ABOUT THE LAIRD.
Thomas Fordyce was a sucker from the root of a very old family tree,
born in poverty, and, with great pinching of father and mother, brothers
and sisters, educated for the Church. But from pleasure in scholarship,
from archaeological tastes, a passion for the arcana of history, and a
love of literature, strong, although not of the highest kind, he had
settled down as a school-master, and in his calling had excelled. By all
who knew him he was regarded as an accomplished, amiable, and worthy
man.
When his years were verging on the undefined close of middle age he saw
the lives between him and the family property, one by one wither at the
touch of death, until at last there was no one but himself and his
daughter to succeed. He was at the time the head of a flourishing school
in a large manufacturing town; and it was not without some regret,
though with more pleasure, that he yielded his profession and retired to
Potlurg.
Greatly dwindled as he found the property, and much and long as it had
been mismanaged, it was yet of considerable value, and worth a wise
care. The result of the labor he spent upon it was such that it had now
for years yielded him, if not a large rental, one far larger at least
than his daughter imagined. But the sinking of the school-master in the
laird seemed to work ill for the man, and good only for the land. I say
_seemed_, because what we call degeneracy is often but the unveiling of
what was there all the time; and the evil we could become, we are. If I
have in me the tyrant or the miser, there he is, and such am I--as
surely as if the tyrant or the miser were even now visible to the
wondering dislike of my neighbors. I do not say the characteristic is so
strong, or would be so hard to change as by the revealing development it
must become; but it is there, alive, as an egg is alive; and by no means
inoperative like a mere germ, but exercising real though occult
influence on the rest of my character. Therefore, except the growing
vitality be in process of killing these ova of death, it is for the good
of the man that they should be so far developed as to show their
existence. If the man do not then starve and slay them they will drag
him to the judgment-seat of a fiery indignation.
For the laird, nature could ill replace the human influences that had
surrounded the school-master; while enlargement both of means and
leisure enabled him to develop by indulgence a passion for a peculiar
kind of possession, which, however refined in its objects, was yet but a
branch of the worship of Mammon. It suits the enemy just as well, I
presume, that a man should give his soul for coins as for money. In
consequence he was growing more and more withdrawn, ever filling less
the part of a man--which is to be a hiding-place from the wind, a covert
from the tempest. He was more and more for himself, and thereby losing
his life. Dearly as he loved his daughter, he was, by slow fallings
away, growing ever less of a companion, less of a comfort, less of a
necessity to her, and requiring less and less of her for the good or
ease of his existence. We wrong those near us in being independent of
them. God himself would not be happy without His Son. We ought to lean
on each other, giving and receiving--not as weaklings, but as lovers.
Love is strength as well as need. Alexa was more able to live alone than
most women; therefore it was the worse for her. Too satisfied with
herself, too little uneasy when alone, she did not know that then she
was not in good enough company. She was what most would call a strong
nature, nor knew what weaknesses belong to, and grow out of, such
strength as hers.
The remoter scions of a family tree are not seldom those who make most
account of it; the school-master's daughter knew more about the Fordyces
of Potlurg, and cared more for their traditions, than any who of later
years had reaped its advantages or shared its honors. Interest in the
channel down which one has slid into the world is reasonable, and may be
elevating; with Alexa it passed beyond good, and wrought for evil. Proud
of a family with a history, and occasionally noted in the annals of the
country, she regarded herself as the superior of all with whom she had
hitherto come into relation. To the poor, to whom she was invariably and
essentially kind, she was less condescending than to such as came nearer
her own imagined standing; she was constantly aware that she belonged to
the elect of the land! Society took its revenge; the rich trades-people
looked down upon her as the school-master's daughter. Against their
arrogance her indignation buttressed her lineal with her mental
superiority. At the last the pride of family is a personal arrogance.
And now at length she was in her natural position as heiress of Potlurg!
She was religious--if one may be called religious who felt no immediate
relation to the source of her being. She felt bound to defend, so far as
she honestly could, the doctrines concerning God and His ways
transmitted by the elders of her people; to this much, and little more,
her religion toward God amounted. But she had a strong sense of
obligation to do what was right.
Her father gave her so little money to spend that she had to be very
careful with her housekeeping, and they lived in the humblest way. For
her person she troubled him as little as she could, believing him, from
the half statements and hints he gave, and his general carriage toward
life, not a little oppressed by lack of money, nor suspecting his
necessities created and his difficulties induced by himself. In this
regard it had come to be understood between them that the produce of the
poultry-yard was Alexa's own; and to some little store she had thus
gathered she mainly trusted for the requirements of her invalid. To this
her father could not object, though he did not like it; he felt what was
hers to be his more than he felt what was his to be hers.
Alexa had not learned to place value on money beyond its use, but she
was not therefore free from the service of Mammon; she looked to it as
to a power essential, not derived; she did not see it as God's creation,
but merely as an existence, thus making of a creature of God the mammon
of unrighteousness. She did not, however, cling to it, but was ready to
spend it. At the same time, had George Crawford looked less handsome or
less of a gentleman, she would not have been so ready to devote the
contents of her little secret drawer.
The discovery of her relationship to the young man waked a new feeling.
She had never had a brother, never known a cousin, and had avoided the
approach of such young men as, of inferior position in her eyes, had
sought to be friendly with her; here was one thrown helpless on her
care, with necessities enough to fill the gap between his real relation
to her, and that of the brother after whom she had sighed in vain! It
was a new and delightful sensation to have a family claim on a young
man--a claim, the material advantage of which was all on his side, the
devotion all on hers. She was invaded by a flood of tenderness toward
the man. Was he not her cousin, a gentleman, and helpless as any
new-born child? Nothing should be wanting that a strong woman could do
for a powerless man.