“Miss Greville has been staying at the Windsor Hotel with her small nephew, a boy of nine, to whom she is devoted. I have been there several times, as the child took a fancy to me. He is lame, but likely they say to recover, and it is wonderful to see her care of him. Two or three times we went out driving together. She spoke much of you and of the old days. She looks as young as ever on the stage, but off it her face is careworn and awfully sad. To-day, when I went to take leave of her, Sir Roderick Fenchurch was there. He was decent enough till the other visitors were gone, but then fell into a rage with her about some salmon flies that had been forgotten; he has a tongue that cuts like a sharp razor; there’s not a pin to choose between him and the ordinary, wife-beating ‘pleb,’—in fact, I prefer the latter, for at any rate he can be properly punished, while this polished scoundrel with his sarcasms and his cruelties of the tongue can’t be touched. She was very quiet and dignified all through this scene, but when at last he went out she looked dead tired; this sort of thing at home, and the hard work of professional life, must be more than any one could stand for long, I should think. An odd thing has happened. I have found the son of Linklater, the shepherd who housed me so kindly in the Gaick Forest. He is now Sir Roderick Fenchurch’s man, but will not be with him much longer as the brute has given him warning—chiefly to annoy his wife I believe. Dugald Linklater has just been in to see me, and I told him I had been to his home, and that they were always looking for him to come back. He promises to write to his father at once. So there is one pleasant thing in this day, which Sir Roderick Fenchurch has overclouded. What can be the purpose in creation of such brutes? They are enough to have staggered even your prophet Erskine of Linlathen.”
CHAPTER XIX
“Nothing mars or misleads the influence that issues from a pure and humble and unselfish character. A man’s gifts may lack opportunity, his efforts may be misunderstood and resisted; but the spiritual power of a consecrated will needs no opportunity and can enter where the doors are shut.”—Dean Paget.
Macneillie read and re-read this letter with the awful craving of a man whose love has for years been starved of all knowledge of the beloved, except the mere knowledge that she was still in the world. He had, of course, seen her name daily in the papers, and had known what plays she was acting in, but of her real life he had known nothing. He had tried to think that her marriage though necessarily falling below his ideal of married life might at any rate be as happy as the average, might at least be tranquil and not without a certain comfortable respectability. But the brief account given in Ralph’s letter, and the many details which he could so easily read between the lines—filled him with misery. The post had brought him as usual a mass of correspondence; with a sigh of impatience he ran through it, then pushing it aside caught up his hat and hurriedly left the house. He was in no humour to climb the hill-side to the wishing-well; instead, he passed through the village, over Callander Bridge, and taking a little footpath across the meadows, sought out a favourite nook of his beside the river Teith, which wound its peaceful course through the hayfields. A tiny wood had sprung up near this walk at one part, and Macneillie had a special affection for a certain beech-tree which stood just at a bend in the river, and under its shade many of his pleasantest holiday hours were spent. He threw himself down now on the sloping bank beneath it. Everything was curiously still and peaceful; Ben Ledi rose majestically in the distance, framed by soft foliage in the foreground, and the river was emphatically one of those which “glideth at his own sweet will,” a great contrast to the Leny, which dashed and foamed through its rocky pass. It was just this calm peacefulness he longed for in his inward struggle. With all the vividness of one blessed or cursed with a powerful imagination, he realised Christine as she now was. He knew instinctively that her heart had awakened from its sleep, that, with the dead failure of the mariage de convenance, her love which had only lain dormant had returned—but had returned of course to torture her. Hitherto he had been able to think of Sir Roderick Fenchurch with a sort of impartiality. He knew so very little about him; and it was Macneillie’s nature to think well of people until they disillusioned him; he had even felt a sort of compassion for the man, because he knew that he could never really possess Christine’s heart as he, for a time at any rate, had possessed it. But Ralph’s picture of what the husband really was behind his society mask had driven out all gentler thoughts, had filled the Scotsman’s heart with loathing, had over-clouded his whole world.
Macneillie was, however, before all things, an honest man. He had not accepted conventionally the first religious truths put before him, he had thought much, he had waited patiently, had learnt by degrees, and the hard training of his life had borne its fruit—it was impossible now, that he should remain for long in darkness. It flashed upon him that his trouble came from having stepped out of the right order; for a time he had lost that absolute trust in God’s education of every human being, which had for many years been his stronghold. The words of Ralph’s letter came back to him—“brutes like Sir Roderick are enough to have staggered even your prophet Erskine of Linlathen.”
The name of Thomas Erskine in itself awakened within him a whole train of memories, for he was one of the many thousands who have been rescued by the writings of that barrister, laird and saint from falling a prey to the spirit of unbelief which is the reaction alike from Calvinism and ceremonialism.
Lying under the shade of the beech-tree, the fresh air from the hills playing softly about his uncovered head, he tried to picture to himself what Erskine would have thought of this mistaken marriage, with its unhappy results, and there came back to his mind a passage in “The Spiritual Order,” in which the writer spoke of the strange difficulty of retaining faith in God’s loving purpose when confronted with the evils of the lanes and closes of great towns which seem to be mere hot-beds of vice and profligacy. How look on those and still believe that education was God’s whole purpose in creation? “It would be impossible,” said Erskine, “did we not also realise that there is no haste with God.”
Clearly then it was the imperfection of his own nature, the weakness—not the strength—of his love for Christine, which made him so desperately impatient at the thought of her suffering; for her sake he must learn to be “strong and patient,” learn to love with a diviner love, to wait with a more perfect trust. The letter had come to him like a call to arms, he was perfectly conscious that it marked a fresh turning-point in his life; he had learnt more of Christine and her difficulties than he had known for years, and the only way in which he could interpret the meaning of it all was that he should pray for her in her grievous need more unceasingly than he had yet done.