“And nothing’s going to happen that I ken of, Sir Ludovic. We are all in our ordinar.”
“That is very true, too,” he said, with a smile; “and now you can go away and tell John to bring me my wine and my biscuit. The doctor and you together have wasted my morning.” He drew his book toward him again as he dismissed her. This was the only “good sign” that Bell saw in her master; and her face was so grave when she went down-stairs that John paused in his preparation for his master’s simple luncheon with a sombre triumph.
“Aweel? You’ll not tell me I’m an auld fule again,” John said.
“Then I’ll tell you you’re an auld raven, a prophet o’ evil,” said his wife, with vehemence. “Gang up the stairs this moment and gie the maister his drop o’ wine; he’s crying for that and his biscuit, and there he might sit, and you never take the trouble to gang near him. Oh ay!” said Bell, dreamily—“oh ay! The bairn divined it, and the auld man saw it, and the doctor sees it too, though he winna say sae; and Bell’s the last to ken! In our ordinar, just in our ordinar! but them that has een can see the end.”
However, though this foreboding gathered force by the adhesion of one after another, it was not as yet any more than a foreboding, and the days went on very quietly without any new event. The next Sunday, on which Sir Ludovic had intended to go to church, was very wet, and it was not until a fortnight after his first announcement of his intention, that the old carriage was at last got out, and the horses, which had been making themselves useful in the farm, harnessed. They were not a very splendid or high-spirited pair, as may be conceived, but they answered the purpose well enough. It was a true summer Sunday, the sunshine more warm, the air more still, than on any other day. The roses were fading off the hedge-rows, the green corn was beginning to wave and rustle in the fields; the country groups that came from afar on every visible road, not all to the kirk on the hill (for there was a Free Church in the “laigh toun,” not to speak of “the chapel,” which was Baptist, and had a dozen members, like the Apostles), were sprinkled with light dresses in honor of the season, and all was still in the villages save for this gathering and animated crowd. The big old coach, with its old occupant, called forth much excitement in the Kirkton. Carriages and fine people had failed to the parish church.
Perhaps it is one of the penalties which Scotland has paid for being no longer unanimous, and dividing herself into different camps, that her gentry should have deserted that old centre of local life, and left the National Church which has played so large a part in Scotch history. It is one of the least sensible as well as the least lovely features of modern Scotland. Of all the squires in this division of Fife, not one but old Sir Ludovic united in the national worship. The others drove miles away to the “English Chapel” at the county town, which was gay with their carriages and finery, like the corresponding “English Chapel” in Florence or Rome; very like it, indeed, in more ways than it is necessary to mention. Gentility poured thither, even the rich shopkeepers, or at least the manufacturers of the second generation; for to belong to the English Church gave a kind of brevet rank. Sir Ludovic, perhaps, was too indifferent to change his ways in his old age; and then neither he nor the world required any outward proof that he was a very superior person. Why it was that he had set his mind on going to church at all after this long gap in his attendance it would be hard to tell. He could not have told himself. It was like a last visit to court, a last parade to an old soldier, a thing to be done as long as he could calculate upon his time, before the days had arrived, which he could see advancing, when he would no longer have command of his own movements.
Sir Ludovic felt a sensation of relief when he had fairly set out. Of this thing, then, which he had determined to do, he was not to be balked. He was to have power and time to accomplish this last duty. The burial-place of the Leslies was close to the east end of the church, the head of the vault touching the old chancel, a relic of the times when to be near that sacred spot in the morning quarter, “toward the sunrising,” was to be doubly safe. Here Sir Ludovic stood for a moment, looking less at the familiar grave than at the still more familiar landscape, the low hills round the horizon on three sides, the glimmer of the sea that filled up the circle, the broad amphitheatre of fertile fields that swept around. He did not care to turn from that wide and liberal prospect, all sweet with summer air and warm with sunshine, to the heavy mass of stone that shut in the remains of his kindred. He gave one glance at it only, as he walked past, though it was that spot he had chosen to view the landscape from. A faint smile came upon his face as he looked at it. There was his place waiting and ready, and soon to be filled. He asked himself, with a little thrill of strange sensation, whether he would feel the breezes, such as were always rife in Stratheden, or have any consciousness of the landscape, when he lay there, as, by-and-by, he should be lying. He walked very steadily, yet with a nervous tremor, of which he himself was conscious, if nobody else, and kept his hand upon Margaret’s shoulder, scarcely to support him—that was not necessary—but yet to give him a little prop. Some of the people, the elders and the farmers who felt themselves sufficiently important, threw themselves in his way, and took off their hats with kindly respect.
“I’m real glad to see you out, Sir Ludovic,” and, “I hope you’re well this fine morning, Sir Ludovic,” they said. The old man took off his hat and made them all a sweeping bow.
“Good-morning to you all, my friends,” he said, and, with a little additional tremor, hurried into church, to be safe from all these greetings. The church, as we have already said, was a monstrous compound, such as perhaps only Scotland could produce nowadays. The old door opened into a noble but gloomy old Norman church, very small, but lofty and symmetrical, in the corners of which some old monuments, brass denuded of their metal (if that is not a bull), rude in Northern art, but ancient, and looking, by dint of their imperfections, more ancient than they were—were piled together. In the little round basement of the tower, where there had been a tiny chapel behind the altar in the old days, a man in his shirt-sleeves stood pulling the rope, which moved a cracked and jingling bell; and the vast chancel arch opposite was blocked up with a wooden partition, through which, by means of a little door, you entered the new painted and varnished pews of the modern building, which Sir Claude Morton had built for the parish. The parish was quite contented, be it allowed, and Sir Claude went to the English Chapel, and did not have his sins brought home to him every Sunday; and among the higher classes you may be sure that it was the old Reformers and John Knox who were supposed to be in fault, and not an enlightened connoisseur like Sir Claude, who did so much for the art-instruction of the world away from home. Sir Claude was the chief “heritor” of the parish, for the lands of the Leslies had dwindled almost to nothing.
We will not affirm that Sir Ludovic would have done much better, but then, at least, he was not a connoisseur. He, for his part, made no reflections upon this as he went in, and placed himself in the great square pew, the only one of the kind in the new church, all lined with red cloth, and filled with chairs instead of benches, which marked his own importance in the parish. He thought of the difference between the old and the new without troubling himself about art, and with a little shiver acknowledged that the light and air and brightness of the wooden barn were more comfortable than the stately grace and dampness of the old building, which was, like himself, chilled and colorless with age. But how many generations of old men like himself had passed under the great gray arch that “swore,” as the French say, at the vulgar new walls! A lifetime of threescore and fifteen years was as nothing in the history of that ancient place. And there it would stand for generations more, watching them come and go— It, and he with it, lying so close under the old stones. Would it be anything to Ludovic Leslie, once placed there, who came and who might go? This thought gave him, as it always did, a kind of vertigo and swimming of the brain. To fancy one’s self—one’s self, not another, as insensible to everything in life—