The Marquis of Lossie

"They have it in turn, and it wouldn't do to favour one more than another."

"He could hand his guinea, or whatever they gave him, to the one whose turn it ought to have been, and that would set it all right."

At this point the silk mercer, fearing that the dominie, as he called him, was silently disapproving, and willing therefore to change the subject, turned to him and said,

"Why shouldn't you give us a sermon, Graham?"

The schoolmaster laughed.

"Did you never hear," he said, "how I fell like Dagon on the threshold of the church, and have lain there ever since."

"What has that to do with it?" returned his friend, sorry that his forgetfulness should have caused a painful recollection. "That is ages ago, when you were little more than a boy. Seriously," he added, chiefly to cover his little indiscretion, "will you preach for us the Sunday after next?"

Deacons generally ask a man to preach for them.

"No," said Mr Graham.

But even as he said it, a something began to move in his heart – a something half of jealousy for God, half of pity for poor souls buffeted by such winds as had that morning been roaring, chaff laden, about the church, while the grain fell all to the bottom of the pulpit. Something burned in him: was it the word that was as a fire in his bones, or was it a mere lust of talk? He thought for a moment.

"Have you any gatherings between Sundays?" he asked.

"Yes; every Wednesday evening," replied Mr Marshal. "And if you won't preach on Sunday, we shall announce tonight that next Wednesday a clergyman of the Church of Scotland will address the prayer meeting."

He was glad to get out of it so, for he was uneasy about his friend, both as to his nerve, which might fail him, and his Scotch oddities, which would not.

"That would be hardly true," said Mr Graham, "seeing I never got beyond a licence."

"Nobody here knows the difference between a licentiate and a placed minister; and if they did they would not care a straw. So we'll just say clergyman."

"But I won't have it announced in any terms. Leave that alone, and I will try to speak at the prayer meeting."

"It won't be in the least worth your while except we announce it. You won't have a soul to hear you but the pew openers, the woman that cleans the chapel, Mrs Marshal's washerwoman, and the old greengrocer we buy our vegetables from. We must really announce it."

"Then I won't do it. Just tell me – what would our Lord have said to Peter or John if they had told Him that they had been to synagogue and had been asked to speak, but had declined because there were only the pew openers, the chapel cleaner, a washerwoman, and a greengrocer present?"

"I said it only for your sake, Graham; you needn't take me up so sharply."

"And ra-a-ther irreverently – don't you think – excuse me, sir?" said Mrs Marshal very softly. But the very softness had a kind of jellyfish sting in it.

"I think," rejoined the schoolmaster, indirectly replying, "we must be careful to show our reverence in a manner pleasing to our Lord. Now I cannot discover that he cares for any reverences but the shaping of our ways after his; and if you will show me a single instance of respect of persons in our Lord, I will press my petition no farther to be allowed to speak a word to your pew openers, washerwoman, and greengrocer."

His entertainers were silent – the gentleman in the consciousness of deserved rebuke, the lady in offence.

Just then the latter bethought herself that their guest, belonging to the Scotch Church, was, if no Episcopalian, yet no dissenter, and that seemed to clear up to her the spirit of his disapproval.

"By all means, Mr Marshal," she said, "let your friend speak on the Wednesday evening. It would not be to his advantage to have it said that he occupied a dissenting pulpit. It will not be nearly such an exertion either; and if he is unaccustomed to speak to large congregations, he will find himself more comfortable with our usual week evening one."

"I have never attempted to speak in public but once," rejoined Mr Graham, "and then I failed."

"Ah! that accounts for it," said his friend's wife and the simplicity of his confession, while it proved him a simpleton, mollified her.

Thus it came that he spent the days between Sunday and Thursday in their house, and so made the acquaintance of young Marshal.

When his mother perceived their growing intimacy, she warned her son that their visitor belonged to an unscriptural and worldly community, and that notwithstanding his apparent guilelessness – deficiency indeed – he might yet use cunning arguments to draw him aside from the faith of his fathers. But the youth replied that, although in the firmness of his own position as a Congregationalist, he had tried to get the Scotchman into a conversation upon church government, he had failed; the man smiled queerly and said nothing. But when a question of New Testament criticism arose, he came awake at once, and his little blue eyes gleamed like glowworms.

"Take care, Frederick," said his mother. "The Scriptures are not to be treated like common books and subjected to human criticism."

"We must find out what they mean, I suppose, mother," said the youth.

"You're to take just the plain meaning that he that runneth may read," answered his mother. – "More than that no one has any business with. You've got to save your own soul first, and then the souls of your neighbours if they will let you; and for that reason you must cultivate, not a spirit of criticism, but the talents that attract people to the hearing of the Word. You have got a fine voice, and it will improve with judicious use. Your father is now on the outlook for a teacher of elocution to instruct you how to make the best of it, and speak with power on God's behalf"

When the afternoon of Wednesday began to draw towards the evening, there came on a mist, not a London fog, but a low wet cloud, which kept slowly condensing into rain; and as the hour of meeting drew nigh with the darkness, it grew worse. Mrs Marshal had forgotten all about the meeting and the schoolmaster: her husband was late, and she wanted her dinner. At twenty minutes past six, she came upon her guest in the hall, kneeling on the doormat, first on one knee, then on the other, turning up the feet of his trousers.

"Why, Mr Graham," she said kindly, as he rose and proceeded to look for his cotton umbrella, easily discernible in the stand among the silk ones of the house, "you're never going out on a night like this?"

"I am going to the prayer meeting, ma'am," he said.

"Nonsense! You'll be wet to the skin before you get half way."

"I promised, you may remember, ma'am, to talk a little to them."

"You only said so to my husband. You may be very glad, seeing it has turned out so wet, that I would not allow him to have it announced from the pulpit. There is not the slightest occasion for your going. Besides, you have not had your dinner."

"That's not of the slightest consequence, ma'am. A bit of bread and cheese before I go to bed is all I need to sustain nature, and fit me for understanding my proposition in Euclid. I have been in the habit, for the last few years, of reading one every night before I go to bed."

"We dissenters consider a chapter of the Bible the best thing to read before going to bed," said the lady, with a sustained voice.

"I keep that for the noontide of my perceptions – for mental high water," said the schoolmaster, "Euclid is good enough after supper. Not that I deny myself a small portion of the Word," he added with a smile, as he proceeded to open the door – "when I feel very hungry for it."

"There is no one expecting you," persisted the lady, who could ill endure not to have her own way, even when she did not care for the matter concerned. "Who will be the wiser or the worse if you stay at home?"

"My dear lady," returned the schoolmaster, "when I have on good grounds made up my mind to a thing, I always feel as if I had promised God to do it; and indeed it amounts to the same thing very nearly. Such a resolve then is not to be unmade except on equally good grounds with those upon which it was made. Having resolved to try whether I could not draw a little water of refreshment for souls which if not thirsting are but fainting the more, shall I allow a few drops of rain to prevent me?"

"Pray don't let me persuade you against your will," said his hostess, with a stately bend of her neck over her shoulder, as she turned into the drawing room.

Her guest went out into the rain, asking himself by what theory of the will his hostess could justify such a phrase – -too simple to see that she had only thrown it out, as the cuttlefish its ink, to cover her retreat.

But the weather had got a little into his brain: into his soul it was seldom allowed to intrude. He felt depressed and feeble and dull. But at the first corner he turned, he met a little breath of wind. It blew the rain in his face, and revived him a little, reminding him at the same time that he had not yet opened his umbrella. As he put it up he laughed.

"Here I am," he said to himself, "lance in hand, spurring to meet my dragon!"

Once when he used a similar expression, Malcolm had asked him what he meant by his dragon; "I mean," replied the schoolmaster, "that huge slug, The Commonplace. It is the wearifulest dragon to fight in the whole miscreation. Wound it as you may, the jelly mass of the monster closes, and the dull one is himself again – feeding all the time so cunningly that scarce one of the victims whom he has swallowed suspects that he is but pabulum slowly digesting in the belly of the monster."

If the schoolmaster's dragon, spread abroad as he lies, a vague dilution, everywhere throughout human haunts, has yet any headquarters, where else can they be than in such places as that to which he was now making his way to fight him? What can be fuller of the wearisome, depressing, beauty blasting commonplace than a dissenting chapel in London, on the night of the weekly prayer meeting, and that night a drizzly one? The few lights fill the lower part with a dull, yellow, steamy glare, while the vast galleries, possessed by an ugly twilight, yawn above like the dreary openings of a disconsolate eternity. The pulpit rises into the dim damp air, covered with brown holland, reminding one of desertion and charwomen, if not of a chamber of death and spiritual undertakers, who have shrouded and coffined the truth. Gaping, empty, unsightly, the place is the very skull of the monster himself – the fittest place of all wherein to encounter the great slug, and deal him one of those death blows which every sunrise, every repentance, every childbirth, every true love deals him. Every hour he receives the blow that kills, but he takes long to die, for every hour he is right carefully fed and cherished by a whole army of purveyors, including every trade and profession, but officered chiefly by divines and men of science.

When the dominie entered, all was still, and every light had a nimbus of illuminated vapour. There were hardly more than three present beyond the number Mr Marshal had given him to expect; and their faces, some grim, some grimy, most of them troubled, and none blissful, seemed the nervous ganglions of the monster whose faintly gelatinous bulk filled the place. He seated himself in a pew near the pulpit, communed with his own heart and was still. Presently the ministering deacon, a humbler one in the worldly sense than Mr Marshal, for he kept a small ironmongery shop in the next street to the chapel, entered, twirling the wet from his umbrella as he came along one of the passages intersecting the pews. Stepping up into the desk which cowered humbly at the foot of the pulpit, he stood erect, and cast his eyes around the small assembly. Discovering there no one that could lead in singing, he chose out and read one of the monster's favourite hymns, in which never a sparkle of thought or a glow of worship gave reason wherefore the holy words should have been carpentered together. Then he prayed aloud, and then first the monster found tongue, voice, articulation. If this was worship, surely it was the monster's own worship of itself! No God were better than one to whom such were fitting words of prayer. What passed in the man's soul, God forbid I should judge: I speak but of the words that reached the ears of men.

And over all the vast of London lay the monster, filling it like the night – not in churches and chapels only – in almost all theatres, and most houses – most of all in rich houses: everywhere he had a foot, a tail, a tentacle or two – everywhere suckers that drew the life blood from the sickening and somnolent soul.