The Elect Lady | Page 7

A man's natural feelings remain."
"If the thing is not to be helped, let us think no more about it!"
"It is the expense, my dear! Will you not let your mind rest for a
moment upon the fact? I am doing my utmost to impress it upon you.
For other expenses there is always something to show; for this there
will be nothing, positively nothing!"
"Not the mended leg, father?"
"The money will vanish, I tell you, as a tale that is told."
"It is our life that vanishes that way!"
"The simile suits either. So long as we do not use the words of
Scripture irreverently, there is no harm in making a different
application of them. There is no irreverence here: next to the grace of
God, money is the thing hardest to get and hardest to keep. If we are
not wise with it, the grace--I mean 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