THE SCHOOLMASTER.
Alexander Graham, the schoolmaster, was the son of a grieve, or
farm-overseer, in the North of Scotland. By straining every nerve,
his parents had succeeded in giving him a university education, the
narrowness of whose scope was possibly favourable to the development
of what genius, rare and shy, might lurk among the students. He had
laboured well, and had gathered a good deal from books and lectures,
but far more from the mines they guided him to discover in his own
nature. In common with so many Scotch parents, his had cherished the
most wretched as well as hopeless of all ambitions, seeing it presumes
to work in a region into which _no_ ambition can enter--I mean that
of seeing their son a clergyman. In presbyter, curate, bishop, or
cardinal, ambition can fare but as that of the creeping thing to build
its nest in the topmost boughs of the cedar. Worse than that; my simile
is a poor one; for the moment a thought of ambition is _cherished_,
that moment the man is out of the kingdom. Their son with already a
few glimmering insights, which had not yet begun to interfere with
his acceptance of the doctrines of his church, made no opposition to
their wish, but having qualified himself to the satisfaction of his
superiors, at length ascended the pulpit to preach his first sermon.
The custom of the time as to preaching was a sort of compromise
between reading a sermon and speaking extempore, a mode morally as
well as artistically false: the preacher learned his sermon by rote,
and repeated it--as much like the man he therein was not, and as
little like the parrot he was, as he could. It is no wonder, in such
an attempt, either that memory should fail a shy man, or assurance
an honest man. In Mr Graham’s case it was probably the former:
the practice was universal, and he could hardly yet have begun to
question it, so as to have had any conscience of evil. Blessedly,
however, for his dawning truth and well-being, he failed --failed
utterly--pitifully. His tongue clave to the roof of his mouth; his
lips moved, but shaped no sound; a deathly dew bathed his forehead;
his knees shook; and he sank at last to the bottom of the chamber
of his torture, whence, while his mother wept below, and his father
clenched hands of despair beneath the tails of his Sunday coat, he
was half led, half dragged down the steps by the bedral, shrunken
together like one caught in a shameful deed, and with the ghastly look
of him who has but just revived from the faint supervening on the
agonies of the rack. Home they crept together, speechless and hopeless
all three, to be thenceforth the contempt and not the envy of their
fellow-parishioners. For if the vulgar feeling towards the home-born
prophet is superciliousness, what must the sentence upon failure be in
ungenerous natures, to which every downfall of another is an uplifting
of themselves! But Mr Graham’s worth had gained him friends in the
presbytery, and he was that same week appointed to the vacant school of
another parish.
There it was not long before he made the acquaintance of Griselda
Campbell, who was governess in the great house of the neighbourhood,
and a love, not the less fine that it was hopeless from the first,
soon began to consume the chagrin of his failure, and substitute for
it a more elevating sorrow;--for how could an embodied failure, to
offer whose miserable self would be an insult, dare speak of love to
one before whom his whole being sank worshipping. Silence was the sole
armour of his privilege. So long as he was silent, the terrible arrow
would never part from the bow of those sweet lips; he might love on,
love ever, nor be grudged the bliss of such visions as to him, seated
on its outer steps, might come from any chance opening of the heavenly
gate. And Miss Campbell thought of him more kindly than he knew. But
before long she accepted the offered situation of governess to Lady
Annabel, the only child of the late marquis’s elder brother, at that
time himself marquis, and removed to Lossie House. There the late
marquis fell in love with her, and persuaded her to a secret marriage.
There also she became, in the absence of her husband, the mother of
Malcolm. But the marquis of the time, jealous for the succession of his
daughter, and fearing his brother might yet marry the mother of his
child, contrived, with the assistance of the midwife, to remove the
infant and persuade the mother that he was dead, and also to persuade
his brother of the death of both mother and child; after which,
imagining herself wilfully deserted by her husband, yet determined to
endure shame rather than break the promise of secrecy she had given
him, the poor lady accepted the hospitality of her distant relative,
Miss Horn, and continued with her till she died.
When he learned where she had gone, Mr Graham seized a chance of
change to Portlossie that occurred soon after, and when she became her
cousin’s guest, went to see her, was kindly received, and for twenty
years lived in friendly relations with the two. It was not until after
her death that he came to know the strange fact that the object of his
calm unalterable devotion had been a wife all those years, and was the
mother of his favourite pupil. About the same time he was dismissed
from the school on the charge of heretical teaching, founded on certain
religious conversations he had had with some of the fisher-people
who sought his advice; and thereupon he had left the place, and gone
to London, knowing it would be next to impossible to find or gather
another school in Scotland after being thus branded. In London he
hoped, one way or another, to avoid dying of cold or hunger, or in
debt: that was very nearly the limit of his earthly ambition.
He had just one acquaintance in the whole mighty city, and no more. Him
he had known in the days of his sojourn at King’s College, where he
had grown with him from bejan to magistrand. He was the son of a linen
draper in Aberdeen, and was a decent, good humoured fellow, who, if he
had not distinguished, had never disgraced himself. His father, having
somewhat influential business relations, and finding in him no leanings
to a profession, bespoke the good offices of a certain large retail
house in London, and sent him thither to learn the business. The result
was that he had married a daughter of one of the partners, and become
a partner himself. His old friend wrote to him at his shop in Oxford
Street, and then went to see him at his house in Haverstock Hill.
He was shown into the library--in which were two mahogany cases with
plate-glass doors, full of books, well cared for as to clothing and
condition, and perfectly placid, as if never disturbed from one week’s
end to another. In a minute Mr Marshal entered--so changed that he
could never have recognized him--still, however, a kind-hearted, genial
man. He received his classfellow cordially and respectfully--referred
merrily to old times, and begged to know how he was getting on, asked
whether he had come to London with any special object, and invited
him to dine with them on Sunday. He accepted the invitation, met him,
according to agreement, at a certain chapel in Kentish Town, of which
he was a deacon, and walked home with him and his wife.
They had but one of their family at home--the youngest son, whom his
father was having educated for the dissenting ministry, in the full
conviction that he was doing not a little for the truth, and justifying
its cause before men, by devoting to its service the son of a man of
standing and worldly means, whom he might have easily placed in a
position to make money. The youth was of simple character and good
inclination--ready to do what he saw to be right, but slow in putting
to the question anything that interfered with his notions of laudable
ambition, or justifiable self-interest. He was attending lectures at a
dissenting college in the neighbourhood, for his father feared Oxford
or Cambridge, not for his morals, but his opinions in regard to church
and state.
The schoolmaster spent a few days in the house. His friend was
generally in town, and his wife, regarding him as very primitive and
hardly fit for what she counted society--the class, namely, that she
herself represented, was patronising and condescending; but the young
fellow, finding, to his surprise, that he knew a great deal more about
his studies than he did himself, was first somewhat attracted and then
somewhat influenced by him, so that at length an intimacy tending to
friendship arose between them.
Mr Graham was not a little shocked to discover that his ideas in
respect of the preacher’s calling were of a very worldly kind. The
notions of this fledgling of dissent differed from those of a clergyman
of the same stamp in this:--the latter regards the church as a society
with accumulated property for the use of its officers; the former
regarded it as a community of communities, each possessing a preaching
house which ought to be made commercially successful. Saving influences
must emanate from it of course-- but dissenting saving influences.
His mother was a partisan to a hideous extent. To hear her talk you
would have thought she imagined the apostles the first dissenters,
and that the main duty of every Christian soul was to battle for
the victory of Congregationalism over Episcopacy, and Voluntaryism
over State Endowment. Her every mode of thinking and acting was of
a levelling common-place. With her, love was liking, duty something
unpleasant--generally to other people, and kindness patronage. But she
was just in money-matters, and her son too had every intention of being
worthy of his hire, though wherein lay the value of the labour with
which he thought to counterpoise that hire, it were hard to say.