“I beg your pardon, Jock, I didn’t mean to worry you. I know it is a grand thing for you. But mother was so merry and happy when we thought we should all be snug with you in the old house, and she made such nice plans. But now she is so fagged and worn, and she can’t sleep. She began to read as soon as it was light all those long summer mornings to keep from thinking; and she is teasing herself over her accounts. There were shoals of great horrid bills of things Allen ordered coming in at Midsummer, just as she thought she saw her way! Do you know, she thinks she may have to let our own house and go into lodgings.”
“Is that you, Barbara?” said a voice at the Parsonage wicket. “How is our dear patient?”
“Rather better to-night, we think.”
“Tell him I hope to come and see him to-morrow. And say the vases are come. I thought your mother would wish us to have the large ones, so I put them in the Church. They are £3.”
Babie thought Jock’s face was dazed when he came among the lights in Church, and that he moved and responded like an automaton, and she could hardly get a word out of him all the way home. There, they were sent for to Armine, who was sufficiently better to want to hear all about the services, the procession, the wheat-sheaf, the hymns, and the sermons. Jock stood the examination well till it came to evensong, when, as his sister had conjectured, he knew nothing, except one sentence, which he said had come over and over again in the sermon, and he wanted to know whence it came. It was, “Seekest thou great things for thyself.”
Even Armine only knew that it was in a note in the “Christian Year,” and Babie looked out the reference, and found that it was Jeremiah’s rebuke to Baruch for self-seeking amid the general ruin.
“I liked Baruch,” she said. “I am sorry he was selfish.”
“Noble selfishness, perhaps,” said Armine. “He may have aimed at saving his country and coming out a glorious hero, like Gideon or Jephthah.”
“And would that have been self-seeking too, as well as the commoner thing?” said Babie.
“It is like a bit of New Testament in the midst of the Old,” said Armine. “They that are great are called Benefactors—a good sort of greatness, but still not the true Christian greatness.”