Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 11

by Unknown

fell. Age, wisdom, youth, wit, humour, friendship, love, and beauty—what could a raw shepherd lad oppose to all these? "The request of his aged father, the injunction of the moral law, the direct command of God!" some stern, perhaps good man may reply. William tried to control his career by means of these; but the attacks were unceasing, various, distracting—the defence was in the hands of one, and he, alas! too often disposed to admit the enemy. We will pass rapidly over this part of our departed friend's career. He mingled, at first sparingly, at length more freely, in the convivial habits of his new friends; he felt the thrill of friendship; he was keenly alive to the social glow which the bowl awakens; his heart also was elated by the love of men of genius, and his vanity gratified by their loudly-expressed admiration. Unfortunately, he engaged to write for a new periodical which some of his friends were then attempting to establish. Amid the solitude of his native hills he had experienced the grateful and rapid awakening of noble ideas; he was surprised to find that, in the city, amid the distractions of ambition, music, love, and wine, he could only now and then call up his natural powers to his aid. He had pledged himself to support the new periodical to a certain extent; and, in order to fulfil his promise, at the instigation of an acquaintance, he stimulated himself to its accomplishment by means of brandy. This was the first time he had ever drank ardent spirits for the sake of the effects which they produce. The paper which he had written was universally admired, the sale of the periodical was very much increased by its influence, and he was plied by the proprietors with new and lucrative engagements.

On the very morning on which he had received these proposals, he also received a letter from his aged father, informing him, that the brother of the old man, who was engaged in commerce, and for whom he had some time ago become surety, had failed, and that the whole of the little earnings of his past life would be required to liquidate the debt.

William closed with the proposal of the proprietors of the magazine, and wrote to the old man a letter, partly of condolence, but more of triumph. He was almost glad that the resources of his father were destroyed, now that he himself had the means of supporting him; and it was with a joyous heart that he sat down to write his paper for the new periodical. But alas! he felt what all who have so occupied themselves have felt, how the mind becomes weak, and the fancy flags, when compelled to action. He rushed into society, to escape from the dreadful depression which follows high mental excitement; the warmth of friendship with which he was met fell gratefully on his spirit; the glee and glory of social intercourse first relieved his wearied faculties, and then pleasantly excited them; the titillation of gratified vanity, and the exercise of intellectual power, combined to make the scene fascinating; he went more and more into society; it became more and more necessary to him—he was a social man. His father was a strange, I had almost said a stubborn man in some respects, and he might in some measure be blamed for this gradual sliding from sobriety of his son. To the affectionate letter of William, which beseeched him, now that his little hoard had been carried away, and now that his years were above fourscore, to come to Edinburgh, and dwell with his son, the old man answered, that God had yet left him vigour to mount the hills, and thread the valleys; and that, so long as this was the case, he would consider it unjust to become a burden to others. There was a stern independence and lofty resolve in the determination of the aged shepherd which harmonised well with his character; but it fell like lead upon the bright dreams of William—it strangled many of his best resolutions of future virtue and industry. He did not know that his father had already heard of his relaxed habits, and had even had reported to him, in exaggerated phrase, the detail of some of his midnight carousals. William went on, gaining fame, but losing virtue. In the popular use of the word, it was impossible for him to resist the importunities of those who pressed him to partake of their bottle or their bowl. They grasped his hand cordially; they sang the songs which he loved, or perhaps had written; they drank his health with cheers of enthusiasm. It was impossible for him to resist the entreaties of those persons—it was impossible for him not to believe them sincere. Nor were they otherwise; but the value of the sincerity of the intemperate and the immoral, what is it?

"Ashes within beautiful fruit."

William Riddell passed the whole of his examinations, and was, as the students say, "ready for a church." Nor was he long in procuring one. Among the friends to whom his genius and character had recommended him was a nobleman, who had the gift of the very kirk to which William and his father had been accustomed to resort. The incumbent died; the nobleman presented the living to William. With the new duties which now devolved upon him, came a crowd of new feelings and springs of action. He gave up his engagement with the literary periodical, he retired from his social companions, and he devoted himself to grave and worthy study and contemplation. The struggle was severe; but he bore up against it under the excitement of the new responsibility which had fallen upon him. He went down to the country with some of the most distinguished members of the Scottish Church, who officiated at his ordination. A proud, a tumultuously happy day was it for old David Riddell, who, with wonder and awe, felt his horny hand grasped by the great men whose very names he had considered subservient to his happiness of old time, and beheld his son, little William, the boy whom he had taught the alphabet upon Scaurhope Hill, with the pebbles that lie there—beheld him holding high discourse with these same dignitaries, saw that his opinions were listened to with respect, and that his thoughts, according as they were solemn or ludicrous, were responded to by these great men with gravity or broad grins. A delightful day was it to the old shepherd, as he beheld the first man in the General Assembly—the greatest man in the Scottish Kirk—lay his hand upon the youthful head of his beloved son, and consecrate him to the care of the souls who dwelt in the very valley where he had been born and reared, in which his genius was known, and his family, though humble, respected.

There was another, and an equally strong reason, for William's giving up his convivial habits and boisterous companions. He was in love.

It was at that least romantic of all places for a lover, a ball in Edinburgh, that William Riddell, the new pastor of Mosskirk, had first met Ellen Ogilvie, the daughter of the principal heritor of his parish, the owner of the hills on which his father had watched the sheep for above threescore years. Ellen had beheld him moving, a gay and welcome visitant, in noble halls; her hand had met his in the dance, in exchange with those of countesses and duchesses; she had heard his praise echoed from house to house, and from mouth to mouth; she was now alone in the country, with nothing but ignorant or coarse men around her: let it not seem wonderful that she, though the only daughter of a wealthy landholder, should bestow her love on the poor, handsome, manly, eloquent pastor of Mosskirk. And if this does not seem wonderful, it will surely not appear singular that the proud, haughty, bigoted, and ignorant father of Ellen should forbid the match, and should threaten with his vengeance the usurper of his daughter's love.

His vengeance! How weak a word to such a being as William! Not that he would not have rejoiced, for Ellen's sake, and for the sake of decorum, to have had the old gentleman's approval; not that he would not have used every possible means, consistent with honour and the dignity of his own character, to have gained the good opinion of the father of his beloved; but the laird was a man of the world, of acres, and of hundreds; his litany lay in pounds, shillings, and pence; his affections were wrapped up in rents and lordships; and that a poor parson, however God had chosen to ennoble him by genius and generous sentiments—that a poor parson should have dared to look upon a child of his with the eyes of affection, upon the child who was the natural heir of all those riches which he had laboured for half-a-century to amass, smote him as a personal insult, as an indignity which nothing but blood could wipe out. The mother of Ellen had all along thought differently; and from the first moment in which she had perceived the affection that existed between them (and oh, how much quicker women are than men in discovering these things!) she had encouraged their intimacy.

William Riddell, the minister of Mosskirk, was out of the canons of the duello, and the laird, therefore, instead of calling him out, was compelled to be satisfied with disinheriting Ellen, who, under circumstances which fully exonerated her from her father's tyrannical wishes, became William's wife.

My friend William had always been one of those persons who abhorred the usual terms on which wives are sought and husbands achieved. "Keeping a wife," was a phrase of blasphemy to him, or at least it seemed desecrating women to the level of a dog, a horse, or a cow—the "keeping" of which appeared, according to their phraseology, a matter of the same general import as the cherishing a beloved partner of all in which the human heart takes an interest. Nor, although he was a shepherd's son, could he perceive much inequality in a minister who earned four hundred pounds a-year, by looking after the spiritual interests of some hundreds of individuals, and who was to become the confidant of their griefs, and the sharer of their joys, their supporter in sickness, and their guide in the common path of life—he could not perceive much presumption in such a man matching himself with the daughter of an ignorant and coarse person, whose worth lay only in his wealth, whose character was not esteemed by his neighbours, and whose sympathy for suffering human nature only developed itself now and then in his bestowal of a basin of hot soup upon a starving beggar at Christmas.