dear! everybody knows that!" exclaimed the girl.
But Rob said no more.
While he was talking, Alister had come up behind him, with Annie of the shop, and he said—
"Rob, my friend, I know what you mean, and I want to hear the rest of it: what did the angels say next?"
"They said," answered Rob, "—'Was it your will set you on this beautiful hill, with all these things to love, with such air to breathe, such a father as you've got, and such grand deer about you?' 'No,' I answered. 'Then,' said the angel, 'there must be a better will than yours, for you would never have even thought of such things!' 'How could I, when I wasn't made?' said I. 'There it is!' he returned, and said no more. I looked up, and the moon was shining, and there were no angels on the stone. But a little way off was my father, come out to see what had become of me."
"Now did you really see and hear all that, Rob?" said Alister.
Rob smiled a beautiful smile—with something in it common people would call idiotic—stopped and turned, took the chief's hand, and carried it to his lips; but not a word more would he speak, and soon they came where the path of the two turned away over the hill.
"Will you not come and sleep at our house?" said one of the company.
But they made kindly excuse.
"The hill-side would miss us; we are expected home!" said Rob—and away they climbed to their hut, a hollow in a limestone rock, with a front wall of turf, there to sleep side by side till the morning came, or, as Rob would have said, "till the wind of the sun woke them."
Rob of the Angels made songs, and would sing one sometimes; but they were in Gaelic, and the more poetic a thing, the more inadequate at least, if not stupid is its translation.
He had all the old legends of the country in his head, and many stories of ghosts and of the second sight. These stories he would tell exactly as he had heard them, showing he believed every word of them; but with such of the legends as were plainly no other than poetic inventions, he would take what liberties he pleased—and they lost nothing by it; for he not only gave them touches of fresh interest, but sent glimmering through them hints of something higher, of which ordinary natures perceived nothing, while others were dimly aware of a loftier intent: according to his listeners was their hearing. In Rob's stories, as in all the finer work of genius, a man would find as much as, and no more than, he was capable of. Ian's opinion of Rob was even higher than Alister's.
"What do you think, Ian, of the stories Rob of the Angels tells?" asked Alister, as they walked home.
"That the Lord has chosen the weak things of the world to confound the mighty," answered Ian.
"Tut! Rob confounds nobody."
"He confounds me," returned Ian.
"Does he believe what he tells?"
"He believes all of it that is to be believed," replied Ian.
"You are as bad as he!" rejoined Alister. "There is no telling, sometimes, what you mean!"
"Tell me this, Alister: can a thing be believed that is not true?"
"Yes, certainly!"
"I say, NO. Can you eat that which is not bread?"
"I have seen a poor fellow gnawing a stick for hunger!" answered Alister.
"Yes, gnawing! but gnawing is not eating. Did the poor fellow eat the stick? That is just it! Many a man will gnaw at a lie all his life, and perish of want. I mean LIE, of course, the real lie—a thing which is in its nature false. He may gnaw at it, he may even swallow it, but I deny that he can believe it. There is not that in it which can be believed; at most it can but be supposed to be true. Belief is another thing. Truth is alone the correlate of belief, just as air is for the lungs, just as form and colour are for the sight. A lie can no more be believed than carbonic acid can be breathed. It goes into the lungs, true, and a lie goes into the mind, but both kill; the one is not BREATHED, the other is not BELIEVED. The thing that is not true cannot find its way to the home of faith; if it could, it would be at once rejected with a loathing beyond utterance; to a pure soul, which alone can believe, nothing is so loathsome as a pretence of truth. A lie is a pretended truth. If there were no truth there could be no lie. As the devil upon God, the very being of a lie depends on that whose opposite and enemy it is. But tell me, Alister, do you believe the parables of our Lord?"
"With all my heart."
"Was there any real person in our Lord's mind when he told that one about the unjust judge?"
"I do not suppose there was; but there were doubtless many such."
"Many who would listen to a poor woman because she plagued them?"
"Well, it does not matter; what the story teaches is true, and that was what he wanted believed."
"Just so. The truth in the parables is what they mean, not what they say; and so it is, I think, with Rob of the Angels' stories. He believes all that can be believed of them. At the same time, to a mind so simple, the spirit of God must have freer entrance than to ours—perhaps even teaches the man by what we call THE MAN'S OWN WORDS. His words may go before his ideas—his higher ideas at least—his ideas follow after his words. As the half-thoughts pass through his mind—who can say how much generated by himself, how much directly suggested by the eternal thought in which his spirit lives and breathes!—he drinks and is refreshed. I am convinced that nowhere so much as in the highest knowledge of all—what the people above count knowledge—will the fulfilment of the saying of our Lord, "Many first shall be last, and the last first," cause astonishment; that a man who has been leader of the age's opinion, may be immeasurably behind another whom he would have shut up in a mad-house. Depend upon it, things go on in the soul of that Rob of the Angels which the angels, whether they come to talk with him or not, would gladly look into. Of such as he the angels may one day be the pupils."
A silence followed.
"Do you think the young ladies of the New House could understand Rob of the Angels, Ian?" at length asked Alister.
"Not a bit. I tried the younger, and she is the best.—They could if they would wake up."
"You might say that of anybody!"
"Yes; but there is this among other differences—that some people do not wake up, because they want a new brain first, such as they will get when they die, perhaps; while others do not wake up, because their whole education has been a rocking of them to sleep. And there is this difference between the girls, that the one is full of herself, and the other is not. The one has a close, the other an open mind."
"And yet," said Alister, "if they heard you say so, the open mind would imagine itself the close, and the close never doubt it was the open!"
CHAPTER III
AT THE NEW HOUSE
The ladies of the New House were not a little surprised the next day when, as they sat waiting their guests, the door of the drawing-room opened, and they saw the young highlanders enter in ordinary evening dress. The plough-driving laird himself looked to Christina very much like her patterns of Grosvenor-square. It was long since he had worn his dress-coat, and it was certainly a
