Alick, ceasing to make a confidante of his mother, began to make a
friend of Mr. Gryce. Perhaps it ought rather to be said that Mr. Gryce
began to make a friend of him. The old philosopher, with that corkscrew
mind of his, knew well enough what was amiss with the poor lank-visaged
curate. Being of the order of the benevolent busybodies fond of playing
Providence, how mole-like soever his method, he had marked out a little
plan of his own by which he thought he could make all the crooked roads
run straight and discord flow into harmony. But he too fell into the
mistake common to busybodies, benevolent and otherwise--treating souls
as if they were machines to be wound up and kept going by the clockwork
of an extraneous will and neatly manipulated by well-arranged
circumstance.
One day he joined Alick in his walk to an outlying cottage of the
parish, where the husband was sick and the wife and children short of
food, and the Church sent its prayer-book and ministers as the best
substitute it knew for a wholesome dwelling and sufficient wages.
Theology was not much in the way of an old heathen who reduced all
religions save Mohammedanism to the transmuted presentation of the
archaic solar myth, and who thought Buddhism far ahead of every other
creed; but he liked the man Alick, if the parson bored him, and he was
caressing a plan which he had in his pocket.
"You find your life here satisfying, I suppose?" he began, his blue eyes
looking into the wayside banks for creatures.
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