Donal Grant

“ He is a good and honourable man; but like most men he needs a moment to pull himself together. Few men, Mr. Grant, when suddenly called upon, answer from the best that is in them.”
“The fact is simply this,” resumed Donal: “I do not want the Morven property. I thank God for lady Arctura: what was hers I do not desire.” ”

“ Donal Grant was descending a path on a hillside to the valley below—a sheep-track of which he knew every winding as well as any boy his half-mile to and from school. But he had never before gone down the hill with the feeling that he was not about to go up again. He was on his way to pastures very new, and in the distance only negatively inviting. But his heart was too full to be troubled—nor was his a heart to harbour a care, the next thing to an evil spirit, though not quite so bad; for one care may drive out another, while one devil is sure to bring in another. ”

“ Ere the shades of evening fell that day around Donal Grant, he was in the new childhood of a new world.
I do not mean such thoughts had never been present to him before; but to think a thing is only to look at it in a glass; to know it as God would have us know it, and as we must know it to live, is to see it as we see love in a friend’s eyes—to have it as the love the friend sees in ours. To make things real to us, is the end and the battle-cause of life. We often think we believe what we are only presenting to our imaginations. The least thing can overthrow that kind of faith. ”

“ The boy looked up in his tutor’s face, mutely asking if he should obey her.
“Go,” said Donal.
In less than a minute he came back, his eyes full of tears.
“Arkie says she is going to tell papa. Is it true, Mr. Grant, that you are a dangerous man? I do not believe it—though you do carry such a big knife.”
Donal laughed.
“It is my grandfather’s skean dhu,” he said: “I mend my pens with it, you know! But it is strange, Davie, that, when a body knows something other people don’t, they should be angry with him! They will even think he wants to make them bad when he wants to help them to be good!” ”

“ Grant, who had never done any sliding except on the soles of his nailed shoes: when the time came, he acquired the art the more rapidly that he never minded what blunders he made in learning a thing. The dread of blundering is a great bar to success.
He visited the Comins often, and found continual comfort and help in their friendship. The letters he received from home, especially those of his friend sir Gibbie, who not unfrequently wrote also for Donal’s father and mother, were a great nourishment to him. ”

“ As the cold and the nights grew, the water-level rose in Donal’s well, and the poetry began to flow. When we have no summer without, we must supply it from within. Those must have comfort in themselves who are sent to help others. Up in his aerie, like an eagle above the low affairs of the earth, he led a keener life, breathed the breath of a more genuine existence than the rest of the house. No doubt the old cobbler, seated at his last over a mouldy shoe, breathed a yet higher air than Donal weaving his verse, or reading grand old Greek, in his tower ”

“ God was not to be trusted in until she had done something she could not do, upon which he would take her into his favour, and then she could trust him! What a God to give all her heart to, to long for, to dream of being at home with! Then she compared Miss Carmichael and Donal Grant, and thought whether Donal might not be as likely to be right as she. Oh, where was assurance, where was certainty about anything! How was she ever to know? What if the thing she came to know for certain should be—a God she could not love! ”

“ Grant can make me understand!”
“I wonder,” said lady Arctura, “what that curious opening in the side of the chimney-stack means! It can’t be for smoke to come out at!”
“No,” said Donal; “there is not a mark of smoke about it. If it had been meant for that, it would hardly have been put half-way from the top! I can’t make it out! A hole like that in any chimney must surely interfere with the draught! I must get a ladder!”
“Let me climb on your shoulders, Mr. Grant,” said Davie.
“Come then; up you go!” said Donal. ”

“ Arctura was silent. She had inherited prejudices which, while she hated selfishness, were yet thoroughly selfish. Such are of the evils in us hardest to get rid of. They are even cherished for a lifetime by some of the otherwise loveliest of souls. Knowing that herein much thought would be necessary for her, and that she would think, Donal went no farther: a house must have its foundation settled before it is built upon; argument where the grounds of it are at all in dispute is worse than useless. ”

“ A sudden, divine change!—her fear was gone, and in its place a sense of absolute safety: there was nothing in all the universe to be afraid of! It was a night of June, with roses, roses everywhere! Glory be to the Father! But how was it? Had he sent her mother to think her full of roses? Why her mother? God himself is the heart of every rose that ever bloomed! She would have sung aloud for joy, but no voice came; she could not utter a sound. What a thing this would be to tell Donal Grant! This poor woman cried, and God heard her, and saved her out of all her distresses! ”

“ But what’s bred in the bone—! A gentleman’s not made in a day!”
“Nor in a thousand years, Hector!” rejoined his sister. “Donal Grant is a gentleman in the best sense of the word! That you say he is not, lets me see you are vexed with yourself. He is a little awkward sometimes, I confess; but only when he is looking at a thing from some other point of view, and does not like to say you ought to have been looking at it from the same. ”

“ But the good thing in it for Davie was, that he noted the immediate faith with which Donal did or tried to do what he told him: this reacted in opening his mind to the beauty and dignity of obedience, and went a long way towards revealing the low moral condition of the man who seeks freedom through refusal to act at the will of another. He who does so will come by degrees to have no will of his own, and act only from impulse—which may be the will of a devil. So Donal and Davie grew together into one heart of friendship. ”

“ It is God we want, not heaven; his righteousness, not an imputed one, for our own possession; remission, not letting off; love, not endurance for the sake of another, even if that other be the one loveliest of all.
They turned from the sunset and made their way to the chimney-stack. There once more Donal set up his ladder. He tied the clock-weight to the end of his cord, dropped it in, and with a little management got it through the wires. It went down and down, gently lowered, till the cord was all out, and still it would go.
“Do run and get some more,” said Arctura. ”

“ Grant! We won’t say a word about him, for Arkie says except you promise never to speak of God, she will tell papa, and he will send you away.”
“Davie,” said Donal with solemnity, “I would not give such a promise for the castle and all it contains—no, not to save your life and the life of everybody in it! For Jesus says, ‘Whosoever denieth me before men, him will I deny before my father in heaven;’ and rather than that, I would jump from the top of the castle. Why, Davie! would a man deny his own father or mother?” ”

“ Donal said no more. He did not feel at liberty, from his own feeling merely, to check the boy. The thing was not wrong, and something might be intended to come out of it! He shrank from the least ruling of events, believing man’s only call to action is duty. So he left Davie to do as he pleased. ”

“ It seemed hardly for education, when he would even do what he could sometimes to keep a pupil back! He did not care to make the best of any one! The truth was, Donal’s best was so many miles ahead of theirs, that it was below their horizon altogether. If there be any relation between time and the human mind, every forcing of human process, whether in spirit or intellect, is hurtful, a retarding of God’s plan.
Lady Arctura’s old troubles were gradually fading into the limbo of vanities. ”

“ As he said this, Donal, half mechanically, filled a glass from the decanter his host had pushed towards him.
“I should like you, though,” resumed his lordship, after a short pause, “to keep your eyes open to the fact that Davie must do something for himself. You would then be able to let me know by and by what you think him fit for!”
“I will with pleasure, my lord. Tastes may not be infallible guides to what is fit for us, but they may lead us to the knowledge of what we are fit for.” ”

“ Some sicknesses are better than any but the true health.
“I never thought you were like this, Arkie!” said Davie. “You are just as if you had come to school to Mr. Grant! You would soon know how much happier it is to have somebody you must mind!”
“If having me, Davie,” said Donal, “doesn’t help you to be happy without me, there will not have been much good done. What I want most to teach you is, to leave the door always on the latch for some one—you know whom I mean—to come in.”
“Race me up the stair, Arkie,” said Davie, when they came to the foot of the spiral. ”

“ Her power over me is gone.”
“And will never return,” said Donal, “while you keep close to the master. With him you need no human being to set you right, and will allow no human being to set you wrong; you will need neither friend nor minister nor church, though all will help you. I am very glad, for something seems to tell me I shall not be long here.”
Arctura dropped on a chair—pale as rosy before.
“Has anything fresh happened?” she asked, in a low voice that did not sound like hers. ”

“ Donal tried to imagine what a smile would do for his face, but failed. He was not in the least awed by the presence of the great man. What is rank to the man who honours everything human, has no desire to look what he is not, has nothing to conceal and nothing to compass, is fearful of no to-morrow, and does not respect riches! Toward such ends of being the tide of Donal’s life was at least setting. ”

“ To be God’s helper with our fellows is the one high calling; the presence of God in the house the one high condition.
At the end of a week Arctura was better, and able to see Donal. She had had mistress Brookes’s bed moved into the same room with her own, and had made the dressing-room into a sitting-room. It was sunny and pleasant—the very place, Donal thought, he would have chosen for her. ”

“ In the morning Donal learned from Simmons that his master was very ill—could not raise his head.
“The way he do moan and cry!” said Simmons. “You would think sure he was either out of his mind, or had something heavy upon it! All the years I known him, he been like that every now an’ then, and back to his old self again, little the worse! Only the fits do come oftener.”
Towards the close of school, as Donal was beginning to give his lesson in religion, lady Arctura entered, and sat down beside Davie. ”

“ Donal never longed for his hours with Davie to pass, and Davie was never so happy as when with Donal. The one was gently leading the other into the paths of liberty. Nothing but the teaching of him who made the human soul can make that soul free, but it is in great measure through those who have already learned that he teaches; and Davie was an apt pupil, promising to need less of the discipline of failure and pain that he was strong to believe, and ready to obey. ”

“ Davie, thinking he heard her footsteps behind him all the time, flew up shrieking with the sweet terror of love’s pursuit.
“What a darling the boy has grown!” said Arctura when Donal overtook her.
“Yes,” answered Donal; “one would think such a child might run straight into the kingdom of heaven; but I suppose he must have his temptations and trials first: out of the storm alone comes the true peace.”
“Will peace come out of all storms?”
“I trust so. Every pain and every fear, every doubt is a cry after God. ”

“ But Donal would not mix the tumbler of toddy she would have had him take. For one thing he did not like his higher to be operated upon from his lower: it made him feel as if possessed by a not altogether real self. But the root of his objection lay in the teaching of his mother. The things he had learned of his parents were to him his patent of nobility, vouchers that he was honourably descended: of his birth he was as proud as any man. And hence this night he was led to talk of his father and mother, and the things of his childhood. He told Arctura all about the life he had led ”

“ Could anything be done that would not both be and cause a wrong? His first impulse was to follow: a man in such a condition was surely not to be left to go whither he would among the heights and depths of the castle, where he might break his neck any moment! Interference no doubt was dangerous, but he would follow him at least a little way! He heard the steps going down the stair, and made haste after them. But ere they could have reached the bottom, the sound of them ceased; and Donal knew the earl must have left the stair at a point from which he could not follow him. ”

“ The few wise souls in the neighbourhood know Donal as the heart of the place—the man to go to in any difficulty, in any trouble or apprehension.
Miss Carmichael grew by degrees less talkative, and less obtrusive of her opinions. After some years she condescended to marry a farmer on lord Morven’s estate. Their only child, a thoughtful boy, and a true reader, sought the company of the grave man with the sweet smile, going often to his house to ask him about this or that. He reminded him of Davie, and grew very dear to him. ”