sees him far abune, mother, but Andrew himsel' never thinks o' nae sic things. He's sae used to luikin' up, he's forgotten to luik doon. He bauds his lan' frae a higher than the laird, or the yerl himsel'!"

The mother was silent. She was faithful and true, but, fed on the dried fish of logic and system and Roman legalism, she could not follow the simplicities of her daughter's religion, who trusted neither in notions about him, nor even in what he had done, but in the live Christ himself whom she loved and obeyed.

"If Andrew wanted to marry me," Dawtie went on, jealous for the divine liberty of her teacher, "which never cam intil's heid—na, no ance—the same bein' ta'en up wi' far ither things, it wouldna be because I was but a cotter lass that he wouldna tak his ain gait! But the morn's the Sabbath day, and we'll hae a walk thegither."

"I dinna a'thegither like thae walks upo' the Sabbath day," said the mother.

"Jesus walkit on the Sabbath the same as ony ither day, mother!"

"Weel, but He kenned what He was aboot!"

"And sae do I, mother! I ken His wull!"

"He had aye something on han' fit to be dune o' the Sabbath!"

"And so hae I the day, mother. If I was to du onything no fit i' this His warl', luikin' oot o' the e'en He gae me, wi' the han's an' feet He gae me, I wad jist deserve to be nippit oot at ance, or sent intil the ooter mirk (darkness)!"

"There's a mony maun fare ill then, lass!"

"I'm sayin' only for mysel'. I ken nane sae to blame as I would be mysel'."

"Is na that makin' yersel' oot better nor ither fowk, lass?"

"Gien I said I thoucht onything worth doin' but the wull o' God, I wad be a leear; gien I say man or woman has naething ither to do i' this warl' or the neist, I say it believin' ilkane o' them maun come til't at the lang last. Feow sees't yet, but the time's comin' when ilkabody will be as sure o' 't as I am. What won'er is't that I say't, wi' Jesus tellin' me the same frae mornin' to nicht!"

"Lass, lass, I fear me, ye'll gang oot o' yer min'!"

"It 'll be intil the mind o' Christ, then, mother! I dinna care for my ain min'. I hae nane o' my ain, an' will stick to His. Gien I dinna mak His mine, and stick til't, I'm lost! Noo, mother, I'll set the things, and run ower to the hoose, and lat An'rew ken I'm here!"

"As ye wull, lass! ye'r ayont me! I s' say naething anent a willfu' woman, for ye've been aye a guid dochter. I trust I hae risen to houp the Lord winna be disappointit in ye."

Dawtie found Andrew in the stable, suppering his horses, told him she had something to talk to him about, and asked if he would let her go with him in his walk the next day. Andrew was delighted to see her, but he did not say so; and she was back before her mother had taken the milk from the press. In a few minutes her father appeared, and welcomed her with a sober joy. As they eat their supper, he could not keep his eyes off her, she sat looking so well and nice and trim. He was a good-looking, work-worn man, his hands absolutely horny with labor. But inside many such horny husks are ripening beautiful kingdom hands, for the time when "dear welcome Death" will loose and let us go from the grave-clothes of the body that bind some of us even hand and foot. Rugged father and withered mother were beautiful in the eyes of Dawtie, and she and God saw them better than any other. Good, endless good was on the way to them all! It was so pleasant to be waiting for the best of all good things.



CHAPTER XVI.

ANDREW AND DAWTIE.

Dawtie slept in peace and happy dreams till the next morning, when she was up almost with the sun, and out in his low clear light. For the sun was strong again; the red labor and weariness were gone from his shining face. Everything about her seemed to know God, or at least to have had a moment's gaze upon Him. How else could everything look so content, hopeful and happy. It is the man who will not fall in with the Father's bliss to whom the world seems soulless and dull. Dawtie was at peace because she desired nothing but what she knew He was best pleased to give her. Even had she cherished for Andrew the kind of love her mother feared, her Lord's will would have been her comfort and strength. If any one say: "Then she could not know what love is!" I answer: "That person does not know what the better love is that lifts the being into such a serene air that it can fast from many things and yet be blessed beyond what any other granted desire could make it." The scent of the sweet-pease growing against the turf wall entered Dawtie's soul like a breath from the fields of heaven, where the children made merry with the angels, the merriest of playfellows, and the winds and waters, and all the living things, and all the things half alive, all the flowers and all the creatures, were at their sportive call; where the little ones had babies to play with, and did not hurt them, and where dolls were neither loved nor missed, being never thought of. Suchlike were the girl's imaginings as her thoughts went straying, inventing, discovering. She did not fear the Father would be angry with her for being His child, and playing at creation. Who, indeed, but one that in loving heart can make, can rightly love the making of the Maker!

When they had had their breakfast, and the old people were ready for church—where they would listen a little, sleep a little, sing heartily, and hear nothing to wake hunger, joy or aspiration, Dawtie put a piece of oat-cake in her pocket, and went to join Andrew where they had made their tryst and where she found him waiting—at his length in a bush of heather, with Henry Vaughan's "Silex Scintillans," drawing from it "bright shoots of everlastingness" for his Sabbath day's delight. He read one or two of the poems to Dawtie, who was pleased but not astonished—she was never astonished at anything; she had nothing in her to make anything beautiful by contrast; her mind was of beauty itself, and anything beautiful was to her but in the order and law of things—what was to be expected. Nothing struck her because of its rarity; the rare was at home in her country, and she was at home with it. When, for instance, he read: "Father of lights, what sunny seeds," she took it up at once and understood it, felt that the good man had said the thing that was to be said, and loved him for it. She was not surprised to hear that the prayer was more than two hundred years old; were there not millions of years in front? why should it be wonderful that a few years behind men should have thought and felt as she did, and been able to say it as she never could! Had she not always loved the little cocks, and watched them learning to crow?

"But, An'rew," she said at length, "I want to tell ye something that's troublin' me; then ye can learn me what ye like."

"Tell on, Dawtie," said Andrew; and she began.

"Ae nicht aboot a fornight ago, I couldna sleep. I drave a' the sheep I could gether i' my brain, ower ae stile efter anither, but the sleep stack to the woo' o' them, an' ilk ane took o' 't awa' wi' him. I wadna hae tried, but that I had to be up ear', and I was feared I wad sleep in."

For the sake of my more polished readers—I do not say more refined, for polish and refinement may be worlds apart—I will give the rest in modern English.

"So I got up, and thought to sweep and dust the hall and the stairs; then if, when I lay down again, I should sleep too long, there would be a part of the day's work done! You know, Andrew, what the house is like; at the top of the stair that begins directly you enter the house, there is a big irregular place, bigger than the floor of your barn, laid with flags. It is just as if all the different parts of the house had been built at different times round about it, and then it was itself roofed in by an after-thought. That's what we call the hall. The spare room opens on the left at the top of the stair, and to the right, across the hall, beyond the swell of the short thick tower you see the half of outside, is the door of the study. It is all round with books—some of them, mistress says, worth their weight in gold, they are so scarce. But the master trusts me to dust them. He used to do it himself; but now that he is getting old, he does not like the trouble, and it makes him asthmatic. He says books more need dusting than anything else, but are in more danger of being hurt by it, and it makes him nervous to see me touch them. I have known him stand an hour watching me while I dusted, looking all the time as if he had just taken a dose of medicine. So I often do a few books at a time, as I can, when he is not in the way to be worried with it. But he always knows where I have been with my duster and long-haired brush. And now it came across me that I had better dust some books first of all, as it was a good chance, he being sound asleep. So I lighted my lamp, went straight to the study, and began where I last left off.

"As I was dusting, one of the books I came to looked so new and different from the rest that I opened it to see what it was like inside. It was full of pictures of mugs, and gold and silver jugs and cups—some of them plain and some colored; and one of the colored ones was so beautiful that I stood and looked at it. It was a gold cup, I suppose, for it was yellow; and all round the edge, and on the sides, it was set with stones, like the stones in mistress's rings, only much bigger. They were blue and red and green and yellow, and more colors than I can remember. The book said it was made by somebody, but I forget his name. It was a long name. The first part of it began with a B, and the second with a C, I remember that much. It was like Benjamin, but it wasn't Benjamin. I put it back in its place, thinking I would ask the master whether there really were such beautiful things, and took down the next. Now whether that had been passed over between two batches I don't know, but it was so dusty that before I would touch another I gave the duster a shake, and the wind of it blew the lamp out I took it up to take it to the kitchen and kindle it again, when, to my astonishment, I saw a light under the door of a press which was always locked, and where master said he kept his most precious books. 'How strange!' I thought; 'a light inside a locked cupboard!' Then I remembered how in one place where I had been there was, in a room over the stable, a press whose door had no fastening except a bolt on the inside, which set me thinking, and some terrible things came to me that made me remember it. So now I said to myself: 'There's some one in there, after master's books!' It was not a likely thing, but the night is the time for fancies, and in the night you don't know what is likely and what is not. One thing, however, was clear—I ought to find out what the light meant. Fearful things darted one after the other through my head as I went to the door, but there was one thing I dared not do, and that was to leave it unopened. So I opened it as softly as I could, in terror lest the thief should hear my heart beating. When I could peep in what do you think I saw? I could not believe my eyes! There was a great big room! I rubbed my eyes, and stared; and rubbed them again and stared—thinking to rub it away; but there it was, a big odd-shaped room, part of it with round sides, and in the middle of the room a table, and on the table a lamp, burning as I had never seen lamp burn, and master at the table with his back to me. I was so astonished I forgot that I had no business there, and ought to go away. I stood like an idiot, mazed and lost. And you will not wonder when I tell you that the laird was holding up to the light, between his two hands, the very cup I had been looking at in the book, the stones of it flashing all the colors of the rainbow. I should think it a dream, if I did not know it was not. I do not believe I made any noise, for I could not move, but he started up with a cry to God to preserve him, set the cup on the table, threw something over it, caught up a wicked-looking knife, and turned round. His face was like that of a corpse, and I could see him tremble. I stood steady; it was no time then to turn away. I supposed he expected to see a robber, and would be glad when he discovered it was only me; but when he did his fear changed to anger, and he came at me. His eyes were flaming, and he looked as if he would kill me. I was not frightened—poor old man, I was able for him any day!—but I was afraid of hurting him. So I closed the door quickly, and went softly to my own room, where I stood a long time in the dark, listening, but heard nothing more. What am I to do, Andrew?"

"I don't know that you have to do anything. You have one thing not to do, that is—tell anybody what you have seen."

"I was forced to tell you because I did not know what to do. It makes me so sorry!"

"It was no fault of yours. You acted to the best of your knowledge, and could not help what came of it. Perhaps nothing more will come. Leave the thing alone, and if he say anything tell him how it happened."

"But, Andrew, I don't think you see what it is that troubles me. I am afraid my master is a miser. The mistress and he take their meals, like poor people, in the kitchen. That must be the dining-room of the house!—and though my eyes were tethered to the flashing cup, I could not help seeing it was full of strange and beautiful things. Among them, I knew, by pictures I had seen, the armor of knights, when they fought on their horses' backs. Before people had money they must have misered other things. Some girls miser their clothes, and never go decent!"

"Suppose him a miser," said Andrew, "what could you do? How are you to help it?"

"That's what I want to know. I love my master, and there must be a way to help it. It was terrible to see him, in the middle of the night, gazing at that cup as if he had found the most precious thing that can ever have existed on the earth."

"What was that?" asked Andrew.

He delighted in Dawtie's talk. It was like an angel's, he said, both in its ignorance and its wisdom.

"You can't have forgotten, Andrew. It's impossible!" she answered. "I heard you say yourself!"

Andrew smiled.

"I know," he said.

"Poor man!" resumed Dawtie; "he looked at the cup as you might at that manuscript! His soul was at it, feasting upon it! Now wasn't that miserly?"

"It was like it."

"And I love my master," repeated Dawtie, thus putting afresh the question what she was to do.

"Why do you love him, Dawtie?" asked Andrew.

"Because I'm set to love him. Besides, we're told to love our enemies—then surely we're to love our friends. He has always been a friend to me. He never said a hard word to me, even when I was handling his books. He trusts me with them! I can't help loving him—a good deal, Andrew! And it's what I've got to do!"

"There's not a doubt about it, Dawtie. You've got to love him, and you do love him!"

"But there's more than that, Andrew. To hear the laird talk you would think he cared more for the Bible than for the whole world—not to say gold cups. He talks of the merits of the Saviour, that you would think he loved Him with all his heart. But I can not get it out of my mind, ever since I saw that look on his face, that he loves that cup—that it's his graven image—his idol! How else should he get up in the middle of the night to—to—to—well, it was just like worshiping it."

"You're afraid then that he's a hypocrite, Dawtie!"

"No; I daren't think that—if it were only for fear I should stop loving him—and that would be as bad!"

"As bad as what, Dawtie?"

"I don't always know what I'm going to say," answered Dawtie, a little embarrassed, "and then when I've said it I have to look what it means. But isn't it as bad not to love a human being as it would be to love a thing?"

"Perhaps worse," said Andrew.

"Something must be done!" she went on. "He can't be left like that! But if he has any love to his Master, how is it that the love of that Master does not cast out the love of Mammon? I can't understand it."

"You have asked a hard question, Dawtie. But a cure may be going on, and take a thousand years or ages to work it out."

"What if it shouldn't be begun yet."

"That would be terrible."

"What then am I to do, Andrew? You always say we must do something! You say there is no faith but what does something!"

"The apostle James said so, a few years before I was born, Dawtie!"

"Don't make fun of me—please, Andrew! I like it, but I can't bear it to-day, my head is so full of the poor old laird!"

"Make fun of you, Dawtie! Never! But I don't know yet how to answer you."

"Well, then, what am I to do?" persisted Dawtie.

"Wait, of course, till you know what to do. When you don't know what to do, don't do anything—only keep asking the Thinker for wisdom. And until you know, don't let the laird see that you know anything."

With this answer Dawtie was content.

Business was over, and they turned to go home.



CHAPTER XVII.

DAWTIE AND THE CUP.

The old man had a noteworthy mental fabric. Believing himself a true lover of literature, and especially of poetry, he would lecture for ten minutes on the right mode of reading a verse in Hilton or Dante; but as to Satan or Beatrice, would pin his faith to the majority of the commentators: Milton's Satan was too noble, and Beatrice was no woman, but Theology. He was discriminative to a degree altogether admirable as to the brightness or wrongness of a proposition with regard to conduct, but owed his respectability to good impulses without any effort of the will. He was almost as orthodox as Paul before his conversion, lacking only the heart and the courage to persecute. Whatever the eternal wisdom saw in him, the thing most present to his own consciousness was the love of rare historic relics. And this love was so mingled in warp and woof, that he did not know whether a thing was more precious to him for its rarity, its money value, or its historico-reliquary interest. All the time he was a school-master, he saved every possible half-penny to buy books, not because of their worth or human interest, but because of their literary interest, or the scarcity of the book or edition. In the holidays he would go about questing for the prey that his soul loved, hunting after precious things; but not even the precious things of the everlasting hills would be precious to him until they had received the stamp of curiosity. His life consisted in a continual search for something new that was known as known of old. It had hardly yet occurred to him that he must one day leave his things and exist without them, no longer to brood over them, take them in his hands, turn, and stroke, and admire them; yet, strange to say, he would at times anxiously seek to satisfy himself that he was safe for a better world, as he called it—to feel certain, that is, that his faith was of the sort he supposed intended by Paul—not that he had himself gathered anything from the apostle, but all from the traditions of his church concerning the teaching of the apostle. He was anxious, I say, as to his safety for the world to come, and yet, while his dearest joy lay treasured in that hidden room, he never thought of the hour when he must leave it all, and go houseless and pocketless, empty-handed if not armless, in the wide, closetless space, hearing ever in the winds and the rain and the sound of the sea-waves, the one question—"Whose shall those things be which thou hast provided?" Like the rich man to whom God said the words, he had gathered much goods for many years—hundreds and hundreds of things, every one of which he knew, and every one of which he loved. A new scratch on the bright steel of one of his suits of armor was a scratch on his heart; the moth and the rust troubled him sore, for he could not keep them away; and where his treasure was, there was his heart, devoured by the same moth, consumed by the same rust. He had much suffering from his possessions—was more exposed to misery than the miser of gold, for the hoarded coin of the latter may indeed be stolen, but he fears neither moth nor rust nor scratch nor decay. The laird cherished his things as no mother her little ones. Nearly sixty years he had been gathering them, and their money-worth was great, but he had no idea of its amount, for he could not have endured the exposure and handling of them which a valuation must involve.

His love for his books had somewhat declined in the growth of his love for things, and now, by degrees not very slow, his love for his things was graduating itself after what he supposed their money-value. His soul not only clave to the dust but was going deeper and deeper in the dust as it wallowed. All day long he was living in the past and growing old in it—it is one thing to grow old in the past, and another to grow old in the present! As he took his walk about his farms, or sat at his meals, or held a mild, soulless conversation with his daughter, his heart was growing old, not healthily in the present, which is to ripen, but unwholesomely in the past, which is to consume with a dry rot. While he read the Bible at prayers, trying hard to banish worldly things from his mind, his thoughts were not in the story or the argument he read, but hovering, like a bird over its nest, about the darlings of his heart. Yea, even while he prayed, his soul, instead of casting off the clay of the world, was loaded and dragged down with all the still-moldering, slow-changing things that lined the walls and filled the drawers and cabinets of his treasure-chamber. It was a place of whose existence not even his daughter knew; for before ever she entered the house, he had taken with him a mason from the town, and built up the entrance to it from the hall, ever afterward keeping the other door of it that opened from his study carefully locked, and leaving it to be regarded as the door of a closet.

It was as terrible as Dawtie felt it, that a live human soul should thus haunt the sepulcher of the past, and love the lifeless, turning a room hitherto devoted to hospitality and mirthful intercourse into the temple of his selfish idolatry. It was as one of the rooms carved for the dead in the Beban El Malook. Sure, if left to himself, the ghost that loved it would haunt the place! But he could not surely be permitted! for it might postpone a thousand years his discovery of the emptiness of a universe of such treasures. Now he was moldering into the world of spirits in the heart of an avalanche of the dust of ages, dust material from his hoards, dust moral and spiritual from his withering soul itself.

The next day he was ill, which, common as is illness to humanity, was strange, for it had never befallen him before. He was unable to leave his bed. But he never said a word to his daughter, who alone waited on him, as to what had happened in the night. He had passed it sleepless, and without the possibility of a dream on which to fall back; yet, when morning came, he was in much doubt whether what he had seen—the face, namely, of Dawtie, peeping in at the door—was a reality, or but a vision of the night. For when he opened the door which she had closed, all was dark, and not the slightest sound reached his quick ear from the swift foot of her retreat. He turned the key twice, and pushed two bolts, eager to regard the vision as a providential rebuke of his carelessness in leaving the door on the latch—for the first time, he imagined. Then he tottered back to his chair, and sunk on it in a cold sweat. For, although the confidence grew, that what he had seen was but

a false creation Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain,

it was far from comfortable to feel that he could no longer depend upon his brain to tell him only the thing that was true. What if he were going out of his mind, on the way to encounter a succession of visions—without reality, but possessed of its power! What if they should be such whose terror would compel him to disclose what most he desired to keep covered? How fearful to be no more his own master, but at the beck and call of a disordered brain, a maniac king in a cosmos acosmos! Better it had been Dawtie, and she had seen in his hands Benvenuto Cellini's chalice made for Pope Clement the Seventh to drink therefrom the holy wine—worth thousands of pounds! Perhaps she had seen it! No, surely she had not! He must be careful not to make her suspect! He would watch her and say nothing!

But Dawtie, conscious of no wrong, and full of love to the old man, showed an untroubled face when next she met him; and he made up his mind that he would rather have her ignorant. Thenceforward, naturally though childishly, he was even friendlier to her than before: it was so great a relief to find that he had not to fear her!

The next time Dawtie was dusting the books, she felt strongly drawn to look again at the picture of the cup: it seemed now to hold in it a human life! She took down the book, and began where she stood to read what it said about the chalice, referring as she read from letterpress to drawing. It was taken from an illumination in a missal, where the cup was known to have been copied; and it rendered the description in the letterpress unnecessary except in regard to the stones and dessins repousses on the hidden side. She quickly learned the names of the gems, that she might see how many were in the high-priest's breast-plate and the gates of the new Jerusalem, then proceeded to the history of the chalice. She read that it had come into the possession of Cardinal York, the brother of Charles Edward Stuart, and had been by him intrusted to his sister-in-law, the Duchess of Albany, from whose house it disappeared, some said stolen, others said sold. It came next to the historic surface in the possession of a certain earl whose love of curiosities was well known; but from his collection again it vanished, this time beyond a doubt stolen, and probably years before it was missed.

A new train of thought was presently in motion in the mind of the girl: The beautiful cup was stolen! it was not where it ought to be! it was not at home! it was a captive, a slave! She lowered the book, half closed, with a finger between the leaves, and stood thinking. She did not for a moment believe her master had stolen it, though the fear did flash through her mind. It had been stolen and sold, and he had bought it at length of some one whose possession of it was nowise suspicious! But he must know now that it had been stolen, for here, with the cup, was the book which said so! That would be nothing if the rightful owner were not known, but he was known, and the thing ought to be his! The laird might not be bound, she was not sure, to restore it at his own loss, for when he bought it he was not aware that it was stolen; but he was bound to restore it at the price he had paid for it, if the former owner would give it! This was bare justice! mere righteousness! No theft could make the owner not the rightful owner, though other claims upon the thing might come in! One ought not to be enriched by another's misfortune! Dawtie was sure that a noble of the kingdom of heaven would not wait for the money, but would with delight send the cup where it ought to have been all the time! She knew better, however, than require magnificence in any shape from the poor wizened soul of her master—a man who knew all about everything, and whom yet she could not but fear to be nothing: as Dawtie had learned to understand life, the laird did not yet exist. But he well knew right from wrong, therefore the discovery she just made affected her duty toward him! It might be impossible to make impression on the miserliness of a miser, but upon the honesty in a miser it might be possible! The goblet was not his!

But the love of things dulls the conscience, and he might not be able, having bought and paid for it, to see that the thing was not therefore his! he might defend himself from seeing it! To Dawtie, this made the horror of his condition the darker. She was one of God's babes, who can not help seeing the true state of things. Logic was to her but the smoke that rose from the burning truth; she saw what is altogether above and beyond logic—the right thing, whose meanest servant, the hewer of its wood, not the drawer of its water, the merest scullion and sweeper away of lies from the pavement of its courts, is logic.

With a sigh she woke to the knowledge that she was not doing her work, and rousing herself, was about to put the book on its shelf. But, her finger being still in the place, she would have one more glance at the picture! To her dismay she saw that she had made a mark on the plate, and of the enormity of making a dirty mark on a book her master had made her well aware.

She was in great distress. What was to be done? She did not once think of putting it away and saying nothing. To have reasoned that her master would never know, would have been an argument, pressing and imperative, for informing him at once. She had done him an injury, and the injury must be confessed and lamented; it was all that was left to be done! "Sic a mischance!" she said, then bethought herself that there was no such thing as mischance, when immediately it flashed upon her that here was the door open for the doing of what was required of her. She was bound to confess the wrong, and that would lead in the disclosure of what she knew, rendering it comparatively easy to use some remonstrance with the laird, whom in her mind's eye she saw like a beggar man tottering down a steep road to a sudden precipice. Her duty was now so plain that she felt no desire to consult Andrew. She was not one to ask an opinion for the sake of talking opinion; she went to Andrew only when she wanted light to do the right thing; when the light was around her, she knew how to walk, and troubled no one.

At once she laid down book and duster, and went to find the laird. But he had slipped away to the town, to have a rummage in a certain little shop in a back street, which he had not rummaged for a long time enough, he thought, to have let something come in. It was no relief to Dawtie: the thing would be all the day before her instead of behind her! It burned within her, not like a sin, but like what it was, a confession unconfessed. Little wrong as she had done, Dawtie was yet familiar with the lovely potency of confession to annihilate it. She knew it was the turning from wrong that killed it, that confession gave the coup de grace to offense. Still she dreaded not a little the displeasure of her master, and yet she dreaded more his distress.

She prepared the laird's supper with a strange mingling of hope and anxiety: she feared having to go to bed without telling him. But he came at last, almost merry, with a brown paper parcel under his arm, over which he was very careful. Poor man, he little knew there waited him at the moment a demand from the eternal justice almost as terrible as: "This night they require thy soul of thee!"—(What a they is that! Who are they?)—The torture of the moral rack was ready for him at the hands of his innocent house-maid! In no way can one torture another more than by waking conscience against love, passion, or pride.

He laid his little parcel carefully on the supper-table, said rather a shorter grace than usual, began to eat his porridge, praised it as very good, spoke of his journey and whom he had seen, and was more talkative than his wont He informed Alexa, almost with jubilation, that he had at length found an old book he had been long on the watch for—a book that treated, in ancient broad Scots, of the laws of verse, in full, even exhaustive manner. He pulled it from his pocket.

"It is worth at least ten times what I gave for it!" he said.

Dawtie wondered whether there ought not to have been some division of the difference; but she was aware of no call to speak. One thing was enough for one night!

Then came prayers. The old man read how David deceived the Philistines, telling them a falsehood as to his raids. He read the narrative with a solemnity of tone that would have graced the most righteous action: was it not the deed of a man according to God's own heart?—how could it be other than right! Casuist ten times a week, he made no question of the righteousness of David's wickedness! Then he prayed, giving thanks for the mercy that had surrounded them all the day, shielding them from the danger and death which lurked for them in every corner. What would he say when death did get him? Dawtie thought. Would he thank God then? And would he see, when she spoke to him, that God wanted to deliver him from a worse danger than any out-of-doors? Would he see that it was from much mercy he was made more uncomfortable than perhaps ever in his life before?

At length his offering was completed—how far accepted who can tell! He was God's, and He who gave him being would be his Father to the full possibility of God. They rose from their knees; the laird took up his parcel and book; his daughter went with him.



CHAPTER XVIII.

DAWTIE AND THE LAIRD.

As soon as Dawtie heard her mistress's door close, she followed her master to the study, and arrived just as the door of the hidden room was shut behind him. There was not a moment to be lost! She went straight to it, and knocked rather loud. No answer came. She knocked again. Still there was no answer. She knocked a third time, and after a little fumbling with the lock, the door opened a chink, and a ghastly face, bedewed with drops of terror, peeped through. She was standing a little back, and the eyes did not at once find the object they sought; then suddenly they lighted on her, and the laird shook from head to foot.

"What is it, Dawtie?" he faltered out in a broken voice.

"Please, sir," answered Dawtie, "I have something to confess: would ye hearken to me?"

"No, no, Dawtie! I am sure you have nothing to confess!" returned the old man, eager to send her away, and to prevent her from seeing the importance of the room whose entrance she had discovered. "Or," he went on, finding she did not move, "if you have done anything, Dawtie, that you ought not to have done, confess it to God. It is to Him you must confess, not to a poor mortal like me! For my part, if it lies to me, I forgive you, and there is an end! Go to your bed, Dawtie."

"Please, sir, I canna. Gien ye winna hear til me, I'll sit doon at the door o' this room, and sit till—"

"What room, Dawtie? Call you this a room? It's a wee bit closet where I say my prayers before I go to bed."

But as he spoke his blood ran cold within him, for he had uttered a deliberate lie—two lies in one breath: the bit closet was the largest room in the house, and he had never prayed a prayer in it since first he entered it! He was unspeakably distressed at what he had done, for he had always cherished the idea that he was one who would not lie to save his life. And now in his old age he had lied who when a boy had honor enough to keep him from lying! Worst of all, now that he had lied, he must hold to the lie! He dared not confess it! He stood sick and trembling.

"I'll wait, sir," said Dawtie, distressed at his suffering, and more distressed that he could lie who never forgot his prayers! Alas, he was further down the wrong road than she had supposed!

Ashamed for his sake, and also for her own, to look him in the face—for did he not imagine she believed him, while she knew that he lied?—she turned her back on him. He caught at his advantage, glided out, and closed the door behind him. When Dawtie again turned, she saw him in her power.

Her trial was come; she had to speak for life or death! But she remembered that the Lord told His disciples to take no care how they should speak; for when the time came it would be given them to speak. So she began by simply laying down the thing that was in her hand.

"Sir," she said, "I am very sorry, but this morning I made a dirty mark in one of your books!"

Her words alarmed him a little, and made him forget for the instant his more important fears. But he took care to be gentle with her; it would not do to offend her! for was she not aware that where they stood was a door by which he went in and out?

"You make me uneasy, Dawtie!" he said. "What book was it? Let me see it."

"I will, sir."

She turned to take it down, but the laird followed her, saying:

"Point it out to me, Dawtie. I will get it."

She did so. It opened at the plate.

"There is the mark!" she said. "I am right sorry."

"So am I!" returned the laird. "But," he added, willing she should feel his clemency, and knowing the book was not a rare one, "it is a book still, and you will be more careful another time! For you must remember, Dawtie, that you don't come into this room to read the books, but to dust them. You can go to bed now with an easy mind, I hope!"

Dawtie was so touched by the kindness and forbearance of her master that the tears rose in her eyes, and she felt strengthened for her task. What would she not have encountered for his deliverance!

"Please, sir," she said, "let me show you a thing you never perhaps happened to read!" And taking the book from his hand—he was too much astonished to retain it—she turned over the engraving, and showed him the passage which stated that the cup had disappeared from the possession of its owner, and had certainly been stolen.

Finding he said not a word, she ventured to lift her eyes to his, and saw again the corpse-like face that had looked through the chink of the door.

"What do you mean?" he stammered. "I do not understand!"

His lips trembled: was it possible he had had to do with the stealing of it?

The truth was this: he had learned the existence of the cup from this very book; and had never rested until, after a search of more than ten years, he at length found it in the hands of a poor man who dared not offer it for sale. Once in his possession, the thought of giving it up, or of letting the owner redeem it, had never even occurred to him. Yet the treasure made him rejoice with a trembling which all his casuistry would have found it hard to explain; for he would not confess to himself its real cause—namely, that his God-born essence was uneasy with a vague knowledge that it lay in the bosom of a thief. "Don't you think, sir," said Dawtie, "that whoever has that cup ought to send it back to the place it was stolen from?"

Had the old man been a developed hypocrite, he would have replied at once: "He certainly ought." But by word of mouth to condemn himself would have been to acknowledge to himself that he ought to send the cup home, and this he dared not do. Men who will not do as they know, make strange confusion in themselves. The worst rancor in the vessel of peace is the consciousness of wrong in a not all-unrighteous soul. The laird was false to his own self, but to confess himself false would be to initiate a change which would render life worthless to him! What would all his fine things be without their heart of preciousness, the one jewel that now was nowhere in the world but in his house, in the secret chamber of his treasures, which would be a rifled case without it! As is natural to one who will not do right, he began to argue the moral question, treating it as a point of casuistry that troubled the mind of the girl.

"I don't know that, Dawtie!" he said. "It is not likely that the person that has the cup, whoever he may be—that is, if the cup be still in existence—is the same who stole it; and it would hardly be justice to punish the innocent for the guilty?—as would be the case, if, supposing I had bought the cup, I had to lose the money I paid for it. Should the man who had not taken care of his cup have his fault condoned at my expense? Did he not deserve, the many might say, to be so punished, placing huge temptation in the path of the needy, to the loss of their precious souls, and letting a priceless thing go loose in the world, to work ruin to whoever might innocently buy it?"

His logic did not serve to show him the falsehood of his reasoning, for his heart was in the lie. "Ought I or he," he went on, "to be punished because he kept the thing ill? And how far would the quixotic obligation descend? A score of righteous men may by this time have bought and sold the cup!—is it some demon-talisman, that the last must meet the penalty, when the original owner, or some descendant of the man who lost it, chooses to claim it? For anything we know, he may himself have pocketed the price of the rumored theft! Can you not see it would be a flagrant injustice?—fit indeed to put an end to all buying and selling! It would annihilate transfer of property! Possession would mean only strength to keep, and the world would fall into confusion."

"It would be hard, I grant," confessed Dawtie; "but the man who has it ought at least to give the head of the family in which it had been the chance of buying it back at the price it cost him. If he could not buy it back—then the thing would have to be thought over."

"I confess I don't see the thing," returned the laird. "But the question needs not keep you out of bed, Dawtie! It is not often a girl in your position takes an interest in the abstract! Besides," he resumed, another argument occurring to him, "a thing of such historical value and interest ought to be where it was cared for, not where it was in danger every moment."

"There might be something in that," allowed Dawtie, "if it were where everybody could see it. But where is the good if it be but for the eyes of one man?"

The eyes she meant fixed themselves upon her till their gaze grew to a stony stare. She must know that he had it! Or did she only suspect? He must not commit himself! He must set a watch on the door of his lips! What an uncomfortable girl to have in the house! Oh, those self-righteous Ingrams! What mischief they did! His impulse was to dart into his treasure-cave, lock himself in, and hug the radiant chalice. He dared not. He must endure instead the fastidious conscience and probing tongue of an intrusive maid-servant!

"But," he rejoined, with an attempt at a smile, "if the pleasure the one man took in it should, as is easy to imagine, exceed immeasurably the aggergate pleasure of the thousands that would look upon it and pass it by—what then?"

"The man would enjoy it the more that many saw it—except he loved it for greed, when he would be rejoicing in iniquity, for the cup would not be his. And anyhow, he could not take it with him when he died!"

The face of the miser grew grayer; his lip trembled; but he said nothing. He was beginning to hate Dawtie. She was an enemy! She sought his discomfiture, his misery! He had read strange things in certain old books, and half believed some of them: what if Dawtie was one of those evil powers that haunt a man in pleasant shape, learn the secrets of his heart, and gain influence over him that they may tempt him to yield his soul to the enemy! She was set on ruining him! Certainly she knew that cup was in his possession! He must temporize! He must seem to listen! But as soon as fit reason could be found, such as would neither compromise him nor offend her, she must be sent away! And of all things, she must not gain the means of proving what she now perhaps only suspected, and was seeking assurance of! He stood thinking. It was but for a moment; for the very next words from the lips of the girl that was to him little more than a house-broom, set him face to face with reality—the one terror of the unreal.

"Eh, maister, sir," said Dawtie, with the tears in her eyes, and now at last breaking down in her English, "dinna ye ken 'at ye hae to gie the man 'at aucht that gowden bicker, the chance o' buyin' 't back?"

The laird shivered. He dared not say: "How do you know?" for he dared not hear the thing proved to him. If she did know, he would not front her proof! He would not have her even suppose it an acknowledged fact!

"If I had the cup," he began—but she interrupted him: it was time they should have done with lying!

"Ye ken ye hae the cup, sir!" she said. "And I ken tu, for I saw 't i' yer han's!"

"You shameless, prying hussy!" he began, in a rage at last—but the eager, tearful earnestness of her face made him bethink himself: it would not do to make an enemy of her! "Tell me, Dawtie," he said, with sudden change of tone, "how it was you came to see it."

She told him all—how and when; and he knew that he had seen her see him.

He managed to give a poor little laugh.

"All is not gold that glitters, Dawtie!" he said. "The cup you saw was not the one in the book, but an imitation of it—mere gilded tin and colored glass—copied from the picture, as near as they could make it—just to see better what it must have been like. Why, my good girl, that cup would be worth thousands of pounds! So go to bed, and don't trouble yourself about gold cups. It is not likely any of them will come our way!"

Simple as Dawtie was, she did not believe him. But she saw no good to be done by disputing what he ought to know.

"It wasna aboot the gold cup I was troublin' mysel'!" she said, hesitatingly.

"You are right there!" he replied, with another deathly laugh, "it was not! But you have been troubling me about nothing half the night, and I am shivering with cold! We really must, both of us, go to bed! What would your mistress say!"

"No," persisted Dawtie, "it wasna aboot the cup, gowd or no gowd; it was and is aboot my maister I'm troubled! I'm terrible feart for ye, sir! Ye're a worshiper o' Mammon, sir!"

The laird laughed, for the danger was over!—to Dawtie's deep dismay he laughed!

"My poor girl," he said, "you take an innocent love of curious things for the worship of Mammon! Don't imagine me jesting. How could you believe an old man like me, an elder of the kirk, a dispenser of her sacred things, guilty of the awful crime of Mammon worship?"

He imagined her ignorantly associating the idea of some idolatrous ritual with what to him was but a phrase—the worship of Mammon. "Do you not remember," he continued, "the words of Christ, that a man can not serve God and Mammon? If I be a Christian, as you will hardly doubt, it follows that I am not a worshiper of Mammon, for the two can not go together."

"But that's just the question, sir! A man who worships God, worships Him with his whole heart and soul and strength and mind. If he wakes at night, it is to worship God; if he is glad in his heart, it is because God is, and one day he shall behold His face in brightness. If a man worships God, he loves Him so that no love can come between him and God; if the earth were removed, and the mountains cast into the midst of the sea, it would be all one to him, for God would be all the same. Is it not so, sir?"

"You are a good girl, Dawtie, and I approve of every word you say. It would more than savor of presumption to profess that I loved God up to the point you speak of; but I deserve to love Him. Doubtless a man ought to love God so, and we are all sinners just because we do not love God so. But we have the atonement!"

"But, sir," answered Dawtie, the silent tears running down her face, "I love God that way! I don't care a dust for anything without Him! When I go to bed, I don't care if I never wake again in this world; I shall be where He would have me!"

"You presume, Dawtie! I fear me much you presume! What if that should be in hell?"

"If it be, it will be the best. It will be to set me right. Oh, sir, He is so good! Tell me one thing, sir: when you die—"

"Tut, tut, lass! we're not come to that yet! There's no occasion 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.