The Elect Lady | Page 7

money--will not go far."
"Not so far as the next world, anyhow!" said Alexa, as if to herself.
"How dare you, child! The Redeemer tells us to make friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, that when we die it may receive us into everlasting habitations!"
"I read the passage this morning, father: it is they, not it, will receive you. And I have heard that it ought to be translated, 'make friends with, or by means of the mammon of unrighteousness."
"I will reconsider the passage. We must not lightly change even the translated word!"
The laird had never thought that it might be of consequence to him one day to have friends in the other world. Neither had he reflected that the Lord did not regard the obligation of gratitude as ceasing with this life.
Alexa had reason to fear that her father made a friend of, and never a friend with the mammon of unrighteousness. At the same time the half-penny he put in the plate every Sunday must go a long way if it was not estimated, like that of the poor widow, according to the amount he possessed, but according to the difficulty he found in parting with it.
"After weeks, perhaps months of nursing and food and doctor's stuff," resumed the laird, "he will walk away, and we shall see not a plack of the money he carries with him. The visible will become the invisible, the present the absent!"
"The little it will cost you, father--"
"Hold there, my child! If you call any cost little, I will not hear a word more: we should be but running a race from different points to different goals! It will cost--that is enough! How much it will cost me, you can not calculate, for you do not know what money stands for in my eyes. There are things before which money is insignificant!"
"Those dreary old books!" said Alexa to herself, casting a glance on the shelves that filled the room from floor to ceiling, and from wall to wall.
"What I was going to say, father," she returned, "was, that I have a little money of my own, and this affair shall cost you nothing. Leave me to contrive. Would you tell him his friends must pay his board, or take him away? It would be a nice anecdote in the annals of the Fordyces of Potlurg!"
"At the same time, what more natural?" rejoined her father. "His friends must in any case be applied to! I learn from his pocket-book--"
"Father!"
"Content yourself, Alexa. I have a right to know whom I receive under my roof. Besides, have I not learned thereby that the youth is a sort of connection!"
"You don't mean it, father?"
"I do mean it. His mother and yours were first cousins."
"That is not a connection; it's a close kinship!"
"Is it?" said the laird, dryly.
"Anyhow," pursued Alexa, "I give you my word you shall hear nothing more of the expense."
She bade her father good-night, and returning to the bedside of her patient, released Meg.

CHAPTER VI.
ABOUT THE LAIRD.
Thomas Fordyce was a sucker from the root of a very old family tree, born in poverty, and, with great pinching of father and mother, brothers and sisters, educated for the Church. But from pleasure in scholarship, from archaeological tastes, a passion for the arcana of history, and a love of literature, strong, although not of the highest kind, he had settled down as a school-master, and in his calling had excelled. By all who knew him he was regarded as an accomplished, amiable, and worthy man.
When his years were verging on the undefined close of middle age he saw the lives between him and the family property, one by one wither at the touch of death, until at last there was no one but himself and his daughter to succeed. He was at the time the head of a flourishing school in a large manufacturing town; and it was not without some regret, though with more pleasure, that he yielded his profession and retired to Potlurg.
Greatly dwindled as he found the property, and much and long as it had been mismanaged, it was yet of considerable value, and worth a wise care. The result of the labor he spent upon it was such that it had now for years yielded him, if not a large rental, one far larger at least than his daughter imagined. But the sinking of the school-master in the laird seemed to work ill for the man, and good only for the land. I say seemed, because what we call degeneracy is often but the unveiling of what was there all the time; and the evil we could become, we are. If I have in me the tyrant or the miser, there he is, and such am I--as surely as if the tyrant or the