Chapter II (3)

Often we are reminded of Scriptural proverbs and aphorisms. “Nothing unheard of in the world” sounds Solomonian enough; while “Out with the eye that profits me not,” “The negro does not whiten with washing,” and “That which thou sowest, that also shalt thou reap,” are strikingly like New Testament teaching. Again and again we find expressed in other words lessons of charity, considerateness, and justice, that would not be unworthy of a Christian teacher, as, “The stranger’s prayer is heard;” “The heart’s testimony is stronger than a thousand witnesses;” “Among the blind, close your eyes;” “In truth is right;” “Justice is half religion;” “Neighbor’s right, God’s right.”

The heading under which, perhaps, the largest number of proverbs can be grouped, is that of opportune speech and silence. If the Turk, as has been said, talks well, he also knows how to hold his tongue. He looks down with the greatest contempt on the idle chatterer, and does not even think that good-manners require him to make small-talk when he has nothing to say. In fact, when on a visit to a well-bred Turk, with whom you have no common subjects of interest to discuss, after exhausting those suggested by politeness—his health, your own, that of your family, the weather, and the water (a most interesting topic in the East)—you may safely fall back upon that golden silence which their proverb, like ours, rates above silver speech. Hear his comments on the chatterer:—“There is no ass but brays;” “The dog barks, the caravan passes;” “Fool is he who alone talks, and is his only listener;” “The fool wears his heart on his tongue, the wise man keeps his tongue in his heart;” and “Many words, an unsound heart.” He warns us of the mischief of evil-speaking,—“The knife’s wound heals, the tongue’s never;” “The tongue slays more than the sword;” and “The tongue is boneless, but it breaks bones.” Again, he feels keenly the danger of free speech under a corrupt and despotic rule; while he extols honesty and good-faith, and generally condemns lying. The latter is condoned in certain cases, for “Some lies are better than truth,” and we may “Lie, but with measure.” The _suppressio veri_ is even strongly recommended, for is not the “truth-teller banished out of nine cities?” while “He who holds his tongue saves his head,” and “There is no better answer than this, ‘I know not, I saw not.’”

But to turn to something pleasanter, we will quote a few sayings still familiar in our Turk’s mouth, which have survived the corruption of the Palace and official Kings, and seem still to breathe the hardy and independent spirit of the old days, when courage and enterprise were the only passports to the highest places in a conquering empire. Then it could be said that “The horse is to him who mounts, the sword to him who girds it on,” “The brave man’s word is a coat of mail,” “Fortune is not far from the brave man’s head,” “The hero is known on the battle-field,” and “Fear not to-morrow’s mischance.” Who but a conquering race could have produced such a proverb as “Power on my head, or the raven on my corpse;” and who can fail to hear a true ring in “Peasant erect is taller than noble on bended knee,” or “I am the slave of him who regards me; the king of him who disregards me?”

Almsgiving is creditable, for “The hand which gives is above that which takes;” and it offers temporal advantages as well as spiritual. In this world “No one cuts the hand that gives,” and “What thou givest that shalt thou take with thee” [to the next]. But beware of accepting alms or favors if you would keep your self-respect, and “Accept the largess of thy friend as if thou wert an enemy.”

Great is the power of wealth; “Even the mountains fear the rich man.” It covers a multitude of failings, and averts many ills. “If a man’s money is white, no matter if his face be black.” “The knife cuts not hand of gold.” But then the disadvantages and dangers of it in a land where empty treasuries are filled by the suppression of a few rich men, and the confiscation of their property! Truly the _vacuus viator_ has the better part where brigands swarm. “Not even a thousand men in armor can strip a naked man.” Our Turk is a man of few wants,—pilaff, coffee, and tobacco are enough for him, and so he will rest contented in the “Health that is better than fortune,” sagely reflecting that “A big head has a big ache,” that “He who has many vineyards has many cares,” and congratulating himself if he can say, “My money is little, my head without strife.” He is not likely to make a fortune in business, being destitute of the enterprise, as well as of the sharpness and hardness, necessary to success. “The bazaar knows neither father nor mother,” and our easy-going friend has a great regard for these domestic ties. Besides, his religion forbids him either to speculate or to put out money at interest, although he sometimes avoids this prohibition by the clumsy expedient of a fictitious sale, or a “present” taken by the lender.

It is a pity that his rulers should not have profited by his experiences of debt. “Poor without debts is better than Prince,” “A thousand cares do not pay one debt,” and “Creditors have better memories than debtors,” are explicit enough, but, perhaps, were not supposed to apply to Government loans.

We find some sound advice on the subject of friendship. Do not expect your friend to be a paragon,—“Who seeks a faultless friend, rests friendless.” But when you have found him, keep him,—“Old friend, old bath,” you will do better to change neither; and if he is “a true friend, he is better than a relation.” On the other hand, avoid the British error of underrating your foe; he is always dangerous. “Water sleeps, the enemy wakes,” and “Be thine enemy an ant, see in him an elephant,” for “A thousand friends are few, one foe many.”

The references to woman are as ungallant as they are unjust. She is to be treated as a child, and as such contemptuously pardoned for her shortcomings. “You should lecture neither child nor woman;” it would be waste of time. Her intelligence, too, is underrated, “her hair is long, her wits short!” It is she who as a mother “makes the house, and mars it,” and she is classed with good wine as “a sweet poison.” But it must be admitted that in this want of gallantry the Turk is far surpassed by the Persian, who says “The dog is faithful, woman never.”

The lover is regarded as a lunatic, unfit for the society of his fellows. “If you are in love, fly to the mountains,” for “Lover and king brook no companion.” He is “blind,” and distance is nothing to him; for him, “Bagdad is not far,” and the only cures for his malady are “travel and patience.”

A word of advice to those about to marry. “Marry below you, but do not marry your daughter above you;” and “Choose cloth by its edge, and a wife by her mother.” It is natural that we should find many references to that submission which is at the root of Islam. Sometimes we find the idea without reference to the Deity, as in the cases, “When fate comes the eye of wisdom is blind,” “No one eats another’s destined portion,” and “What will come, will come, willy nilly;” but more often he is directly invoked. His will is fate, “Whom he slays not, man slays not,” “Who calls on Him is not abandoned,” “He delays, but neglects not,” provides for the helpless and “builds the blind bird’s nest;” and so we should address ourselves to Him, “asking God for what we want, not his servant.” If you apply to the latter, you may be disappointed. Even the minister of religion is chary of his assistance. “Food from the Imam’s house, tears from the dead man’s eye,”—you are as likely to get one as the other. Sometimes, too, we meet with a small touch of scepticism, as when we are told, “First tie-up your donkey, _then_ recommend him to God;” and sometimes a cry of black despair, “Happiest he who dies in the cradle.”

Let us conclude this hasty sketch with a few miscellaneous proverbs, remarkable for point or picturesqueness. “The fish stinks from the head” is often quoted in these days of Ottoman decay, in allusion to the bad example which comes from above. We have heard the incapacity for action which is engendered in Turkish rulers by the enforced seclusion of their youth commented on with “Who stays at home, loses his cap in the crowd.” The difficulties of equality,—“You are master, and I am master; who will groom the horse?” On an impostor,—“The empty sack won’t stand upright.” “_Qui trop embrasse, mal étreint_,” is rendered by “Two water-melons won’t fit under one arm.” “Old brooms are thrown on the roof,” may be taken to apply to the promotion of superannuated fogies. Your hangers-on profit by your success,—“When you climb a tree your shoes go up too.” The higher you are the worse you fall, for “There is a cure for him who falls from horse or donkey-back, but a pick-axe (to dig his grave) for him who falls from a camel.” Let us hope that this proverb, in its literal sense, may never be justified in the persons of our gallant Camel Corps in the Soudan. Three proverbs on the donkey, exemplifying—the useful guest, “They asked the donkey to the wedding, water or wood was wanting;” the power of hope, “Die not, my donkey; summer is coming and clover will grow;” and the folly of exposing oneself to needless criticism, “Don’t cut your donkey’s tail in public; some will say, ‘It is too long;’ others, ‘It is too short.’” And, lastly, as an instance in which the jingle of the original may be reproduced in English,—“The mannerly man learns manners of the mannerless.”—_The Spectator._

MACPHERSON’S LOVE STORY.

BY C. H. D. STOCKER.

It was on a summer Sunday morning that the story began—or let me rather say, that I take up the story, for who shall mark the real beginning of those events that mightily color and disturb, and even turn the course of our lives?

In the early sunshine, while the dew was still heavy on the grass, Ian Macpherson had been away three miles up the valley with a dying shepherd. Following the course of the broad, brawling, shallow Riach river; now clambering along steep slate-colored banks of shifting flakes and chips of stone, that looked as if they had swept in avalanches down the abrupt hillside; now springing with the sure, agile step of a born Highlander from one boulder to another as he crossed a streamlet or took a short cut across a bend of the river; now walking quickly over narrow, level reaches of meadow-ground, or amongst springy heather under the birches that overhung the broken gravel banks above the water,—his whole heart was overflowing with that exultation which breathes in the very early hours of morning when the days are long. The earth in that hour was very Paradise, not for anything it had given or ever could give him, but because it was so beautiful, and in its glorious undesecrated solitude seemed still fresh from the hand of God.

The home of the dying man was a mere hovel of peat-sods covered with moss-grown thatch, built on one of those fertile reaches of soil brought down and left here and there in these wild Scotch valleys by floods of long ago. It stood just above the river—all too perilously near in time of storm and flood, you would have thought—and round it towered the rugged hills, echoing unceasingly the murmur of the water and the wind—a murmur, at least, in summer. In winter many a wild storm raged up there, darkening the air with heavy snow and sleet, bowing and breaking and uprooting whole tracts of pines and larch; raving down the shrouded peaks and narrow, dim ravines, and making to tremble the little peat hut and the stout hearts within. And then, when the storm was spent, would be a silence as of death; snowy steeps and glittering peaks rising up on all sides motionless against a motionless sky, and down below the dark water creeping slow and quiet under masses of ice.

Macpherson could see it all in memory even as he stepped across the summer flowers, for the poor shepherds in the lone huts scattered here and there in the long valley needed him in winter as well as in summer, in foul weather no less than in fair. But to-day, as he grew accustomed to the half-light in the hut, and the wan face of the dying man became clearer in the shadow of the berth in the wall where he was lying, the minister saw well enough that he would know no more an earthly winter, nor ever see the snow come down upon the hills again. There was only one window in the hut, a single unmovable pane a foot square, let into the sod wall at one end, and rendered even less useful by a strip of rag pinned across it by way of a blind. Most of the light came in dusty beams down the wide chimney, slanting across the background of smoke-blackened wall and rafter, and lying in patches on the uneven mud floor.

As the day was warm the minister set the door wide open, and the dim, dying eyes looked out wistfully at the sunny summer weather and the beautiful wooded slopes where the foot of the opposite hill came down to the river. But he was tired now; all this was passing from him, and his eyes came back to Ian Macpherson’s face, where, as he dimly felt, dwelt something that could not pass away—something that death itself would have no power to disturb or change. Light kindled faintly on his rugged, wasted features when Macpherson came and took the toil-worn hand—so powerless now—in his, for in the young minister’s life this poor shepherd had seen and understood what no words could have brought home to him—the reality and power of love. He knew that Macpherson counted not his life his own, nor any of the things that he possessed. Year by year he had felt the subtle influence deepening, and had seen the spirit burning clearer in the eyes, so that to meet him—to the ignorant, simple shepherd—was like meeting an angel. In Macpherson he saw and knew a man in the very prime of manhood, clever, as those said who knew best, and with the world before him; who yet could let the world go by; who sought no preferment, whose whole life and soul and energy were devoted to his people without a thought for himself, and who had ever a kind word and a happy smile for one and all.

These poor people could perhaps not have explained what their young minister was to them; what he really was beyond what they saw they could never know; and yet they did feel that he had sacrificed himself for their sake in staying there, that this sacrifice was no grudging martyrdom, but a glad free-will offering to the Lord he loved and to them. It shed more light upon their hearts than a thousand sermons; it had power to draw aside for them now and again the gross veil of material aims, and to give them as in a mirror a glimpse of eternal love.

This dying man could believe in the great love of the Lord who died for him when he had seen its living power in his minister’s life; and, though the comparison is but as of a spark to the sun itself, the selfless brotherhood of one whom he knew very far above him in ways which he could not understand brought home to him the brotherhood of Christ. With his hand in Macpherson’s, listening with fast-closing ears to his earnest words, following his childlike, simple prayers, it seemed as if earth and its soul-chains of sin and sorrow faded and fell away; as if the gates of heaven opened wide and wider, and the light shone out more and more perfect, till at last the call came down, “Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord;” and then the spirit went up out of the darkness and ignorance and poverty of the hard shepherd life, and Macpherson was kneeling alone on the mud floor in the dim hovel beside the dead.

An hour later the solitary bell of the kirk on the wooded knoll overlooking Loch Riach was ringing thin and clear across lake and meadow for morning prayer, and Macpherson hurried up the steep footpath that wound upwards to the kirk between Scotch firs from the flat grass land about the water.

A group of strangers stood at the kirkyard gate, a young fellow of two or three-and-twenty, a lady who looked about the same age, tall and very fair, and a lad in an Eton jacket with a top hat and broad white collar. No doubt they belonged to the English family who had been expected at the villa near the railway station and the store—the only villa within half a dozen miles.

Macpherson, with the courtesy that is natural to even the shyest Highlander, lifted his hat to them as a matter of course, and would have passed on, but the young man stepped forward and asked if they might go into the church, and whether it mattered where they sat.

“Oh! There’s only too much room,” he said, when he understood what they wanted, which was not all at once, for the Gaelic was his native tongue and his ears were utterly unfamiliar with English as spoken by English people. He led the way through long rank grass and nettles, across sunken graves and flat tombstones where the inscriptions were worn away, more, surely, by wild winter storms than by church-going feet, for there was no trace of any path from the gate to the door.

“Rummiest hole ’t ever I saw, Lily,” poor Macpherson heard the boy say in an undertone, as he ushered the strangers into as curious a place of worship as perhaps this nineteenth century can show.

The floor was all uneven and rudely paved with round cobble stones, glistening and dark with perpetual damp; a gallery, sagging rather alarmingly towards the middle, ran across either end; on the front panel of the eastern one was branded in irregular characters,

“I. M. FECIT. AUG. 17, 1771,”

and these were certainly the very newest part of the interior. Along under the north wall was a row of little wooden pews, some with broken doors, others with no doors at all; their flooring consisted merely of earth, with a few rough planks thrown down here and there to help to keep the feet of the congregation more or less dry. The once whitewashed walls were stained and blotted with great seas of green and red mould, and the atmosphere was as that of a subterranean dungeon—chill, damp, and smelling of ancient decay. Macpherson opened a pew for them, and they took their places while he walked, just as he was, up the crazy pulpit stair, hung his hat on a nail above him, and knelt down. There were two women in one of the rickety galleries, and not more than half a dozen people in the pews below: a farmer’s daughter in very gay attire, two or three laboring men in ill-fitting suits of Sunday black; a keeper in his master’s former shooting-coat and knickerbockers, and a couple of shepherds in kilt and plaid.

The bell ceased, and the bell-ringer, sexton, precentor, beadle—whatever he was—having made the rope fast where it hung on the gable outside, came in and took his place at the desk under the pulpit, and the Psalm was given out—

“I to the hills will lift mine eyes,
From whence doth come mine aid,
My safety cometh from the Lord,
Who heav’n and earth hath made.”

But the only person who attempted to sing was the factotum at the clerk’s desk, and he rendered the entire Psalm alone from beginning to end, in slow, loud, wavering, twangy tones that took small account of a semi-tone higher or lower, and left the tune, when he had finished, still a matter of conjecture to the uninitiated.

As the service proceeded a few more people came in, dropped into pews here and there, and stared at the unwonted sight of a lovely English face and fresh London millinery. But when Macpherson rose, and gave out his text, “What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” reading it twice or thrice in his curious foreign accent, every eye was fixed upon his face, and each man placed his arms on the table or shelf in front of him and bent forward to listen.

It was a thin, plain face, with a low, broad brow, high cheekbones and irregular features, that showed against the dull light-blue of the old pulpit; but the dark eyes lit up with intense eagerness as he leaned forward to preach in his fashion the old, oft-repeated lesson, and every line of the slight, wiry figure was instinct with energy and life. His sermon was short, and his language strong and simple—so simple that to at least one listener it had the force almost of a new revelation. The hearers could not know what that simplicity cost him, though some of them might have remembered a time when they could not understand him; there was nothing to tell how each plain, homely phrase came out victorious over eloquent words and symbolic imagery and high intellectual reasonings that were always thronging there within him; nothing to reveal how hard he was trying to live in them and out of himself, that he might realise their need, and feel how the message he so burned to deliver might best wake echoes in those poor dull hearts that were so slow to respond.

Very earnestly he set forth the nothingness of all the things that “grossly close us in” and bar the way that leads to life. Passionately he pleaded for the great single purpose that opens and makes plain that way and guides unerringly the feet that find it.

The fair English lady, looking up at that young earnest face, and then beyond it, where through the window she could see red fir boughs stirring against the summer sky, wondered at the courage that could face this mere handful of listeners and feel as enthusiastic and speak with as much energy as though thousands hung upon his words. To other than Gaelic ears that voice, too, had a special charm with its undertone of pathos, its plaintive echo of “old, unhappy, far-off things,” the melancholy of a dying language and a race that is being fast merged and lost in the self-asserting, irreverent Saxon, akin to that sorrow on the wind across the moors and among the lonesome hills, even when it comes whispering down the wild warm corries, or blows cool off the sunny summits on a summer day, carrying a sound of tears.

At the evening service the young Englishman was there alone, and on his homeward way Macpherson wondered whether he ought to call at the villa. For the next day or two, however, he knew he would have no time, for there was fever at a little farm on the lower boundary of the parish, and in the poor cottages belonging to it, and as often as other work would allow Macpherson was there comforting, nursing, helping, and always bringing with him some welcome trifle that the sufferers could not afford; a few eggs, a lemon or two, a little tea, two or three bottles of seltzer-water—anything his kind heart could suggest and his ready hand procure. Visits like these sometimes occupied his whole afternoon, so that he did not come home till the shadows of the hills darkened all the valley.

The sun had disappeared behind the rugged granite steeps to westward, though the eastern summits could see it still and glowed rose-red against the evening sky when Macpherson reached the Manse after Monday’s work. The door stood wide and showed a vista of boarded, carpetless passage sprinkled with sand, carpetless stairs opposite the entrance, and a door on either hand; merely looking in, it gave one the impression that whoever kept the house had good intentions, but fell lamentably short in carrying them out. Perhaps, however, it had ceased to strike the master’s eye, for he hung up his hat in the passage with quite a sigh of relief, turned to the door on the left with a smile of content on his face, and went into his study.

There, a good deal to his astonishment, stood the young Englishman of yesterday, holding out a cordial hand and introducing himself with an apology as Robert Echalaz.

“I have been making your acquaintance through the names of your books,” said he, with a smile. “The—the maid”—he hesitated a moment before venturing to apply this title to the grimy child who had admitted him—“the maid told me, as far as I could make out what she said, that you would be home soon, so I took the liberty of waiting here.”

Macpherson assured him that he was very welcome, and fetched in another chair out of the adjacent kitchen to add force to his words.

Then young Echalaz came straight to his point. His brother, he said, was bent on getting some fishing, and they thought that probably Mr. Macpherson, if he could not help them himself, might at any rate be able to direct them to some one who could.

“And I was glad of so plausible an excuse for getting to know you,” added the young fellow, with a frank smile. “I—I am preparing for holy orders, and”—he hesitated—“well, I don’t know—but I should very much like to have some talks with you.”

Macpherson’s face lit up with pleasure at this.

“I am afraid I shall disappoint you if you expect to learn anything from me,” he said, and his quaint accent struck the young Englishman afresh. Nevertheless, the two talked there for an hour before it even occurred to them that time was passing, and Echalaz jumped up and declared he ought to have been at home before now.

“And the fishing?” suggested Macpherson.

The fishing had been quite forgotten, but it was very soon settled, and Macpherson after some debate promised to meet the two brothers on the following Thursday. He accompanied his new acquaintance down the path to the gate, thinking it would be pleasant to be able to offer him hospitality of some sort, but afraid that dry oatcake would hardly be attractive, even with the addition—supposing that boiling water could be produced within reasonable time—of tea that this well-to-do young Englishman might possibly not think good. Poor Macpherson dismissed his hospitable inclinations with regret that made his grasp of the other’s hand all the warmer when they parted.

When Macpherson arrived at the villa at the appointed hour he found Tom waiting at the gate.

“Mother wants you to come in and see her,” said the boy, shaking hands, and Macpherson followed him into the house to the drawing-room, where Mrs. Echalaz—a pretty, faded, delicate-looking woman—lay on the sofa beside the open window. She turned her head languidly towards him, and held out a slim white hand.

“Ah, Mr. Macpherson, it is so good of you to devote yourself to my boy,” she said, conventionally. “I am sure he is very grateful; are you not, Tom?”

Tom murmured something about “awfully jolly,” and suggested that they should start at once.

Mrs. Echalaz, however, first asked many questions, as to the distance, the river, and the possibility of danger to her son, who was evidently the spoiled pet of the family.

Macpherson assured her that she need not be alarmed, and promised at all events to do his best to take care of Tom; and then, instead of Robert, when he was expected, Lily came in equipped for a walk, and Mrs. Echalaz said, “Ah, yes, my daughter, Mr. Macpherson. I’m sorry to say Robert is not well. He reads too hard, I am sure; he is not fit to go, and so I am sending Lily instead. I can’t let Tom”—she changed the expression of the thought in her heart—“Tom would be quite too much for you alone,” she said. “I always send one of them with him—not,” she added, betraying herself still more to Macpherson’s quick perceptions, “not that I doubt your care; I am sure you will not let any harm befall him.”

But her last words, far from being expressive of any such assurance, sounded like a reiterated appeal to him to guard her darling.

Macpherson said he would be very careful, and at length the three were allowed to depart.

Tom lost no time in handing over all his encumbrances to his sister, and before they had walked through the wood at the back of the villa he was away after butterflies, leaving Lily and Macpherson to carry the rods and tackle, the fishing-basket, and the lunch. It was a great relief to the young minister to find that the English girl was neither shy nor self-conscious, but ready to talk with the same pleasant frankness and cordiality that had so struck him in the elder brother.

She watched Tom’s retreating figure with an indulgent smile for a minute, and then turned to her companion. “May I ask you a great many questions, Mr. Macpherson?” she said, with natural directness.

“Surely,” answered he, readily; “and I hope I may be able to answer some of them.”

“I want to tell Robert,” she explained, with a smile. “After we had been to your little kirk on Sunday we both wanted very much to know you. He is to take holy orders, and he and I think a great deal about the work to which he will be called. Your life, now, must be something utterly different from anything we have ever seen or imagined before.”

“Is it?” he said. “Only because such primitive conditions exist perhaps no longer in England. I suppose a time is drawing nearer that will sweep away what lingers here.”

“Well, but—” Lily hesitated an instant. “May I be quite frank?” she put in, deprecatingly. “How is it that _you_ are in such a place?”

He did not know the drift of this question, and looked puzzled.

“Why should I not be?” he asked, diffidently.

The girl glanced expressively to north and south, down and up the lonely valley.

“One might say, speaking roughly,” she said, “that there are no people here,”

Macpherson too looked up the valley, and saw, far off, the hut where that poor shepherd had died, and thoughts of that Sunday morning brought the light into his face.

“That _would_ be ’speaking roughly,’” he said, with a gentleness that made her feel ashamed at first, and then anxious to justify herself.

“But is your congregation always so small?” she asked.

“That was about the average on Sunday,” he answered, and added, with a sigh, as if the fact were one he tried to forget, “It _is_ small. My predecessor, I’m afraid, was unpopular, and latterly very old and feeble, and could not keep them together. A few have come back to me, but only a few.”

“Then why do you stay here?” said Lily, impetuously. “Robert told me about your books, and—and the house—the Manse—so poor and bare. He says you must be far above your work. Indeed, we knew it from your sermon on Sunday.”

He looked distressed.

“Do you think they will not have understood me?” he asked, with eager anxiety. “Was it difficult—obscure—beyond the mark?”

“Oh, no, no!” said Lily, astonished at his way of looking at it; “a child must have understood every word. I can’t quite explain how it struck me and Robert too; it was so short and so complete, and the words so simple that one wondered at their intense force; and yet—yet—”

He looked anxiously at her. “Don’t be afraid to find fault, Miss Echalaz,” he said, earnestly; “I shall be so thankful to you—”

“Fault!” she interrupted; “oh, you don’t understand me! I never heard anything that went so straight from heart to heart as those words of yours. When we came out I turned to Robert, and he turned to me, and we both said, ‘Well?’ and then Robert asked me what was the secret of such power, but I couldn’t tell. And he thought a long time as we went home, about what you had said, and what he would have said in your place, which none of them would have listened to or understood.”

Lily smiled rather sadly and broke off, for she remembered how Robert had said to her at last that Macpherson “_walked with God_,” and that that was the secret of his power. She could not well repeat her brother’s words, but she knew that they were true, and wanted to acknowledge to Macpherson the debt that both felt they owed to him.

“Ah! Mr. Macpherson,” she said, earnestly, “you made us both ashamed. We were eager to begin teaching, and we suddenly found we had everything still to learn. Robert says he sees now that _nothing_, absolutely nothing, can be done by a man who has not begun with himself.”

Macpherson looked up with keen sympathy, divining at once a fellow-struggler, for this was beaten ground to him, sorely familiar.

“That is true enough,” he said; “and yet we all begin at the outside, and are always returning to it again.”

Lily sighed.

“Yes,” she said, “and looking downward from ourselves instead of up to our ideal—to God. One seems to be always beginning, only beginning, over and over again.”

“Perhaps,” said Macpherson thoughtfully—“perhaps we need a whole life of beginning to show us what we are, and to teach us that the good that is done is all of God.”

“But don’t you feel yourself thrown away on such a miserable little congregation?” Lily went on, recurring to her first idea. “Would you not like a large parish?—a city audience?”

His eyes kindled.

“Once,” he said, “I wished for a larger field, and, as you say, an _audience_; and I thought myself thrown away. I looked on this as a mere stepping-stone to preferment; it was quite too paltry for my enthusiasm; I could not make myself intelligible to my few people, my sermons flew quite over their heads; I was disappointed and miserable. I wanted to bring a sacrifice, you understand, Miss Echalaz, but it was to be of my own choosing—such as Cain’s. And when I felt that God did not require it of me, I was angry and hurt, just, you know, as Cain was. And then one day a poor shepherd said to me, humbly and simply, ‘You are too clever for the like of us.’ That was lightning across thick darkness, Miss Echalaz. I understood, by God’s mercy, what I had known without understanding all along; it was obedience that He required; no sacrifice but the laying down of my will before His. And now,” he said, sadly—“now I wish I _could_ throw myself away, if it were but for one man.”

“But you won’t stay here always?” Lily suggested.

“Ah! I don’t know,” he answered, with a smile. “We are soldiers; we go where we are sent; but I know now that it is good for us—for me at least—to work in a field where no glory can be reaped. If there were a prize within reach one might be in danger of looking away from the Master who calls us to follow only Him.”

Lily walked on in thoughtful silence.

Meanwhile Tom had strayed far from the track, plunging knee-deep through heather and green cranberry scrub after butterflies, and alarming the oyster-catchers, which flew whistling and circling overhead, “tiring the echoes with unvaried cries,” and grouse, which went whirring and clamoring away up among the big grey boulders on the mountainside. The two sat down to wait for him.

“Every sight and sound here has a personality for me,” Macpherson said, looking across the valley, where along the brow of a scarped hollow lay white wreaths of snow, and a little cloud above it hung about the mountain-top, clinging as if it would fain wander no more across the pathless heaven.

“That little cloud, see how it clings—heaven-born though it is—to the barren earth. If it lingers there it must dissolve in rain and fall into that cold hollow which never sees the sun.”

Even as he spoke the cloudlet stirred, detached itself, and stole slowly away into the blue air.

“Ay!” he said to himself, with expressive intonation as he watched it; and then, bending his head while he held a piece of heather ungathered in his hand, he listened a minute. “Hark!” he said, raising his eyes with a dreamy smile. “Do you hear it?”

Far through the stillness of the sultry summer air came the murmur of water falling down its stony channel.

“It is the burn yonder—that green streak between the hills—tumbling down among the ferns. I used to fancy it mourned to leave its native fountains, and flowery sheltering banks, and the solitude of these mighty hills; but now it seems to me it feels a great destiny drawing it irresistibly onward, down to the forests below, through moor and meadow, to exchange the mountain echoes and the wild birds’ cry for the shriek and rattle of railways and the din of busy towns; to hurry onward, though it lose its early sweetness and receive many a foul stain as it goes to join the ocean, the mighty heart which draws it to itself, reaching which at last all its impurity shall be purged away.”

He was looking into the far horizon, where rank on rank of faint and fainter hills mingled with the clouds and blue sky, and seemed lost in thoughts beyond the words he had been speaking.

Lily’s glance rested on his spiritual face, and presently she sighed.

“My lot, I’m afraid,” she said, “is cast in that same city turmoil—we live in London, you know. It will be hard to go back to that artificial, crowded, stifling atmosphere after this.” Glancing up and round them at the wide moorland and the hills, “Here the soul lies open to all the winds of heaven; there—ah! one can soon forget there is a heaven at all.”

“Hullo!” cried Tom’s voice, some little way behind them; and presently he came up flushed and very much out of breath, and flung himself down in the heather at their feet. “I should like to climb up and touch that snow,” he remarked, after only one minute’s prostrate inaction, resting on his elbows with his chin in his hands and his feet waving slowly about. “I shouldn’t fancy your living in winter, sir,” he went on, looking up at Macpherson, “but perhaps you just shut yourself up with your books, like a dormouse, till the snow clears off?”

“I can’t do that,” said Macpherson, simply. “I have been up this valley sometimes in snow so deep that the three miles took over three hours to walk, and once before I could come back there was such a blinding storm that I had to spend the night in that little black hut—you can just see it, to the right, far up the valley. It is not always safe to go alone, but I generally do because I know almost every stone and tree.”

Tom cross-questioned a little about these winter expeditions, and then voted for refreshments; but Lily laughed at him, and proposed that they should do a little more of the day’s work first, and then the three rose and set forward, Tom engrossing the minister’s attention with a host of such far-fetched and extraordinary questions as only a schoolboy can possibly propound and care to have answered.

When at last they reached the river, after looking about and choosing a place for lunch, Tom condescended to relieve his sister of his own paraphernalia, told her she might “turn out the grub” because he required the basket, and coolly recommended her to mount guard over everything till they came back.

“Are you not going to fish, Miss Echalaz?” asked Macpherson, becoming aware that it was proposed to leave her alone, and not altogether happy at the idea.

“Oh! she’s only chaperon,” cried Tom, impatient to be off, and Lily held up a cloud of white knitting which she said would keep her quiet as long as they liked to be away. Tom uttered an urgent “Oh, sir—_please_—she really is all right,” Macpherson turned away, and then the two went obliquely down the bank with their rods, and were soon lost to sight.

All was silence but the babbling of the water among the rocks, and the faint summer air playing in the tassels of the birches, and all above the glowing brown and purple moor the heat twinkled and trembled aromatic of thyme and bog myrtle and juniper.

Lily clambered down the bank and found a shady nook fringed about with stunted birch and ferns, and there she resigned herself to knitting and to thronging thoughts suggested by what the young minister had said.

Macpherson, meanwhile, and Tom had established themselves to their entire satisfaction on two large boulders in mid stream, and abandoned themselves to the “sport” of waiting for the fishes.

Tom, conscious at first of Macpherson’s experienced eye, contrived to be very patient for half an hour; but then he could no longer help thinking that the fishes were obstinate, or the spot unfavorable, or the sun too hot and bright, or the air too still, or the fly—probably the fly was not the right kind; at any rate, a change of position must no longer be deferred. By judicious tacking from boulder to boulder, and then across a low shingle island where stunted alder scrub made a shelter for the oyster-catchers, and tufts of saxifrage and stonecrop grew, he arrived at a more likely place, and tried again. Still it was evident that the fishes did not see the matter from his point of view. He very soon wearied of his new position and cast about for a better. He saw a big round boulder out in the very middle of the broadest part of the stream, and was seized with all a boy’s longing to be on it, sport or no sport. To long for a thing, with Tom Echalaz, was as a rule to attain it rather sooner than later, and he at once began making his way out with plenty of pluck and very little caution, and finally landed with his rod, much wetter than he cared to notice, and tried again. He turned presently, when even this new delight was beginning to pall, to see what Macpherson was doing. Then he fancied he heard thunder, and stood motionless to listen. His eyes were fixed on the brown laughing water, flowing so softly over the stones below, that caught the sun and shadow through it and looked like broken gold amongst the soft brown of the bottom; the pebbly clatter of the shallow waterfall beyond was in his ears. This was the moment, the sight, the sound that remained indelibly fixed in his memory afterwards—the sultry stillness, and the slumbrous babble and murmur that only made it seem more still. Surely there was a curious sound far off up the valley.

“It _is_ thunder,” he said softly to himself, and looked up at the cloudless sky. “How—really—it does sound awfully queer.”

He glanced up stream to see what had become of his companion, and called out, “I say, isn’t that thunder?”

Macpherson, who also was in the middle of the stream, to Tom’s astonishment was in the act of throwing off his coat, and shouted almost before Tom had spoken,

“To the bank—the bank, for your life! At once!” and even careless, unobservant Tom saw his face look white as death against the dark background of rock and river.

Young Echalaz, although alarmed, was by no means the man to move without sufficient cause shown, and rather naturally looked about him for his danger before doing what he was told, even when Macpherson shouted again.

Yet the first far-off sound, the shouts and the delay, were all embraced in a few seconds. Then suddenly the boy realised that it was _not_ thunder—this fearful, awesome wail and roar that was drawing nearer. He turned in terror, towards the bank, and heard Macpherson call out, “Can you swim?”

“No,” Tom shouted, but his voice was lost in the wild tumult of rushing water, the river rose to his waist, the spate was upon them. Bewildered, but not losing all his natural courage, the boy made an effort to plant the thick end of his rod down into the bottom to steady himself, but the next instant the water was about his shoulders, he lost his footing and was swept away upon the flood. Exactly what happened then, or how long it was that he felt himself rolling over, whirling helplessly along with the mighty current, choking and struggling, deafened by the thunder of the water, fighting desperately for his life, Tom never could make out, but he remembered feeling at last that he was beaten, that his earthly career was “about played out,” as he himself expressed it; then there was a moment’s vivid anguish of death, and keen memories of things done and left undone in the long ago that he must now “let alone for ever,” and then a pause, a stoppage, energy coming back—he was caught and entangled by the fishing-basket that hung about his shoulders, and then a strong arm held him fast and he heard Macpherson’s voice saying bravely, “Hold on—you’re all safe, thank God!” and in another minute he was dragged on to the bank.

“I’m all right!” he gasped, plucking up his spirits as he got his eyes open and pushed his dripping hair off his face, and then he sat up and laughed at the figure his preserver presented kneeling there in his shirt-sleeves, soaked and streaming with water. “What _will_ the mater say?” he exclaimed, delighted with his adventure. “Let’s go and show ourselves to Lily.”

Macpherson sprang to his feet and looked along the bank down stream.

“Where is your sister?” he faltered, dashing the water from his eyes; and then, without waiting for an answer, he was away like an arrow from the bow, running beside the river as hard as man can run. Tom set off running too, and presently saw Macpherson, now far ahead, plunge into the flood.

A dead tree, bleached by last winter’s storms, went sweeping past him, checked now and again by projecting rocks or overhanging boughs, and then driven on once more by the overwhelming force of the water. For an instant the boy threw himself upon the ground sobbing loud in agonising dread, and then again he struggled to his feet, choked down his sobs, and ran on at his utmost speed.

Not very far down the river turned at a sharp angle towards the nearer bank, and a few old alders leaned out between the rocks. As Tom drew near enough to distinguish one object from another amongst the foam and swirling water, he gave a glad shout, “Hold on! hold on!” and in another two minutes, holding by the alders, he was clambering down towards the edge of the water, where Macpherson had caught a bough with one hand and with the other supported Lily, who was clinging to his shoulder.

“Give her your hand,” said Macpherson, rather faintly. “I can do nothing.”

“Can you give me your hand, Lily?” panted the boy, leaning down. “Can you climb a bit?”

“Oh! save us, Tom! I can’t let go,” Lily gasped, helpless with terror.

“There’s no footing,” said Macpherson, desperately.

Tom laid himself carefully along the trunk, and reaching down, succeeded in taking firmly hold of Lily’s hand. Macpherson at the same moment exerted his flagging strength to lift her a little towards the friendly boughs.

“Be brave,” he said, detaching her clinging hands.

Tom pulled valiantly, and in another minute she was safe; only half out of the water it is true, and trembling with cold and fright, but still able to hold on, and with Tom’s help climb up on to dry land.

“Thank God!” Macpherson uttered, and added, “Is she hurt?” but before either could answer they heard a crashing noise and a cry, and steadying themselves to look downwards, saw the dead tree, which had been caught somewhere higher up and detained a little while, go swinging round the curve with its roots tossing in the air, and Macpherson—? Macpherson was gone, and the lower boughs, where he and Lily had been clinging, were all broken and torn away.

* * * * *

Two hours later Mrs. Echalaz was brought to the verge of hysterics at the sight of her daughter, wet from head to foot, her face scratched and bruised, her long wet hair hanging tangled about her shoulders, without hat or gloves, and alone, hurrying towards the house.

Before Lily could explain what had happened Tom too appeared, wet and pale, and choking with sobs, followed at a little distance by two red-bearded, red-haired keepers, wet through also, moving slowly, and carrying between them Macpherson, without coat or hat, his head fallen back, his face white and still, his arms hanging limply down, water trickling from his clothes and hair.

“I knew it! I said so!” screamed Mrs. Echalaz, clasping Tom in her arms. “Never, never will I trust you out of my sight again!”

Tom broke away, crying bitterly.

“Oh, mother, don’t! He’s dead!”

“Dead!” shrieked poor Mrs. Echalaz; “and they’re bringing him into this house?”

She was rushing out into the passage, but Robert, who had already helped to bring Macpherson in, met her, and led her quietly back.

“You put these two to bed,” said he, “and I will take care of him, mother. The men say he may come round,” and he hurried away to do all that the keeper’s experience suggested and send at once for a doctor.

The keeper, whose name, in common with most of the population of that district, was also Macpherson, told Robert how this very thing had happened only two years before to the young laird and his own son, who were both very nearly drowned, and explained that an unusual amount of rain must have fallen up in the hills, some sudden and violent downpour, to occasion the spate.

It was long before they dared cease to doubt of Macpherson’s recovery, and when at last he really began to mend, the process was slow and tedious.

As soon as her terrors for Tom were appeased by finding that he was not a whit the worse for his wetting, Mrs. Echalaz took so kindly to the young fellow, who certainly owed his whole misfortune to them, that she waited on him and nursed him as patiently and tenderly as his own mother could have done.

“I could not have believed it was so pleasant to be ill,” he said to her, with a grateful smile, one day when, helped by Robert and Tom, he had come into the sitting-room for the first time; “I shall be spoiled for going back to work.”

They all protested that he need not think of work yet, as he could not so much as walk alone; and many a pleasant day went by in that little sitting-room, where half-drawn blinds made a cool dimness, and an unfamiliar perfume dwelt in the air—attar of roses, perhaps; something quite different, at any rate, from the odor of plain—very plain— cookery and peat smoke to which he was accustomed at the Manse.

The room was like fairyland, with its hundred costly trifles, china ornaments, scraps of Oriental work, curious fans and other nicknacks, photographs and books littered about in prettily-regulated disorder.

Lying there, weak and weary, his eyes dwelt upon it all with vague, unspeculating wonder and faint content. Mrs. Echalaz and Lily too were always so lovely to look at, “a gude sicht for sair een,” their faces so refined, voices so low and gentle, hands so delicately fair; their dress, too, was wonderful and beautiful, like a part of themselves. He felt himself under a deepening spell in their midst; he had never seen things like the things he saw here, nor women like these women.

As for Lily, he was ashamed at all she did for him, but too helpless to protest.

Once, when she saw that he hardly knew how to suffer so much kindness at her hands, she said, rather sadly,