Of late the boy had been more than usual with his father, and he may have dropped some word that turned his father’s thoughts toward Donal and his ways of thinking: however weak the earl’s will, and however dull his conscience, his mind was far from being inactive. In the afternoon the butler brought a message that his lordship would be glad to see Mr. Grant when school was over.
Donal found the earl very weak, but more like a live man, he thought, than he had yet seen him. He pointed to a seat, and began to talk in a way that considerably astonished the tutor.
“Mr. Grant,” he began, with not a little formality, “I have known you long enough to believe I know you really. Now I find myself, partly from the peculiarity of my constitution, partly from the state of my health, partly from the fact that my views do not coincide with those of the church of Scotland, and there is no episcopal clergyman within reach of the castle—I find myself, I say, for these reasons, desirous of some conversation with you, more for the sake of identifying my own opinions, than in the hope of receiving from you what it would be unreasonable to expect from one of your years.”
Donal held his peace; the very power of speech seemed taken from him: he had no confidence in the man, and nothing so quenches speech as lack of faith. But the earl had no idea of this distrust, never a doubt of his listener’s readiness to take any position he required him to take. Experience had taught him as little about Donal as about his own real self.
“I have long been troubled,” continued his lordship after a momentary pause, “with a question of which one might think the world must by this time be weary—which yet has, and always will have, extraordinary fascination for minds of a certain sort—of which my own is one: it is the question of the freedom of the will:—how far is the will free? or how far can it be called free, consistently with the notion of a God over all?”
He paused, and Donal sat silent—so long that his lordship opened the eyes which, the better to enjoy the process of sentence-making, he had kept shut, and half turned his head towards him: he had begun to doubt whether he was really by his bedside, or but one of his many visions undistinguishable by him from realities. Re-assured by the glance, he resumed.
“I cannot, of course, expect from you such an exhaustive and formed opinion as from an older man who had made metaphysics his business, and acquainted himself with all that had been said upon the subject; at the same time you must have expended a considerable amount of thought on these matters!”
He talked in a quiet, level manner, almost without inflection, and with his eyes again closed—very much as if he were reading a book inside him.
“I have had a good deal,” he went on, “to shake my belief in the common ideas on such points.—Do you believe there is such a thing as free will?”
He ceased, awaiting the answer which Donal felt far from prepared to give him.