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The Elect Lady, a novel by George MacDonald |
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Chapter 13. Dawtie |
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_ CHAPTER XIII. DAWTIE Is not the Church supposed to be made up of God's elect? and yet most of my readers find it hard to believe there should be three persons, so related, who agreed to ask of God, and to ask neither riches nor love, but that God should take His own way with them, that the Father should work His will in them, that He would teach them what He wanted of them, and help them to do it! The Church is God's elect, and yet you can not believe in three holy children! Do you say: "Because they are represented as beginning to obey so young?" "Then," I answer, "there can be no principle, only an occasional and arbitrary exercise of spiritual power, in the perfecting of praise out of the mouth of babes and sucklings, or in the preference of them to the wise and prudent as the recipients of divine revelation." Dawtie never said much, but tried the more. With heartiness she accepted what conclusions the brothers came to, so far as she understood them--and what was practical she understood as well as they; for she had in her heart the spirit of that Son of Man who chose a child to represent Him and His Father. As to what they heard at church, their minds were so set on doing what they found in the Gospel, that it passed over them without even rousing their intellect, and so vanished without doing any hurt. Tuned to the truth by obedience, no falsehood they heard from the pulpit partisans of God could make a chord vibrate in response. Dawtie indeed heard nothing but the good that was mingled with the falsehood, and shone like a lantern through a thick fog. She was little more than a child when, to the trouble of her parents, she had to go out to service. Every half year she came home for a day or so, and neither feared nor found any relation altered. At length after several closely following changes, occasioned by no fault of hers, she was without a place. Miss Fordyce heard of it, and proposed to her parents that, until she found another, she should help Meg, who was growing old and rather blind: she would thus, she said, go on learning, and not be idling at home. Dawtie's mother was not a little amused at the idea of any one idling in her house, not to say Dawtie, whom idleness would have tried harder than any amount of work; but, if only that Miss Fordyce might see what sort of girl Dawtie was, she judged it right to accept her offer. She had not been at Potlurg a week before Meg began to complain that she did not leave work enough to keep her warm. No doubt it gave her time for her book, but her eyes were not so good as they used to be, and she was apt to fall asleep over it, and catch cold! But when her mistress proposed to send her away, she would not hear of it So Alexa, who had begun to take an interest in her, set her to do things she had hitherto done herself, and began to teach her other things. Before three months were over, she was a necessity in the house, and to part with Dawtie seemed impossible. A place about that time turning up, Alexa at once offered her wages, and so Dawtie became an integral portion of the laird's modest household. The laird himself at length began to trust her as he had never trusted servant, for he taught her to dust his precious books, which hitherto he had done himself, but of late had shrunk from, finding not a few of them worse than Pandora-boxes, liberating asthma at the merest unclosing. Dawtie was now a grown woman, bright, gentle, playful, with loving eyes, and a constant overflow of tenderness upon any creature that could receive it. She had small but decided and regular features, whose prevailing expression was confidence--not in herself, for she was scarce conscious of herself even in the act of denying herself--but in the person upon whom her trusting eyes were turned. She was in the world to help--with no political economy beyond the idea that for help and nothing else did any one exist. To be as the sun and the rain and the wind, as the flowers that lived for her and not for themselves, as the river that flowed, and the heather that bloomed lovely on the bare moor in the autumn, such was her notion of being. That she had to take care of herself was a falsehood that never entered her brain. To do what she ought, and not do what she ought not, was enough on her part, and God would do the rest! I will not say she reasoned thus; to herself she was scarce a conscious object at all. Both bodily and spiritually she was in the finest health. If illness came, she would perhaps then discover a self with which she had to fight--I can not tell; but my impression is, that she had so long done the true thing, that illness would only develop unconscious victory, perfecting the devotion of her simple righteousness. It is because we are selfish, with that worst selfishness which is incapable of recognizing itself, not to say its own loathsomeness, that we have to be made ill. That they may leave the last remnants of their selfishness, are the saints themselves over-taken by age and death. Suffering does not cause the vile thing in us--that was there all the time; it comes to develop in us the knowledge of its presence, that it may be war to the knife between us and it. It was no wonder that Dawtie grew more and more of a favorite at Potlurg. She did not read much, but would learn by heart anything that pleased her, and then go saying or singing it to herself. She had the voice of a lark, and her song prevented many a search for her. Against that "rain of melody," not the pride of the laird, or the orderliness of the ex-school-master ever put up the umbrella of rebuke. Her singing was so true, came so clear from the fountain of joy, and so plainly from no desire to be heard, that it gave no annoyance; while such was her sympathy, that, although she had never get suffered, you would, to hear her sing "My Nannie's awa'!" have thought her in truth mourning an absent lover, and familiar with every pang of heart-privation. Her cleanliness, clean even of its own show, was a heavenly purity; while so gently was all her spiriting done, that the very idea of fuss died in the presence of her labor. To the self-centered such a person soon becomes a nobody; the more dependent they are upon her unfailing ministration, the less they think of her; but they have another way of regarding such in "the high countries." Hardly any knew her real name; she was known but by her pet name _Dawtie_. Alexa, who wondered at times that she could not interest her in things she made her read, little knew how superior the girl's choice was to her own! Not knowing much of literature, what she liked was always of the best in its kind, and nothing without some best element could interest her at all. But she was not left either to her "own sweet will" or to the prejudices of her well-meaning mistress; however long the intervals that parted them, Andrew continued to influence her reading as from the first. A word now and a word then, with the books he lent or gave her, was sufficient. That Andrew liked this or that, was enough to make Dawtie set herself to find in it what Andrew liked, and it was thus she became acquainted with most of what she learned by heart. Above two years before the time to which I have now brought my narrative, Sandy had given up farming, to pursue the development of certain inventions of his which had met the approval of a man of means who, unable himself to devise, could yet understand a device: he saw that there was use, and consequently money in them, and wisely put it in Sandy's power to perfect them. He was in consequence but little at home, and when Dawtie went to see her parents, as she could much oftener now, Andrew and she generally met without a third. However many weeks might have passed, they always met as if they had parted only the night before. There was neither shyness nor forwardness in Dawtie. Perhaps a livelier rose might tinge her sweet round cheek when she saw Andrew; perhaps a brighter spark shone in the pupil of Andrew's eye; but they met as calmly as two prophets in the secret of the universe, neither anxious nor eager. The old relation between them was the more potent that it made so little outward show. "Have you anything for me, Andrew?" Dawtie would say, in the strong dialect which her sweet voice made so pleasant to those that loved her; whereupon Andrew, perhaps without immediate answer more than a smile, would turn into his room, and reappear with what he had got ready for her to "chew upon" till they should meet again. Milton's sonnet, for instance, to the "virgin wise and pure," had long served her aspiration; equally wise and pure, Dawtie could understand it as well as she for whom it was written. To see the delight she took in it, would have been a joy to any loving student of humanity. It had cost her more effort to learn than almost any song, and perhaps therefore it was the more precious. Andrew seldom gave her a book to learn from; in general he copied, in his clearest handwriting, whatever poem or paragraph he thought fit for Dawtie; and when they met, she would not unfrequently, if there was time, repeat unasked what she had learned, and be rewarded with his unfailing look of satisfaction. There was a secret between them--a secret proclaimed on the house-tops, a secret hidden, the most precious of pearls, in their hearts--that the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof; that its work is the work of the Lord, whether the sowing of the field, the milking of the cow, the giving to the poor, the spending of wages, the reading of the Bible; that God is all in all, and every throb of gladness His gift; that their life came fresh every moment from His heart; that what was lacking to them would arrive the very moment He had got them ready for it. They were God's little ones in God's world--none the less their own that they did not desire to swallow it, or thrust it in their pockets. Among poverty-stricken Christians, consumed with care to keep a hold of the world and save their souls, they were as two children of the house. By living in the presence of the living One, they had become themselves His presence--dim lanterns through which His light shone steady. Who obeys, shines. _ |
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