第69章

"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."

"Extremely well said!" returned the earl.

I do not think he understood in the least what Donal meant.

"Shall I try how he takes to trigonometry? He might care to learn land-surveying! Gentlemen now, not unfrequently, take charge of the properties of their more favoured relatives. There is Mr. Graeme, your own factor, my lord--a relative, I understand!"

"A distant one," answered his lordship with marked coldness, "--the degree of relationship hardly to be counted."

"In the lowlands, my lord, you do not care to count kin as we do in the highlands! My heart warms to the word kinsman."

"You have not found kinship so awkward as I, possibly!" said his lordship, with a watery smile. "The man in humble position may allow the claim of kin to any extent: he has nothing, therefore nothing can be taken from him! But the man who has would be the poorest of the clan if he gave to every needy relation."

"I never knew the man so poor," answered Donal, "that he had nothing to give. But the things of the poor are hardly to the purpose of the predatory relative."

"'Predatory relative!'--a good phrase!" said his lordship, with a sleepy laugh, though his eyes were wide open. His lips did not seem to care to move, yet he looked pleased. "To tell you the truth," he began again, "at one period of my history I gave and gave till I was tired of giving! Ingratitude was the sole return. At one period I had large possessions--larger than I like to think of now: if I had the tenth part of what I have given away, I should not be uneasy concerning Davie."

"There is no fear of Davie, my lord, so long as he is brought up with the idea that he must work for his bread."

His lordship made no answer, and his look reminded Donal of that he wore when he came to his chamber. A moment, and he rose and began to pace the room. An indescribable suggestion of an invisible yet luminous cloud hovered about his forehead and eyes--which latter, if not fixed on very vacancy, seemed to have got somewhere near it. At the fourth or fifth turn he opened the door by which he had entered, continuing a remark he had begun to Donal--of which, although he heard every word and seemed on the point of understanding something, he had not caught the sense when his lordship disappeared, still talking. Donal thought it therefore his part to follow him, and found himself in his lordship's bedroom. But out of this his lordship had already gone, through an opposite door, and Donal still following entered an old picture-gallery, of which he had heard Davie speak, but which the earl kept private for his exercise indoors. It was a long, narrow place, hardly more than a wide corridor, and appeared nowhere to afford distance enough for seeing a picture. But Donal could ill judge, for the sole light in the place came from the fires and candles in the rooms whose doors they had left open behind them, with just a faint glimmer from the vapour-buried moon, sufficing to show the outline of window after window, and revealing something of the great length of the gallery.

By the time Donal overtook the earl, he was some distance down, holding straight on into the long dusk, and still talking.

"This is my favourite promenade," he said, as if brought to himself by the sound of Donal's overtaking steps. "After dinner always, Mr. Grant, wet weather or dry, still or stormy, I walk here. What do I care for the weather! It will be time when I am old to consult the barometer!"

Donal wondered a little: there seemed no great hardihood in the worst of weather to go pacing a picture-gallery, where the fiercest storm that ever blew could send in only little threads of air through the chinks of windows and doors!

"Yes," his lordship went on, "I taught myself hardship in my boyhood, and I reap the fruits of it in my prime!--Come up here: I will show you a prospect unequalled."

He stopped in front of a large picture, and began to talk as if expatiating on the points of a landscape outspread before him. His remarks belonged to something magnificent; but whether they were applicable to the picture Donal could not tell; there was light enough only to give a faint gleam to its gilded frame.

"Reach beyond reach!" said his lordship; "endless! infinite! How would not poor Maldon, with his ever fresh ambition after the unattainable, have gloated on such a scene! In Nature alone you front success! She does what she means! She alone does what she means!"

"If," said Donal, more for the sake of confirming the earl's impression that he had a listener, than from any idea that he would listen--"if you mean the object of Nature is to present us with perfection, I cannot allow she does what she intends: you rarely see her produce anything she would herself call perfect. But if her object be to make us behold perfection with the inner eye, this object she certainly does gain, and that just by stopping short of--"

He did not finish the sentence. A sudden change was upon him, absorbing him so that he did not even try to account for it: something seemed to give way in his head--as if a bubble burst in his brain; and from that moment whatever the earl said, and whatever arose in his own mind, seemed to have outward existence as well. He heard and knew the voice of his host, but seemed also in some inexplicable way, which at the time occasioned him no surprise, to see the things which had their origin in the brain of the earl.

Whether he went in very deed out with him into the night, he did not know--he felt as if he had gone, and thought he had not--but when he woke the next morning in his bed at the top of the tower, which he had no recollection of climbing, he was as weary as if he had been walking the night through.