In the meantime, Maggie was walking shoeless and bonnetless up the hill
to the farm she sought. It was a hot morning in June, tempered by a
wind from the north-west. The land was green with the slow-rising tide
of the young corn, among which the cool wind made little waves, showing
the brown earth between them on the somewhat arid face of the hill.
A few fleecy clouds shared the high blue realm with the keen sun. As
she rose to the top of the road, the gable of the house came suddenly
in sight, and near it a sleepy old gray horse, treading his ceaseless
round at the end of a long lever, too listless to feel the weariness of
a labour that to him must have seemed unprogressive, and, to anything
young, heart-breaking. Nor did it appear to give him any consolation
to be aware of the commotion he was causing on the other side of the
wall, where a threshing machine of an antiquated sort responded with
multiform movement to the monotony of his round-and-round. Near by, a
peacock, as conscious of his glorious plumage as indifferent to the
ugliness of his feet, kept time with undulating neck to the motion of
those same feet, as he strode with stagey gait across the cornyard, now
and then stooping to pick up a stray grain spitefully, and occasionally
erecting his superb neck to give utterance to a hideous cry of
satisfaction at his own beauty— a cry as unlike the beauty as ever was
discord to harmony. His glory, his legs and his voice, perplexed Maggie
with an unanalyzed sense of contradiction and unfitness.
Radiant with age and light, the old horse stood still just as the sun
touched the meridian; the hour of repose and food was come, and he knew
it; and at the same moment the girl, passing one of the green-painted
doors of the farm-house, stopped at the other, the kitchen one. It
stood open, and in answer to her modest knock, a ruddy maid appeared,
with a question in her eyes, and a smile on her lips at sight of the
shoemaker’s Maggie, whom she knew well. Maggie asked if she might see
the mistress.
“Here’s soutar’s Maggie wanting ye, mem!” said the maid, and Mistress
Blatherwick, who was close at hand, came; to which Maggie humbly but
confidently making her request, had it as kindly granted, and followed
her to the barn to fill her pock with the light plumy covering of the
husk of the oats, the mistress of Stonecross helping her the while
and talking to her as she did so—for the soutar and his daughter were
favourites with her and her husband, and they had not seen either of
them for some while.
“Ye used to ken oor Maister Jeames i’ the auld lang-syne, Maggie!” for
the two had played together as children in the same school, although
growth and difference in station had gradually put an end to
their intimacy, so that it became the mother to refer to him with
circumspection, seeing that, in her eyes at least, Maister Jeames was
now far on the way to becoming a great man, being a divinity student;
for in the Scotch church, although it sets small store on apostolic
descent, every Minister, until he has shown himself eccentic or
incapable of interesting a congregation, is regarded with quite as
much respect as in England is accorded to the claimant of a
phantom-priesthood; and therefore, prospectively, Jeames was to his
mother a man of no little note. Maggie remembered how, when a boy, he
had liked to talk with her father; and how her father would listen to
him with a curious look on his rugged face, while the boy set forth
the commonplaces of a lifeless theology with an occasional freshness
of logical presentation that at least interested himself. But she
remembered also that she had never heard the soutar on his side make
any attempt to lay open to the boy his stores of what one or two in the
place, one or two only, counted wisdom and knowledge.
“He’s a gey clever laddie,” he had said once to Maggie, “and gien he
gets his een open i’ the coorse o’ the life he’s hardly yet ta’en haud
o’, he’ll doobtless see something; but he disna ken yet that there’s
onything rael to be seen, ootside or inside o’ him!” When he heard that
he was going to study divinity, he shook his head, and was silent.
“I’m jist hame frae peyin him a short veesit,” Mrs. Blatherwick went on.
“I cam hame but twa nichts ago. He’s lodged wi’ a dacent widow in Arthur
Street, in a flat up a lang stane stair that gangs roun and roun till ye
come there, and syne gangs past the door and up again. She taks in han’
to luik efter his claes, and sees to the washin o’ them, and does her
best to haud him tidy; but Jeamie was aye that partic’lar aboot his
appearance! And that’s a guid thing, special in a minister, wha has to
set an example! I was sair pleased wi’ the auld body.”
There was one in the Edinburgh lodging, however, of whom Mrs.
Blatherwick had but a glimpse, and of whom, therefore, she had made no
mention to her husband any more than now to Maggie MacLear; indeed, she
had taken so little notice of her that she could hardly be said to
have seen her at all—a girl of about sixteen, who did far more for the
comfort of her aunt’s two lodgers than she who reaped all the advantage.
If Mrs. Blatherwick had let her eyes rest upon her but for a moment, she
would probably have looked again; and might have discovered that she was
both a good-looking and graceful little creature, with blue eyes, and
hair as nearly black as that kind of hair, both fine and plentiful, ever
is. She might then have discovered as well a certain look of earnestness
and service that would at first have attracted her for its own sake, and
then repelled her for James’s; for she would assuredly have read in it
what she would have counted dangerous for him; but seeing her poorly
dressed, and looking untidy, which at the moment she could not help, the
mother took her for an ordinary maid-of-all-work, and never for a moment
doubted that her son must see her just as she did. He was her only son;
her heart was full of ambition for him; and she brooded on the honour
he was destined to bring her and his father. The latter, however, caring
less for his good looks, had neither the same satisfaction in him nor an
equal expectation from him. Neither of his parents, indeed, had as yet
reaped much pleasure from his existence, however much one of them might
hope for in the time to come. There were two things indeed against such
satisfaction or pleasure—that James had never been open-hearted toward
them, never communicative as to his feelings, or even his doings;
and—which was worse—that he had long made them feel in him a certain
unexpressed claim to superiority. Nor would it have lessened their
uneasiness at this to have noted that the existence of such an implicit
claim was more or less evident in relation to every one with whom
he came in contact, manifested mainly by a stiff, incommunicative
reluctance, taking the form now of a pretended absorption in his books,
now of contempt for any sort of manual labour, even to the saddling of
the pony he was about to ride; and now and always by an affectation of
proper English, which, while successful as to grammar and accentuation,
did not escape the ludicrous in a certain stiltedness of tone and
inflection, from which intrusion of the would-be gentleman, his father,
a simple, old-fashioned man, shrank with more of dislike than he was
willing to be conscious of.
Quite content that, having a better education than himself, his son
should both be and show himself superior, he could not help feeling that
these his ways of asserting himself were signs of mere foolishness, and
especially as conjoined with his wish to be a minister—in regard to
which Peter but feebly sympathized with the general ambition of Scots
parents. Full of simple paternal affection, whose utterance was quenched
by the behaviour of his son, he was continuously aware of something that
took the shape of an impassable gulf between James and his father and
mother. Profoundly religious, and readily appreciative of what was new
in the perception of truth, he was, above all, of a great and simple
righteousness—full, that is, of a loving sense of fairplay—a
very different thing indeed from that which most of those who count
themselves religious mean when they talk of the righteousness of God!
Little, however, was James able to see of this, or of certain other
great qualities in his father. I would not have my reader think that he
was consciously disrespectful to either of his parents, or knew that his
behaviour was unloving. He honoured their character, indeed, but shrank
from the simplicity of their manners; he thought of them with no
lively affection, though not without some kindly feeling and much
confidence—at the same time regarding himself with still greater
confidence. He had never been an idler, or disobedient; and had made
such efforts after theological righteousness as served to bolster
rather than buttress his conviction that he was a righteous youth,
and nourished his ignorance of the fact that he was far from being the
person of moral strength and value that he imagined himself. The person
he saw in the mirror of his self-consciousness was a very fine and
altogether trustworthy personage; the reality so twisted in its
reflection was but a decent lad, as lads go, with high but untrue
notions of personal honour, and an altogether unwarranted conviction
that such as he admiringly imagined himself, such he actually was: he
had never discovered his true and unworthy self! There were many things
in his life and ways upon which had he but fixed eyes of question, he
would at once have perceived that they were both judged and condemned;
but so far, nevertheless, his father and mother might have good hope of
his future.
It is folly to suppose that such as follow most the fashions of this
world are more enslaved by them than multitudes who follow them only
afar off. These reverence the judgments of society in things of far
greater importance than the colour or cut of a gown; often without
knowing it, they judge life, and truth itself, by the falsest of all
measures, namely, the judgment of others falser than themselves; they do
not ask what is true or right, but what folk think and say about this
or that. James, for instance, altogether missed being a gentleman by his
habit of asking himself how, in such or such circumstances, a gentleman
would behave. As the man of honour he would fain know himself, he would
never tell a lie or break a promise; but he had not come to perceive
that there are other things as binding as the promise which alone
he regarded as obligatory. He did not, for instance, mind raising
expectations which he had not the least intention of fulfilling.
Being a Scotch lad, it is not to be wondered at that he should turn
to Theology as a means of livelihood; neither is it surprising that
he should do so without any conscious love to God, seeing it is not in
Scotland alone that untrue men take refuge in the Church, and turn the
highest of professions into the meanest, laziest, poorest, and most
unworthy, by following it without any genuine call to the same. In
any profession, the man must be a poor common creature who follows
it without some real interest in it; but he who without a spark of
enthusiasm for it turns to the Church, is either a “blind mouth,” as
Milton calls him—scornfullest of epithets, or an “old wife” ambitious
of telling her fables well; and James’s ambition was of the same
contemptible sort—that, namely, of distinguishing himself in the
pulpit. This, if he had the natural gift of eloquence, he might well do
by its misuse to his own glory; or if he had it not, he might acquire a
spurious facility resembling it, and so be every way a mere windbag.
Mr. Petrie, whom it cost the soutar so much care and effort to love, and
who, although intellectually small, was yet a good man, and by no means
a coward where he judged people’s souls in danger, thought to save
the world by preaching a God, eminently respectable to those who could
believe in such a God, but to those who could not, a God far from lovely
because far from righteous. His life, nevertheless, showed him in many
ways a believer in Him who revealed a very different God indeed from the
God he set forth. His faith, therefore, did not prevent him from looking
upon the soutar, who believed only in the God he saw in Jesus Christ,
as one in a state of rebellion against him whom Jesus claimed as his
father.
Young Blatherwick had already begun to turn his back upon several of the
special tenets of Calvinism, without, however, being either a better or
a worse man because of the change in his opinions. He had cast aside,
for instance, the doctrine of an everlasting hell for the unbeliever;
but in doing so he became aware that he was thus leaving fallow a great
field for the cultivation of eloquence; and not having yet discovered
any other equally productive of the precious crop, without which so
little was to be gained for the end he desired—namely, the praise of
men, he therefore kept on, “for the meantime,” sowing and preparing to
reap that same field. Mr. Petrie, on the other hand, held the doctrine
as absolutely fundamental to Christianity, and preached it with power;
while the soutar, who had discarded it from his childhood, positively
refused, jealous of strife, to enter into any argument upon it with the
disputatious little man.
As yet, then, James was reading Scotch metaphysics, and reconciling
himself to the concealment of his freer opinions, upon which concealment
depended the success of his probation, and his license. But the close of
his studies in divinity was now near at hand.