A Son of the Soil

by Mrs. Oliphant

“Here is Sir Thomas; he will never accuse me of looking so, or changing like that—and it is a guest’s first duty to make himself agreeable to his host, is it not?” said Colin, who was rather glad of Sir Thomas’s arrival. As for Matty, she was conscious that Lady Frankland had given her what she would have called “a look” before leaving the room, and that her uncle regarded her with a little anxiety as he approached. Decidedly, though she liked talking to Colin, it was necessary to be less confidential. “I won’t say au revoir,” she said, shrugging her pretty shoulders; “you know what you said about that once upon a time, when you were a poet.” And then Matty felt a little sorry for herself as she went away. “They might know, if they had any sense, that it does not matter in the least what I say to him,” the young lady said to herself; but then she was only suffering the natural penalty of a long course of conquest, and several good matches sacrificed, and matters were serious this time, and not to be trifled with. Miss Matty accordingly gave up her researches into Colin’s secret; but not the less regarded with a certain degree of lively despite, the revelation out of the clouds of that unknown woman at thought of which Colin blushed. “I daresay it is somebody quite stupid, who does not understand him a bit,” she said to herself, taking a little comfort from the thought—for Matty Frankland was not a model woman, desiring only the hero’s happiness; and a man who is sufficiently insensible to console himself under such circumstances with another attachment, deserves to have his inconstancy punished, as everybody will allow.

To tell the truth, Colin, though guiltless of any breach of allegiance towards Matty, was punished sufficiently for his second attempt at love. He had heard nothing of Alice all these three years, but, notwithstanding, had never ceased to feel upon his neck that invisible bridle which restrained him against his will. Perhaps, if the woman of his imagination had ever fairly revealed herself, the sight would have given him courage to break for ever such a visionary bond, and to take possession of his natural liberty; but she contented herself with waving to him those airy salutations out of the clouds, and with now and then throwing a glance at him out of the eyes of some passer-by, who either disappeared at once from his sight, or turned out upon examination to be utterly unlike that not impossible She; and Colin had two sentinels to keep watch upon his honour in the forms of his mother and Lauderdale, both of whom believed in Love, and did not know what inconstancy meant. He said to himself often enough that the struggle in his heart was not inconstancy; but then he was not a man who could admit to them, or even to himself, that the bond between him and Alice was a great and tender pity, and not love. She had been on the eve of becoming his wife—she might be his wife still for anything he knew to the contrary—and Colin, who in this respect was spotless as any Bayard, would not, even to his dearest friends, humiliate by such a confession the woman whose love he had once sought.

And now the time had almost come when he could in reality “settle in life.” His Scotch parish came nearer and nearer, in the natural course of affairs, without any dazzling obstacles and temptations between it and himself, as he had once hoped; and Alice was of age by this time; and honour seemed to demand that, now when his proposal really meant something, he should offer to her the possibility of confirming her early choice. But somehow Colin was not at all anxious to take this step; he hung back, and nursed the liberty which still remained to him, and longed, in spite of himself, towards the visionary creature of his dreams, who was not Alice. Accordingly, he had two rather troublesome matters to think over at Wodensbourne, and occupied a position which was made all the more vexatious because it was at the same time amusing and absurd. His mind had been made up from the beginning as to his future life, as he truly said; but then he had quite intended it to be a sacrifice which he made out of his supreme love for his Church and his country. He meant to have fought his way back to the venerable mother through every sort of brilliant temptation; and to carry his honours to her with a disinterested love which he should prove by leaving behind him still higher honours and ambitions; whereas, in reality, the world was permitting him to return very quietly to his native country as if it was the most natural thing in the world. The disappointment was perhaps harsher in its way than if Colin had meant to avail himself of those splendid imaginary chances; and it did not make it any the less hard to bear that he himself saw the humour of the situation, and could not but laugh grimly at himself.

Perhaps Colin will suffer in the opinion of the readers of this history when we add that, notwithstanding the perplexing and critical character of the conjuncture, and notwithstanding the other complication in his history in regard to Alice, he employed his leisure at Wodensbourne, after the interview we have recorded, in writing[3] verses for Miss Matty. It was true she had challenged him to some such task, but still it was undoubtedly a weakness on the part of a man with so much to think of. Truth, however, compels his historian to confess to this frivolity. As he strayed about the flat country, and through the park, the leisure in which he had intended to think over his position only betrayed him into this preposterous idleness; for, to be sure, life generally arranges itself in its own way without much help from thinking—but one cannot succeed in writing a farewell to a first love, for which one retains a certain kindness, without a due attention to one’s rhymes: and this was the sole result, as far as anybody was aware, of Colin’s brief but pleasant holiday at Wodensbourne.

CHAPTER XLV.

It is so difficult a matter to tell the story of a man’s life without wearying the audience, that we will make a leap over all the circumstances of Colin’s probation in Scotland, though they were sufficiently amusing. For, naturally, the presbytery of Glen-Diarmid—in which district the Holy Loch, Colin’s native parish, is situated—were a little at a loss what to make of a Fellow of Balliol when he offered himself for licence. To be sure, they made a long pause over the fact of his Fellowship, which implied that he was a member of the Church of England; but the presbytery permitted Colin to be heard in defence, and he had friends among them, and had sufficient skill with his weapons to perplex and defeat any rising antagonist. Besides, it was not in the nature of a country presbytery in this tolerant age to be otherwise than a little proud of the academical honours which the young neophyte bore. “If we accept any lout who comes up for licence, and refuse a lad of his attainments, what do you suppose the world will think of us?” said one of the more enlightened members of the clerical court, forgetting, as was natural, that the world concerned itself very little with the doings of the presbytery of Glen-Diarmid. “It’s safe to leave all that to the objectors when he comes to be placed,” said another of Colin’s judges, more wary than his brother; “if he’s not sound, you may trust it to them to find that out,”—and the young man was accordingly endued with the preliminary privileges of preacher, and licensed to exercise his gift. Colin had made friends all along the road of his life, as some men are happy enough to do, and had many who would have been pleased to do him a service, and one, as it happened, who at this juncture could; and so it befell, that, a very short time after, the second and more serious trial to which the prudent presbyter had referred, came into the life of the young preacher. He was presented, as people say in Scotland, to the parish of Afton, in the county, or, as the natives prefer to call it, the kingdom of Fife. It was a good living enough, making up, when the harvest was of average productiveness, and wheat steady, rather more than three hundred pounds a year—and more than that when the harvest was bad, and the price of com high; and there was an excellent manse, not much inferior to an English parsonage, and a compact little comfortable glebe, of which a minister of agricultural tastes might make something if he chose; and, above all, there were “heritors” of good conditions, and a university town, of small dimensions, but wealthy in point of society, within reach—all of which points seemed to Colin’s English friends a fabulous combination of advantages to be found in a Scotch parish.

Colin, however, did not fully describe the horrible gulf which lay between him and his benefice to anybody out of Scotland; for he was not the man to betray the imperfections of his beloved country, even while he suffered from them. His historian, however, does not require to exercise so much delicacy; and, as Colin’s case was exactly the same as that of any other young clergyman in the Church of Scotland, there is no betrayal of confidence involved. Between him and that haven there was a channel to cross before which the boldest might have quailed. The parish of Alton was a large parish, and there were seven hundred and fifty people in it who had a right to “object” to Colin. They had a right to object, if they liked, to his looks, or his manners, or his doctrines, or the colour of his hair; they had a right to investigate all his life, and make a complaint at “the bar of the presbytery”—which meant, at the same time, in all the local newspapers, eager for any kind of gossip—that he had once been guilty of bird’s-nesting, or had heard the midnight chimes at some unguarded moment of his youth. When Colin entered the pulpit for the first time in the parish to which he was presented, he made his appearance there not to instruct the congregation, but to be inspected, watched, judged, and finally objected to—and all the process was vigorously enforced in his case. For, to be sure, there were several things to be remarked in this young man—or, as the people of Afton expressed it, “this new laud”—which were out of the way, and unlike other people. He was a lad that had not found Scotch education good enough for him, but had gone to England for at least part of his training. To be sure, he had partly made up for this by taking the highest honours possible, and coming out of the contest in a manner creditable to Scotland—which was a point in his favour. And then his prayers (which was odd, as Colin was decidedly a liturgist) were wanting in those stock expressions which, more pertinacious than any liturgy, haunt the public prayers of the ordinary ministers of the Church of Scotland; and his sermons were short and innocent of divisions, and of a tenor totally unlike what the respectable parishioners had been used to hear. Some of the shrewder elders were of opinion that this or that expression “might mean onything”—a conclusion in which there was a certain truth; for Colin, as we have said, was not perfectly clear on all points as to what he believed. If he was not altogether heterodox on the subject of eternal punishment, for example, he was, to say the least, extremely vague; and, indeed, he deserted doctrinal ground altogether as often as he could, and took refuge in life and its necessities in a way which, doubtless, had its effect on the uninstructed multitude, but was felt to be meagre and unsatisfactory by the theologians of the parish. Two or three public meetings were held on the subject before it was time to lodge the final objections against the “presentee;” and Colin himself, who was living at St. Rule’s, within a few miles of the theatre of war, naturally found those meetings, and the speeches thereat, which appeared in the Fife Argus, much less amusing than an impartial spectator might have done.

And then the same enlightened journal contained all sorts of letters on the subject—letters in which “An Onlooker” asked whether the Rev. Mr. Campbell, who was presentee to the parish of Afton, was the same Mr. Campbell who had passed a spring at Rome three or four years before, and had been noted for his leaning to the Papacy and its superstitious observances; while, on the other hand, “A Fife Elder” implored the parishioners to take notice that the man whom an Erastian patron—not himself a member of the Church, and perhaps unaware how dearly the spiritual privileges purchased by the blood of their martyred forefathers are regarded by Scotsmen—thus endeavoured to force upon them, was notoriously a disciple of Heward, and belonged to the most insidious school of modern infidelity. It was the main body of the opposing army which made such attacks; but there was no lack of skirmishers, who treated the subject in a lighter manner, and addressed the obliging editor in a familiar and playful fashion:—“Sir,—Having nothing better to do last Sunday morning, I strayed into the parish church of Afton, with the intention of worshipping with the congregation; but you may judge of my surprise when I observed ascending the pulpit-stairs a young gentleman presenting all the appearance of a London swell or a cavalry officer, with a beard upon which it was evident he had spent more time than on his sermon”—wrote a witty correspondent; while another indignant Scot demanded solemnly, “Is it to be tolerated that our very pulpits should be invaded by the scum of the English Universities, inexperienced lads that make a hash of the Prayer-book, and preach sermons that may do very well on the other side of the Tweed, but won’t go down here?”

Such were the pleasant effusions with which Colin’s friend at St. Rule’s amused his guest at breakfast. They were very amusing to a spectator safely established in the Elysian fields of a Scotch professorship, and beyond the reach of objections; but they were not amusing, to speak of, to Colin; and the effect they produced upon the household at Ramore may be faintly imagined by the general public, as it will be vividly realized by such Scotch families as have sons in the Church. The Mistress had said to herself, with a certain placid thankfulness, “It’s little they can have to say about my Colin, that has been aye the best and the kindest.” But when she saw how much could be made of nothing, the indignation of Colin’s mother did not prevent her from being wounded to the heart. “I will never mair believe either in justice or charity,” she said, with a thrill of wrath in her voice which had never before been heard at Ramore; “him that was aye so true and faithful—him that has aye served his Master first, and made no account of this world!” And, indeed, though his mother’s estimation of him might be a little too favourable, it is certain that few men more entirely devoted to their work than Colin had ever taken upon them the cure of souls. That, however, was a matter beyond the ken of the congregation and parish of Afton. There were seven hundred and fifty communicants, and they had been well trained in doctrine under their late minister, and had a high character for intelligence; and, when an opportunity thus happily arrived for distinguishing themselves, it was not in human nature to neglect it. Had not West Port worried to the point of extinction three unhappy men whom the Crown itself had successively elevated to the unenviable distinction of presentee? The Afton case now occupied the newspapers as the West Port case had once occupied them. It combined all the attractions of a theological controversy and a personal investigation; and, indeed, there could have been few better points of view for observing the humours of Scotch character and the peculiarities of rural Scotch society of the humbler levels; only that, as we have before said, the process was not so amusing as it might have been to Colin and his friends.

“Me ken, Mr. Heward?” said the leading weaver of Afton; “no, I ken nothing about him. I’m no prepared to say what he believes. For that matter (but this was drawn out by cross-examination), I’m no just prepared to say at a moment’s notice what I believe myself. I believe in the Confession of Faith and the Shorter Catechism. No, I cannot just say that I’ve ever read the Confession of Faith—but eh, man, you ken little about parish schools if you think I dinna ken the Catechism. Can I say ‘What is Effectual Calling?’ I would like to know what right you have to ask me. I’ll say it at a proper time, to them that have a title to ask. I’m here to put in my objections against the presentee. I’m no here to say my questions. If I was, may be I would ken them better than you.”