'Poor Colewort!' cried Julia, with just a thrill of viciousness in her voice, 'there go his hopes of a prize at the flower show next week! I know he has been nursing that rose for weeks past. For all that, Miss Brown, they will go nicely with your black gown, so I shall leave you now to embellish yourself with the poor man's broken hopes--Pathetic sentiment that? Ha! ha!'
CHAPTER XIII.
[A HARBOUR OF REFUGE.]
Roderick having bestowed his companion safely in the shieling of Stephen Boague, did not linger. He started at once down the glen by the path beaten by the shepherd and his family. Down a glen, over a mountain shoulder, across rolling upland, zig-zagging between marsh and peat bog, at length coming out on the road, and in course of time gaining the inn from which they had started in the forenoon. There was no lifting or clearing away of the mist, it had thickened rather, and filled the air with a diffused drizzling spray, which settled drenchingly on every thing, trickling down rock and herbage, soaking into clothing and ground, till like sponge, they were distended with moisture.
He was wet already, as well as more or less bruised, battered, and foot-sore from his late experience, therefore the drizzle did not add materially to his discomfort, besides, the ferment in his mind made him insensible to bodily pains. He had heard from Mrs. Sangster's own lips when apparent danger had momentarily removed the restraints of civilized life, and her native egotistic worldliness and greed for once spoke out for themselves, that she was contemplating a match between Sophia and Wallowby. His Sophia, for whom like another Jacob earning his Rachel, he had laboured and borne so long. He had not gone out each morning for fourteen years, it is true, driving the cattle before him on the pastures of Auchlippie; but these are not the days in which human life is measured by centuries. Out of what the insurance companies would call his presumption of life, he had bestowed a far larger percentage on Sophia, than were the fourteen years devoted by the patriarch to winning his bride, not to mention difference in intensity. Notwithstanding the beauty of the sacred episode, one cannot but suspect some coolness, along with the much patience required to watch the beloved object drifting from the bright bloom of girlhood into the sun-burnt maturity of thirty summers, and still keep waiting to work out the bargain. Roderick had been working out his bridal on the other line, not ministering to the greed of a grasping father-in-law, but submitting to whims, exactions, and pretensions innumerable from the coarse-fibred mother of his charmer. How she had taken upon her to regulate his orthodoxy!--had sat in judgment on all that he did! reproved and exhorted him! and how he had borne it all, and attributed it to ignorant good intentions, for the love of Sophia! Sophia, whom he had picked blaeberries for in childhood, and worshipped openly ever since.
And had he not been given fair encouragement too? When he returned from Edinburgh for his college vacations, had he not always met a special welcome there, and received invitations to come and stay as frequently as even he could desire? And since then, had he not become in every respect what this most fickle of mothers the most approved? Had he not cast aside the offer of a good manse and stipend, and come forth with the faithful to suffer tribulation for righteousness' sake? Had he not been zealous, and showed his desire to spend and be spent in the cause of truth? True, he had obeyed the command of conscience, and not of Mrs. Sangster in all this; but his line of conduct had been the one she belauded as most noble and holy, and she had already, in the earlier time, let him clearly see that personally she approved him, and had given him every facility for becoming intimate with her girl. And now without the pretence of falling out or complaint against him, she was deliberately contemplating to marry her to another man. Was ever such treachery, fickleness, worldly-mindedness, and all that is worst?
Poor young man! It was bad treatment looked at from his point of view,--it was black, and deserving of all the hard names he applied to it; but then there are more points of view than one, and who shall decide which is to prevail over the others? His was the suitor's point of view, but there is also that of the sought, and likewise that of her family. A family can wed its flower and pride but once, and it is neither unnatural nor improper that it should try to do its best, which, speaking in the general, means to secure a rich husband for the girl. The most mercenary will admit that riches do not necessarily bring happiness, but the moral point is whether happiness is possible without them. Many have doubted whether happiness is compatible with poverty, but no one has ventured to assert that the poverty is an element in the happiness.
Therefore, friend Roderick, there is something to be said on the side of the old woman. It is not to your interests she can be held bound, further than the truth and justice due to all our fellow creatures require, but to her daughter's. As to how the case may appear from the daughter's point of view, you have no right to say, or even to think, as you have never put it in her power to tell you, and a maiden may not divulge the secret of her preferences unasked. She has encouraged you, you say? But how? Answered you civilly when you spoke to her? Could a lady do less? Has not been averse to your company? Why should she be? Could she civilly have shown a distaste for it? And supposing she felt no distaste, but rather liked it? Must a woman be prepared to marry any man whose company she finds pleasurable, or less irksome than solitude? You never spoke the word, my friend, that would have called her to speak for herself, and therefore you have no right to complain; though I grant that Mrs. Sangster may have been inconsiderate and fickle, and may be mercenary. Still, if when she extended her encouragement, you did not tender your proposal, and thereby nail her, she must be allowed to change her mind if she desires. As to Sophia herself, the probability is, that her affections are, and will remain, in an amorphous form, or let us say in solution, until such time as her relatives provide her with a husband round whom they may properly crystallize, as they no doubt will, and she will prove a pattern wife and mother. I fear, however, that as regards the nucleus round which her affections are to gather, as in the case of sugar (another sweet substance), any stick will answer quite well.
Love is blind, and young love headstrong, therefore it is little wonder if these cold-blooded reflections did not occur to Roderick. He fretted and fumed as he walked along, and was thoroughly miserable, while the moisture dripped steadily from his hat brim, and meandered in little brooks down his neck.
Eventually he reached the inn, and bade the landlord send out a gig or tax-cart at once, to bring in Mrs. Sangster. The landlady came forward, officious to welcome a guest, and eager to show hospitality to her minister.