第77章

"It would be terrible if he did not. All hatred of sin is love to the sinner. Do you think Jesus came to deliver us from the punishment of our sins? He would not have moved a step for that. The horrible thing is being bad, and all punishment is help to deliver us from that, nor will punishment cease till we have ceased to be bad. God will have us good, and Jesus works out the will of his father. Where is the refuge of the child who fears his father? Is it in the farthest corner of the room? Is it down in the dungeon of the castle, my lady?"

"No, no!" cried lady Arctura, "--in his father's arms!"

"There!" said Donal, and was silent.

"I hold by Jesus!" he added after a pause, and rose as he said it, but stood where he rose.

Lady Arctura sat motionless, divided between reverence for distorted and false forms of truth taught her from her earliest years, and desire after a God whose very being is the bliss of his creatures.

Some time passed in silence, and then she too rose to depart. She held out her hand to Donal with a kind of irresolute motion, but withdrawing it, smiled almost beseechingly, and said, "I wish I might ask you something. I know it is a rude question, but if you could see all, you would answer me and let the offence go."

"I will answer you anything you choose to ask."

"That makes it the more difficult; but I will--I cannot bear to remain longer in doubt: did you really write that poem you gave to Kate Graeme--compose it, I mean, your own self?"

"I made no secret of that when I gave it her," said Donal, not perceiving her drift.

"Then you did really write it?"

Donal looked at her in perplexity. Her face grew very red, and tears began to come in her eyes.

"You must pardon me!" she said: "I am so ignorant! And we live in such an out-of-the-way place that--that it seems very unlikely a real poet--! And then I have been told there are people who have a passion for appearing to do the thing they are not able to do, and I was anxious to be quite sure! My mind would keep brooding over it, and wondering, and longing to know for certain!--So I resolved at last that I would be rid of the doubt, even at the risk of offending you. I know I have been rude--unpardonably rude, but--"

"But," supplemented Donal, with a most sympathetic smile, for he understood her as his own thought, "you do not feel quite sure yet!

What a priori reason do you see why I should not be able to write verses? There is no rule as to where poetry grows: one place is as good as another for that!"

"I hope you will forgive me! I hope I have not offended you very much!"

"Nobody in such a world as this ought to be offended at being asked for proof. If there are in it rogues that look like honest men, how is any one, without a special gift of insight, to be always sure of the honest man? Even the man whom a woman loves best will sometimes tear her heart to pieces! I will give you all the proof you can desire.--And lest the tempter should say I made up the proof itself between now and to-morrow morning, I will fetch it at once."

"Oh, Mr. Grant, spare me! I am not, indeed I am not so bad as that!"

"Who can tell when or whence the doubt may wake again, or what may wake it!"

"At least let me explain a little before you go," she said.

"Certainly," he answered, reseating himself, in compliance with her example.

"Miss Graeme told me that you had never seen a garden like theirs before!"

"I never did. There are none such, I fancy, in our part of the country."

"Nor in our neighbourhood either."

"Then what is surprising in it?"

"Nothing in that. But is there not something in your being able to write a poem like that about a garden such as you had never seen?

One would say you must have been familiar with it from childhood to be able so to enter into the spirit of the place!"

"Perhaps if I had been familiar with it from childhood, that might have disabled me from feeling the spirit of it, for then might it not have looked to me as it looked to those in whose time such gardens were the fashion? Two things are necessary--first, that there should be a spirit in a place, and next that the place should be seen by one whose spirit is capable of giving house-room to its spirit.--By the way, does the ghost-lady feel the place all right?"