Robert Glen, whose reappearance had so interested and excited the
innocent mind of Margaret Leslie, was no other than the farmer’s son,
in point of locality her nearest neighbor, but in every other respect,
childhood being fairly over, as far removed from her as if she had been
a princess, instead of the child of an impoverished country gentleman.
In childhood it had not been so. Little Margaret had played with Rob
in the hay-fields, and sat by him while he fished in the burn, and had
rides upon the horses he was leading to the water, many a day in that
innocent period. She had been as familiar about the farm “as if it
had belonged to her,” Mrs. Glen had said, and had shared the noonday
“piece” of her little cavalier often enough, as well as his sports.
Even Bell had found nothing to say against this intimacy.
The Glens were very decent folks, not on a level with the great farmers
of Fife, yet well to do and well doing; and Rob’s devoted care of
the little lady had saved Bell, as she herself expressed it, “many
a trail;” but in the ten years from seven to seventeen many changes
occur. Rob, who was the youngest, had been the clever boy of the family
at the farm. His mother, proud of his early achievements, had sent him
to St. Andrews to the excellent schools there, with vague notions of
advancement to come. That he should be a minister was, of course, her
chief desire, and the highest hope of her ambition; but at this early
period there was no absolute necessity for a decision. He might be a
writer if he proved to have no “call” for the ministry; or he might be
a doctor if his mind took that turn. However, when he had reached the
age at which in Scotland the college supplants the school (too early,
as everybody knows), Rob was quite of opinion that he had a call to be
a minister; and he would have gone on naturally to his college career
at St. Andrews, but for the arrival of an uncle, himself sonless,
from Glasgow, whose family pride was much excited by Rob’s prizes and
honors. This was his mother’s brother, like herself come of the most
respectable folk, “a decent, honest man,” which means everything in
Scottish moral phraseology. He was “a merchant” in Glasgow, meaning a
shopkeeper, and had a good business and money in the bank, and only one
little daughter--a fact which opened his heart to the handsome, bright
boy who was likely to bring so much credit to his family. Whether
Robert Hill (for the boy was his namesake) would have thought so highly
of his nephew without these prizes is another question; but as it was,
he took an immediate and most warm interest in him. Mr. Hill, however,
felt the usual contempt of a member of a large trading community for
every small and untrading place.
“St. An’rews!” he said; “send the boy to St. An’rews to sleep away his
time in an auld hole where there’s naething doing! Na, na, I’ll no hear
o’ that. Send him to me, and I’ll look after him. We know what we’re
about in Glasskie; nane o’ your dreamin’ and dozin’ there. We ken the
value o’ time and the value o’ brains, and how to make use o’ them.
There’s a room that’s never used at the tap o’ the house, and I’ll see
till ’im,” said the generous trader.
Mrs. Glen, though half offended at this depreciation of native
learning, was pleased and proud of her brother’s liberality.
“I’ll no hear a word against St. An’rews,” she said. “Mony a clever
man’s come out of it; but still I’m no blind to the advantages on the
other side. The lad’s at an age when it’s a grand thing to have a man
over him. No but what he’s biddable: but laddies will be laddies, and a
man in the house is aye an advantage. So if you’re in earnest, Robert
(and I’m much obliged to ye for your guid opinion of him), I’m no
saying but what I’ll take ye at your word.”
“You may be sure I mean it, or I wadna say it,” said her brother; and
so the bargain was made.
Rob went to Glasgow, half eager, half reluctant, as is the manner of
boys, and in due time went through his classes, and was entered at the
Divinity Hall. A Scotch student of his condition has seldom luxurious
or over-dainty life in his long vacations--six months long; and
calculated for this purpose, that the student may be self-supporting,
Rob did many things which kept him independent. He helped his uncle in
the shop at first with the placidity of use and wont, thinking a good
shop a fine thing, as who can doubt it is? But when Rob began to get on
in his learning, and was able to take a tutorship, he discovered with a
pang that a shop was not so fine a thing as he supposed.
Early, very early, the pangs of intellectual superiority came upon
him. He was clever, and loved reading, and thus got himself, as it
were, into society before he was aware of the process that was going on
within him, making friends of very different social position from his
own. Then the professors noticed him, found him what is easily called
“cultivated”--for he had read much in his little room over the shop,
with constantly growing ambition to escape from his lowly place and
find a higher--and one of them recommended him to a lady in the country
as tutor to her boys. This was a most anxious elevation at first, but
it trained him to the habits of a class superior to his own; and after
that the shop and its homely ways were anguish to Rob. Very soon he
found out that it was inconvenient to go so far to college; then he
found occupations in the evening, even during the college session,
and thus felt justified in separating himself from his kind uncle,
who accepted his excuses, though not without a shade of doubt. “Well,
laddie, well, laddie, we’re no the folk to keep you if you can do
better for yourself,” the good shopkeeper said, affronted yet placable.
The process is not uncommon; and, indeed, the young man meant no great
harm. He meant that his younger life was pushing out of the husk in
which it had been confined, that he was no longer altogether the same
as the people to whom he belonged. It was true enough, and if it was
hard, who could help that? It gave him more pain to take his plentiful
meal rudely in the room behind the shop than it could give them to take
it without him.
So he reasoned, and was right and wrong, as we all are, in every
revolutionary crisis. Had he been bred a shopkeeper or a farmer lad,
no such thoughts would have distracted his mind, and probably he would
have been happier; but then he had not been brought up either to the
shop or to the farm, and how could he help the natural development
which his circumstances and training brought with them? So by degrees
he dropped the shop. There was no quarrel, and he went to see them
sometimes on the wintry Sunday afternoons, and restrained all his
feelings of dismay and humiliation, and bore their “ways” as best he
could; but there is nobody so quick as a vulgar relation to find out
when a rising young man begins to be ashamed of him. The Hills were
sore and angry with the young man to whom they had been so kind. But
the next incident in Rob’s career was one that called all his relations
round him, out of sheer curiosity and astonishment, to see a prodigy
unprecedented in their lives.
After he had gone through all the Latin and Greek that Glasgow
could furnish, and he had time for, and had roamed through all the
philosophies and begun Hebrew, and passed two years at the Divinity
Hall, this crisis came. Six months more and Rob would have been ready
to begin his trials before the Presbytery for license as a probationer,
when he suddenly petrified all his friends, and drove his mother half
out of her senses, by the bewildering announcement that his conscience
made it impossible for him to enter the Scotch Church. The shock was
one which roused the entire family into life. Cousins unheard of
before aroused themselves to behold this extraordinary spectacle.
Such hesitations are not so common with the budding Scotch minister
as with the predestined English parson, and they are so rare in Rob’s
class, that this announcement on his part seemed to his relations to
upset the very balance of heaven and earth. Made up his mind not to
be a minister! The first sensation in their minds was one of absolute
incredulity, followed by angry astonishment when the “infatuated” young
fellow repeated and stood by his determination. Not to be a minister!
What would he be, then? what would satisfy him? Set him up! they all
cried. It was like a fresh assertion of superiority, a swagger and
flourish over them all, unbounded presumption and arrogance. Doubts! he
was a bonnie one to have doubts. As if many a better man had not signed
the Confession before him, ay, and been glad to have the Confession to
sign!
This at first was the only view which the kindred felt capable of
taking. But by-and-by, when it became apparent that this general
flutter of horror was to have no effect, and that Rob stood by his
resolution, other features in his enormity began to strike the family.
All the money spent upon him at the college, all the time he had
lost; what trade could he go into now with any chance of getting on?
Two-and-twenty, and all his time gone for nothing! His uncle, Robert
Hill, who had been as indignant as any, here interposed. He sent for
his sister, and begged her to compose herself. The lad’s head was
turned, he said. He had made friends that were not good for a lad in
his class of life, that had led him away in other ways, and had made
him neglectful of his real friends. But still the lad was a fine lad,
and not beyond the reach of hope. This placable sentiment was thought
by everybody to proceed from Uncle Robert’s only daughter, Anne, who
was supposed to regard her cousin with favorable eyes; but anyhow the
suggestion of the Hills was that “the minister,” their own minister,
should be got to “speak to” Rob. Glad was the mother of this or any
other suggestion, and the minister undertook the office with good-will.
“Perhaps I may be able to remove some of your difficulties,” he said,
and he called to himself a professor, one of those who had the young
man’s training in hand. Thus Rob became a hero once more among all
belonging to him. Had the minister spoken? What had the minister said?
Had he come to his right mind? the good people asked. And, indeed, the
minister did speak, and so did the professor, both of whom thought
Rob’s a most interesting case. They were most anxious to remove his
difficulties; nay, for that matter, to remove everything--doctrines
and all--to free the young man from his scruples. They spoke, but they
spoke with bated breath, scarcely able to express the full amount of
the “respect and sympathy” with which they regarded these difficulties
of his. “We too--” they said, in mysterious broken sentences, with
imperfect utterance of things too profound for the common ear. And they
did their best to show him how he might gulp down a great many things
without hurting his conscience, which the robust digestion of the past
had been able to assimilate, but which were not adapted for the modern
mind. “There is more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half
the creeds,” these gentlemen said. But Rob held out. He would have been
foolish, indeed, as well as rarely disinterested and unsusceptible to
the most delicate of flatteries, had he not held out. He had never been
of so much importance in the course of his life.
It may be doubtful, however, if it was his conscience alone which
stopped him short in his career. Rob had learned in his tutorships,
and among the acquaintances acquired at college, to know that a Scotch
minister did not possess so elevated a position as in rural Fife he
was thought to do. The young man had a large share of ambition in him,
and he had read of society and of the great world, that abstraction
which captivates inexperienced youth. A minister could no more reach
this than, indeed, could the country laird who was the highest
representative of greatness known to Rob; but literature could (he
thought), art could: and he could write (he flattered himself), and
he could draw. Why, then, should he bind himself to the restraints
necessary for that profession, when other means of success more easy
and glorious were in his power?
This was a very strong supplementary argument to strengthen the
resistance of his conscience. And he did not give in; he preferred to
go home with his mother, to take, as all his advisers entreated him,
time to think everything over. Rob had no objections to take a little
time. He wanted money to take him to London, to start him in life, even
to pay off the debts which he said nothing of, but which weighed quite
as heavily upon him as his troubles of conscience. This was how he came
to be, after such a long interval, once more living with his mother at
Earl’s-hall farm. He had come home in all the importance of a sceptical
hero, a position very dazzling to the simple mind, and very attractive
to many honest people. But it was not so pleasant at home. Instead
of being the centre of anxious solicitude, instead of being plied
by conciliatory arguments, coaxed and persuaded, and respected and
sympathized with, he found himself the object of his mother’s irony,
and treated with a contemptuous impatience which he fain would have
called bigotry and intolerance.
Mrs. Glen was not at all respectful of honest doubt, and she had a
thorough contempt for anything and everything that kept a man from
making his way in the world. She was not indeed a person of refinement
at all. She had lived a hard life, struggling to bring up her children
and to “push them forrit,” as she said. The expression was homely, and
the end to be obtained perhaps not very elevated. To “push forrit” your
son to be Lord Chancellor, or even a general officer, or a bishop, is
a fine thing, which strikes the spectator; but when all you can do is
to push him “forrit” to a shop in Dundee, is the struggle less noble?
It is less imposing, at all events. And the struggling mother who had
done her best to procure such rise in life and in comfort as was within
her reach for her children was not a person of noble mind or generous
understanding. When Rob came home, upon whom her highest hopes had been
set, not prosperous like the others, but a failure and disappointment,
doing nothing, earning nothing, and with no prospect before him of
either occupation or gain, her mortification made her bitter. Fury and
disappointment filled her heart. She kept silent for the first day,
only going about her household affairs with angry energy, scolding her
servants, and as they said, “dinging everything about.” “So lang as she
disna ding me!” said Jean the dairy-maid; but it was not to be expected
that any long time should pass before she began to “ding” some one, and
ere long the culprit himself began to feel the force of her trouble.
“What are you doing?” she cried; “do you call that doing
onything--drawing a crookit line with a pencil and filling it up with
paint? Paint! ye might paint the auld cart if that’s the trade you mean
to follow. It would aye be worth a shilling or twa, which is mair than
ever thae scarts and splashes will be.” Or when Rob escaped into the
seclusion of a book: “Read, oh ay, ye can read fast enough when it’s
for naething but diversion and to pass the time; but ye’ll ne’er gather
bawbees with your reading, nor be a credit to them that belong to you.”
This was the sting of the whole. He was no credit to those who belonged
to him, rather he was an implied shame; for who would believe, Mrs.
Glen asked, that this sudden return was by his own will? “Na, na,” she
said, “they’ll think it is for ill-doing, and that he’s turned away out
of the college. It’s what I would do mysel’. And to think of all I’ve
done, and all I’ve put up with, and a’ to come to naething! Eh, man! I
would soon, soon have put an end to your douts. I would have made ye
sure of ae thing, if it hadna been your uncle Robert and his ministers,
ye should hae had nae douts about that: that no idle lad should sit at
my fireside and devour the best o’ everything. If ye had the heart of a
mouse ye couldna do it. Me, I would starve first; me, I would sweep the
streets. I would go down a coal-pit, or work in a gawley chain afore I
would sorn on my ain mother, a widow-woman, and eat her out o’ house
and hame!”
Poor Rob! he was not very sensitive, and he had been used to his
mother’s ways and moods, or these reproaches would have been hard
upon him. No doubt, had he been the innocent sufferer for conscience’
sake which he half believed himself to be, life would have been
unendurable in these circumstances; but as it was, he only shrugged
his shoulders, or jibed in return and paid her back in her own coin.
They were both made of the same rough material, and were able to give
and take, playing with the blows which would have killed others. Rob
was not driven out of the house, out upon the world in despair, as a
more sensitive person might have been. He stayed doggedly, not minding
what was said, till he should succeed in extracting the money which
would be necessary for his start; and from this steady purpose a few
warm words were not likely to dissuade him. He, on his side, felt that
he was too much of a man for that. But it is not pleasant to have
your faults dinned into your ears, however much you may scorn the
infliction, and Rob had gone out on the day he met Margaret very much
cast down and discouraged. He had almost made up his mind to confront
fate rather than his mother. Almost--but he was not a rash young man,
notwithstanding all that had happened to him, and the discomfort of
issuing forth upon the world penniless was greater than putting up (he
said to himself) with an old wife’s flyting; but still the flyting was
not pleasant to bear.
“Wha’s that?” his mother said when he returned. “Oh, it’s you! bless
me, I thought it was some person with something to do. There was not
the draigh in the foot that I’m getting used to. Maybe something’s
happened! You’ve gotten something to do, or you’ve ta’en another
thought! and well I wot it’s time.”
“No,” he said, “nothing’s happened. I’m tired enough and ready enough
to take anything that offered, mother; but, worse luck, nothing has
happened. I don’t know what could happen here.”
“No, nor me neither,” said Mrs. Glen; “when a lad hangs on at hame
looking for luck like you, and never doing a hand’s turn, it’s far from
likely luck will ever come the side he’s on. Oh, pit away your trash,
and dinna trouble me with the sight o’t! Painting! paint the auld cart,
as I tell ye, if you’re that fond o’ painting, or the byre door.”
“Everybody is not of your mind,” said Rob, stung by this assault.
“There are some that think them worth looking at, and that not far off
either: somebody better worth pleasing than--” you, he had almost said;
but with better taste he added, “any one here.”
“And wha may it be that has such guid taste?” said the mother,
satirically; “a lass, I’ll wager. Some poor silly thing or other that
thinks Rob Glen’s a gentleman, and is proud of a word from ane sae
well put on. Eh, but it’s easy to be well put on when it comes out of
another person’s pocket. It would be some lass out of the Kirkton. How
dare ye stand there no saying a word, but smile-smiling at me?”
“Would you like it better if I cried?” he said; “smiling is not so easy
always. I have little enough to smile at; but it is good sometimes to
feel that all the world is not against me.”
“And wha is’t that’s on your side? Some fool of a lass,” repeated Mrs.
Glen, contemptuously. “They’re silly enough for onything when a young
lad’s in the case. Who was it?” she added, raising her voice; “eh, I
would just like to gie her my opinion. It’s muckle the like of them
know.”
“I doubt if your opinion would matter much,” he said, with an air of
superiority that drove her frantic, “_I_ respect it deeply, of
course; but she--a young lady, mother--may be allowed, perhaps, to
think herself the best judge.”
“Leddy!” said Mrs. Glen, surprised; and instinctively she searched
around her to find out who this could be. “You’ll be meaning Mary
Fleming, the dress-maker lass; some call _her_ Miss; or maybe the
bit governess at Sir Claud’s.”
Rob laughed; in the midst of his troubles this one gleam of triumph
was sweet. “I mean no stranger,” he said, “but an old friend--one that
was once my companion and playfellow; and now she’s grown up into the
prettiest fairy, and does not despise me even now.”
Mrs. Glen was completely nonplussed. She looked at him with an air
of imperious demand, which, gradually yielding to the force of
her curiosity, fell, as he made no reply, into a quite softened
interrogation. “An auld companion?” she said to herself, bewildered;
then added, in a gentler tone than she had used since his return, a
side remark to herself: “He’s no that auld himsel’.”
“No,” he said, “but she is younger, mother, and as beautiful as an
angel, I think; and she had not forgotten Rob Glen.”
His mother looked at him more and more perplexed. But with her
curiosity and with her perplexity her heart melted. Lives there a
mother so hard, even when her anger is hottest, as to be indifferent
to any one who cares for her boy? “I canna think who you’re meaning,”
she said; “auld companions are scarce even to the like o’ me-- I mind
upon nobody that you could name by that name, a callant like you. Auld
playfellow! there’s the minister’s son, as great a credit to his family
as you’re a trial; but he’s no a leddy--”
Again Rob laughed; he was indemnified for all his sufferings. “I will
not keep you in doubt,” he said, with a certain condescension. “It is
little Margaret Leslie; you cannot have forgotten _her_, mother.
If she is not a lady I don’t know who is, and,” he added, sinking his
voice with genuine feeling, and a tender rush of childish recollection,
“my little queen.”
“Little Margaret Leslie!” said his mother, looking at him stupefied,
“you’re no meaning Miss Margret at Earl’s-hall?” she cried, with a half
shriek of astonishment, and gazed at him open-mouthed, like one in a
dream.