Dawtie was glad that at least he left the door open between them. She said she would do a little dusting in the afternoon, and would be very careful. Then the laird rose and went out, and Dawtie perceived, with a shoot of compassion mingled with mild remorse, that he had left his breakfast almost untasted.
But after that, so far from ever beginning any sort of conversation with her, he seemed uncomfortable the moment they happened to be alone together. If he caught her eye, he would say—hurriedly, and as if acknowledging a secret between them, “By and by, Dawtie;” or, “I'm thinking about the business, Dawtie;” or, “I'm making up my mind, Dawtie!” and so leave her. On one occasion he said, “Perhaps you will be surprised some day, Dawtie!”
On her part Dawtie never felt that she had anything more to say to him. She feared at times that she had done him evil rather than good by pressing upon him a duty she had not persuaded him to perform. She spoke of this fear to Andrew, but he answered decisively:
“If you believed you ought to speak to him, and have discovered in yourself no wrong motive, you must not trouble yourself about the result. That may be a thousand years off yet. You may have sent him into a hotter purgatory, and at the same time made it shorter for him. We know nothing but that God is righteous.”
Dawtie was comforted, and things went on as before. Where people know their work and do it, life has few blank spaces for ennui, and they are seldom to be pitied. Where people have not yet found their work, they may be more to be pitied than those that beg their bread. When a man knows his work and will not do it, pity him more than one who is to be hanged to-morrow.
CHAPTER XIX. ANDREW AND ALEXA.
Andrew had occasion to call on the laird to pay his father's rent, and Alexa, who had not seen him for some time, thought him improved both in carriage and speech, and wondered. She did not take into account his intercourse with God, as with highest human minds, and his constant wakefulness to carry into action what things he learned. Thus trained in noblest fashions of freedom, it was small wonder that his bearing and manners, the natural outcome and expression of his habits of being, should grow in liberty. There was in them the change only of development. By the side of such education as this, dealing with reality and inborn dignity, what mattered any amount of ignorance as to social custom! Society may judge its own; this man was not of it, and as much surpassed its most accomplished pupils in all the essentials of breeding, as the apostle Paul was a better gentleman than Mr. Nash or Mr. Brummel. The training may be slow, but it is perfect. To him who has yielded self, all things are possible. Andrew was aware of no difference. He seemed to himself the same as when a boy.
Alexa had not again alluded to his brother's letter concerning George Crawford, fearing he might say what she would find unpleasant. But now she wanted to get a definite opinion from him in regard to certain modes of money-making, which had naturally of late occupied a good deal of her thought.
“What is your notion concerning money-lending—I mean at interest, Mr. Ingram?” she said. “I hear it is objected to nowadays by some that set up for teachers!”