“It is near the earl’s room: is there no danger of his hearing anything?”
“Not the least. The room is not far from his, it is true, but it is not in the same block; there are thick walls between. Besides he is too ill to be up.”
She led the way, and Donal followed her up the main staircase to the second floor, and into the small, curious, ancient room, evidently one of the oldest in the castle, which she had chosen for her sitting-room. Perhaps if she had lived less in the shadow, she might have chosen a less gloomy one: the sky was visible only through a little lane of walls and gables and battlements. But it was very charming, with its odd nooks and corners, recesses and projections. It looked an afterthought, the utilization of a space accidentally defined by rejection, as if every one of its sides were the wall of a distinct building.
“I do wish, my lady,” said Donal, “you would not sit so much where is so little sunlight! Outer and inner things are in their origin one; the light of the sun is the natural world-clothing of the truth, and whoever sits much in the physical dark misses a great help to understanding the things of the light. If I were your director,” he went on, “I would counsel you to change this room for one with a broad, fair outlook; so that, when gloomy thoughts hid God from you, they might have his eternal contradiction in the face of his heaven and earth.”
“It is but fair to tell you,” replied Arctura, “that Sophia would have had me do so; but while I felt about God as she taught me, what could the fairest sunlight be to me?”
“Yes, what indeed!” returned Donal. “Do you know,” he added presently, his eyes straying about the room, “I feel almost as if I were trying to understand a human creature. A house is so like a human mind, which gradually disentangles and explains itself as you go on to know it! It is no accidental resemblance, for, as an unavoidable necessity, every house must be like those that built it.”
“But in a very old house,” said Arctura, “so many hands of so many generations have been employed in the building, and so many fancied as well as real necessities have been at work, that it must be a conflict of many natures.”
“But where the house continues in the same family, the builders have more or less transmitted their nature, as well as their house, to those who come after them.”
“Do you think then,” said Arctura, almost with a shudder, “that I inherit a nature like the house left me—that the house is an outside to me—fits my very self as the shell fits the snail?”
“The relation of outer and inner is there, but there is given with it an infinite power to modify. Everyone is born nearer to God than to any ancestor, and it rests with him to cultivate either the godness or the selfness in him, his original or his mere ancestral nature. The fight between the natural and the spiritual man is the history of the world. The man who sets right his faults inherited, makes atonement for the sins of those who went before him; he is baptized for the dead, not with water but with fire.”