It was good to have Bell there, to feel the touch of homely love about her, and the sound of the voice which was as familiar as her own soft breath. Bell was pleased too. She was not offended when she perceived that her nursling answered somewhat at random. “What is she but a bairn? and bairns’ ways are wonderful when their bit noddles begin working,” Bell said, with the heavenly tolerance of wise affection. She went out of the room afterward, with her Scotch delicacy, to give Margaret time to say her prayers, then came back and covered her carefully with her hard-working hand, softened miraculously by love. “And the Lord bless my white doo,” the old woman said. There were no kisses or caresses exchanged, which was not the habit of the reserved Scotchwoman; but her hand lingered on the coverlet, “happing” her darling. Summer nights are sweet in Fife, but not overwarm. And thus ended the long midsummer day.
CHAPTER V.
Robert Glen, whose reappearance had so interested and excited the innocent mind of Margaret Leslie, was no other than the farmer’s son, in point of locality her nearest neighbor, but in every other respect, childhood being fairly over, as far removed from her as if she had been a princess, instead of the child of an impoverished country gentleman. In childhood it had not been so. Little Margaret had played with Rob in the hay-fields, and sat by him while he fished in the burn, and had rides upon the horses he was leading to the water, many a day in that innocent period. She had been as familiar about the farm “as if it had belonged to her,” Mrs. Glen had said, and had shared the noonday “piece” of her little cavalier often enough, as well as his sports. Even Bell had found nothing to say against this intimacy.
The Glens were very decent folks, not on a level with the great farmers of Fife, yet well to do and well doing; and Rob’s devoted care of the little lady had saved Bell, as she herself expressed it, “many a trail;” but in the ten years from seven to seventeen many changes occur. Rob, who was the youngest, had been the clever boy of the family at the farm. His mother, proud of his early achievements, had sent him to St. Andrews to the excellent schools there, with vague notions of advancement to come. That he should be a minister was, of course, her chief desire, and the highest hope of her ambition; but at this early period there was no absolute necessity for a decision. He might be a writer if he proved to have no “call” for the ministry; or he might be a doctor if his mind took that turn. However, when he had reached the age at which in Scotland the college supplants the school (too early, as everybody knows), Rob was quite of opinion that he had a call to be a minister; and he would have gone on naturally to his college career at St. Andrews, but for the arrival of an uncle, himself sonless, from Glasgow, whose family pride was much excited by Rob’s prizes and honors. This was his mother’s brother, like herself come of the most respectable folk, “a decent, honest man,” which means everything in Scottish moral phraseology. He was “a merchant” in Glasgow, meaning a shopkeeper, and had a good business and money in the bank, and only one little daughter—a fact which opened his heart to the handsome, bright boy who was likely to bring so much credit to his family. Whether Robert Hill (for the boy was his namesake) would have thought so highly of his nephew without these prizes is another question; but as it was, he took an immediate and most warm interest in him. Mr. Hill, however, felt the usual contempt of a member of a large trading community for every small and untrading place.
“St. An’rews!” he said; “send the boy to St. An’rews to sleep away his time in an auld hole where there’s naething doing! Na, na, I’ll no hear o’ that. Send him to me, and I’ll look after him. We know what we’re about in Glasskie; nane o’ your dreamin’ and dozin’ there. We ken the value o’ time and the value o’ brains, and how to make use o’ them. There’s a room that’s never used at the tap o’ the house, and I’ll see till ’im,” said the generous trader.
Mrs. Glen, though half offended at this depreciation of native learning, was pleased and proud of her brother’s liberality.
“I’ll no hear a word against St. An’rews,” she said. “Mony a clever man’s come out of it; but still I’m no blind to the advantages on the other side. The lad’s at an age when it’s a grand thing to have a man over him. No but what he’s biddable: but laddies will be laddies, and a man in the house is aye an advantage. So if you’re in earnest, Robert (and I’m much obliged to ye for your guid opinion of him), I’m no saying but what I’ll take ye at your word.”
“You may be sure I mean it, or I wadna say it,” said her brother; and so the bargain was made.
Rob went to Glasgow, half eager, half reluctant, as is the manner of boys, and in due time went through his classes, and was entered at the Divinity Hall. A Scotch student of his condition has seldom luxurious or over-dainty life in his long vacations—six months long; and calculated for this purpose, that the student may be self-supporting, Rob did many things which kept him independent. He helped his uncle in the shop at first with the placidity of use and wont, thinking a good shop a fine thing, as who can doubt it is? But when Rob began to get on in his learning, and was able to take a tutorship, he discovered with a pang that a shop was not so fine a thing as he supposed.
Early, very early, the pangs of intellectual superiority came upon him. He was clever, and loved reading, and thus got himself, as it were, into society before he was aware of the process that was going on within him, making friends of very different social position from his own. Then the professors noticed him, found him what is easily called “cultivated”—for he had read much in his little room over the shop, with constantly growing ambition to escape from his lowly place and find a higher—and one of them recommended him to a lady in the country as tutor to her boys. This was a most anxious elevation at first, but it trained him to the habits of a class superior to his own; and after that the shop and its homely ways were anguish to Rob. Very soon he found out that it was inconvenient to go so far to college; then he found occupations in the evening, even during the college session, and thus felt justified in separating himself from his kind uncle, who accepted his excuses, though not without a shade of doubt. “Well, laddie, well, laddie, we’re no the folk to keep you if you can do better for yourself,” the good shopkeeper said, affronted yet placable. The process is not uncommon; and, indeed, the young man meant no great harm. He meant that his younger life was pushing out of the husk in which it had been confined, that he was no longer altogether the same as the people to whom he belonged. It was true enough, and if it was hard, who could help that? It gave him more pain to take his plentiful meal rudely in the room behind the shop than it could give them to take it without him.