During the next three years (and that is a long driech time) I made many excuses for not going down to Eden Valley. I cannot say whether I managed to get myself believed or not. But the fact of the matter is, that, as things were, I could not bring myself to face Irma again and so bring back the pain. My father had come up to see me twice. Once he had brought my mother, of whom Mrs. Craven had made much, recognizing a kindred refinement of spirit. But Amelia and my Aunt Jen (who came at the time of the General Assembly) learned to respect one another—all the more that they had been highly prejudiced before meeting.
“She seems a weel-doing lass, wi’ no feery-faries aboot her!” declared my aunt, speaking of Amelia Craven. While that young woman, delivering her mind after the departure of Miss Janet Lyon, declared that she was a “wiselike woman and very civil—but I’ll wager she came here thinking that I was wanting ye. Faith, no, I wadna marry any student that ever stepped in leather—I ken ower muckle aboot them!”
“There’s Freddie!” I suggested.
“Oh,” said Amelia shortly, “he’s different, I allow. But then, there’s a medium. One doesna want a man with his nose aye in a book. But one that, when ye spit at him, will spit back!”
“Try me!” I said, daring her in conscious security.
“Goliah of Gath,” cried she, “but I wad be sair left to mysel’!”
We continued, however, to be pretty good friends always, and in a general way she knew about Irma. She had seen the oval miniature lying on the table. She had also closely interrogated Freddy, and lastly she had charged me with the fact, which I did not deny.
Freddy was now assistant to the professor of Humanity, which is to say of the Latin language, while besides my literary work on the Universal Review I was interim additional Under-secretary to the University Court. In both which positions, literary and secretarial, I did the work for which another man pocketed the pay.
But after all I was not ill-off. One way and another I was making near on to a hundred pounds a year, which was a great deal for the country and time, and more than most ministers got in country parts. I wrote a great many very learned articles, though I signed none. I even directed foreign affairs in the Review, and wrote the most damaging indictments against “the traditional policy of the house of Austria.”
Then the other man, the great one in the public eye, he who paid me—put in this and that sonorous phrase, full of echoing emptiness, launched an antithesis which had done good service a time or two on the hustings or in the House of Commons, and—signed the article. Well, I do not object. That was what I was there for, and after all I made myself necessary to the Universal Review. It would never have appeared in time but for me. I verified quotations, continued articles that were too short by half-a-dozen pages, found statistics where there were blanks in the manuscript, invented them if I could not find them, generally bullied the printers and proof-readers, saw to the cover, and never let go till the “Purple-and-Green,” as we were called, was for sale on all the counters and speeding over Britain in every postboy’s leathers.