The Laird stares, as if he had not heard aright. Angus Sutherland is not aware of having said anything startling. He continues quite innocently—
"Any occupation is valuable enough that diverts the mind—that is why hard work is conducive to complete mental health; it does not matter whether it is grouse-shooting, or commanding an army, or wrangling about major or minor propositions. If a man were continually to be facing the awful mystery of existence—asking the record of the earth and the stars how he came to be here, and getting no answer at all—he must inevitably go mad. The brain could not stand it. If the human race had not busied itself with wars and commerce, and so forth, it must centuries ago have committed suicide. That is the value of hard work—to keep people from thinking of the unknown around them; the more a man is occupied, the happier he is—it does not matter whether he occupies himself with School Boards, or salmon-fishing, or the prosecution of a heretic."
He did not remark the amazed look on the Laird's face, nor yet that Mary Avon had dropped her painting and was listening.
"The fact is," he said, with a smile, "if you are likely to fall to thinking about the real mysteries of existence anywhere, it is among solitudes like these, where you see what a trivial little accident human life is in the history of the earth. You can't think about such things in Regent Street; the cigar-shops, the cabs, the passing people occupy you. But here you are brought back as it were to all sorts of first principles; and commonplaces appear somehow in their original freshness. In Regent Street you no doubt know that life is a strange thing, and that death is a strange thing, because you have been told so, and you believe it, and think no more about it. But here—with the seas and skies round you, and with the silence of the night making you think, you feel the strangeness of these things. Now just look over there; the blue sea, and the blue sky, and the hills—it is a curious thing to think that they will be shining there just as they are now—on just such another day as this—and you unable to see them or anything else—passed away like a ghost. And the White Dove will be sailing up here; and John will be keeping an eye on Ushinish lighthouse; but your eyes won't be able to see anything——"
"Well, Angus, I do declare," exclaims our sovereign mistress, "you have chosen a comforting thing to talk about this morning. Are we to be always thinking about our coffin?"
"On the contrary," says the young Doctor; "I was only insisting on the wholesomeness of people occupying themselves diligently with some distraction or other, however trivial. And how do you think the Semple case will end, sir?"
But our good friend of Denny-mains was far too deeply shocked and astounded to reply. The great Semple case a trivial thing—a distraction—an occupation to keep people from serious thinking! The public duties, too, of the Commissioner for the Burgh of Strathgovan; were these to be regarded as a mere plaything? The new steam fire-engine was only a toy, then? The proposed new park and the addition to the rates were to be regarded as a piece of amiable diversion?
The Laird knew that Angus Sutherland had not read the Vestiges of Creation, and that was a hopeful sign. But, Vestiges or no Vestiges, what were the young men of the day coming to if their daring speculations led them to regard the most serious and important concerns of life as a pastime? The Commissioners for the Burgh of Strathgoven were but a parcel of children, then, playing on the sea-shore, and unaware of the awful deeps beyond?
"I am looking at these things only as a doctor," says Dr. Sutherland, lightly—seeing that the Laird is too dumbfounded to answer his question, "and I sometimes think a doctor's history of civilisation would be an odd thing, if only you could get at the physiological facts of the case. I should like to know, for example, what Napoleon had for supper on the night before Waterloo. Something indigestible, you may be sure; if his brain had been clear on the 15th, he would have smashed the Allies, and altered modern history. I should have greatly liked, too, to make the acquaintance of the man who first announced his belief that infants dying unbaptised were to suffer eternal torture: I think it must have been his liver. I should like to have examined him."
"I should like to have poisoned him," says Mary Avon, with a flash of anger in the soft eyes.