The Elect Lady by George MacDonald (ap literature book list TXT) 📕

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 rôle-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