It may be asked whence it arose that Duncan should now be willing to quit his claim to any paternal property in Malcolm, confessing that he was none of his blood.
One source of the change was doubtless the desire of confidences between himself and Lady Florimel; another, the growing conviction, generated it may be by the admiration which is born of love, that the youth had gentle blood in his veins; and a third, that Duncan had now so thoroughly proved the heart of Malcolm as to have no fear of any change of fortune ever alienating his affections, or causing him to behave otherwise than as his dutiful grandson.
It is not surprising that such a tale should have a considerable influence on Lady Florimel’s imagination: out of the scanty facts which formed but a second volume, she began at once to construct both a first and a third. She dreamed of the young fisherman that night, and reflecting in the morning on her intercourse with him, recalled sufficient indications in him of superiority to his circumstances, noted by her now, however, for the first time, to justify her dream: he might indeed well be the last scion of a noble family.
I do not intend the least hint that she began to fall in love with him. To balance his good looks, and the nobility, to keener eyes yet more evident than to hers, in both his moral and physical carriage, the equally undeniable clownishness of his dialect and tone had huge weight, while the peculiar straightforwardness of his behaviour and address not unfrequently savoured in her eyes of rudeness; besides which objectionable things, there was the persistent odour of fish about his garments—in itself sufficient to prevent such a catastrophe. The sole result of her meditations was the resolve to get some amusement out of him by means of a knowledge of his history superior to his own.
CHAPTER XXX.
THE REVIVAL.
Before the close of the herring-fishing, one of those movements of the spiritual waters, which in different forms, and under different names, manifest themselves at various intervals of space and of time, was in full vortex. It was supposed by the folk of Portlossie to have begun in the village of Scaurnose, but by the time it was recognized as existent, no one could tell whence it had come, any more than he could predict whither it was going. Of its spiritual origin it may be also predicated with confidence that its roots lay deeper than human insight could reach, and were far more interwoven than human analysis could disentangle.
One notable fact bearing on its nature was, that it arose amongst the people themselves, without the intervention or immediate operation of the clergy, who indeed to a man were set against it. Hence the flood was at first free from the results of one influence most prolific of the pseudo-spiritual, namely, the convulsive efforts of men with faith in a certain evil system of theology, to rouse a galvanic life by working on the higher feelings through the electric sympathies of large assemblages, and the excitement of late hours, prolonged prayers and exhortations, and sometimes even direct appeal to individuals in public presence. The end of these things is death, for the reaction is towards spiritual hardness and a more confirmed unbelief: when the excitement has died away, those at least in whom the spiritual faculty is for the time exhausted, presume that they have tasted and seen, and found that nothing is there. The whole thing is closely allied to the absurdity of those who would throw down or who would accept the challenge to test the reality of answer to prayer by applying the force of a multitudinous petition to the will of the supposed divinity—I say supposed divinity, because a being whose will could be thus moved like a water-wheel could not be in any sense divine. If there might be a religious person so foolish and irreverent as to agree to such a test—crucial indeed, but in a far other sense than that imagined —I would put it to him whether the very sense of experiment would not destroy in his mind all faculty of prayer, placing him in the position, no more of a son of God, but of one who, tempting the Lord his God, may read his rebuke where it stands recorded for the ages.
But where such a movement has originated amongst the people, the very facts adduced to argue its falsehood from its vulgarity, are to me so many indications on the other side; for I could ill believe in a divine influence which did not take the person such as he was; did not, while giving him power from beyond him, leave his individuality uninjured, yea intensify it, subjecting the very means of its purification, the spread of the new leaven, to the laws of time and growth. To look at the thing from the other side, the genuineness of the man’s reception of it will be manifest in the meeting of his present conditions with the new thing—in the show of results natural to one of his degree of development. To hear a rude man utter his experience in the forms of cultivation, would be at once to suspect the mere glitter of a reflex, and to doubt an illumination from within. I repeat, the genuine influence shows itself such in showing that it has laid hold of the very man, at the very stage of growth he had reached. The dancing of David before the ark, the glow of St. Stephen’s face, and the wild gestures and rude songs of miners and fishers and negroes, may all be signs of the presence of the same spirit in temples various. Children will rush and shout and hollo for the same joy which sends others of the family to weep apart.
Of course the one infallible test as to whether any such movement is of man without God, or of God within the man, is the following life; only, a large space for fluctuation must be allowed where a whole world of passions and habits has to be subjected to the will of God through the vice-regency of a human will hardly or only just awakened, and as yet unconscious of itself.
The nearest Joseph Mair could come to the origin of the present movement was the influence of a certain Stornoway fisherman, whom they had brought back with them on their return from the coasts of Lewis—a man of Celtic fervour and faith, who had agreed to accompany them probably in the hope of serving a set of the bravest and hardest-working men in the world, who yet spent a large part of their ease in drinking up the earnings of fierce and perilous labour. There were a few amongst them, he found, already prepared to receive the word, and to each of these he spoke in private. They spoke to one another, then each to his friend outside the little circle. Next a few met to pray. These drew others in, and at length it was delivered from mouth to mouth that on the following Sunday, at a certain early hour in the morning, a meeting would be held in the Bailie’s Barn, a cave large enough to receive all the grown population of Scaurnose.