Arthur Townshend laughed. "No, I can't see your father being jocose. I was thinking when I listened to him what a tremendous thing for people to have a padre like that. His very face is an inspiration. His eyes seem to see things beyond. He makes me think of—who was it in The Pilgrim's Progress who had 'a wonderful innocent smile'?"
Elizabeth nodded.
"I know. Isn't it wonderful, after sixty odd years in this world? There is something so oddly joyous about him. And it isn't that sort of provoking fixed brightness that some Christian people have—people who have read Robert Louis and don't mean to falter in their task of happiness. When you ask them how they are, they say 'Splendid'; and when you remark, conversationally, that the weather is ghastly beyond words, they pretend to find pleasure in it, until, like Pet Marjorie, you feel your birse rise at them. Father knows just how bad the world is, the cruelty, the toil, the treason; he knows how bitter sorrow is, and what it means to lay hopes in the grave, but he looks beyond and sees something so ineffably lovely—such an exceeding and eternal weight of glory—that he can go on with his day's work joyfully."
"Yes," said Arthur, "the other world seems extraordinarily real to him."
"Oh! Real! Heaven is much the realest place there is to Father. I do believe that when he is toiling away in the Gorbals he never sees the squalor for thinking of the streets of gold."
Elizabeth's grey eyes grew soft for a moment with unshed tears, but she blinked them away and laughed.
"The nicest thing about my father is that he is full of contradictions. So gentle and with such an uncompromising creed! The Way is the Way to Father, narrow and hard and comfortless. And he is so good, so purely good, and yet never righteous over much. There is a sort of ingrained humility and lovableness in him that attracts the sinners as well as the saints. He never thinks that because he is virtuous there should be no more cakes and ale. And then, though with him he carries gentle peace, he is by no means a pacific sort of person. He loves to fight; and he hates to be in the majority. Minorities have been right, he says, since the days of Noah. When he speaks in the Presbytery it is always on the unpopular side. D'you remember what a fuss they made about Chinese labour in South Africa? Father made a speech defending it! Someone said to me that he must have an interest in the Mines! Dear heart! He doesn't even know what his income is. The lilies of the field are wily financiers compared to him."
Half an hour later, at four o'clock to be precise, the Setons and their guest sat down to dinner.
"I often wonder," said Mr. Seton, as he meditatively carved slices of cold meat, "why on Sabbath we have dinner at four o'clock and tea at seven. Wouldn't it be just as easy to have tea at four and dinner at seven?"
"'Sir,'" said Elizabeth, "in the words of Dr. Johnson, 'you may wonder!' All my life this has been the order of meals on the Sabbath Day, and who am I that I should change them? Besides, it's a change and makes the Sabbath a little different. Mr. Townshend, I hope you don't mind us galumphing through the meal? Father and I have to be back at the church at five o'clock."