From that day life flew upon celestial wings for Charley Frankland’s
tutor. It was not that love-making proved possible, or that existence at
Wodensbourne became at all what it had been at Ardmartin. The difference
was in the atmosphere, which was now bright with all kinds of gladsome
chances, and pervaded by anticipations--a charm which, at Colin’s age,
was more than reality. He never knew what moment of delight might come
to him any day--what words might be said, or smiles shed upon him. Such
an enchantment could not, indeed, have lasted very long; but, in the
meantime, it was infinitely sweet, and made his life like a romance to
the young man. There was nobody at Wodensbourne to occupy Miss Matty, or
withdraw her attention from her young worshipper; and Colin, with his
poetic temperament, and his youthful genius, and all the simplicities
and inexperience which rendered him so different from the other clever
young men who had been seen or heard of in that region, was very
delightful company, even when he was not engaged in any acts of worship.
Lady Frankland herself acknowledged that Mr. Campbell was a great
acquisition. “He is not the least like other people,” said the lady of
the house; “but you must take care not to let him fall in love with you,
Matty;” and both the ladies laughed softly as they sat over their cup of
tea. As for Matty, when she went to dress for dinner, after that
admonition, she put on tartan ribbons over her white dress, partly, to
be sure, because they were the fashion; but chiefly to please Colin, who
knew rather less about tartan than she did, and had not the remotest
idea that the many-coloured sash had any reference to himself.
“I love Scotland,” the little witch said to him, when he came into the
drawing-room, to which he was now admitted during Sir Thomas’s nap--and,
to tell the truth, Lady Frankland herself had just closed her eyes in a
gentle doze, in her easy chair--“but, though you are a Scotchman, you
don’t take the least notice of my ribbons; I am very fond of Scotland,”
said Matty;--“and the Scotch,” the wicked little girl added, with a
glance at him, which made Colin’s heart leap in his deluded breast.
“Then I am very glad to be Scotch,” said the youth, and stooped down
over the end of the sash till Matty thought he meant to kiss it, which
was a more decided act of homage than it would be expedient, under the
circumstances, to permit.
“Don’t talk like everybody else,” said Miss Matty; “that does not make
any difference--you were always glad to be Scotch. I know you all think
you are so much better and cleverer than we are in England. But, tell
me, do you still mean to be a Scotch minister? I wish you would not,”
said Matty, with a little pout. And then Colin laughed--half with
pleasure at what he thought her interest in him, and half with a quaint
recollection which belonged only to himself.
“I don’t think I could preach about the twentieth Sunday after
Trinity,” he said with a smile; which, however, was a speech Miss Matty
did not understand.
“People here don’t preach as you do in Scotland,” said the English girl,
with a little offence. “You are always preaching, and that is what makes
it so dull. But what is the good of being a minister? There are plenty
of dull people to be ministers; you who are so clever--”
“Am I clever?” said Colin. “I am Charley’s tutor--it does not require a
great deal of genius--” but while he spoke, his eyes--which Matty did
not comprehend, which always went leagues further than she could
follow--kindled up a little. He looked a long way beyond her, and no
doubt he saw something; but it piqued her not to be able to follow him,
and find out what he meant.
“If you had done what I wished, and gone to Oxford, Campbell,” said Sir
Thomas, whose repose had been interrupted earlier than usual; “I can’t
say much about what I could have done myself, for I have heaps of boys
of my own to provide for; but, if you’re bent on going into the Church,
something would certainly have turned up for you. I don’t say there’s
much of a career in the Church for an ambitious young fellow, but still,
if you do work well and have a few friends--. As for your Scotch Church,
I don’t know very much about it,” said the baronet, candidly. “I never
knew any one who did. What a bore it used to be a dozen years ago, when
there was all that row; and now, I suppose, you’re all at sixes and
sevens, ain’t you?” asked the ingenuous legislator. “I suppose whisky
and controversy go together somehow.” Sir Thomas got himself packed into
the corner of a sofa very comfortably, as he spoke, and took no notice
of the lightning in Colin’s eyes.
“Oh, uncle! don’t,” said Miss Matty; “don’t you know that the
Presbyterians are all going to give up and join the Church? and it’s all
to be the same both in England and Scotland? You need not laugh. I
assure you I know quite well what I am saying,” said the little beauty,
with a look of dignity. “I have seen it in the papers; such funny
papers!--with little paragraphs about accidents, and about people
getting silver snuff-boxes!--but all the same, they say what I tell you.
There’s to be no Presbyterians and no precentors, and none of their
wicked ways, coming into church with their hats on, and staring all
round instead of saying their prayers; and all the ministers are to be
made into clergymen--priests and deacons, you know; and they are going
to have bishops and proper service like other people. Mr. Campbell,”
said Matty, looking up at him with a little emphasis, to mark that, for
once, she was calling him formally by his name--“knows it is quite
true.”
“Humph,” said Sir Thomas, “I know better; I know how Campbell, there,
looked the other day when he came out of church. I know the Scotch and
their ways of thinking. Go and make the tea, and don’t talk of what you
don’t understand. But, as for you, Campbell, if you have a mind for the
University and to go in for the Church--”
But this was more than Colin, being twenty, and a Scotchman, could bear.
“I _am_ going in for the Church,” said the lad, doing all he could to
keep down the excitement at which Sir Thomas would have laughed, “but it
did not in the least touch my heart the other day to know that it was
the twentieth Sunday after Trinity. Devotion is a great matter,” said
the young Scotchman, “I grant you have the advantage over us there; but
it would not do in Scotland to preach about the Church’s goodness, and
what she had appointed for such or such a day. We preach very stupid
sermons, I dare say; but at least we mean to teach somebody
something--what God looks for at their hands, or what they may look for
at His. It is more an occupation for a man,” cried the young
revolutionary, “than reading the sublimest of prayers. I am going in for
the Church--but it is the Church of Scotland,” said Colin. He drew
himself up with a grand youthful dignity, which was much lost on Sir
Thomas, who, for his part, looked at his new tutor with eyes of sober
wonderment, and did not understand what this emotion meant.
“There is no occasion for excitement,” said the baronet; “nobody
now-a-days meddles with a man’s convictions; indeed, Harry would say,
it’s a great thing to have any convictions. That is how the young men
talk now-a-days,” said Sir Thomas; and he moved off the sofa again, and
yawned, though not uncivilly. As for Miss Matty, she came stealing up
when she had made the tea, with her cup in her hand.
“So you do mean to be a minister?” she said, in a half whisper, with a
deprecating look. Lady Frankland had roused up, like her husband, and
the two were talking, and did not take any notice of Matty’s proceedings
with the harmless tutor. The young lady was quite free to play with her
mouse a little, and entered upon the amusement with zest, as was
natural. “You mean to shut yourself up in a square house, with five
windows in front, like the poor gentleman who has such red hair; and
never see anybody but the old women in the parish, and have your life
made miserable every Sunday by _that_ precentor--”
“I hope I have a soul above precentors,” said Colin, with a little
laugh, which was unsteady still, however, with excitement; “and one
might mend all that,” he added a minute after, looking at her with a
kind of wistful inquiry which he could not have put into words. What was
it he meant to ask with his anxious eye? But he did not himself know.
“Oh yes,” said Matty, “I know what you could do: you could get a little
organ and marry somebody who would play it, and teach the people better;
I know exactly what you could do,” said the young lady with a piquant
little touch of spite, and a look that startled Colin; and then she
paused, and hung her head for a moment and blushed, or looked as if she
blushed. “But you would not?” said Matty, softly, with a sidelong glance
at her victim. “Don’t marry anybody; no one is of any use after that. I
don’t approve of marrying, for my part, especially for a priest. Priests
should always be detached, you know, from the world.”
“Why?” said Colin. He was quite content to go on talking on such a
subject for any length of time. “As for marrying, it is only your rich
squires and great people who can marry when they please; we who have to
make our own way in the world--” said the young man, with a touch of
grandeur, but was stopped by Miss Matty’s sudden laughter.
“Oh, how simple you are! As if rich squires and great people, as you
say, could marry when they pleased--as if any man could marry when he
pleased!” cried Miss Matty, scornfully. “After all, we do count for
something, we poor women; now and then, we can put even an eldest son
out in his calculations. It is great fun too,” said the young lady, and
she laughed, and so did Colin, who could not help wondering what special
case she might have in her eye, and listened with all the eagerness of a
lover. “There is poor Harry--” said Miss Matty under her breath, and
stopped short and laughed to herself and sipped her tea, while Colin
lent an anxious ear. But nothing further followed that soft laughter.
Colin sat on thorns, gazing at her with a world of questions in his
face, but the siren looked at him no more. Poor Harry! Harry’s natural
rival was sensible of a thrill of jealous curiosity mingled with
anxiety. What had she done to Harry, this witch who had beguiled
Colin?--or was it not she who had done anything to him, but some other
as pretty and as mischievous? Colin had no clue to the puzzle, but it
gave him a new _accès_ of half-conscious enmity to the heir of
Wodensbourne.
After that talk there elapsed a few days during which Colin saw but
little of Matty, who had visits to pay, and some solemn dinner-parties
to attend in Lady Frankland’s train. He had to spend the evenings by
himself on these occasions after dining with Charley, who was not a very
agreeable companion; and, when this invalid went to his room, as he did
early, the young tutor found himself desolate enough in the great house,
where no human bond existed between him and the little community within
its walls. He was not in a state of mind to take kindly to abstract
study at that moment of his existence, for Colin had passed out of the
unconscious stage in which he had been at Ardmartin. There, however much
he might have wished to be out of temptation, he could not help himself,
which was a wonderful consolation; but now he had come wilfully and
knowingly into danger, and had become aware of it; and far more
distinctly than ever before had become aware of the difference between
himself and the object of his thoughts. Though he found it very possible
at times to comfort himself with the thought that this was an ordinary
interruption of a Scotch student’s work, and noways represented the
Armida’s garden in which the knight lost both his vocation and his life,
there were other moments and moods which were less easily manageable;
and, on the whole, he wanted the stimulus of perpetual excitement to
keep him from feeling the false position he was in, and the inexpediency
of continuing it. Though this feeling haunted him all day, at night, in
the drawing-room--which was brightened and made sweet by the fair
English matron who was kind to Colin, and the fairer maiden who was the
centre of all his thoughts--it vanished like an evil spirit, and left
him with a sense that nowhere in the world could he have been so well;
but, when the stimulus was withdrawn, the youth was left in a very
woeful plight, conscious, to the bottom of his heart, that he ought to
be elsewhere, and here was consuming his strength and life. He went out
in the darkness of the December nights through the gloomy silent park
into the little village with its feeble lights, where everybody and
everything was unknown to him; and all the time his demon sat on his
shoulder and asked what he did there. One evening while he strayed
through the broken, irregular village-street, to all appearance looking
at the dim cottage-windows and listening to the rude songs from the
little ale-house, the curate encountered the tutor. Most probably the
young priest, who was not remarkable for wisdom, imagined the Scotch lad
to be in some danger; for he laid a kindly hand upon his arm and turned
him away from the vociferous little tavern, which was a vexation to the
curate’s soul. “I should like you to go up to the Parsonage with me, if
you will only wait till I have seen this sick woman,” he said; and Colin
went in very willingly within the cottage porch to wait for his
acquaintance, who had his prayer-book under his arm. The young Scotchman
looked on with wondering eyes while the village priest knelt down by his
parishioner’s bedside and opened his book. Naturally there was a
comparison always going on in Colin’s mind. He was like a passive
experimentalist, seeing all kinds of trials made before his eyes, and
watching the result. “I wonder if they all think it is a spell,” said
Colin to himself; but he was rebuked and was silent when he heard the
responses which the cottage folk made on their knees. When the curate
had read his prayer he got up and said good-night, and went back to
Colin; and this visitation of the sick was a very strange experience to
the young Scotch observer, who stood revolving everything, with an eye
to Scotland, at the cottage-door.
“You don’t make use of our Common Prayer in Scotland?” said the curate;
“pardon me for referring to it. One cannot help being sorry for people
who shut themselves out from such an inestimable advantage. How did it
come about?”
“I don’t know,” said Colin. “I suppose because Laud was a fool, and King
Charles a ----”
“Hush, for goodness sake,” said the curate, with a shiver. “What do you
mean? such language is painful to listen to. The saints and martyrs
should be spoken of in a different tone. You think that was the reason?
Oh, no; it was your horrible Calvinism, and John Knox, and the mad
influences of that unfortunate Reformation which has done us all so much
harm; though I suppose you think differently in Scotland,” he said with
a little sigh, steering his young companion, of whose morality he felt
uncertain, past the alehouse door.
“Did you never hear of John Knox’s liturgy?” said the indignant Colin;
“the saddest, passionate service! You always had time to say your
prayers in England, but we had to snatch them as we could. And your
prayers would not do for us now,” said the Scotch experimentalist; “I
wish they could; but it would be impossible. A Scotch peasant would have
thought _that_ an incantation you were reading. When you go to see a
sick man, shouldn’t you like to say, God save him, God forgive him,
straight out of your heart without a book?” said the eager lad; at which
question the curate looked up with wonder in the young man’s face.
“I hope I do say it out of my heart,” said the English priest, and
stopped short, with a gravity that had a great effect upon Colin;--“but
in words more sound than any words of mine,” the curate added a moment
after, which dispersed the reverential impression from the Scotch mind
of the eager boy.
“I can’t see that,” said Colin, quickly, “in the church for common
prayer, yes; at a bedside in a cottage, no. At least, I mean that’s how
we feel in Scotland--though I suppose you don’t care much for our
opinion,” he added with some heat, thinking he saw a smile on his
companion’s face.
“Oh, yes, certainly; I have always understood that there is a great deal
of intelligence in Scotland,” said the curate, courteous as to a
South-Sea Islander. “But people who have never known this inestimable
advantage--I believe preaching is considered the great thing in the
North?” he said with a little curiosity. “I wish society were a little
more impressed by it among ourselves; but mere _information_ even about
spiritual matters is of so much less importance! though that, I daresay,
is another point on which we don’t agree?” the curate continued,
pleasantly. He was just opening the gate into his own garden, which was
invisible in the darkness, but which enclosed and surrounded a homely
house with some lights in the windows, which, it was a little comfort to
Colin to perceive, was not much handsomer nor more imposing in
appearance than the familiar manse on the borders of the Holy Loch.
“It depends on what you call spiritual matters,” said the polemical
youth. “I don’t think a man can possibly get too much information about
his relations with God, if only anybody could tell him anything; but
certainly about ecclesiastical arrangements and the Christian year,”
said the irreverent young Scotchman, “a little might suffice;” and Colin
spoke with the slightest inflection of contempt, always thinking of the
twentieth Sunday after Trinity, and scorning what he did not understand,
as was natural to his years.
“Ah, you don’t know what you are saying,” said the devout curate. “After
you have spent a Christian Year, you will see what comfort and beauty
there is in it. You say, ‘if anybody could tell him anything.’ I hope
you have not got into a sceptical way of thinking. I should like very
much to have a long talk with you,” said the village priest, who was
very good and very much in earnest, though the earnestness was after a
pattern different from anything known to Colin; and, before the youth
perceived what was going to happen, he found himself in the curate’s
study, placed on a kind of moral platform, as the emblem of Doubt and
that pious unbelief which is the favourite of modern theology. Now, to
tell the truth, Colin, though it may lower him in the opinion of many
readers of his history, was not by nature given to doubting. He had, to
be sure, followed the fashion of the time enough to be aware of a
wonderful amount of unsettled questions, and questions which it did not
appear possible ever to settle. But somehow these elements of scepticism
did not give him much trouble. His heart was full of natural piety, and
his instincts all fresh and strong as a child’s. He could not help
believing, any more than he could help breathing, his nature being such;
and he was half-amused and half-irritated by the position in which he
found himself, notwithstanding the curate’s respect for the ideal
sceptic, whom he had thus pounced upon. The commonplace character of
Colin’s mind was such, that he was very glad when his new friend relaxed
into gossip, and asked him who was expected at the Hall for Christmas;
to which the tutor answered by such names as he had heard in the ladies’
talk, and remembered with friendliness or with jealousy, according to
the feeling with which Miss Matty pronounced them--which was Colin’s
only guide amid this crowd of the unknown.
“I wonder if it is to be a match,” said the curate, who, recovering from
his dread concerning the possible habits of his Scotch guest, had taken
heart to share his scholarly potations of beer with his new friend. “It
was said Lady Frankland did not like it, but I never believed that.
After all, it was such a natural arrangement. I wonder if it is to be a
match?”
“Is what to be a match?” said Colin, who all at once felt his heart
stand still and grow cold, though he sat by the cheerful fire which
threw its light even into the dark garden outside. “I have heard nothing
about any match,” he added, with a little effort. It dawned upon him
instantly what it must be, and his impulse was to rush out of the house
or do something rash and sudden that would prevent him from hearing it
said in words.
“Between Henry Frankland and his cousin,” said the calm curate; “they
looked as if they were perfectly devoted to each other at one time. That
has died off, for she is rather a flirt, I fear; but all the people
hereabouts had made up their minds on the subject. It would be a very
suitable match on the whole. But why do you get up? you are not going
away?”
“Yes; I have something to do when I go home,” said Colin, “something to
prepare,” which he said out of habit, thinking of his old work, at home,
without remembering what he was saying or whether it meant anything. The
curate put down the poker which he had lifted to poke the fire, and
looked at Colin with a touch of envy.
“Ah! something literary, I suppose?” said the young priest, and went
with his new friend to the door thinking how lucky he was, at his age,
to have a literary connexion; a thought very natural to a young priest
in a country curacy with a very small endowment. The curate wrote
verses, as Colin himself did, though on very different subjects, and
took some of them out of his desk and looked at them, after he had shut
the door, with affectionate eyes, and a half intention of asking the
tutor what was the best way to get admission to the magazines; and on
the whole he was pleased with what he had seen of the young Scotchman,
though he was so ignorant of church matters; an opinion which Colin
perfectly reciprocated, with a more distinct sentiment of compassion for
the English curate, who knew about as much of Scotland as if it had lain
in the South Seas.
Meanwhile Colin walked home to Wodensbourne with fire and passion in his
heart. “It would be a very suitable match on the whole,” he kept saying
to himself, and then tried to take a little comfort from Matty’s sweet
laughter over “Poor Harry!” Poor Harry was rich and fortunate, and
independent, and Colin was only the tutor; were these two to meet this
Christmas time and contend over again on this new ground? He went along
past the black trees as if he were walking for a wager; but, quick as he
walked, a dog-cart dashed past him with lighted lamps gleaming up the
avenue. When he reached the Hall-door, one of the servants was
disappearing up stairs with a portmanteau, and a heap of coats and
wrappers lay in the Hall.
“Mr. Harry just come, sir--a week sooner than was expected,” said the
butler, who was an old servant and shared in the joys of the family.
Colin went to his room without a word, and shut himself up there with
feelings which he could not have explained to any one. He had not seen
Harry Frankland since they were both boys; but he had never got over the
youthful sense of rivalry and opposition which had sent him skimming
over the waters of the Holy Loch to save the boy who was his born rival
and antagonist. Was this the day of their encounter and conflict which
had come at last?