All his life, since ever he had had business, Mr Crathie had prided himself on his honesty, and was therefore in one of the most dangerous moral positions a man could occupy—ruinous even to the honesty itself. Asleep in the mud, he dreamed himself awake on a pedestal. At best such a man is but perched on a needle point when he thinketh he standeth. Of him who prided himself on his honour I should expect that one day, in the long run it might be, he would do some vile thing. Not, probably, within the small circle of illumination around his wretched rushlight, but in the great region beyond it, of what to him is a moral darkness, or twilight vague, he may be or may become capable of doing a deed that will stink in the nostrils of the universe—and in his own when he knows it as it is. The honesty in which a man can pride himself must be a small one, for more honesty will ever reveal more defect, while perfect honesty will never think of itself at all. The limited honesty of the factor clave to the interests of his employers, and let the rights he encountered take care of themselves. Those he dealt with were to him rather as enemies than friends, not enemies to be prayed for, but to be spoiled. Malcolm’s doctrine of honesty in horse-dealing was to him ludicrously new. His notion of honesty in that kind was to cheat the buyer for his master if he could, proud to write in his book a large sum against the name of the animal. He would have scorned in his very soul the idea of making a farthing by it himself through any business quirk whatever, but he would not have been the least ashamed if, having sold Kelpie, he had heard—let me say, after a week of possession—that she had dashed out her purchaser’s brains. He would have been a little shocked, a little sorry perhaps, but nowise ashamed. “By this time,” he would have said, “the man ought to have been up to her, and either taken care of himself—or sold her again,”—to dash out another man’s brains instead!
That the bastard Malcolm, or the ignorant and indeed fallen fisher-girl Lizzy, should judge differently, nowise troubled him: what could they know about the rights and wrongs of business? The fact which Lizzy sought to bring to bear upon him, that our Lord would not have done such a thing, was to him no argument at all. He said to himself with the superior smile of arrogated common-sense, that “no mere man since the fall” could be expected to do like him; that he was divine, and had not to fight for a living; that he set us an example that we might see what sinners we were; that religion was one thing, and a very proper thing, but business was another, and a very proper thing also—with customs and indeed laws of its own far more determinate, at least definite, than those of religion, and that to mingle the one with the other was not merely absurd—it was irreverent and wrong, and certainly never intended in the Bible, which must surely be common sense. It was the Bible always with him,—never the will of Christ. But although he could dispose of the question thus satisfactorily, yet, as he lay ill, supine, without any distracting occupation, the thing haunted him.
Now in his father’s cottage had lain, much dabbled in of the children, a certain boardless copy of the Pilgrim’s Progress, round in the face and hollow in the back, in which, amongst other pictures was one of the Wicket-gate. This scripture of his childhood, given by inspiration of God, threw out, in one of his troubled and feverish nights, a dream-bud in the brain of the man. He saw the face of Jesus looking on him over the top of the Wicket-gate, at which he had been for some time knocking in vain, while the cruel dog barked loud from the enemy’s yard. But that face, when at last it came, was full of sorrowful displeasure. And in his heart he knew that it was because of a certain transaction in horse-dealing, wherein he had hitherto lauded his own cunning—adroitness, he considered it—and success. One word only he heard from the lips of the Man —“Worker of iniquity,”—and woke with a great start. From that moment truths began to be facts to him. The beginning of the change was indeed very small, but every beginning is small, and every beginning is a creation. Monad, molecule, protoplasm, whatever word may be attached to it when it becomes appreciable by men, being then, however many stages, I believe, upon its journey, beginning is an irrepressible fact; and however far from good or humble even after many days, the man here began to grow good and humble. His dull unimaginative nature, a perfect lumber-room of the world and its rusting affairs, had received a gift in a dream—a truth from the lips of the Lord, remodelled in the brain and heart of the tinker of Elstow, and sent forth in his wondrous parable to be pictured and printed, and lie in old Hector Crathie’s cottage, that it might enter and lie in young Hector Crathie’s brain until he grew old and had done wrong enough to heed it, when it rose upon him in a dream, and had its way. Henceforth the claims of his neighbour began to reveal themselves, and his mind to breed conscientious doubts and scruples, with which, struggle as he might against it, a certain respect for Malcolm would keep coming and mingling—a feeling which grew with its returns, until, by slow changes, he began at length to regard him as the minister of God’s vengeance—for his punishment,—and perhaps salvation— who could tell?
Lizzy’s nightly ministrations had not been resumed, but she often called, and was a good deal with him; for Mrs Crathie had learned to like the humble, helpful girl still better when she found she had taken no offence at being deprived of her post of honour by his bedside. One day, when Malcolm was seated, mending a net, among the thin grass and great red daisies of the links by the bank of the burn, where it crossed the sands from the Lossie grounds to the sea, Lizzy came up to him and said,
“The factor wad like to see ye, Ma’colm, as sune ’s ye can gang till ’im.”
She waited no reply. Malcolm rose and went.
At the factor’s, the door was opened by Mrs Crathie herself, who, looking mysterious, led him to the dining-room, where she plunged at once into business, doing her best to keep down all manifestation of the profound resentment she cherished against him. Her manner was confidential, almost coaxing.
“Ye see, Ma’colm,” she said, as if pursuing instead of commencing a conversation, “he’s some sore about the little fraicass between him ’an you. Jist make your apoalogies till ’im and tell ’im you had a drop too much, and you’re soary for misbehavin’ yersel’ to wann sae much your shuperrior. Tell him that, Ma’colm, an’ there’s a half-croon to ye.”
She wished much to speak English, and I have tried to represent the thing she did speak, which was neither honest Scotch nor anything like English. Alas! the good, pithy, old Anglo-saxon dialect is fast perishing, and a jargon of corrupt English taking its place.
“But, mem,” said Malcolm, taking no notice either of the coin or the words that accompanied the offer of it, “I canna lee. I wasna in drink, an’ I’m no sorry.”