“Whisht! laddie—I would have been angry but for this,” said the Mistress. “The like of you has nae call to work; but I canna say onything mair, Cosmo, now that Providence has taken it out of my hand. And I dinna wonder you would like to travel—the like of you canna be fed on common bread like common folk—and you’ll hae to see every thing if you’re to be an author. Na, laddie, no’ for the comfort of seeing you and hearing you would I put bars on your road. I aye thought I would live to be proud of my sons, but I didna ken I was to be overwhelmed in a moment, and you naething but a bairn!”
CHAPTER XXXVI.
The result of this conversation was that Cosmo made a little private visit to Edinburgh to determine his own entrance into the republic of letters, and to see the enterprising projector of the Auld Reekie Magazine through whom this was to take place. The boy went modestly, half abashed by his good fortune and dawning dream of fame, yet full of a flush of youthful hope, sadly out of proportion to any possible pretensions of the new periodical. He saw it advertised in the newspaper which one of his fellow-passengers on the coach read on the way. He saw a little printed hand-bill with its illustrious name in the window of the first bookseller’s shop he looked into on his arrival in Edinburgh, and Cosmo marched over the North Bridge with his carpet-bag in his hand, with a swell of visionary glory. He could not help half wondering what the indifferent people round him would think, if they knew—and then could not but blush at himself for the fancy. Altogether the lad was in a tumult of delightful excitement, hope, and pleasure, such as perhaps only falls to the lot of boys who hope themselves poets, and think at eighteen that they are already appreciated and on the highway to fame.
As he ascended the stairs to Mrs. Purdie’s, he met Cameron coming down. There was a very warm greeting between them—a greeting which surprise startled into unusual affectionateness on the part of the Highlander. Cameron forgot his own business altogether to return with Cosmo, and needed very little persuasion to enter the little parlor, which no other lodger had turned up to occupy, and share the refreshment which the overjoyed landlady made haste to prepare for her young guest. This was so very unusual a yielding on Cameron’s part, that Cosmo almost forgot his own preoccupation in observing his friend, who altogether looked brightened and smoothed out, and younger than when they parted. The elder and soberer man, who knew a little more of life and the world than Cosmo, though very little more of literature, could not help a half-perceptible smile at the exuberance of Cosmo’s hopes. Not that Cameron despised the Auld Reekie Magazine; far from that, the Divinity student had all the reverence for literature common to those who know little about it, which reverence, alas! grows smaller and smaller in this too-knowing age. But at thirty years old people know better than at eighteen how the sublimest undertakings break down, and how sometimes even “the highest talent” can not float its venture. So the man found it hard not to smile at the boy’s shy triumph and undoubting hope, yet could not help but be proud, notwithstanding, with a tenderness almost feminine, of the unknown gifts of the lad, whose youth, he could not quite tell how, had found out the womanish corner of his own reserved heart, in which, as he said himself, only two or three could find room at any time.
“But you never told me of these poetical effusions, Cosmo,” said his friend, as he put up the bookseller’s note.
“Don’t laugh at Mr. Todhunter. I only call them verses,” said Cosmo, with that indescribable blending of vanity and humility which belongs to his age; “and I knew you would not care for them; they were not worth showing to you.”
“I’m not a poetical man,” said Cameron, “but I might care for your verses in spite of that; and now Cosmo, laddie, while you have been thinking of fame, what novel visitor should you suppose had come to me?”
“Who?—what?” cried Cosmo, with eager interest.
“What?” echoed Cameron, “either temptation or good fortune—it’s hard to say which—only I incline to the first. Satan’s an active chield, and thinks little of trouble; but I doubt if the other one would have taken the pains to climb my stair. I’ve had an offer of a tutorship, Cosmo—to go abroad for six months or so with a callant like yourself.”
“To go abroad!” Cosmo’s eyes lighted up with instant excitement, and he stretched his hand across the table to his friend, with a vehemence which Cameron did not understand, though he returned the grasp.