“I to the hills will lift mine eyes,
From whence doth come mine aid,
My safety cometh from the Lord,
Who heav’n and earth hath made.”
But the only person who attempted to sing was the factotum at the clerk’s desk, and he rendered the entire Psalm alone from beginning to end, in slow, loud, wavering, twangy tones that took small account of a semi-tone higher or lower, and left the tune, when he had finished, still a matter of conjecture to the uninitiated.
As the service proceeded a few more people came in, dropped into pews here and there, and stared at the unwonted sight of a lovely English face and fresh London millinery. But when Macpherson rose, and gave out his text, “What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” reading it twice or thrice in his curious foreign accent, every eye was fixed upon his face, and each man placed his arms on the table or shelf in front of him and bent forward to listen.
It was a thin, plain face, with a low, broad brow, high cheekbones and irregular features, that showed against the dull light-blue of the old pulpit; but the dark eyes lit up with intense eagerness as he leaned forward to preach in his fashion the old, oft-repeated lesson, and every line of the slight, wiry figure was instinct with energy and life. His sermon was short, and his language strong and simple—so simple that to at least one listener it had the force almost of a new revelation. The hearers could not know what that simplicity cost him, though some of them might have remembered a time when they could not understand him; there was nothing to tell how each plain, homely phrase came out victorious over eloquent words and symbolic imagery and high intellectual reasonings that were always thronging there within him; nothing to reveal how hard he was trying to live in them and out of himself, that he might realise their need, and feel how the message he so burned to deliver might best wake echoes in those poor dull hearts that were so slow to respond.
Very earnestly he set forth the nothingness of all the things that “grossly close us in” and bar the way that leads to life. Passionately he pleaded for the great single purpose that opens and makes plain that way and guides unerringly the feet that find it.
The fair English lady, looking up at that young earnest face, and then beyond it, where through the window she could see red fir boughs stirring against the summer sky, wondered at the courage that could face this mere handful of listeners and feel as enthusiastic and speak with as much energy as though thousands hung upon his words. To other than Gaelic ears that voice, too, had a special charm with its undertone of pathos, its plaintive echo of “old, unhappy, far-off things,” the melancholy of a dying language and a race that is being fast merged and lost in the self-asserting, irreverent Saxon, akin to that sorrow on the wind across the moors and among the lonesome hills, even when it comes whispering down the wild warm corries, or blows cool off the sunny summits on a summer day, carrying a sound of tears.
At the evening service the young Englishman was there alone, and on his homeward way Macpherson wondered whether he ought to call at the villa. For the next day or two, however, he knew he would have no time, for there was fever at a little farm on the lower boundary of the parish, and in the poor cottages belonging to it, and as often as other work would allow Macpherson was there comforting, nursing, helping, and always bringing with him some welcome trifle that the sufferers could not afford; a few eggs, a lemon or two, a little tea, two or three bottles of seltzer-water—anything his kind heart could suggest and his ready hand procure. Visits like these sometimes occupied his whole afternoon, so that he did not come home till the shadows of the hills darkened all the valley.