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 neighborhood, 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 neighborhood.
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.
Rose married a young fisherman, and made a brave wife and mother. To the end of her days she regarded the marquis almost as a being higher than human, an angel that had found and saved her.
Kelpie had a foal, and, apparently in consequence, grew so much more gentle that at length Malcolm consented that Clementina, who was an excellent horsewoman, should mount her. After a few attempts to unseat her, not of the most determined kind, however, Kelpie, on her part, consented to carry her, and ever after seemed proud of having a mistress that could ride. Her foal turned out a magnificent horse. Malcolm did not allow him to do anything that could be called work before he was eight years old, and had the return at the other end, for when Goblin was thirty he rode him still, and, to judge by appearances, might but for an accident have ridden him ten years more.
It was not long ere people began to remark that no one now ever heard the piper utter the name Campbell. An ill-bred youth once—it was well for him that Malcolm was not near—dared the evil word in his presence: a cloud swept across the old man's face, but he held his peace, and to the day of his death, which arrived in his ninety-first year, it never crossed his lips. He died with the Lossie pipes on his bed, Malcolm on one side of him and Clementina on the other.
Some of my readers may care to know that Phemy and Davy were married, and made the quaintest, oldest-fashioned little couple, with hearts which king and beggar might equally have trusted.
Malcolm's relations with the fisher-folk, founded as they were in truth and open uprightness, were not in the least injured by his change of position. He made it a point to be always at home during the herring-fishing. Whatever might be going on in London, the marquis and marchioness, their family and household, were sure to leave in time for the commencement of that. Those who admired Malcolm—of whom there were not a few even in Vanity Fair—called him the fisher-king: the wags called him the kingfisher, and laughed at the oddity of his taste in preferring what he called his duty to the pleasures of the season. But the marquis found even the hen-pecked Partan a nobler and more elevating presence than any strutting platitude of Bond street. And when he was at home he was always about amongst the people. Almost every day he would look in at some door in the Seaton, and call out a salutation to the busy house-wife—perhaps go in and sit down for a minute. Now he would be walking with this one, now talking with that—oftenest with Blue Peter; and sometimes both their wives would be with them upon the shore or in the grounds. Nor was there a family meal to which any one or all together of the six men whom he had set over the Seaton and Scaurnose would not have been welcomed by the marquis and his Clemency. The House was head and heart of the whole district.