Donal Grant by George MacDonald (sight word readers txt) 📖

no gentleman could fail of response.

The rider was plainly one who had more to do with affairs bucolic than with those of cities or courts, but withal a man of conscious dignity, socially afloat, and able to hold his own.

"What the devil-," he cried-for nothing is so irritating to a horseman as to come near losing his seat, except perhaps to lose it altogether, and indignation against the cause of an untoward accident is generally a mortal's first consciousness thereupon: however foolishly, he feels himself injured. But there, having better taken in Donal's look, he checked himself.

"I beg your pardon, sir," said Donal. "It was foolish of me to show myself so suddenly; I might have thought it would startle most horses. I was too absorbed to have my wits about me."

The gentleman lifted his hat.

"I beg your pardon in return," he said with a smile which cleared every cloud from his face. "I took you for some one who had no business here; but I imagine you are the tutor at the castle, with as good a right as I have myself."

"You guess well, sir."

"Pardon me that I forget your name."

"My name is Donal Grant," returned Donal, with an accent on the my intending a wish to know in return that of the speaker.

"I am a Graeme," answered the other, "one of the clan, and factor to the earl. Come and see where I live. My sister will be glad to make your acquaintance. We lead rather a lonely life here, and don't see too many agreeable people."

"You call this lonely, do you!" said Donal thoughtfully. "-It is a grand place, anyhow!"

"You are right-as you see it now. But wait till winter! Then perhaps you will change your impression a little."

"Pardon me if I doubt whether you know what winter can be so well as I do. This east coast is by all accounts a bitter place, but I fancy it is only upon a great hill-side you can know the heart and soul of a snow-blast."

"I yield that," returned Mr. Graeme. "-It is bitter enough here though, and a mercy we can keep warm in-doors."

"Which is often more than we shepherd-folk can do," said Donal.

Mr. Graeme used to say afterwards he was never so immediately taken with a man. It was one of the charms of Donal's habit of being, that he never spoke as if he belonged to any other than the class in which he had been born and brought up. This came partly of pride in his father and mother, partly of inborn dignity, and partly of religion. To him the story of our Lord was the reality it is, and he rejoiced to know himself so nearly on the same social level of birth as the Master of his life and aspiration. It was Donal's one ambition-to give the high passion a low name-to be free with the freedom which was his natural inheritance, and which is to be gained only by obedience to the words of the Master. From the face of this aspiration fled every kind of pretence as from the light flies the darkness. Hence he was entirely and thoroughly a gentleman. What if his clothes were not even of the next to the newest cut! What if he had not been used to what is called society! He was far above such things. If he might but attain to the manners of the "high countries," manners which appear because they exist-because they are all through the man! He did not think what he might seem in the eyes of men. Courteous, helpful, considerate, always seeking first how far he could honestly agree with any speaker, opposing never save sweetly and apologetically-except indeed some utterance flagrantly unjust were in his ears-there was no man of true breeding, in or out of society, who would not have granted that Donal was fit company for any man or woman. Mr. Graeme's eye glanced down over the tall square-shouldered form, a little stooping from lack of drill and much meditation, but instantly straightening itself upon any inward stir, and he said to himself, "This is no common man!"

They were moving slowly along the avenue, Donal by the rider's near knee, talking away like men not unlikely soon to know each other better.

"You don't make much use of this avenue!" said Donal.

"No; its use is an old story. The castle was for a time deserted, and the family, then passing through a phase of comparative poverty, lived in the house we are in now-to my mind much the more comfortable."

"What a fine old place it must be, if such trees are a fit approach to it!"

"They were never planted for that; they are older far. Either there was a wood here, and the rest were cut down and these left, or there was once a house much older than the present. The look of the garden, and some of the offices, favour the latter idea."

"I have never seen the house," said Donal.

"You have not then been much about yet?" said Mr. Graeme.

"I have been so occupied with my pupil, and so delighted with all that lay immediately around me, that I have gone nowhere-except, indeed, to see Andrew Comin, the cobbler."

"Ah, you know him! I have heard of him as a remarkable man. There was a clergyman here from Glasgow-I forget his name-so struck with him he seemed actually to take him for a prophet. He said he was a survival of the old mystics. For my part I have no turn for extravagance."

"But," said Donal, in the tone of one merely suggesting a possibility, "a thing that from the outside may seem an extravagance, may look quite different when you get inside it."

"The more reason for keeping out of it! If acquaintance must make you in love with it, the more air between you and it the better!"

"Would not such precaution as that keep you from gaining a true knowledge of many things? Nothing almost can be known from what people say."

"True; but there are things so plainly nonsense!"

"Yes; but there are things that seem to be nonsense, because the man thinks he knows what they are when he does not. Who would know the shape of a chair who took his idea of it from its shadow on the floor? What idea can a man have of religion who knows nothing of it except from what he hears at church?"

Mr. Graeme was not fond of going to church yet went: he was the less displeased with the remark. But he made no reply, and the subject dropped.


CHAPTER XX.

THE OLD GARDEN.

The avenue seemed to Donal about to stop dead against a high wall, but ere they quite reached the end, they turned at right angles, skirted the wall for some distance, then turned again with it. It was a somewhat dreary wall-of gray stone, with mortar as gray-not like the rich-coloured walls of old red brick one meets in England. But its roof-like coping was crowned with tufts of wall-plants, and a few lichens did something to relieve the grayness. It guided them to a farm-yard. Mr. Graeme left his horse at the stable, and led the way to the house.

They entered it by a back door whose porch was covered with ivy, and going through several low passages, came to the other side of the house. There Mr. Graeme showed Donal into a large, low-ceiled, old-fashioned drawing-room, smelling of ancient rose-leaves, their odour of sad hearts rather than of withered flowers-and leaving him went to find his sister.

Glancing about him Donal saw a window open to the ground, and went to it. Beyond lay a more fairy-like garden than he had ever dreamed of. But he had read of, though never looked on such, and seemed to know it from times of old. It was laid out in straight lines, with soft walks of old turf, and in it grew all kinds of straight aspiring things: their ambition seemed-to get up, not to spread abroad. He stepped out of the window, drawn as by the enchantment of one of childhood's dreams, and went wandering down a broad walk, his foot sinking deep in the velvety grass, and the loveliness of the dream did not fade. Hollyhocks, gloriously impatient, whose flowers could not wait to reach the top ere they burst into the flame of life, making splendid blots of colour along their ascending stalks, received him like stately dames of faerie, and enticed him, gently eager for more, down the long walks between rows of them-deep red and creamy white, primrose and yellow: sure they were leading him to some wonderful spot, some nest of lovely dreams and more lovely visions! The walk did lead to a bower of roses-a bed surrounded with a trellis, on which they climbed and made a huge bonfire-altar of incense rather, glowing with red and white flame. It seemed more glorious than his brain could receive. Seeing was hardly believing, but believing was more than seeing: though nothing is too good to be true, many things are too good to be grasped.

"Poor misbelieving birds of God," he said to himself, "we hover about a whole wood of the trees of life, venturing only here and there a peck, as if their fruit might be poison, and the design of our creation was our ruin! we shake our wise, owl-feathered heads, and declare they cannot be the trees of life: that were too good to be true! Ten times more consistent are they who deny there is a God at all, than they who believe in a middling kind of God-except indeed that they place in him a fitting faith!"

The thoughts rose gently in his full heart, as the flowers, one after the other, stole in at his eyes, looking up from the dark earth like the spirits of its hidden jewels, which themselves could not reach the sun, exhaled in longing. Over grass which fondled his feet like the lap of an old nurse, he walked slowly round the bed of the roses, turning again towards the house. But there, half-way between him and it, was the lady of the garden descending to meet him!-not ancient like the garden, but young like its flowers, light-footed, and full of life.

Prepared by her brother to be friendly, she met him with a pleasant smile, and he saw that the light which shone in her dark eyes had in it rays of laughter. She had a dark, yet clear complexion, a good forehead, a nose after no recognized generation of noses, yet an attractive one, a mouth larger than to human judgment might have seemed necessary, yet a right pleasing mouth, with two rows of lovely teeth. All this Donal saw approach without dismay. He was no more shy with women than with men; while none the less his feeling towards them partook largely of the reverence of the ideal knight errant. He would not indeed have been shy in the presence of an angel of God; for his only courage came of truth, and clothed in the dignity of his reverence, he could look in the face of the lovely without