Donal Grant

"Tell me, please, anything that would make it look probable."

"I will not answer your question directly, but I will answer it. Listen, Davie.

"In all ages men have longed to see God—some men in a grand way. At last, according to the story of the gospel, the time came when it was fit that the Father of men should show himself to them in his son, the one perfect man, who was his very image. So Jesus came to them. But many would not believe he was the son of God, for they knew God so little that they did not see how like he was to his Father. Others, who were more like God themselves, and so knew God better, did think him the son of God, though they were not pleased that he did not make more show. His object was, not to rule over them, but to make them know, and trust, and obey his Father, who was everything to him. Now when anyone died, his friends were so miserable over him that they hardly thought about God, and took no comfort from him. They said the dead man would rise again at the last day, but that was so far off, the dead was gone to such a distance, that they did not care for that. Jesus wanted to make them know and feel that the dead were alive all the time, and could not be far away, seeing they were all with God in whom we live; that they had not lost them though they could not see them, for they were quite within his reach—as much so as ever; that they were just as safe with, and as well looked after by his father and their father, as they had ever been in all their lives. It was no doubt a dreadful-looking thing to have them put in a hole, and waste away to dust, but they were not therefore gone out—they were only gone in! To teach them all this he did not say much, but just called one or two of them back for a while. Of course Lazarus was going to die again, but can you think his two sisters either loved him less, or wept as much over him the next time he died?"

"No; it would have been foolish."

"Well, if you think about it, you will see that no one who believes that story, and weeps as they did the first time, can escape reproof. Where Jesus called Lazarus from, there are his friends, and there are they waiting for him! Now, I ask you, Davie, was it worth while for Jesus to do this for us? Is not the great misery of our life, that those dear to us die? Was it, I say, a thing worth doing, to let us see that they are alive with God all the time, and can be produced any moment he pleases?"

"Surely it was, sir! It ought to take away all the misery!"

"Then it was a natural thing to do; and it is a reasonable thing to think that it was done. It was natural that God should want to let his children see him; and natural he should let them know that he still saw and cared for those they had lost sight of. The whole thing seems to me reasonable; I can believe it. It implies indeed a world of things of which we know nothing; but that is for, not against it, seeing such a world we need; and if anyone insists on believing nothing but what he has seen something like, I leave him to his misery and the mercy of God."

If the world had been so made that men could easily believe in the maker of it, it would not have been a world worth any man's living in, neither would the God that made such a world, and so revealed himself to such people, be worth believing in. God alone knows what life is enough for us to live—what life is worth his and our while; we may be sure he is labouring to make it ours. He would have it as full, as lovely, as grand, as the sparing of nothing, not even his own son, can render it. If we would only let him have his own way with us! If we do not trust him, will not work with him, are always thwarting his endeavours to make us alive, then we must be miserable; there is no help for it. As to death, we know next to nothing about it. "Do we not!" say the faithless. "Do we not know the darkness, the emptiness, the tears, the sinkings of heart, the desolation!" Yes, you know those; but those are your things, not death's. About death you know nothing. God has told us only that the dead are alive to him, and that one day they will be alive again to us. The world beyond the gates of death is, I suspect, a far more homelike place to those that enter it, than this world is to us.

"I don't like death," said Davie, after a silence.

"I don't want you to like, what you call death, for that is not the thing itself—it is only your fancy about it. You need not think about it at all. The way to get ready for it is to live, that is, to do what you have to do."

"But I do not want to get ready for it. I don't want to go to it; and to prepare for it is like going straight into it!"

"You have to go to it whether you prepare for it or not. You cannot help going to it. But it must be like this world, seeing the only way to prepare for it is to do the thing God gives us to do."

"Aren't you afraid of death, Mr. Grant?"

"No, I am not. Why should I fear the best thing that, in its time, can come to me? Neither will you be afraid when it comes. It is not the dreadful thing it looks."

"Why should it look dreadful if it is not dreadful?"

"That is a very proper question. It looks dreadful, and must look dreadful, to everyone who cannot see in it that which alone makes life not dreadful. If you saw a great dark cloak coming along the road as if it were round somebody, but nobody inside it, you would be frightened—would you not?"

"Indeed I should. It would be awful!"

"It would. But if you spied inside the cloak, and making it come towards you, the most beautiful loving face you ever saw—of a man carrying in his arms a little child—and saw the child clinging to him, and looking in his face with a blessed smile, would you be frightened at the black cloak?"

"No; that would be silly."

"You have your answer! The thing that makes death look so fearful is that we do not see inside it. Those who see only the black cloak, and think it is moving along of itself, may well be frightened; but those who see the face inside the cloak, would be fools indeed to be frightened! Before Jesus came, people lived in great misery about death; but after he rose again, those who believed in him always talked of dying as falling asleep; and I daresay the story of Lazarus, though it was not such a great thing after the rising of the Lord himself, had a large share in enabling them to think that way about it."

When they went home, Davie, running up to lady Arctura's room, recounted to her as well as he could the conversation he had just had with Mr. Grant.

"Oh, Arkie!" he said, "to hear him talk, you would think Death hadn't a leg to stand upon!"

Arctura smiled; but it was a smile through a cloud of unshed tears. Lovely as death might be, she would like to get the good of this world before going to the next!—As if God would deny us any good!—At one time she had been willing to go, she thought, but she was not now!—The world had of late grown very beautiful to her!

CHAPTER LXI.

THE BUREAU

On the Monday night Donal again went down into the hidden parts of the castle. Arctura had come to the schoolroom, but seemed ill able for her work, and he did not tell her what he was doing farther.

They were rather the ghosts of fears than fears themselves that had assailed him, and this time they hardly came near him as he wrought. With his new file he made better work than before, and soon finished cutting through the top of the staple. Trying it then with a poker as a lever, he broke the bottom part across; so there was nothing to hold the bolt, and with a creaking noise of rusty hinges the door slowly opened to his steady pull. Nothing appeared but a wall of plank! He gave it a push; it yielded: another door, close-fitting, and without any fastening, flew open, revealing a small closet or press, and on the opposite side of it a third door. This he could not at once open. It was secured, however, with a common lock, which cost him scarcely any trouble. It opened on a little room, of about nine feet by seven. He went in. It contained nothing but an old-fashioned secretary or bureau, and a seat like a low music-stool.

"It may have been a vestry for the priest!" thought Donal; "but it must have been used later than the chapel, for this desk is not older than the one at The Mains, which mistress Jean said was made for her grandmother!"

Then how did it get into the place? There was no other door! Above the bureau was a small window, or what seemed a window doubtful with dirt; but door there was not! It was not too large to enter by the oak door, but it could not have got to it along any of the passages he had come through! It followed that there must, and that not so very long ago, have been another entrance to the place in which he stood!

He turned to look at the way he had himself come: it was through a common press of painted deal, filling the end of the little room, there narrowed to about five feet. When the door in the back of it was shut, it looked merely a part of the back of the press.

He turned again to the bureau, with a strange feeling at his heart. The cover was down, and on it lay some sheets of paper, discoloured with dust and age. A pen lay with them, and beside was an ink-bottle of the commonest type, the ink in powder and flakes. He took up one of the sheets. It had a great stain on it. The bottle must have been overturned! But was it ink? No; it stood too thick on the paper. With a gruesome shiver Donal wetted his finger and tried the surface of it: a little came off, a tinge of suspicious brown. There was writing on the paper! What was it? He held the faded lines close to the candle. They were not difficult to decipher. He sat down on the stool, and read thus—his reading broken by the stain: there was no date:—

"My husband for such I will—blot—are in the sight of God—blot—men why are you so cruel what—blot—deserve these terrors—blot—in thought have I—blot—hard upon me to think of another."

Here the writing came below the blot, and went on unbroken.

"My little one is gone and I am left lonely oh so lonely. I cannot but think that if you had loved me as you once did I should yet be clasping my little one to my bosom and you would have a daughter to comfort you after I am gone. I feel sure I cannot long survive this—ah there my hand has burst out bleeding again, but do not think I mind it, I know it was only an accident, you never meant to do it, though you teased me by refusing to say so—besides it is nothing. You might draw ever drop of blood from my body and I would not care if only you would not make my heart bleed so. Oh, it is gone all over my paper and you will think I have done it to let you see how it bleeds—but I cannot write it all over again it is too great a labour and too painful to write, so you must see it just as it is. I dare not think where my baby is, for if I should be doomed never to see her because of the love I have borne to you and consented to be as you wished if I am cast out from God because I loved you more than him I shall never see you again—for to be where I could see you would never be punishment enough for my sins."

Here the writing stopped: the bleeding of the hand had probably brought it to a close. The letter had never been folded, but lying there, had lain there. He looked if he could find a date; there was none. He held the sheet up to the light, and saw a paper mark; while close by lay another sheet with merely a date—in the same hand, as if the writer had been about to commence another in lieu of the letter spoiled.

"Strange!" thought Donal with himself; "an old withered grief looks almost as pitiful as an old withered joy!—But who is to say either is withered? Those who look upon death as an evil, yet regard it as the healer of sorrows! Is it such? No one can tell how long a grief may last unwithered! Surely till the life heals it! He is a coward who would be cured of his sorrow by mere lapse of time, by the mere forgetting of a brain that grows musty with age. It is God alone who can heal—the God of the dead and of the living! and the dead must find him, or be miserable for evermore!"

He had not a doubt that the letter he had read was in the writing of the mother of the present earl's children.

What was he to do? He had thought he was looking into matters much older—things over which the permission of lady Arctura extended; and in truth what he had discovered, or seen corroborated, was a thing she had a right to know! but whether he ought to tell her at once he did not yet see. He took up his candle, and with a feeling of helpless dismay, withdrew to his chamber. But when he reached the door of it, yielding to a sudden impulse, he turned away, and went farther up the stair, and out upon the bartizan.

It was a frosty night, and the stars were brilliant. He looked up and said,

"Oh Saviour of men, thy house is vaulted with light; thy secret places are secret from excess of light; in thee is no darkness at all; thou hast no terrible crypts and built-up places; thy light is the terror of those who love the darkness! Fill my heart with thy light; let me never hunger or thirst after anything but thy will—that I may walk in the light, and light not darkness may go forth from me."

As he turned to go in, came a faint chord from the aeolian harp.

"It sings, brooding over the very nest of evil deeds!" he thought. "The light eternal, with keen arrows of radiant victory, will yet at last rout from the souls of his creatures the demons that haunt them!

"But if there be creatures of God that have turned to demons, may not human souls themselves turn to demons? Would they then be victorious over God, too strong for him to overcome—beyond the reach of repentance?

"How would they live? By their own power? Then were they Gods!—But they did not make themselves, and could not live of themselves. If not, then they must live by God's power. How then should they be beyond his reach?

"If the demons can never be brought back, then the life of God, the all-pure, goes out to keep alive, in and for evil, that which is essentially bad; for that which is irredeemable is essentially bad."

Thus reasoned Donal with himself, and his reasoning, instead of troubling his faith, caused him to cling the more to the only One, the sole hope and saviour of the hearts of his men and women, without whom the whole universe were but a charnel house in which the ghosts of the dead went about crying, not over the life that was gone from them, but its sorrows.

He stood and gazed out over the cold sea. And as he gazed, a shivering surge of doubt, a chill wave of negation, came rolling over him. He knew that in a moment he would strike out with the energy of a strong swimmer, and rise to the top of it; but now it was tumbling him about at its evil will. He stood and gazed—with a dull sense that he was waiting for his will. Suddenly came the consciousness that he and his will were one; that he had not to wait for his will, but had to wake—to will, that is, and do, and so be. And therewith he said to himself:—

"It is neither time, nor eternity, nor human consolation, nor everlasting sleep, nor the satisfied judgment, nor attained ambition, even in love itself, that is the cure for things; it is the heart, the will, the being of the Father. While that remains, the irremediable, the irredeemable cannot be. If there arose a grief in the heart of one of his creatures not otherwise to be destroyed, he would take it into himself, there consume it in his own creative fire—himself bearing the grief, carrying the sorrow. Christ died—and would die again rather than leave one heart-ache in the realms of his love—that is, of his creation. 'Blessed are they who have not seen and yet have believed!'"

Over his head the sky was full of shining worlds—mansions in the Father's house, built or building.

"We are not at the end of things," he thought, "but in the beginnings and on the threshold of creation! The Father is as young as when first the stars of the morning sang—the Ancient of Days who can never grow old! He who has ever filled the dull unbelieving nations with food and gladness, has a splendour of delight for the souls that believe, ever as by their obedience they become capable of receiving it."