Mr. Lindsay was a mild, gentle man, whose face and hair seemed to
have grown gray together. He was very tall, and stooped much. He
had a mouth of much sensibility, and clear blue eyes, whose light
was rarely shed upon any one within reach except his daughter--they
were so constantly bent downwards, either on the road as he walked,
or on his book as he sat. He had been educated for the church, but
had never risen above the position of a parish school-master. He
had little or no impulse to utterance, was shy, genial, and, save in
reading, indolent. Ten years before this point of my history he had
been taken up by an active lawyer in Edinburgh, from information
accidentally supplied by Mr. Lindsay himself, as the next heir to a
property to which claim was laid by the head of a county family of
wealth. Probabilities were altogether in his favour, when he gave
up the contest upon the offer of a comfortable annuity from the
disputant. To leave his schooling and his possible estate together,
and sit down comfortably by his own fireside, with the means of
buying books, and within reach of a good old library--that of King's
College by preference--was to him the sum of all that was desirable.
The income offered him was such that he had no doubt of laying
aside enough for his only child, Mysie; but both were so ill-fitted
for saving, he from looking into the past, she from looking
into--what shall I call it? I can only think of negatives--what was
neither past, present, nor future, neither material nor eternal,
neither imaginative in any true sense, nor actual in any sense, that
up to the present hour there was nothing in the bank, and only the
money for impending needs in the house.
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