All the rest of us were motherless; but even the gruff “Good-bye, boys,” of Murrayshaugh had some feeling in it this morning; and Lucy Murray’s eyes were too heavy to be raised to us, as she stood by her father’s side. Then there was a small white hand waving a handkerchief from within the high holly hedge of Greenshaw as we passed. It perhaps was not all for her brother. I appropriated, with trembling, some share of the farewell.
In a very short time we had settled down to our respective studies. It is comparatively unusual in Scotland to give youths the benefit of college education except for some special profession; so that, put the learned faculties aside, and you leave but a small residuum to represent what forms the larger proportion of students in England. It is perhaps for this reason that we are more practical than our neighbours; that those niceties of profound classical learning which form the glory on the head of English universities—those painful researches into the nature of the Greek verb, and folio disputations on contested words, do scarcely exist among us. But that by the way. We were very frank, very unsophisticated, very innocent, we Fendie lads; and even, as I fancy, very little less so when we left than when we entered Edinburgh. It has its abundant temptations, no doubt, as all other towns have, but, so far as I myself saw, we came through them with tolerable safety. Faults of mind, and temper, and spirit, we had many, but I think we, in a great degree, escaped that round of petty vices, the assumed manliness of which leads so many foolish lads astray.
CHAPTER IV.
I walk as ere I walked forlorn
When all our path was fresh with dew
And all the bugle breezes blew
Reveillée to the breaking morn.—In Memoriam.
I am looking out from the deep window of my study, through the sharp air of a frosty, clear November night. There are lights gleaming in some cottage windows, so far down under the bare trees by the water-side, that you would think them glow-worms on the grass; and silvery mists are floating about the sky, and yonder lie some great distant mountain clouds, with stars embayed in creeks and inlets at their feet, like lights of anchored ships.
The face of the beautiful night before me brings back another time. I fancy I am leaning again over the grey wall, which bounds the sloping road on yonder Calton, looking down with rapt and dreamy eyes upon that wonderful scene below. Hew Murray’s arm is in mine; we have the visionary reverence of youth upon us, and when we speak, we speak low, and with few words. Yonder noble hill with its proud crest, and its visible darkness—yonder faint towers, far below, of storied Holyrood—that grand rugged line from the dim valley of the palace to the bluff front of the castle, with its graceful hovering crown of St Giles lying so fitly upon the stately head of our royal city—the gleaming lights, halfway between the dim sky and the dimmer earth—the confused hum ascending up in softened dreamy murmurs. So near the life and din of a great city; so near the wonderful gloom and silence of the everlasting hills. There is a jarring sound below. I start and open my eyes—and I am looking forth upon the placid water of Fendie, the low cottage lights below, and the steady stars above—an old man and alone!
After our third session together at college, Hew Murray went to his distant destination. Murrayshaugh himself came to Edinburgh to superintend his son’s outfit, and to my very great grief, and the regret of the whole band of us, slightly mingled with envy, Hew set sail in a Leith smack—we had no steamers in those days—for London, from whence he was to proceed to Portsmouth, where his ship lay.
Hew was not of the cosmopolitan class; he was one of those—happily still existing, and I hope increasing in these days—whom the very name of home and country stirred like a trumpet. After the greatest motive of all—and I fear that in our youthful time that had but little comparative weight with us, as it had little place in the teachings of those who had the guiding of our unformed minds—the honour of his name and of his native land roused the warm spirit of my dear friend, Hew, as no other causes could. “For poor auld Scotland’s sake”—in some degree we all shared the intense and loving loyalty which took this as its centre, but it was a ruling principle with Hew Murray; and he felt his banishment most painfully, though he submitted to the necessity like a man—for Hew had not any very brilliant hopes.
“There is little chance that I will be able to return till I am old, Adam,” he said to me, sadly, as we lingered on our favourite walk for the last time, looking down on the Old Town through the balmy dim spring night; “and if I should come home as rich as old Major Wardlaw of the Elms, what then? One would scarcely like to look forward to such an end of one’s labours. His gouty chair, and his hot unwholesome room, and his solitude, and his grumbling, and his spiceries, and his inflammable temper. Man, Adam! to think that I must leave home, and part with Lucy and with all of you, and toil through my whole life where I shall never hear a Scotch tongue, for such an end as that!”
“You will hear many Scotch tongues in Bombay, Hew,” said I, “and then you are sure to marry somebody’s daughter, and come home immediately.”