Amelia Barr - Playing With Fire

An high priest clothed with doctrine and with truth. – Esdras I: 5:40.

Glasgow is the city of Human Power. It is not a beautiful city, but the gray granite of which it is built gives it a natural nobility. There is nothing romantic about its situation, and its streets are too often steeped in wet, gray mist, or wrapped in yellowish vapor. But there are no loungers in them. The crowd is a busy, hard-working crowd, whose civic motto is Enterprise and Perseverance. They made the river that made the city, and then established on its banks those immense shipbuilding yards, whose fleets take the river to the ocean, and the ocean to every known port of the world.

It is also a very religious city. Its inhabitants do not forget that they are mortals, though no doubt mortals of a superior order, and the number of churches they have built is amazing. It is impossible to walk far in any direction without coming face to face with one. I am writing of the midway years of the nineteenth century, when there was one church among the many that all strangers were advised to visit. It was not the Cathedral, nor the old Ram's Horn Kirk; it was a large, plain building, called the Church of the Disciples. No one could find it to-day, for it stood upon a corner that became necessary to the trade of a certain great street. Then the Church of the Disciples disappeared, and handsome shops devoted to business of many kinds rose in its place.

This church derived its fame from its minister, a very handsome man, of great scholarly attainments and a preponderance of that quality we call "presence." Even when at twenty-three years of age he stepped from the halls of St. Andrew's into the pulpit of the Church of the Disciples, elders, deacons, and the whole congregation succumbed to his influence. And when, after twenty-one years of service, he made his dramatic exit from that pulpit he still held his congregation in the hollow of his hand.

He was a Highlander of the once powerful house of Macrae; tall among his brethren as was Saul among his people. His face was darkly handsome, and made doubly attractive by a shadowy Celtic pathos. His eyes were piercing but sad, his voice grand and resonant, suiting well the wrathful, impassioned Calvinism of his sermons. For he was a Pharisee of Pharisees touching every tittle of the law laid down by that troubler of mankind called John Calvin.

One evening in the beginning of June he went to his home after a rather unimportant session with his elders. He had taken his own way as usual, and was not in the least moved by the slight opposition he had been compelled to silence. With a slow, stately step he walked up the wide spaces of Bath Street until he came to the handsome residence in which he dwelt. He had no time to open the door; it was gently set wide by a girl who stood just within its shelter. A tinge of pleasure came into the minister's face, and when she said in a low, sweet voice:

" Father! " he answered her in one word full of tenderness:

" Marion! "

They went into the parlor together. It was the ordinary parlor of its day, inartistic and comfortably ugly, but withal suitable and pleasant to the generation, who found in it their ideal of "home." A Brussels carpet covered the floor, the furniture was of mahogany upholstered in black horse-hair cloth. There were crimson damask curtains at the windows, a crimson cloth on the large center table, and a soft large rug before the bright steel grate, which held a handful of fire, though it was a fine day in the early part of June. The chimneypiece was of dark marble; on it there were two bronze figures and a handsome clock, above it a very large picture of Queen Victoria's coronation. It was a parlor duplicated in every respectable residence. Such rooms were comfortable and serviceable and very suitable to the big men who occupied them.

The minister felt its pleasant "use and wont," and with a sigh of relief took the easy-chair his daughter drew to the fireside. Then she brought him a glass of water and his slippers, went for the mail which had come during his absence, lit the gas, and in many other ways fluttered so lovingly about him that it was amazing he hardly seemed to notice her affectionate service. An American father would have drawn the girl to his side, given her sweet words and tender kisses, and doubtless Dr. Macrae felt all the affection necessary for this result, but he had never seen fathers pet their daughters, never been told to do so, had no precedents to go by, and, on the contrary, had been constantly instructed both by precept and example that women were not "to be put too much forward, or given too much praise." Service was the duty of the women in any household, and men were born with the expectation of it in their blood. So Dr. Macrae watched and felt and admired and loved, but made no attempt to express his feelings, and Marion did not expect it.

Dr. Macrae had lifted a paper, but he soon laid it down, and asked impatiently: "Marion, where is Aunt Jessy?"

"She will be here anon, Father – here she comes!" and at the words a little woman wearing a gray dress, a white lace tippet, and a small white lace cap, set with pink bows, entered. She was rather pretty, and sweet and homely as honey. A maid carrying the simple supper of the family accompanied her. Dr. Macrae looked at her pleasantly, and she said:

"Well, Ian!"

That was all, until the boiled oatmeal and milk, and the toasted cakes and cheese were spread upon the table. But as soon as the minister had his plate of boiled oatmeal and his glass of milk before him, she continued:

"You are a bit late home to-night, Ian. I was wondering about it."

"There was a useless kind of session – much talking about nothing."

"Men must talk, especially when they are in session for that purpose. What were they talking about?"

"Many usual things, rather unusually, about the Bible."

"What for were they meddling with the Book? They were hearing it, or reading it, all day yesterday."

"They were discussing the buying of a new Bible for the Church. Deacon Laird proposed it. He said he had been noticing for a long time that the pulpit Bible was frizzled and worn, and the cushion much faded; both of them looking as they should not look in the Church of the Disciples."

"And what words did you give them?"

"I let them talk among themselves, until Elder Black said he knew a place where a large Bible could be got at a very cheap figure, likewise the cushion, and he would take time to ask the selling price of the same this week."

"Well?"

"I said then: 'Elder, you will keep your silence concerning a cheap Bible. I'll have no cheap Bible in my pulpit. You are grudging nothing of the best for all your private necessities, and you will buy the House of God what is fitting for it.'"

"You spoke well. Now they will be looking for the best Bible in Scotland. But what for did Deacon Laird raise that question, when the congregation, in its most respectable part, is going down the water for the summer months?"

"He is young, and only just elected, and he was trying to do something that none of the other deacons had thought of. That is my surmise. If I wrong the man, I ask pardon."

"He will have to pay for his bit of forwardness. The others will see to it that he backs his proposal with his money."

Dr. Macrae made no further remark on the subject. He took from his pocket a letter and said: "I had a few lines from Lady Cramer, and she tells me that the Little House will be unoccupied this summer. Some unforeseen circumstances preventing Lady Kitty Baird's family visiting her, she offers it to me for four or five months. If you could pack your clothes to-morrow, you might remove there on Wednesday or Thursday, and, by taking the train from Edinburgh, you would reach Cramer early in the afternoon."