Donal Grant

"I've seen it with my own eyes!"

"You've been into it, my lady?—What—what—?"

"It is a chapel—the old castle-chapel—mentioned, I know, somewhere in the history of the place, though no one, I suppose, ever dreamed the missing room could be that!—And in the chapel," continued Arctura, hardly able to bring out the words, for a kind of cramping of the muscles of speech, "there was a bed! and in the bed the crumbling dust of a woman! and on the altar what was hardly more than the dusty shadow of a baby?"

"The Lord be aboot us!" cried the housekeeper, her well-seasoned composure giving way; "ye saw that wi' yer ain e'en, my lady!—Mr. Grant! hoo could ye lat her leddyship luik upo' sic things!"

"I am her ladyship's servant," answered Donal.

"That's varra true! But eh, my bonny bairn, sic sichts is no for you!"

"I ought to know what is in the house!" said Arctura, with a shudder. "But already I feel more comfortable that you know too. Mr. Grant would like to have your advice as to what—.—You'll come and see them, won't you?"

"When you please, my lady.—To-night?"

"No, no! not to-night.—Was that the knocking again?—Some ghosts want their bodies to be buried, though your butler—"

"I wouldna wonder!" responded mistress Brookes, thoughtfully.

"Where shall we bury them?" asked Donal.

"In Englan'," said the housekeeper, "I used to hear a heap aboot consecrated ground; but to my min' it was the bodies o' God's handiwark, no the bishop, that consecrated the ground. Whaur the Lord lays doon what he has done wi', wad aye be a sacred place to me. I daursay Moses, whan he cam upo' 't again i' the desert, luikit upo' the ground whaur stood the buss that had burned, as a sacred place though the fire was lang oot!—Thinkna ye, Mr. Grant?"

"I do," answered Donal. "But I do not believe the Lord Jesus thought one spot on the face of the earth more holy than another: every dust of it was his father's, neither more nor less, existing only by the thought of that father! and I think that is what we must come to.—But where shall we bury them?—where they lie, or in the garden?"

"Some wud doobtless hae dist laid to dist i' the kirkyard; but I wudna wullin'ly raise a clash i' the country-side. Them that did it was yer ain forbeirs, my leddy; an' sic things are weel forgotten. An' syne what wud the earl say? It micht upset him mair nor a bit! I'll consider o' 't."

Donal accompanied them to the door of the chamber which again they shared, and then betook himself to his own high nest. There more than once in what remained of the night, he woke, fancying he heard the ghost-music sounding its coronach over the dead below.

CHAPTER LVIII.

A SOUL DISEASED

"Papa is very ill to-day, Simmons tells me," said Davie, as Donal entered the schoolroom. "He says he has never seen him so ill. Oh, Mr. Grant, I hope he is not going to die!"

"I hope not," returned Donal—not very sure, he saw when he thought about it, what he meant; for if there was so little hope of his becoming a true man on this side of some awful doom, why should he hope for his life here?

"I wish you would talk to him as you do to me, Mr. Grant!" resumed Davie, who thought what had been good for himself must be good for everybody.

Of late the boy had been more than usual with his father, and he may have dropped some word that turned his father's thoughts toward Donal and his ways of thinking: however weak the earl's will, and however dull his conscience, his mind was far from being inactive. In the afternoon the butler brought a message that his lordship would be glad to see Mr. Grant when school was over.

Donal found the earl very weak, but more like a live man, he thought, than he had yet seen him. He pointed to a seat, and began to talk in a way that considerably astonished the tutor.

"Mr. Grant," he began, with not a little formality, "I have known you long enough to believe I know you really. Now I find myself, partly from the peculiarity of my constitution, partly from the state of my health, partly from the fact that my views do not coincide with those of the church of Scotland, and there is no episcopal clergyman within reach of the castle—I find myself, I say, for these reasons, desirous of some conversation with you, more for the sake of identifying my own opinions, than in the hope of receiving from you what it would be unreasonable to expect from one of your years."

Donal held his peace; the very power of speech seemed taken from him: he had no confidence in the man, and nothing so quenches speech as lack of faith. But the earl had no idea of this distrust, never a doubt of his listener's readiness to take any position he required him to take. Experience had taught him as little about Donal as about his own real self.

"I have long been troubled," continued his lordship after a momentary pause, "with a question of which one might think the world must by this time be weary—which yet has, and always will have, extraordinary fascination for minds of a certain sort—of which my own is one: it is the question of the freedom of the will:—how far is the will free? or how far can it be called free, consistently with the notion of a God over all?"

He paused, and Donal sat silent—so long that his lordship opened the eyes which, the better to enjoy the process of sentence-making, he had kept shut, and half turned his head towards him: he had begun to doubt whether he was really by his bedside, or but one of his many visions undistinguishable by him from realities. Re-assured by the glance, he resumed.

"I cannot, of course, expect from you such an exhaustive and formed opinion as from an older man who had made metaphysics his business, and acquainted himself with all that had been said upon the subject; at the same time you must have expended a considerable amount of thought on these matters!"

He talked in a quiet, level manner, almost without inflection, and with his eyes again closed—very much as if he were reading a book inside him.

"I have had a good deal," he went on, "to shake my belief in the common ideas on such points.—Do you believe there is such a thing as free will?"

He ceased, awaiting the answer which Donal felt far from prepared to give him.

"My lord," he said at length, "what I believe, I do not feel capable, at a moment's notice, of setting forth; neither do I think, however unavoidable such discussions may be in the forum of one's own thoughts, that they are profitable between men. I think such questions, if they are to be treated at all between man and man, and not between God and man only, had better be discussed in print, where what is said is in some measure fixed, and can with a glance be considered afresh. But not so either do I think they can be discussed to any profit."

"What do you mean? Surely this question is of the first importance to humanity!"

"I grant it, my lord, if by humanity you mean the human individual. But my meaning is, that there are many questions, and this one, that can be tested better than argued."

"You seem fond of paradox!"

"I will speak as directly as I can: such questions are to be answered only by the moral nature, which first and almost only they concern; and the moral nature operates in action, not discussion."

"Do I not then," said his lordship, the faintest shadow of indignation in his tone, "bring my moral nature to bear on a question which I consider from the ground of duty?"

"No, my lord," answered Donal, with decision; "you bring nothing but your intellectual nature to bear on it so; the moral nature, I repeat, operates only in action. To come to the point in hand: the sole way for a man to know he has freedom is to do something he ought to do, which he would rather not do. He may strive to acquaint himself with the facts concerning will, and spend himself imagining its mode of working, yet all the time not know whether he has any will."

"But how am I to put a force in operation, while I do not know whether I possess it or not?"

"By putting it in operation—that alone; by being alive; by doing the next thing you ought to do, or abstaining from the next thing you are tempted to, knowing you ought not to do it. It sounds childish; and most people set action aside as what will do any time, and try first to settle questions which never can be settled but in just this divinely childish way. For not merely is it the only way in which a man can know whether he has a free will, but the man has in fact no will at all unless it comes into being in such action."

"Suppose he found he had no will, for he could not do what he wished?"

"What he ought, I said, my lord."

"Well, what he ought," yielded the earl almost angrily.

"He could not find it proved that he had no faculty for generating a free will. He might indeed doubt it the more; but the positive only, not the negative, can be proved."

"Where would be the satisfaction if he could only prove the one thing and not the other."

"The truth alone can be proved, my lord; how should a lie be proved? The man that wanted to prove he had no freedom of will, would find no satisfaction from his test—and the less the more honest he was; but the man anxious about the dignity of the nature given him, would find every needful satisfaction in the progress of his obedience."

"How can there be free will where the first thing demanded for its existence or knowledge of itself is obedience?"

"There is no free will save in resisting what one would like, and doing what the Truth would have him do. It is true the man's liking and the truth may coincide, but therein he will not learn his freedom, though in such coincidence he will always thereafter find it, and in such coincidence alone, for freedom is harmony with the originating law of one's existence."

"That's dreary doctrine."

"My lord, I have spent no little time and thought on the subject, and the result is some sort of practical clearness to myself; but, were it possible, I should not care to make it clear to another save by persuading him to arrive at the same conviction by the same path—that, namely, of doing the thing required of him."

"Required of him by what?"