“Oh, uncle! don’t,” said Miss Matty; “don’t you know that the Presbyterians are all going to give up and join the Church? and it’s all to be the same both in England and Scotland? You need not laugh. I assure you I know quite well what I am saying,” said the little beauty, with a look of dignity. “I have seen it in the papers; such funny papers!—with little paragraphs about accidents, and about people getting silver snuff-boxes!—but all the same, they say what I tell you. There’s to be no Presbyterians and no precentors, and none of their wicked ways, coming into church with their hats on, and staring all round instead of saying their prayers; and all the ministers are to be made into clergymen—priests and deacons, you know; and they are going to have bishops and proper service like other people. Mr. Campbell,” said Matty, looking up at him with a little emphasis, to mark that, for once, she was calling him formally by his name—“knows it is quite true.”
“Humph,” said Sir Thomas, “I know better; I know how Campbell, there, looked the other day when he came out of church. I know the Scotch and their ways of thinking. Go and make the tea, and don’t talk of what you don’t understand. But, as for you, Campbell, if you have a mind for the University and to go in for the Church—”
But this was more than Colin, being twenty, and a Scotchman, could bear.
“I am going in for the Church,” said the lad, doing all he could to keep down the excitement at which Sir Thomas would have laughed, “but it did not in the least touch my heart the other day to know that it was the twentieth Sunday after Trinity. Devotion is a great matter,” said the young Scotchman, “I grant you have the advantage over us there; but it would not do in Scotland to preach about the Church’s goodness, and what she had appointed for such or such a day. We preach very stupid sermons, I dare say; but at least we mean to teach somebody something—what God looks for at their hands, or what they may look for at His. It is more an occupation for a man,” cried the young revolutionary, “than reading the sublimest of prayers. I am going in for the Church—but it is the Church of Scotland,” said Colin. He drew himself up with a grand youthful dignity, which was much lost on Sir Thomas, who, for his part, looked at his new tutor with eyes of sober wonderment, and did not understand what this emotion meant.
“There is no occasion for excitement,” said the baronet; “nobody now-a-days meddles with a man’s convictions; indeed, Harry would say, it’s a great thing to have any convictions. That is how the young men talk now-a-days,” said Sir Thomas; and he moved off the sofa again, and yawned, though not uncivilly. As for Miss Matty, she came stealing up when she had made the tea, with her cup in her hand.
“So you do mean to be a minister?” she said, in a half whisper, with a deprecating look. Lady Frankland had roused up, like her husband, and the two were talking, and did not take any notice of Matty’s proceedings with the harmless tutor. The young lady was quite free to play with her mouse a little, and entered upon the amusement with zest, as was natural. “You mean to shut yourself up in a square house, with five windows in front, like the poor gentleman who has such red hair; and never see anybody but the old women in the parish, and have your life made miserable every Sunday by that precentor—”
“I hope I have a soul above precentors,” said Colin, with a little laugh, which was unsteady still, however, with excitement; “and one might mend all that,” he added a minute after, looking at her with a kind of wistful inquiry which he could not have put into words. What was it he meant to ask with his anxious eye? But he did not himself know.
“Oh yes,” said Matty, “I know what you could do: you could get a little organ and marry somebody who would play it, and teach the people better; I know exactly what you could do,” said the young lady with a piquant little touch of spite, and a look that startled Colin; and then she paused, and hung her head for a moment and blushed, or looked as if she blushed. “But you would not?” said Matty, softly, with a sidelong glance at her victim. “Don’t marry anybody; no one is of any use after that. I don’t approve of marrying, for my part, especially for a priest. Priests should always be detached, you know, from the world.”
“Why?” said Colin. He was quite content to go on talking on such a subject for any length of time. “As for marrying, it is only your rich squires and great people who can marry when they please; we who have to make our own way in the world—” said the young man, with a touch of grandeur, but was stopped by Miss Matty’s sudden laughter.
“Oh, how simple you are! As if rich squires and great people, as you say, could marry when they pleased—as if any man could marry when he pleased!” cried Miss Matty, scornfully. “After all, we do count for something, we poor women; now and then, we can put even an eldest son out in his calculations. It is great fun too,” said the young lady, and she laughed, and so did Colin, who could not help wondering what special case she might have in her eye, and listened with all the eagerness of a lover. “There is poor Harry—” said Miss Matty under her breath, and stopped short and laughed to herself and sipped her tea, while Colin lent an anxious ear. But nothing further followed that soft laughter. Colin sat on thorns, gazing at her with a world of questions in his face, but the siren looked at him no more. Poor Harry! Harry’s natural rival was sensible of a thrill of jealous curiosity mingled with anxiety. What had she done to Harry, this witch who had beguiled Colin?—or was it not she who had done anything to him, but some other as pretty and as mischievous? Colin had no clue to the puzzle, but it gave him a new accès of half-conscious enmity to the heir of Wodensbourne.