A Son of the Soil

by Mrs. Oliphant

Colin stood up with his hand on the back of his chair, and delivered his charge full into the breast of his unsuspecting opponent. Perhaps it was cruel; but there are circumstances under which it is a relief to be cruel to somebody, and the pain in his soul found for itself a certain expression in these words. As for the unhappy victim who received them, the sense of surprise almost deadened the effect for the moment; he could not believe that he had heard rightly. Mr. Meredith was of the Low Church, and was used to say every day that wealth was vanity, and that the true treasure had to be laid up above; but still experience had not shown him that poor young priests of any creed were generally so far moved by these sentiments as to despise the fortune which a wife might bring them. He was so much amazed that he gave a gasp of consternation at the young man who thus defied him, and grew not pale but grey with an emotion which was more wonder than anger. Mr. Meredith was not a bad man, notwithstanding that he had ruined several households, and made himself rich at other people’s expense; and, even had he felt the full force of the insult personally, his anxiety about Alice would have made him bear it. That fatherly dread and love made him for the moment a great deal more Christian than Colin, who had thus assaulted him in the bitterness of his heart.

“Mr. Campbell,” he replied, when he had sufficiently recovered himself to speak, “I don’t know what you have heard about me. I don’t mean to enter upon any defence of myself. My poor boy, I know, misunderstood some transactions, not knowing anything about business. But, so far as I can see, that matters very little between you and me. I have explained to you that my conduct in reference to yourself was founded on a mistake. I have expressed my gratitude to you in respect to my son; and now, if we are to be more closely connected——”

“That depends upon Miss Meredith,” said Colin, hastily. “You have opened your doors to me voluntarily, and not by my solicitation; and now it is to her that I have a right to address myself. Otherwise it would have been better if you had not asked me to come here.”

“Yes, yes,” said Mr. Meredith. He thought he saw a doubtful gleam in Colin’s eye, and an accent of repugnance in his voice, and he trembled to the bottom of his heart lest perhaps, after all, he might lose this chance of preserving his daughter. “Yes, yes,” he said with a smile, which it cost him a little trouble to assume, and which looked horribly out of place to Colin; “I ought to have learned by this time that it does not do to interfere between lovers. I allow that it lies entirely between her and you.”

He might have said a great deal more if his young hearer would have given him time; but Colin was only too glad to escape. The word “lovers” which Mr. Meredith used, the smile which he was so far from meaning, the lighter tone which belied his feelings quite as much as Colin’s, drove the young man half frantic with impatience and disgust. At last he managed to get his will, and escaped out of doors, with the cigar which was an excuse for his thoughts. The night was dark, and agitated by a ghostly wind, and the country, utterly unknown, which lay round the house in the darkness, and which neither memory nor imagination presented to the mind of the stranger, increased the natural effect of the gloom and the solitude. He went down through the long straight opening of the avenue, which was a little less black than the surrounding world, with a sensation of loneliness which was as strange as it was painful. He did not seem to know himself or his life henceforward any more than he knew the wild, strange country over which the night and the wind ruled supreme. It seemed to him as if the solace of friendship, the consolation of sympathy, were all ended for ever; he could not talk, even to those who were most dear to him, of his betrothed, or of his marriage—if, indeed, that was what it must come to. He had walked up and down the avenue two or three times, from one end to another, before even a little coherence came to his thoughts. All was so strange and unbelievable as yet; so like a trick of magic played upon him by some malign magician. He was not capable of thinking; but everything passed before him like a vision, appearing and disappearing out of the darkness. His old freedom, his impulses of revolution, the force and fulness of life with which he was young enough to sport, even in its most serious strength, and all the sweet wealth of imagination that had lain hoarded up for him among the clouds—these were things that belonged to yesterday. To-night it was another world that seemed to lie before him in the gloom, a separate sphere from the actual world in which he was standing. Vague limitations and restrictions which he could not identify were awaiting him; and he saw no way of escaping, and yet did not know how he was to bear the future thraldom.

As this ferment calmed down a little, Colin began to think of Alice, sweet and patient, and dutiful as she always was. He even resented, for her sake, his own indifference and repugnance, and said bitterly to himself that it was hard that such a woman should be accepted as a necessary burden, and not longed for as a crown of blessing; but yet, with all that, he could not cheat his own heart, or persuade himself that he wanted to marry her, or that it was less than the sacrifice of all his individual hopes to enter again upon the old relationship, and fulfil the youthful bond. When, however, he attempted to ask himself if he could escape, the same heart which sank at the thought of this bond baffled and stopped him in his question. He would not harm her, should it kill him.

“He loved her with all love, except the love
Of men and women when they love the best.”

And it was he himself who had knitted in youthful generosity and indiscretion the chain that now lay on his limbs like iron. Alice had done nothing unmaidenly, nothing that in all honour and delicacy she ought not to have done. To be sure, another man as honourable as Colin might have given her to understand, or permitted her to find out, the change which had taken in his sentiments. But Colin could not even assert with any truth that his sentiments had changed. For he was almost as conscious that she was not the woman of his imagination when he led her home from the ilex avenue on the day which determined their fortunes as he was now after the long separation which had not broken the link between them. He had known in his heart that it was not broken, even when he had most felt his freedom; and now what could he do? Perhaps that morning, after the carriage had passed him, after the little cry of recognition which convinced his heart, but which his mind could still have struggled against, he might have turned back as he had once thought of doing, and fled ignominiously. But that moment was past, and there was nothing to be done but accept the results of his own youthful rashness. Such were the thoughts that went through his mind as he walked up and down the avenue between the two long lines of trees, hearing the wind roar among the branches overhead, and feeling that henceforward there must always be a secret in his heart, something which nobody must discover, a secret which neither now nor any time could be breathed into any sympathetic ear. This sense of something to conceal weighed harder upon Colin than if it had been a crime—for there is no crime so terrible but a human creature may entertain the hope some time of relieving his mind of it, and breathing it into the ear of some confidant, consecrated either by love or religion, who will not shrink from him in consequence of that revelation. The sting of Colin’s burden was that he could never relieve himself of it, that all the questions raised by it must absolutely confine themselves to his own mind, and must lie unnamed and even unsuggested between him and those friends from whom he had never hidden anything but this.

All this he revolved in his mind as he contemplated his position. So far from seeking sympathy, it would be his business to refuse and ignore it, should it be given by any implication, and to seek congratulations, felicitations, instead. All this he was going to do for Alice’s sake; and yet he did not love Alice. He looked up at a faintly-lighted window, where there seemed to be a shaded light as in an invalid’s room, and thought of her with a mixture of bitterness and sweetness, of tender affection and unconquerable reluctance, of loyalty almost fantastic and the most painful sense of hardship, which it would be impossible to describe. She, for her part, was lying down to rest with her heart full of the sweetest content and thankfulness, thinking with thoughts so different from his how her life had changed since the morning, and how the almost-forgotten sunshine had come back again, to remain for ever. This was how Alice was looking at the matter, and Colin knew it in his heart. If she could but wake out of that soft paradise to see the darkness and the turmoil in his mind! But that was what she must never find out.

And thus Colin made up his mind, if he could ever be said to have had any doubt in his mind, as to what was to be done. He did not even cheat himself by the hope that anything could happen to deliver him. It was Providence, as Alice had said. Perhaps it might come darkly into the young man’s mind to wonder whether those severe lessons which Mr. Meredith said he had had in his family—whether all those fatal losses and sorrows which Alice regarded with awe, yet with a certain devout admiration as God’s mysterious way of bringing about her own happiness, could be designed to effect an end which did not make him happy; for, in such a question, personal content or dissatisfaction has a great deal to do with the way in which a man regards the tenor of Providence. Had he been as happy as Alice was, perhaps he too would have concluded that this was but another instance how all things work together for good. But, as he was not happy, he plunged into a world of more painful questions, and returned again as before, after his favourite speculations had beguiled him for a little out of the immediate matter in hand, to realize, as if by a flash of lightning, all the facts of the case, and all the necessities before him. There may be many people who will condemn Colin both for remaining indifferent to Alice, and for remaining faithful to her in his indifference. But this is not a defence nor eulogium of him, but simply a history. It was thus his mind acted under the circumstances. He could conduct himself only according to his own nature; and this is all that there is to say.