So he reasoned, and was right and wrong, as we all are, in every revolutionary crisis. Had he been bred a shopkeeper or a farmer lad, no such thoughts would have distracted his mind, and probably he would have been happier; but then he had not been brought up either to the shop or to the farm, and how could he help the natural development which his circumstances and training brought with them? So by degrees he dropped the shop. There was no quarrel, and he went to see them sometimes on the wintry Sunday afternoons, and restrained all his feelings of dismay and humiliation, and bore their “ways” as best he could; but there is nobody so quick as a vulgar relation to find out when a rising young man begins to be ashamed of him. The Hills were sore and angry with the young man to whom they had been so kind. But the next incident in Rob’s career was one that called all his relations round him, out of sheer curiosity and astonishment, to see a prodigy unprecedented in their lives.
After he had gone through all the Latin and Greek that Glasgow could furnish, and he had time for, and had roamed through all the philosophies and begun Hebrew, and passed two years at the Divinity Hall, this crisis came. Six months more and Rob would have been ready to begin his trials before the Presbytery for license as a probationer, when he suddenly petrified all his friends, and drove his mother half out of her senses, by the bewildering announcement that his conscience made it impossible for him to enter the Scotch Church. The shock was one which roused the entire family into life. Cousins unheard of before aroused themselves to behold this extraordinary spectacle. Such hesitations are not so common with the budding Scotch minister as with the predestined English parson, and they are so rare in Rob’s class, that this announcement on his part seemed to his relations to upset the very balance of heaven and earth. Made up his mind not to be a minister! The first sensation in their minds was one of absolute incredulity, followed by angry astonishment when the “infatuated” young fellow repeated and stood by his determination. Not to be a minister! What would he be, then? what would satisfy him? Set him up! they all cried. It was like a fresh assertion of superiority, a swagger and flourish over them all, unbounded presumption and arrogance. Doubts! he was a bonnie one to have doubts. As if many a better man had not signed the Confession before him, ay, and been glad to have the Confession to sign!
This at first was the only view which the kindred felt capable of taking. But by-and-by, when it became apparent that this general flutter of horror was to have no effect, and that Rob stood by his resolution, other features in his enormity began to strike the family. All the money spent upon him at the college, all the time he had lost; what trade could he go into now with any chance of getting on? Two-and-twenty, and all his time gone for nothing! His uncle, Robert Hill, who had been as indignant as any, here interposed. He sent for his sister, and begged her to compose herself. The lad’s head was turned, he said. He had made friends that were not good for a lad in his class of life, that had led him away in other ways, and had made him neglectful of his real friends. But still the lad was a fine lad, and not beyond the reach of hope. This placable sentiment was thought by everybody to proceed from Uncle Robert’s only daughter, Anne, who was supposed to regard her cousin with favorable eyes; but anyhow the suggestion of the Hills was that “the minister,” their own minister, should be got to “speak to” Rob. Glad was the mother of this or any other suggestion, and the minister undertook the office with good-will.
“Perhaps I may be able to remove some of your difficulties,” he said, and he called to himself a professor, one of those who had the young man’s training in hand. Thus Rob became a hero once more among all belonging to him. Had the minister spoken? What had the minister said? Had he come to his right mind? the good people asked. And, indeed, the minister did speak, and so did the professor, both of whom thought Rob’s a most interesting case. They were most anxious to remove his difficulties; nay, for that matter, to remove everything—doctrines and all—to free the young man from his scruples. They spoke, but they spoke with bated breath, scarcely able to express the full amount of the “respect and sympathy” with which they regarded these difficulties of his. “We too—” they said, in mysterious broken sentences, with imperfect utterance of things too profound for the common ear. And they did their best to show him how he might gulp down a great many things without hurting his conscience, which the robust digestion of the past had been able to assimilate, but which were not adapted for the modern mind. “There is more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds,” these gentlemen said. But Rob held out. He would have been foolish, indeed, as well as rarely disinterested and unsusceptible to the most delicate of flatteries, had he not held out. He had never been of so much importance in the course of his life.
It may be doubtful, however, if it was his conscience alone which stopped him short in his career. Rob had learned in his tutorships, and among the acquaintances acquired at college, to know that a Scotch minister did not possess so elevated a position as in rural Fife he was thought to do. The young man had a large share of ambition in him, and he had read of society and of the great world, that abstraction which captivates inexperienced youth. A minister could no more reach this than, indeed, could the country laird who was the highest representative of greatness known to Rob; but literature could (he thought), art could: and he could write (he flattered himself), and he could draw. Why, then, should he bind himself to the restraints necessary for that profession, when other means of success more easy and glorious were in his power?
This was a very strong supplementary argument to strengthen the resistance of his conscience. And he did not give in; he preferred to go home with his mother, to take, as all his advisers entreated him, time to think everything over. Rob had no objections to take a little time. He wanted money to take him to London, to start him in life, even to pay off the debts which he said nothing of, but which weighed quite as heavily upon him as his troubles of conscience. This was how he came to be, after such a long interval, once more living with his mother at Earl’s-hall farm. He had come home in all the importance of a sceptical hero, a position very dazzling to the simple mind, and very attractive to many honest people. But it was not so pleasant at home. Instead of being the centre of anxious solicitude, instead of being plied by conciliatory arguments, coaxed and persuaded, and respected and sympathized with, he found himself the object of his mother’s irony, and treated with a contemptuous impatience which he fain would have called bigotry and intolerance.
Mrs. Glen was not at all respectful of honest doubt, and she had a thorough contempt for anything and everything that kept a man from making his way in the world. She was not indeed a person of refinement at all. She had lived a hard life, struggling to bring up her children and to “push them forrit,” as she said. The expression was homely, and the end to be obtained perhaps not very elevated. To “push forrit” your son to be Lord Chancellor, or even a general officer, or a bishop, is a fine thing, which strikes the spectator; but when all you can do is to push him “forrit” to a shop in Dundee, is the struggle less noble? It is less imposing, at all events. And the struggling mother who had done her best to procure such rise in life and in comfort as was within her reach for her children was not a person of noble mind or generous understanding. When Rob came home, upon whom her highest hopes had been set, not prosperous like the others, but a failure and disappointment, doing nothing, earning nothing, and with no prospect before him of either occupation or gain, her mortification made her bitter. Fury and disappointment filled her heart. She kept silent for the first day, only going about her household affairs with angry energy, scolding her servants, and as they said, “dinging everything about.” “So lang as she disna ding me!” said Jean the dairy-maid; but it was not to be expected that any long time should pass before she began to “ding” some one, and ere long the culprit himself began to feel the force of her trouble.
“What are you doing?” she cried; “do you call that doing onything—drawing a crookit line with a pencil and filling it up with paint? Paint! ye might paint the auld cart if that’s the trade you mean to follow. It would aye be worth a shilling or twa, which is mair than ever thae scarts and splashes will be.” Or when Rob escaped into the seclusion of a book: “Read, oh ay, ye can read fast enough when it’s for naething but diversion and to pass the time; but ye’ll ne’er gather bawbees with your reading, nor be a credit to them that belong to you.” This was the sting of the whole. He was no credit to those who belonged to him, rather he was an implied shame; for who would believe, Mrs. Glen asked, that this sudden return was by his own will? “Na, na,” she said, “they’ll think it is for ill-doing, and that he’s turned away out of the college. It’s what I would do mysel’. And to think of all I’ve done, and all I’ve put up with, and a’ to come to naething! Eh, man! I would soon, soon have put an end to your douts. I would have made ye sure of ae thing, if it hadna been your uncle Robert and his ministers, ye should hae had nae douts about that: that no idle lad should sit at my fireside and devour the best o’ everything. If ye had the heart of a mouse ye couldna do it. Me, I would starve first; me, I would sweep the streets. I would go down a coal-pit, or work in a gawley chain afore I would sorn on my ain mother, a widow-woman, and eat her out o’ house and hame!”
Poor Rob! he was not very sensitive, and he had been used to his mother’s ways and moods, or these reproaches would have been hard upon him. No doubt, had he been the innocent sufferer for conscience’ sake which he half believed himself to be, life would have been unendurable in these circumstances; but as it was, he only shrugged his shoulders, or jibed in return and paid her back in her own coin. They were both made of the same rough material, and were able to give and take, playing with the blows which would have killed others. Rob was not driven out of the house, out upon the world in despair, as a more sensitive person might have been. He stayed doggedly, not minding what was said, till he should succeed in extracting the money which would be necessary for his start; and from this steady purpose a few warm words were not likely to dissuade him. He, on his side, felt that he was too much of a man for that. But it is not pleasant to have your faults dinned into your ears, however much you may scorn the infliction, and Rob had gone out on the day he met Margaret very much cast down and discouraged. He had almost made up his mind to confront fate rather than his mother. Almost—but he was not a rash young man, notwithstanding all that had happened to him, and the discomfort of issuing forth upon the world penniless was greater than putting up (he said to himself) with an old wife’s flyting; but still the flyting was not pleasant to bear.
“Wha’s that?” his mother said when he returned. “Oh, it’s you! bless me, I thought it was some person with something to do. There was not the draigh in the foot that I’m getting used to. Maybe something’s happened! You’ve gotten something to do, or you’ve ta’en another thought! and well I wot it’s time.”