As the soutar spoke, overcome by sympathy with the sinner, whom he could not help feeling in bodily presence before him, the minister, who had risen when he began to talk about the English clergy and confession, stood hearing with a face pale as death.
“For God’s sake, minister,” continued the soutar, “gien ye hae ony sic thing upo yer min’, hurry and oot wi’ ’t! I dinna say to me, but to somebody—to onybody! Mak a clean breist o’ ’t, afore the Adversary has ye again by the thrapple!”
But here started awake in the minister the pride of superiority in station and learning: a shoemaker, from whom he had just ordered a pair of boots, to take such a liberty, who ought naturally to have regarded him as necessarily spotless! He drew himself up to his lanky height, and made reply—
“I am not aware, Mr. MacLear, that I have given you any pretext for addressing me in such terms! I told you, indeed, that I was putting a case, a very possible one, it is true, but not the less a merely imaginary one! You have shown me how unsafe it is to enter into an argument on any supposed case with one of limited education! It is my own fault, however; and I beg your pardon for having thoughtlessly led you into such a pitfall!—Good morning!”
As the door closed behind the parson, he began to felicitate himself on having so happily turned aside the course of a conversation whose dangerous drift he seemed now first to recognize; but he little thought how much he had already conveyed to the wide-eyed observation of one well schooled in the symptoms of human unrest.
“I must set a better watch over my thoughts lest they betray me!” he reflected; thus resolving to conceal himself yet more carefully from the one man in the place who would have cut for him the snare of the fowler.
“I was ower hasty wi’ ’im!” concluded the soutar on his part. “But I think the truth has some grup o’ ’im. His conscience is waukin up, I fancy, and growlin a bit; and whaur that tyke has ance taen haud, he’s no ready to lowsen or lat gang! We maun jist lie quaiet a bit, and see! His hoor ’ill come!”
The minister being one who turned pale when angry, walked home with a face of such corpse-like whiteness, that a woman who met him said to herself, “What can ail the minister, bonny laad! He’s luikin as scared as a corp! I doobt that fule body the soutar’s been angerin him wi’ his havers!”
The first thing he did when he reached the manse, was to turn, nevertheless, to the chapter and verse in the epistle to the Romans, which the soutar had indicated, and which, through all his irritation, had, strangely enough, remained unsmudged in his memory; but the passage suggested nothing, alas! out of which he could fabricate a sermon. Could it have proved otherwise with a heart that was quite content to have God no nearer him than a merely adoptive father? He found at the same time that his late interview with the soutar had rendered the machinery of his thought-factory no fitter than before for weaving a tangled wisp of loose ends, which was all he could command, into the homogeneous web of a sermon; and at last was driven to his old stock of carefully preserved preordination sermons; where he was unfortunate enough to make choice of the one least of all fitted to awake comprehension or interest in his audience.
His selection made, and the rest of the day thus cleared for inaction, he sat down and wrote a letter. Ever since his fall he had been successfully practising the art of throwing a morsel straight into one or other of the throats of the triple-headed Cerberus, his conscience—which was more clever in catching such sops, than they were in choking the said howler; and one of them, the letter mentioned, was the sole wretched result of his talk with the soutar. Addressed to a late divinity-classmate, he asked in it incidentally whether his old friend had ever heard anything of the little girl—he could just remember her name and the pretty face of her—Isy, general slavey to her aunt’s lodgers in the Canongate, of whom he was one: he had often wondered, he said, what had become of her, for he had been almost in love with her for a whole half-year! I cannot but take the inquiry as the merest pretence, with the sole object of deceiving himself into the notion of having at least made one attempt to discover Isy. His friend forgot to answer the question, and James Blatherwick never alluded to his having put it to him.