It would be too much to say that the hearts of his parents took no
pleasure in the advancement of their son, such as it was. I suspect the
mother was glad to be proud where she could find no happiness—proud
with the love that lay incorruptible in her being. But the love that is
all on one side, though it may be stronger than death, can hardly be so
strong as life! A poor, maimed, one-winged thing, such love cannot soar
into any region of conscious bliss. Even when it soars into the region
where God himself dwells, it is but to partake there of the divine
sorrow which his heartless children cause him. My reader may well
believe that father nor mother dwelt much upon what their neighbours
called James’s success—or cared in the least to talk about it: that
they would have felt to be mere hypocrisy, while hearty and genuine
relations were so far from perfect between them. Never to human being,
save the one to the other, and that now but very seldom, did they allude
to the bitterness which their own hearts knew; for to speak of it would
have seemed almost equivalent to disowning their son. And alas the
daughter was gone to whom the mother had at one time been able to bemoan
herself, knowing she understood and shared in their misery! For Isobel
would gladly have laid down her life to kindle in James’s heart such a
love to their parents as her own.
We may now understand a little, into what sort of man the lad James
Blatherwick had grown. When he left Stonecross for the University, it
was with scarce a backward look; nothing was in his heart but eagerness
for the coming conflict. Having gained there one of its highest
bursaries, he never spent a thought, as he donned his red gown, on the
son of the poor widow who had competed with him, and who, failing, had
to leave ambition behind him and take a place in a shop—where, however,
he soon became able to keep, and did keep, his mother in what was to her
nothing less than happy luxury; while the successful James—well, so far
my reader already knows about him.
As often as James returned home for the vacations, things, as between
him and his parents, showed themselves unaltered; and by his third
return, the heart of his sister had ceased to beat any faster at the
thought of his arrival: she knew that he would but shake hands limply,
let hers drop, and the same moment be set down to read. Before the time
for taking his degree arrived, Isobel was gone to the great Father.
James never missed her, and neither wished nor was asked to go home to
her funeral. To his mother he was never anything more or less than quite
civil; she never asked him to do anything for her. He came and went as
he pleased, cared for nothing done on the farm or about the house, and
seemed, in his own thoughts and studies, to have more than enough to
occupy him. He had grown a powerful as well as handsome youth, and
had dropped almost every sign of his country breeding. He hardly ever
deigned a word in his mother-dialect, but spoke good English with
a Scotch accent. Neither had he developed any of the abominable
affectations by which not a few such as he have imagined to repudiate
their origin.
His father had not then first to discover that his son was far too fine
a gentleman to show any interest in agriculture, or put out his hand
to the least share in that oldest and most dignified of callings. His
mother continued to look forward, although with fading interest, to
the time when he should be—the messenger of a gospel which he nowise
understood; but his father did not at all share her anticipation; and
she came to know ere long that to hear him preach would but renew and
intensify a misery to which she had become a little accustomed in their
ordinary intercourse. The father felt that his boy had either left him a
long way off, or had never at any time come near him. He seemed to stand
afar upon some mountain-top of conscious or imagined superiority.
James, as one having no choice, lived at _home_, so called by custom
and use, but lived as one come of another breed than his parents, having
with theirs but few appreciable points of contact. Most conventional
of youths, he yet wrote verses in secret, and in his treasure-closet
worshipped Byron. What he wrote he seldom showed, and then only to
one or two of his fellow-students. Possibly he wrote only to prove to
himself that he could do that also, for he never doubted his faculty
in any direction. When he went to Edinburgh—to learn theology,
forsooth!—he was already an accomplished mathematician, and a yet
better classic, with some predilections for science, and a very small
knowledge of the same: his books showed for the theology, and for the
science, an occasional attempt to set his father right on some point of
chemistry. His first aspiration was to show himself a gentleman in the
eyes of the bubblehead calling itself Society—of which in fact he knew
nothing; and the next, to have his eloquence, at present existent only
in an ambitious imagination, recognized by the public. Such were the two
devils, or rather the two forms of the one devil Vanity, that possessed
him. He looked down on his parents, and the whole circumstance of
their ordered existence, as unworthy of him, because old-fashioned and
bucolic, occupied only with God’s earth and God’s animals, and having
nothing to do with the shows of life. And yet to the simply honourable,
to such of gentle breeding as despised mere show, the ways of life in
their house would have seemed altogether admirable: the homely, yet not
unfastidious modes and conditions of the unassuming homestead, would
have appeared to them not a little attractive. But James took no
interest in any of them, and, if possible, yet less in the ways of the
tradesmen and craftsmen of the neighbouring village. He never felt the
common humanity that made him one with them, did not in his thoughts
associate himself at all with them. Had he turned his feeling into
thoughts and words, he would have said, “I cannot help being the son of
a farmer, but at least my mother’s father was a doctor; and had I been
consulted, my father should have been at least an officer in one of his
majesty’s services, not a treader of dung or artificial manure!” The
root of his folly lay in the groundless self-esteem of the fellow;
fostered, I think, by a certain literature which fed the notion, if
indeed it did not plainly inculcate the _duty_ of rising in the world.
To such as he, the praise of men may well seem the patent of their
nobility; but the man whom we call _The Saviour_, and who knew the
secret of Life, warned his followers that they must not seek that sort
of distinction if they would be the children of the Father who claimed
them.
I have said enough, perhaps too much, of this most uninteresting of men!
How he came to be born such, is not for my speculation: had he remained
such, his story would not have been for my telling. How he became
something better, it remains my task to try to set forth.
I now complete the talk that followed the return of the simple couple to
bed. “I was jist thinkin, Peter,” said Marion, after they had again
lain silent for a while, “o’ the last time we spak thegither aboot the
laddie—it maun be nigh sax year sin syne, I’m thinkin!”
“’Deed I canna say! ye may be richt, Mirran,” replied her spouse. “It’s
no sic a cheery subjec’ ’at we sud hae muckle to say to ane anither
anent it! He’s a man noo, and weel luikit upo’; but it maks unco little
differ to his parents! He’s jist as dour as ever, and as far as man
could weel be frae them he cam o’!—never a word to the ane or the ither
o’ ’s! Gien we war twa dowgs, he couldna hae less to say til’s, and
micht weel hae mair! I s’ warran’ Frostie says mair in ae half-hoor to
his tyke, nor Jeemie has said to you or me sin’ first he gaed to the
college!”
“Bairns is whiles a queer kin’ o’ a blessin!” remarked the mother. “But,
eh, Peter! it’s what may lie ahint the silence that frichts me!”
“Lass, ye’re frichtin _me_ noo! What _div_ ye mean?”
“Ow naething!” returned Marion, bursting into tears. “But a’ at ance
it was borne in upo me, that there maun be something to accoont for the
thing. At the same time I daurna speir at God himsel what that thing
can be. For there’s something waur noo, and has been for some time,
than ever was there afore! He has sic a luik, as gien he saw nor heard
onything but ae thing, the whilk ae thing keeps on inside him, and winna
wheesht. It’s an awfu’ thing to say o’ a mither’s ain laddie; and to hae
said it only to my ain man, and the father o’ the laddie, maks my hert
like to brak!—it’s as gien I had been fause to my ain flesh and blude
but to think it o’ ’im!—Eh, Peter, what _can_ it be?”
“Ow jist maybe naething ava’! Maybe he’s in love, and the lass winna
hear til ’im!”
“Na, Peter; love gars a man luik up, no doon at his ain feet! It gars
him fling his heid back, and set his een richt afore him—no turn them
in upo his ain inside! It maks a man straucht i’ the back, strong i’ the
airm, and bauld i’ the hert.—Didna it you, Peter?”
“Maybe it did; I dinna min’ vera weel.—But I see love can hardly be the
thing that’s amiss wi’ the lad. Still, even his parents maun tak tent o’
jeedgin—specially ane o’ the Lord’s ministers—maybe ane o’ the Lord’s
ain elec’!”
“It’s awfu’ to think—I daurna say ’t—I daurna maist think the words
o’ ’t, Peter, but it _wull_ cry oot i’ my vera hert!—Steik the door,
Peter—and ticht, that no a stray stirk may hear me!—Was a minister o’
the gospel ever a heepocreete, Peter?—like ane o’ the auld scribes
and Pharisees, Peter?—Wadna it be ower terrible, Peter, to be
permittit?—Gien our ain only son was—”
But here she broke down; she could not finish the frightful sentence.
The farmer again left his bed, and dropt upon a chair by the side of it.
The next moment he sank on his knees, and hiding his face in his hands,
groaned, as from a thicket of torture—
“God in haiven, hae mercy upon the haill lot o’ ’s.”
Then, apparently unconscious of what he did, he went wandering from the
room, down to the kitchen, and out to the barn on his bare feet, closing
the door of the house behind him. In the barn he threw himself, face
downward, on a heap of loose straw, and there lay motionless. His wife
wept alone in her bed, and hardly missed him: it required of her no
reflection to understand whither he had gone, or what he was doing. He
was crying, like King Lear from the bitterness of an outraged father’s
heart, to the Father of fathers:
“God, ye’re a father yersel,” he groaned; “and sae ye ken hoo it’s rivin
at my hert!—Na, Lord, ye dinna ken; for ye never had a doobt aboot
_your_ son!—Na, I’m no blamin Jeemie, Lord; I’m no cryin oot upo _him_;
for ye ken weel hoo little I ken aboot him: he never opened the buik o’
his hert to _me_! Oh God, grant that he hae naething to hide; but gien
he has, Lord, pluck it oot o’ ’im, and _him_ oot o’ the glaur! latna him
stick there. I kenna hoo to shape my petition, for I’m a’ i’ the dark;
but deliver him some gait, Lord, I pray thee, for his mither’s sake!—ye
ken what she is!—_I_ dinna coont for onything, but ye ken _her_!—Lord,
deliver the hert o’ her frae the awfu’est o’ a’ her fears.—Lord, a
hypocreet! a Judas-man!”
More of what he said, I cannot tell; somehow this much has reached my
ears. He remained there upon the straw while hour after hour passed,
pleading with the great Father for his son; his soul now lost in dull
fatigue, now uttering itself in groans for lack of words, until at
length the dawn looked in on the night-weary earth, and into the two
sorrow-laden hearts, bringing with it a comfort they did not seek to
understand.