Part 34 (2/2)
Grant! Men like you are free to choose; you may make your bread as you please. But men in our position are greatly limited in their choice; the paths open to them are few. Tradition oppresses us. We are slaves to the dead and buried. I could well wish I had been born in your humbler but in truth less contracted sphere. Certain roles are not open to you, to be sure; but your life in the open air, following your sheep, and dreaming all things beautiful and grand in the world beyond you, is entrancing. It is the life to make a poet!”
”Or a king!” thought Donal. ”But the earl would have made a discontented shepherd!”
The man who is not content where he is, would never have been content somewhere else, though he might have complained less.
”Take another gla.s.s of wine, Mr. Grant,” said his lords.h.i.+p, filling his own from the other decanter. ”Try this; I believe you will like it better.”
”In truth, my lord,” answered Donal, ”I have drunk so little wine that I do not know one sort from another.”
”You know whisky better, I daresay! Would you like some now? Touch the bell behind you.”
”No, thank you, my lord; I know as little about whisky: my mother would never let us even taste it, and I have never tasted it.”
”A new taste is a gain to the being.”
”I suspect, however, a new appet.i.te can only be a loss.”
As he said this, Donal, half mechanically, filled a gla.s.s from the decanter his host had pushed towards him.
”I should like you, though,” resumed his lords.h.i.+p, after a short pause, ”to keep your eyes open to the fact that Davie must do something for himself. You would then be able to let me know by and by what you think him fit for!”
”I will with pleasure, my lord. Tastes may not be infallible guides to what is fit for us, but they may lead us to the knowledge of what we are fit for.”
”Extremely well said!” returned the earl.
I do not think he understood in the least what Donal meant.
”Shall I try how he takes to trigonometry? He might care to learn land-surveying! Gentlemen now, not unfrequently, take charge of the properties of their more favoured relatives. There is Mr. Graeme, your own factor, my lord--a relative, I understand!”
”A distant one,” answered his lords.h.i.+p with marked coldness, ”--the degree of relations.h.i.+p hardly to be counted.”
”In the lowlands, my lord, you do not care to count kin as we do in the highlands! My heart warms to the word kinsman.”
”You have not found kins.h.i.+p so awkward as I, possibly!” said his lords.h.i.+p, with a watery smile. ”The man in humble position may allow the claim of kin to any extent: he has nothing, therefore nothing can be taken from him! But the man who has would be the poorest of the clan if he gave to every needy relation.”
”I never knew the man so poor,” answered Donal, ”that he had nothing to give. But the things of the poor are hardly to the purpose of the predatory relative.”
”'Predatory relative!'--a good phrase!” said his lords.h.i.+p, with a sleepy laugh, though his eyes were wide open. His lips did not seem to care to move, yet he looked pleased. ”To tell you the truth,” he began again, ”at one period of my history I gave and gave till I was tired of giving! Ingrat.i.tude was the sole return. At one period I had large possessions--larger than I like to think of now: if I had the tenth part of what I have given away, I should not be uneasy concerning Davie.”
”There is no fear of Davie, my lord, so long as he is brought up with the idea that he must work for his bread.”
His lords.h.i.+p made no answer, and his look reminded Donal of that he wore when he came to his chamber. A moment, and he rose and began to pace the room. An indescribable suggestion of an invisible yet luminous cloud hovered about his forehead and eyes--which latter, if not fixed on very vacancy, seemed to have got somewhere near it. At the fourth or fifth turn he opened the door by which he had entered, continuing a remark he had begun to Donal--of which, although he heard every word and seemed on the point of understanding something, he had not caught the sense when his lords.h.i.+p disappeared, still talking. Donal thought it therefore his part to follow him, and found himself in his lords.h.i.+p's bedroom. But out of this his lords.h.i.+p had already gone, through an opposite door, and Donal still following entered an old picture-gallery, of which he had heard Davie speak, but which the earl kept private for his exercise indoors. It was a long, narrow place, hardly more than a wide corridor, and appeared nowhere to afford distance enough for seeing a picture. But Donal could ill judge, for the sole light in the place came from the fires and candles in the rooms whose doors they had left open behind them, with just a faint glimmer from the vapour-buried moon, sufficing to show the outline of window after window, and revealing something of the great length of the gallery.
By the time Donal overtook the earl, he was some distance down, holding straight on into the long dusk, and still talking.
”This is my favourite promenade,” he said, as if brought to himself by the sound of Donal's overtaking steps. ”After dinner always, Mr. Grant, wet weather or dry, still or stormy, I walk here. What do I care for the weather! It will be time when I am old to consult the barometer!”
Donal wondered a little: there seemed no great hardihood in the worst of weather to go pacing a picture-gallery, where the fiercest storm that ever blew could send in only little threads of air through the c.h.i.n.ks of windows and doors!
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