Malcolm, as he well might, had such a strong feeling of the power for good of every high-souled schoolmaster, that nothing would serve him but Mr Graham must be reinstated. He told the presbytery that if it were not done, he would himself build a school-house for him, and the consequence, he said, needed no prediction. Finding, at the same time, that the young man they had put in his place was willing to act as his assistant, he proposed that he should keep the cottage, and all other emoluments of the office, on the sole condition that, when he found he could no longer conscientiously and heartily further the endeavours of Mr Graham, he should say so; whereupon the marquis would endeavour to procure him another appointment; and on these understandings the thing was arranged.
Mr Graham thenceforward lived in the House, a spiritual father to the whole family, reverenced by all, ever greeted with gladness, ever obeyed. The spiritual dignity and simplicity, the fine sense and delicate feeling of the man, rendered him a saving presence in the place; and Clementina felt as if one of the ancient prophets, blossomed into a Christian, was the glory of their family and house. Like a perfect daughter, she watched him, tried to discover preferences of which he might not himself be aware, and often waited upon him with her own hands.
There was an ancient building connected with the house, divided now for many years into barn and dairy, but evidently the chapel of the monastery: this Malcolm soon set about reconverting. It made a lovely chapel—too large for the household, but not too large for its congregation upon Wednesday evenings, when many of the fishermen and their families, and not a few of the inhabitants of the upper town, with occasionally several farm servants from the neighbourhood, assembled to listen devoutly to the fervent and loving expostulations and rousings, or the tender consolings and wise instructions of the master, as every one called him. The hold he had of their hearts was firm, and his influence on their consciences far reaching.
When there was need of conference, or ground for any wide expostulation, the marquis would call a meeting in the chapel; but this occurred very seldom. Now and then the master, sometimes the marquis himself, would use it for a course of lectures or a succession of readings from some specially interesting book; and in what had been the sacristy they gathered a small library for the use of the neighbourhood.
No meeting was held there of a Sunday, for although the clergyman was the one person to whom all his life the marquis never came any nearer, he was not the less careful to avoid everything that might rouse contention or encourage division.
“I find the doing of the will of God,” he would say, “leaves me no time for disputing about his plans—I do not say for thinking about them.”
Not therefore, however, would he waive the exercise of the inborn right of teaching, and anybody might come to the house and see the master on Sunday evenings. As to whether people went to church or stayed away, he never troubled himself in the least; and no more did the schoolmaster.
The chapel had not been long finished when he had an organ built in it. Lady Lossie played upon it. Almost every evening, at a certain hour, she played for a while; the door was always open, and any one who pleased might sit down and listen.
Gradually the feeling of the community, from the strengthening and concentrating influence of the House, began to bear upon offenders; and any whose conduct had become in the least flagrant soon felt that the general eye was upon them, and that gradually the human tide was falling from them, and leaving them prisoned in a rocky basin on a barren shore. But at the same time, all three of the powers at the House were watching to come in the moment there was a chance; and what with the marquis’s warnings, his wife’s encouragements, and the master’s expostulations, there was no little hope of the final recovery of several who would otherwise most likely have sunk deeper and deeper.
The marchioness took Lizzy for her personal attendant, and had her boy much about her; so that by the time she had children of her own, she had some genuine and worthy notion of what a child was, and what could and ought to be done for the development of the divine germ that lay in the human egg; and had found that the best she could do for any child, or indeed anybody, was to be good herself.