Whats Mines Mine, vol 3 | Page 9

for him! Some people think it
wrong to marry anybody going to die, but at the longest, you know, sir,
you must part sooner than you would! Not many are allowed to die
together!--You don't think, do you, sir, that marriages go for nothing in
the other world?"
She spoke with a white face and brave eyes, and Ian was glad at heart.
"I do not, Annie," he answered. "'The gifts of God are without
repentance.' He did not give you and Lachlan to each other to part you

again! Though you are not married yet, it is all the same so long as you
are true to each other."
"Thank you, sir; you always make me feel strong!"
Alister came from the back room.
"I think your mother sees it not quite so difficult now," he said.
The next time they went, they found them preparing to go.
Now Ian had nearly finished the book he was writing about Russia, and
could not begin another all at once. He must not stay at home doing
nothing, and he thought that, as things were going from bad to worse in
the highlands, he might make a voyage to Canada, visit those of his
clan, and see what ought to be done for such as must soon follow them.
He would presently have a little money in his possession, and believed
he could not spend it better. He made up his mind therefore to
accompany Annie and her mother, which resolve overcame the last of
the old woman's lingering reluctance. He did not like leaving Alister at
such a critical point in his history; but he said to himself that a man
might be helped too much; arid it might come that he and Mercy were
in as much need of a refuge as the clan.
I cannot say NO worldly pride mingled in the chief's contempt for the
distiller's money; his righteous soul was not yet clear of its inherited
judgments as to what is dignified and what is not. He had in him still
the prejudice of the landholder, for ages instinctive, against both
manufacture and trade. Various things had combined to foster in him
also the belief that trade at least was never free from more or less of
unfair dealing, and was therefore in itself a low pursuit. He had not
argued that nothing the Father of men has decreed can in its nature be
contemptible, but must be capable of being nobly done. In the things
that some one must do, the doer ranks in God's sight, and ought to rank
among his fellow-men, according to how he does it. The higher the
calling the more contemptible the man who therein pursues his own
ends. The humblest calling, followed on the principles of the divine
caller, is a true and divine calling, be it scavenging, handicraft,
shop-keeping, or book-making. Oh for the day when God and not the
king shall be regarded as the fountain of honour.
But the Macruadh looked upon the calling of the brewer or distiller as
from the devil: he was not called of God to brew or distil! From
childhood his mother had taught him a horror of gain by corruption.

She had taught, and he had learned, that the poorest of all justifications,
the least fit to serve the turn of gentleman, logician, or Christian,
was--"If I do not touch this pitch, another will; there will be just as
much harm done; AND ANOTHER INSTEAD OF ME WILL HAVE
THE BENEFIT; therefore it cannot defile me.--Offences must come,
therefore I will do them!" "Imagine our Lord in the brewing trade
instead of the carpentering!" she would say. That better beer was
provided by the good brewer would not go far for brewer or drinker,
she said: it mattered little that, by drinking good beer, the drunkard
lived to be drunk the oftener. A brewer might do much to reduce
drinking; but that would be to reduce a princely income to a modest
livelihood, and to content himself with the baker's daughter instead of
the duke's! It followed that the Macruadh would rather have robbed a
church than touched Mr. Peregrine Palmer's money. To rifle the tombs
of the dead would have seemed to him pure righteousness beside
sharing in that. He could give Mercy up; he could NOT take such
money with her! Much as he loved her, separate as he saw her, clearly
as she was to him a woman undefiled and straight from God, it was yet
a trial to him that she should be the daughter of a person whose
manufacture and trade were such.
After much consideration, it was determined in the family conclave,
that Ian should accompany the two women to Canada, note how things
were going,