As for Colin and his friend, they went upon their way steadily, with
that rare sympathy in difference which is the closest bond of
friendship. Lauderdale by this time had lost almost all the lingerings
of youth which had hung long about him, perhaps by right of his union
with the fresh and exuberant youth of his brother-in-arms. His gaunt
person was gaunter than ever, though, by an impulse of the tenderest
pride--not for himself but for his companion--his dress fitted him
better, and was more carefully put on than it had even been during all
his life; but his long hair, once so black and wild, was now grey, and
hung in thin locks, and his beard, that relic of Italy, which Lauderdale
preserved religiously, and had ceased to be ashamed of, was grey also,
and added to the somewhat solemn aspect of his long thoughtful face. He
was still an inch or two taller than Colin, whose great waves of brown
hair, tossed up like clouds upon his forehead, and shining brown eyes,
which even now had not quite lost the soft shade of surprise and
admiration which had given them such a charm in their earlier years,
contrasted strangely with the worn looks of his friend. They were not
like father and son; for Lauderdale preserved in his appearance an
indefinable air of solitude and of a life apart, which made it
impossible to think of him in any such relationship; but perhaps their
union was more close and real than even that tie could have made it,
since the unwedded childless man was at once young and old, and had kept
in his heart a virgin freshness more visionary, and perhaps even more
spotless, than that of Colin’s untarnished youth; for, to be sure, the
young man not only was conscious of that visionary woman in the clouds,
but had already solaced himself with more than one love, and still meant
to marry a wife like other men, though that was not at present the
foremost idea in his mind; whereas, whatever love Lauderdale might have
had in that past from which he never drew the veil, it had never been
replaced by another, nor involved any earthly hope.
As they crossed the borders, and found themselves among the Cumberland
hills, Lauderdale began to make gradual advances to a subject which had
been for a long time left in silence between them. Perhaps it required
that refinement of ear natural to a born citizen of Glasgow to recognise
that it was “English” which was being spoken round them as they
advanced--but the philosopher supposed himself to have made that
discovery. He recurred to it with a certain pathetic meaning as they
went upon their way. They had set out on foot from Carlisle, each with
his knapsack, to make their leisurely way to the Lakes; and, when they
stopped to refresh themselves at the humble roadside inn which was their
first resting-place, the plaintive cadence of his friend’s voice struck
Colin with a certain amusement. “They’re a’ English here,” Lauderdale
said, with a tone of sad recollection, as a man might have said in
Norway or Russia, hearing for the first time the foreign tongue, and
bethinking himself of all the dreary seas and long tracts of country
that lay between him and home. It might have been pathetic under such
circumstances, though the chances are that even then Colin, graceless
and fearless, would have laughed; but at present, when the absence was
only half a day’s march, and the difference of tongue, as we have said,
only to be distinguished by an ear fine and native, the sigh was too
absurd to be passed over lightly. “I never knew you have the _mal du
pays_ before,” Colin said with a burst of laughter:--and the patriot
himself did not refuse to smile.
“Speak English,” he said, with a quaint self-contradiction; “though I
should say speak Scotch if I was consistent;--you needna make your jokes
at me. Oh ay, it’s awfu’ easy laughing. It’s no _that_ I’m thinking of;
there’s nothing out of the way in the association of ideas this time,
though they play bonnie pranks whiles. I’m thinking of the first time I
was in England, and how awfu’ queer it sounded to hear the bits of
callants on the road, and the poor bodies at the cottage doors.”
“The first time you were in England--that was when you came to nurse
me,” said Colin; “I should have died that time but for my mother and
you.”
“I’m not saying that,” said Lauderdale; “you’re one of the kind that’s
awfu’ hard to kill--but it’s no that I’m thinking of. There are other
things that come to my mind with the sound of the English tongue. Hold
your peace, callant, and listen; is there nothing comes back to your ain
mind when you hear the like of _that_?”
“I hear a woman talking very broad Cumberland,” said Colin, who
notwithstanding began to feel an uncomfortable heat mounting upwards in
his face; “you may call it English, if you have a mind. There is some
imperceptible difference between that and the Dumfriesshire, I suppose;
but I should not like to have to discriminate where the difference
lies.”
As for Lauderdale, he sighed; but without intending it, as it appeared,
for he made a great effort to cover his sigh with a yawn, for which
latter indulgence he had evidently no occasion; and then he tried a
faint little unnecessary laugh. “I’m an awfu’ man for associations,” he
said; “I’m no to be held to account for the things that come into my
head. You may say it’s Cumberland, and I’m no disputing; but for a’ that
there’s something in the sound of the voice----”
“Look here,” said Colin impatiently; “listen to my tract. I want you to
give me your opinion now it is finished; turn this way, with your face
to the hills, and never mind the voice.”
“Oh, ay,” said Lauderdale, with another sigh; “there’s nae voice like
his ain voice to this callant’s ear; it’s an awfu’ thing to be an
author, and above a’ a reformer; for you may be sure it’s for the sake
of the cause, and no because he’s written a’ that himsel’. Let’s hear
this grand tract of yours; no that I’ve any particular faith, in that
way of working,” he added impartially. It was not encouraging perhaps to
the young author; but Colin was sufficiently used by this time to his
friend’s predilections, and for his own part was very well pleased to
escape from memories more perplexing and difficult to manage. It was
with this intention that he had taken out No. I. of the _Tracts for the
Times_. If any of the writers of the original series of these renowned
compositions could but have looked over the shoulder of the young Scotch
minister, and beheld the different fashion of thoughts, the curious
fundamental difference which lay underneath, and yet the apparent
similarity of intention on the face of it! Rome and the Pope were about
as far off as Mecca and the prophet from Colin’s ideas. He was not in
the least urgent for any infallible standard, nor at all concerned to
trace a direct line of descent for himself or his Church; and yet withal
his notions were as high and absolute and arbitrary on some points as if
he had been a member of the most potent of hierarchies. It would,
however, be doing Colin injustice to reproduce here this revolutionary
document: to tell the truth, circumstances occurred very soon after to
retard the continuation of the series, and, so far as his historian is
aware, the publication of this preliminary[4] address was only partial.
For, to be sure, the young man had still abundance of time before him,
and the first and most important thing, as Lauderdale suggested, was the
preparation of an audience--an object which was on the whole better
carried out by partial and private circulation than by coming
prematurely before the public, and giving the adversary occasion to
blaspheme, and perhaps frightening the Kirk herself out of her wits.
Having said so much, we may return to the more private and individual
aspect of affairs. The two friends were seated, while all this was going
on, out of doors, on a stone bench by the grey wall of the cottage inn,
in which they had just refreshed themselves with a nondescript meal. The
Cumberland hills--at that moment bleaching under the sunshine, showing
all their scars and stains in the fulness of the light--stretched far
away into the distance, hiding religiously in their depths the sacred
woods and waters that were the end of the pilgrimage on which the two
friends were bound. Lauderdale sat at leisure and listened, shading the
sunshine from his face, and watching the shadows play on the woods and
hills; and the same force of imagination which persuaded the
unaccustomed traveller that he could detect a difference of tone in the
rude talk he heard in the distance, and that that which was only the
dialect of Cumberland was _English_, persuaded him also that the
sunshine in which he was sitting was warmer than the sunshine at home,
and that he was really, as he himself would have described it, “going
south.” He was vaguely following out these ideas, notwithstanding that
he also listened to Colin, and gave him the fullest attention.
Lauderdale had not travelled much in his life, nor enjoyed many
holidays; and, consequently, the very sense of leisure and novelty
recalled to him the one great recreation of his life--the spring he had
spent in Italy, with all its vicissitudes, prefaced by the mournful days
at Wodensbourne. All this came before Lauderdale’s mind more strongly a
great deal than it did before that of Colin, because it was to the elder
man the one sole and clearly marked escape out of the monotony of a long
life--a thing that had occurred but once, and never could occur again.
How the Cumberland hills, and the peasant voices in their rude dialect,
and the rough stone bench outside the door of a grey lime-stone cottage,
could recall to Lauderdale the olive slopes of Frascati, the tall houses
shut up and guarded against the sunshine, and the far-off solemn waste
of the Campagna, would have been something unintelligible to Colin. But
in the meantime these recollections were coming to a climax in his
companion’s mind. He gave a great start in the midst of Colin’s most
eloquent paragraph, and jumped to his feet, crying, “Do you hear that?”
with a thrill of excitement utterly inexplicable to the astonished young
man: and then Lauderdale grew suddenly ashamed of himself, and took his
seat again, abashed, and felt that it was needful to explain.
“Do I hear what?” said Colin; and, as this interruption occurred just at
the moment when he supposed he had roused his hearer to a certain pitch
of excitement and anxiety, by his account of the religious deficiencies
of Scotland, which he was on the point of relieving by an able
exposition of the possibilities of reform, it may be forgiven to him if
he spoke with a little asperity. Such a disappointment is a trying
experience to the best of men. “What is it, for Heaven’s sake?” said the
young man, forgetting he was a minister; and, to tell the truth,
Lauderdale was so much ashamed of himself that he felt almost unable to
explain.
“She’s singing something, that’s a’,” said the confused philosopher.
“I’m an awfu’ haveril, Colin. There’s some things I canna get out of my
head. Never you mind; a’ that’s admirable,” said the culprit, with a
certain deprecatory eagerness. “I’m awfu’ anxious to see how you get us
out of the scrape. Go on.”
Colin was angry, but he was human, and he could not but laugh at the
discomfiture and conciliatory devices of his disarmed critic. “I am not
going to throw away my pearls,” he said; “since your mind is in such a
deplorable state you shall hear no more to-day. Oh, no. I understand the
extent of your anxiety. And so here’s Lauderdale going the way of all
flesh. Who is _she_? and what is she singing? The best policy is to make
a clean breast of it,” said the young man, laughing; “and then, perhaps
I may look over the insult you have been guilty of to myself.”
But Lauderdale was in no mood for laughing. “It would be the best plan
to go on,” he said; “for I’ve been giving my best attention; and maybe
if I was to speak out what was in my heart--”
“Speak it out,” said Colin. He was a little affronted, but he kept his
composure. As he folded up his papers and put them away in his
pocket-book, he too heard the song which Lauderdale had been listening
to. It was only a countrywoman singing as she went about her work, and
there was no marked resemblance in the voice to anything he had heard
before. Yet he knew what was coming when he put up his papers in his
pocket-book, and it occurred to him that perhaps it would be well to
have the explanation over and be done with it, for he knew how
persistent his companion was.
“It’s no that there’s much to say,” said Lauderdale, changing his tone;
“a man like me, that’s little used to change, get’s awfu’ like a fool in
his associations. There’s naething that ony reasonable creature could
see in thae hills, and a’ the sheep on them, that should bring _that_ to
my mind; and, as you say, callant, it’s Cumberland they’re a’ speaking,
and no English. It’s just a kind of folly that men are subject to that
live their lane. I canna but go a’ through again, from the beginning
to---- Well, I suppose,” said Lauderdale with a sigh, “what you and me
would call the end.”
“What any man in his senses would call the end,” said Colin, beginning
to cut his pencil with some ferocity, which was the only occupation that
presented itself to him for the moment; “I don’t suppose there can be
any question as to what you mean. Was it to be expected that I should
court rejection over again for the mere pleasure of being rejected?--as
you know I have been, both by letter and in person; and then, as if even
that was not enough, accused of fortune-hunting; when Heaven knows----”
Here Colin stopped short, and cut his pencil so violently that he cut
his finger, an act which convicted him of using unnecessary force, and
of which accordingly he was ashamed.
“It is no _that_ I was thinking of,” said Lauderdale, “I was minding of
the time when we a’ met first, and the bit soft English voice--it’s no
that I’m fond of the English, or their ways,” continued the philosopher.
“We’re maybe no so well in our ain country, and maybe we’re better; I’ll
no say. It’s a question awfu’ hard to settle. But, if ever we a’
foregather again, I cannot think there will be that difference. It wasna
to say musical that I ken of, but it was aye soft and pleasant--maybe
ower soft, Colin, for the like of you--and with a bit yielding tone in
it, as if the heart would break sooner than make a stand for its own
way. I mind it real weel,” said Lauderdale, with a sigh. “As for the
father, no doubt there was little to be said in his favour. But, after
a’, it wasna him that you had any intention to marry. And yon
Sabbath-day after he was gone, poor man!--when you and me didna ken what
to do with ourselves till the soft thing came out of her painted
cha’amer, and took the guiding of us into her hands. It’s _that_ I was
thinking of,” said Lauderdale, fixing his eyes on a far-off point upon
the hills, and ending his musings with a sigh.
Colin sighed, too, for sympathy--he could not help it. The scene came
before him as his friend spoke. He thought he could see Alice, in her
pallor and exhaustion, worn to a shadow, in her black dress, coming into
the bare Italian room in the glorious summer day, which all the
precautions possible could not shut out from the house of mourning--with
her prayer-book in her hand; and then he remembered how she had chidden
him for reading another lesson than that appointed for the day. It was
in the height of his own revolutionary impulses that this thought struck
him; and he smiled to himself in the midst of his sigh, with a tender
thought for Alice, and a passing wonder for himself, what change might
have been wrought upon him if that dutiful little soul had actually
become the companion of his life. Colin was not the kind of man who can
propose to himself to form his wife’s mind, and rule her thoughts, and
influence her without being sensible of her influence in return. That
was not the order of domestic affairs in Ramore; and naturally he judged
the life that might have been, and even yet might be, by that standard.
The Mistress’s son did not understand having a nullity, or a shadow of
himself, for a wife; and insensibly he made his way back from the
_attendrissement_ into which Lauderdale’s musings had led him, into
half-amused speculation as to the effect Alice and her influence might
have had upon him by this time. “If _that_ had happened,” he said with a
smile, bursting out, as was usual to him when Lauderdale was his
companion, at that particular point of his thoughts which required
expression, without troubling himself to explain how he came there--“if
_that_ had happened,” said Colin, with the conscious smile of old, “I
wonder what sort of fellow I should have been by this time? I doubt if I
should have had any idea of disturbing the constituted order of affairs.
Things are always for the best, you perceive, as everybody says. A man
who has any revolutionary work to do must be free and alone. But don’t
let us talk any more of this--I don’t like turning back upon the road.
But for that feeling I should have settled the business before now about
poor Arthur’s ‘Voice from the Grave.’”
“I was aye against that title,” said Lauderdale, “if he would have paid
any attention; but you’re a’ the same, you young callants; it’s nae more
a voice from the grave than mine is. It’s a voice from an awfu’ real
life, that had nae intention to lose a minute that was permitted. It
would be awfu’ agreeable to ken if he was permitted to have any pleasure
in his book; but then, so far as I can judge, he maun ken an awfu’ deal
better by this time--and maybe up there they’re no heeding about a third
edition. It’s hard to say; he was so terrible like himself up to the
last moment; I canna imagine, in my own mind, that he’s no like himself
still. There should be a heap of siller,” said Lauderdale, “by this
time; and sooner or later you’ll have to open communication, and let
them ken.”
“Yes,” said Colin, with a momentary look of sullenness and repugnance;
and then he added, in a lighter tone, “heaps of money never came out of
a religious publisher’s hands. A third edition does not mean the same
thing with them as with other people. Of course, it must be set right
some time or other. We had better set off, I can tell you, and not talk
idle talk like this, if we mean to get to our journey’s end to-night.”
“Oh, ay,” said Lauderdale, “you’re aye in a hurry, you young
callants. Is it the father that makes you so unwilling for any
correspondence?--but it’s awfu’ easy to settle a thing like that.”
“I think you want to try how far my patience can go,” said Colin, who
had grown crimson up to the hair. “Do you think a man has no feeling,
Lauderdale? Do you think it is possible to be treated as I have been,
and yet go back again with humility, hat in hand? I don’t feel myself
capable of that.”
“If you’re asking me my opinion,” said Lauderdale, calmly, “I’ve nae
objection to tell you what I think. You’re no vindictive, and you’ve nae
pride to speak of--I’m meaning pride of _that_ kind. It’s no in you to
bear a grudge at onybody, beyond, maybe, the hour or the day. So I’m no
heeding much about that question, for my part. If you had an awfu’
regard for the man, he might affront you; but no being indifferent. I’m
telling you just my opinion, with my partial knowledge of the premises;
and for _her_, I cannot but say what is in my ain mind. I’ve a kind of
longing to see her again; we used to be awfu’ good friends, her and me.
I had you to take care of, callant, and she had _him_; and whiles she
had a moment of envy, and grudged terrible in her heart to see the air
and the sun, that are for baith the good and the evil, so hard upon him,
and so sweet to you. There was little in her mind to hide, and her and
me were good friends. I’ll never forget our counts and our reckonings.
It’s awfu’ hard for the like o’ me to divine wherefore it is that a’
that has come to an end, and her and you dropped out of one another’s
life.”
“Lauderdale,” said Colin, with a little choking in his voice, “I will
tell you what I never told you before----” and then the young man
stopped short, as if he had received a blow. What was it that came over
him like an imperious sudden prohibition, stopping the words upon his
lips the first time he had ever dreamt of uttering them to mortal ear?
He had a feeling somehow as if one of those flying shadows that kept
coming and going over the mountains had taken visible shape and stepped
before him, and put a cold hand on his lips. He was about to have
confessed that his love had been no more than tender compassion and
kindness; he was about to have said what Lauderdale perhaps might have
guessed before, what Colin had kept secret and hidden in his
breast--that Alice never was nor could be the ideal woman of his
thoughts, the true love who waited for him somewhere in the future. But
perhaps, after all, it was no shadow nor unseen influence, but only the
young man’s magnanimous heart that spared that humiliation to the name
of Alice--solely to her name; for, now that all was over between them,
it was only that abstract representation of her that was concerned.
“Ay,” said Lauderdale, after a moment, “you were going to tell me----”
and then he rose as Colin had done, and threw his knapsack on his
shoulder, and prepared to resume his march.
“We shall have an hour’s walking in the dark, if we don’t make all the
better progress,” said Colin; “which is uncomfortable when one does not
know the way. And now to return to No I.” he said with a laugh, as they
went on along the dusty road. There was not another word said between
them of the confession thus abruptly stopped. Perhaps Lauderdale in his
heart had a perception of what it meant; but, however that might be,
both fell at once with eagerness, as if they had never digressed for a
moment, upon the first number of Colin’s _Tracts for the Times_.