THE MINISTER.
Time sped the faster that it sped unmarked; and now I had reached
that most important and unpleasant period of a boy's life, when the
necessity for increased action arrives; and a period it too generally
proves to all the delusions, the dreams, and the charms of
childhood--I mean the time when grave old gentlemen begin to question
us categorically, and, as it often seems, somewhat intrusively, upon
our future plans, and to impress upon us the necessity of "doing
something for ourselves."
My mother, who had frequently spoken with me on this subject, and
seen with regret how my thoughts turned towards the army, of which
she had now a terror, as being the too probable means of separating
us for ever, resolved to consult Dr. Twaddel, the minister, on the
subject; and in Scotland, "the minister" is always esteemed the
second person in the parish; so to this consultation I consented,
with some outward reluctance and considerable mental repugnance.
Our minister was a good kind of man in his own quiet way, though his
excessive views of uprightness and propriety, together with certain
severe lectures he had read me for making midnight raids into his
orchard, for shooting one of his hens with a penny cannon on the
King's birthday (the 4th of June), and for burning "Johnnie Wilkes"
in effigy in the churchyard, had made him somewhat of a bugbear to
me. He made indifferent sermons, but capital whisky negus, and could
take a comfortable share thereof, though eschewing all hearty mirth
or levity, and adopting in his deportment that somewhat too solemn
gravity and cold, hard external rigidity, with which the mass of the
Scottish Lowlanders are tinged, and which makes their most sunny
summer Sunday a day of gloom and silence. Like the majority of the
northern clergy, he was a humble, meek, and well-meaning man, who,
though he preached incessantly against the nothingness of this world
and the good things thereof, had taken especial care to provide
himself with a remarkably well-dowered helpmate. Without brilliance
of talent, he possessed just heart enough to find favour with the
poor of his flock; and head enough to accomplish his Sunday task, by
emitting a hazy sermon on some old scriptural text, which no one
cared a jot about. Yet he was a good man withal, our old parish
minister.
I remember, on one occasion, while he was commencing his sermon in
the gloomy little village church, an old man propping himself on a
staff entered the aisle, and being a stranger, he looked wearily and
wistfully round for a seat. Being clad in rather dilapidated
garments, and having a canvas wallet for alms, such as meal and
broken bread, no attention was paid to him, either by the pew-openers
or the congregation. The old man tottered along the aisle, and was
about to seat himself humbly on the lower step of the pulpit stair,
when the portly minister, with a glance of honest indignation on all
around him, descended from the pulpit, and taking the aged mendicant
by the hand, led him to his own pew, and placed him on a
well-cushioned seat, beside his wife and family, to the no small
discomfiture of the Misses Twaddel.
This silent rebuke was worth a thousand homilies; it powerfully
affected the whole congregation; and from that moment, the minister,
though usually cold and reserved, completely won the esteem of my
mother. To consult him on my affairs, we repaired to the manse,
which was a handsome and comfortable modern villa, separated from the
village church by an orchard and the humble burying-ground, in which
"the rude forefathers of the hamlet slept." We were speedily ushered
into his presence in a snugly-curtained, richly-carpeted, and
fashionably-furnished room, which was so large, that our little
cottage might have stood within it altogether. He received us rather
kindly than politely, as he had a great esteem for my mother, though,
since the advent of the felonious appropriation of a dozen of golden
pippins and the slaughter of his best-laying hen, none whatever for
me; and while he reclined in an easy-chair and played with a large
bunch of gold seals in one hand, or polished his bald head
impatiently with the other, my mother, in a voice that was rendered
tremulous by her maternal love and anxiety, briefly stated her wishes
"concerning her boy Oliver."
After letting her relate her own story unaided, he rather sharply
asked me what views I had for myself.
I glanced timidly at my mother; for although now nearly sixteen, I
felt like a child in her presence; and at that moment, the influences
of her faded cheek, her widow's cap, with its modest crimping, and
her sweet sad face, were not lost upon me, though my proud spirit
writhed under the humiliation of consulting even such a parish
potentate as the minister, concerning me or my affairs.
"What views have you for yourself, sir?" reiterated the minister.
"I wish to be--to be----" I stammered and paused.
"What, sir--speak out!" continued the divine, authoritatively.
"Well, then, I wish to be a soldier."
"A soldier--whew!" he reiterated, with a tinge of surprise and
contempt in his tone.
"Like my father before me."
"And leave your poor mother alone in her old age, you ungrateful
loon! you should add that," he added, bending his stern grey eyes
angrily upon me.
I shrunk at these words, and was silent, for they found an accusing
echo in my heart.
"Could you endure his absence, Mrs. Ellis?"
"Alas!" said my poor mother, with her eyes full of tears, "adversity
has taught me to endure all things patiently--a bitter art to
cultivate; but such a separation would be the hardest of all."
"Then we must put him to some respectable business, where hard work
and long hours will knock all silly notions out of his head. What
kind of business would you like, young man?"
"I do not know, sir."
"Then who should know, sir? But no doubt you despise all manner of
business."
I was silent, and my mother gave me an imploring glance to remain so.
"You are a boy--a mere bairn yet," resumed the minister, in that
contemptuous manner often adopted by testy old gentlemen to their
juniors; "but the trials of life will teach you the hollowness of
those romantic fancies which are fostered by novels, playbooks, and
such-like literary trash, of which, I doubt not, you have devoured
over many already. You wish to be happy?"
"Of course, sir," said I, with a sigh of impatience; for all this
sounded uncomfortably like a lecture, or a scrap of the doctor's
sermons.
"Then you will find that it most truly consists in bestowing
happiness on others."
I pondered over this remark, for I was too young to understand the
application of it.
"Do you know the origin of happiness?" continued the minister.
I could have said, Plenty of money and fun--a fine house, a fine
horse, and so forth; but I was silent, or merely said, "No."
"Then hark you, Master Oliver Ellis--the origin of happiness is
contentment, and the resources of a mind humbled by the trials with
which it pleaseth God to inflict us."
"So I have heard you preach a thousand times," thought I; and while I
glanced around the magnificent drawing-room, on his well-cushioned
easy-chair, his amplitude of paunch and successive folds of chin, the
idea _did_ occur to me, that the apostles were content with fewer of
this world's goods; but I was silent again.
In short, the minister talked of morality and duty--of business
habits, of close application, and strict honesty, and so forth, until
I was heartily weary. I seemed to listen, but heard him not; for my
thoughts were running far away on other things, and had soared into
the region of sunshine and daydreams, until, after many trite
common-places and innumerable pious nothings, he broke the spell by
bluntly announcing that "the time was come when I _must_ look about
me. I was now sixteen; my mother was getting old; she could not last
for ever, and if anything happened to her, what would become of _me_."
This cruel insinuation, so coldly uttered, cut me to the heart, and
my mother's sad eyes involuntarily sought mine. She had often--too
often in her sad and lonely hours--thought of the separation death
might one day make between her penniless children and herself; but to
hear it thus roughly alluded to, was too much for her, and the poor
woman wept aloud.
The minister tried to console her by some hackneyed scriptural text:
that man was made to mourn,--that he was sent into this world to be
miserable, and had no business to be anything else; but this burst of
emotion on her part stifled every secret aspiration and every strong
wish in me, and I assented to any plan his reverence had to propose,
resolving to leave to him the onerous office of opening up the path
that was to lead me to fortune and to fame.
He promised "to speak anent me to his _doer_," a literal, and often
fatally literal phrase, applied by the Scots to their lawyer or "man
of business," without consulting whom, many of them will not even
vote for an M.P., or do the most trivial thing. "I'll tak' a
thought--I'll spier o' my doer," being the answer in the country to
almost everything proposed.
Hence, in one week after our visit to the manse, I found myself in
Edinburgh, and perched on the leathern summit of a high three-legged
stool, in the office of Messrs. Harpy, Quirky, and Macfarisee,
solicitors, eminent alike for their "sharp practice" and acute manner
of handling all troublesome or cloudy cases of insolvency.