The Elect Lady. George MacDonald
to his father’s if I would have let him.”
George cast on her a look of gratitude.
“Thank you for keeping me,” he said. “But I wish I had taken some notice of his kindness!”
CHAPTER X. ANDREW INGRAM
Of the persons in my narrative, Andrew Ingram is the simplest, therefore the hardest to be understood by an ordinary reader. I must take up his history from a certain point in his childhood.
One summer evening, he and his brother Sandy were playing together on a knoll in one of their father’s fields. Andrew was ten years old, and Sandy a year younger. The two quarreled, and the spirit of ancestral borderers waking in them, they fell to blows. The younger was the stronger for his years, and they were punching each other with relentless vigor, when suddenly they heard a voice, and stopping their fight, saw before them an humble-looking man with a pack on his back. He was a peddler known in the neighborhood, and noted for his honesty and his silence, but the boys had never seen him. They stood abashed before him, dazed with the blows they had received, and not a little ashamed; for they were well brought up, their mother being an honest disciplinarian, and their father never interfering with what she judged right. The sun was near the setting, and shone with level rays full on the peddler; but when they thought of him afterward, they seemed to remember more light in his face than that of the sun. Their conscience bore him witness, and his look awed them. Involuntarily they turned from him, seeking refuge with each other: his eyes shone so! they said; but immediately they turned to him again.
Sandy knew the pictures in the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and Andrew had read it through more than once: when they saw the man had a book in his hand, open, and heard him, standing there in the sun, begin to read from it, they thought it must be Christian, waiting for Evangelist to come to him. It is impossible to say how much is fact and how much imagination in what children recollect; the one must almost always supplement the other; but they were quite sure that the words he read were these: “And lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world!” The next thing they remembered was their walking slowly down the hill in the red light, and all at once waking up to the fact that the man was gone, they did not know when or where. But their arms were round each other’s necks, and they were full of a strange awe. Then Andrew saw something red on Sandy’s face.
“Eh, Sandy!” he cried, “it’s bluid!” and burst into tears.
It was his own blood, not Sandy’s!—the discovery of which fact relieved Andrew, and did not so greatly discompose Sandy, who was less sensitive.
They began at length to speculate on what had happened. One thing was clear: it was because they were fighting that the man had come; but it was not so clear who the man was. He could not be Christian, because Christian went over the river! Andrew suggested it might have been Evangelist, for he seemed to be always about. Sandy added, as his contribution to the idea, that he might have picked up Christian’s bundle and been carrying it home to his wife. They came, however, to the conclusion, by no ratiocination, I think, but by a conviction which the idea itself brought with it, that the stranger was the Lord himself, and that the pack on His back was their sins, which He was carrying away to throw out of the world.
“Eh, wasna it fearfu’ He should come by jist when we was fechtin’!” said Sandy.
“Eh, na! it was a fine thing that! We micht hae been at it yet! But we winna noo!—will we ever, Sandy?”
“Na, that we winna!”
“For,” continued Andrew, “He said ‘Lo, I am with you always!’ And suppose He werena, we daurna be that ahint His back we would na be afore His face!”
“Do you railly think it was Him, Andrew?”
“Weel,” replied Andrew, “gien the deevil be goin’ aboot like a roarin’ lion, seekin’ whom he may devoor, as father says, it’s no likely He would na be goin’ aboot as weel, seekin’ to haud him aff o’ ‘s!”
“Ay!” said Sandy.
“And noo,” said the elder, “what are we to do?”
For Andrew, whom both father and mother judged the dreamiest of mortals, was in reality the most practical being in the whole parish—so practical that by and by people mocked him for a poet and a heretic, because he did the things which they said they believed. Most unpractical must every man appear who genuinely believes in the things that are unseen. The man called practical by the men of this world is he who busies himself building his house on the sand, while he does not even bespeak a lodging in the inevitable beyond.
“What are we to do?” said Andrew. “If the Lord is going about like that, looking after us, we’ve surely got something to do looking after Him!”
There was no help in Sandy; and it was well that, with the reticence of children, neither thought of laying the case before their parents; the traditions of the elders would have ill agreed with the doctrine they were now under! Suddenly it came into Andrew’s mind that the book they read at worship to which he had never listened, told all about Jesus.
He began at the beginning, and grew so interested in the stories that he forgot why he had begun to read it One day, however, as he was telling Sandy about Jacob—“What a shame!” said Sandy; and Andrew’s mind suddenly opened to the fact that he had got nothing yet out of the book. He threw it from him, echoing Sandy’s words, “What’s a shame!”—not of Jacob’s behavior, but of the Bible’s, which had all this time told them nothing about the man that was going up and down the world, gathering up their sins, and carrying them away in His pack! But it dawned upon him that it was the New Testament that told about Jesus Christ, and they turned to that. Here also I say it was well they asked no advice, for they would probably have been directed to the Epistle to the Romans, with explanations yet more foreign to the heart of Paul than false to his Greek. They began to read the story of Jesus as told by his friend Matthew, and when they had ended it, went on to the gospel according to Mark. But they had not read far when Sandy cried out:
“Eh, Andrew, it’s a’ the same thing ower again!”
“No a’thegither,” answered Andrew. “We’ll gang on, and see!”
Andrew came to the conclusion that it was so far the same that he would rather go back and read the other again, for the sake of some particular things he wanted to make sure about So the second time they read St. Matthew, and came to these words:
“If two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of My Father which is in heaven.”
“There’s twa o’ ‘s here!” cried Andrew, laying down the book. “Lat’s try ‘t!”
“Try what?” said Sandy.
His brother read the passage again.
“Lat the twa o’ ‘s speir Him for something!” concluded Andrew. “What wull’t be?”
“I won’er if it means only ance, or may be three times, like ‘The Three Wishes!’” suggested Sandy, who, like most Christians, would rather have a talk about it than do what he was told.
“We might ask for what would not be good for us!” returned Andrew.
“And make fools of ourselves!” assented Sandy, with “The Three Wishes” in his mind.
“Do you think He would give it us then?”
“I don’t know.”
“But,” pursued Andrew, “if we were so foolish as that old man and woman, it would be better to find it out, and begin to grow wise!—I’ll tell you what we’ll do: we’ll make it our first wish to know what’s best to ask for; and then we can go on asking!”
“Yes, yes; let us!”
“I fancy we’ll have as many wishes as we like! Doon upo’ yer knees, Sandy!”
They knelt together.
I fear there are not a few to say, “How ill-instructed the poor children were!—actually