Warlock o' Glenwarlock: A Homely RomanceMacDonald, George
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Warlock o' Glenwarlock: A Homely Romance
MacDonald, George
Christian fiction; Highlands (Scotland) -- Fiction
The old man had a heart after all! Strange the power of that
comparatively poor thing, local association, to bring to light the
eternal love at the root of the being! Wonderful sign also of the
presence of God wherever a child may open eyes! This man’s heart
was not yet big enough to love a Scotsman, but it was big enough to
love a Muir-o’-Warlock-man; and was not that a precious beginning?
--a beginning as good as any? It matters nothing where or how one
begins, if only one does begin! There are many, doubtless, who have
not yet got farther in love than their own family; but there are
others who have learned that for the true heart there is neither
Frenchman nor Englishman, neither Jew nor Greek, neither white nor
black--only the sons and daughters of God, only the brothers and
sisters of the one elder brother. There may be some who have
learned to love all the people of their own planet, but have not
yet learned to look with patience upon those of Saturn or Mercury;
while others there must be, who, wherever there is a creature of
God’s making, love each in its capacity for love--from the
arch-angel before God’s throne, to the creeping thing he may be
compelled to destroy--from the man of this earth to the man of some
system of worlds which no human telescope has yet brought within
the ken of heaven-poring sage. And to that it must come with every
one of us, for not until then are we true men, true women--the
children, that is, of him in whose image we are made.
Cosmo followed very willingly, longing for water and a
clothes-brush rather than for food. The cold and damp, fatigue and
exposure of the night were telling upon him more than he knew, and
all the time he was at work, he had been cramped by hitherto
unknown pains in his limbs.
The gardener brought him to the half-ruinous wing already
mentioned, to a small kitchen, opening under a great sloping
buttress, and presented him to his wife, an English woman, some ten
years younger than himself. She received him with a dignified
retraction of the feelers, but the moment she understood his needs,
ministered to them, and had some breakfast ready for him by the
time he had made his toilet. He sat down by her little fire, and
drank some tea, but felt shivery, and could not eat. In dread lest,
if he yielded a moment to the invading sickness, it should at once
overpower him, he made haste to get out again into the sun, and
rejoined the old man, who had gone back to his cabbage-ground.
There he pulled off his coat, and once more seized the spade, for
work seemed the only way of meeting his enemy hand to hand. But the
moment he began, he was too hot, and the moment he took breath he
was ready to shiver. As long as he could stand, however, he would
not give in.
“How many years have you been gardener here?” he asked, forcing
himself to talk.
“Five an’ forty year, an’ I’m nearhan’ tired o’ ’t.”
“The present lord is a young man, is he not?”
“Ay; he canna be muckle ayont five an’ thirty.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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