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.