The book of Scottish story

by Various

On the afternoon of the same day, he arrived at Daisybank, where he was welcomed with the greatest cordiality. His appearance was genteel and prepossessing, and it was not long before his new friends discovered, that the slight degree of awkwardness which at first clung to his manners, proceeded more from bashfulness and embarrassment than natural rusticity. But as he began to feel himself at home, this embarrassment of manner gradually gave place to an easy but unobtrusive politeness. Indeed it would not have been easy for a youth of similar views, at his first outset in life, to have fallen into more desirable company. Mr and Mrs Coventry were proverbial among their neighbours for the simplicity and purity of their manners, and they had laboured, not unsuccessfully, to stamp a similar character upon the minds of their children. Their family consisted of two sons and two daughters, the former of whom were confided to the care of William.

Mary, the eldest of the four, now in her sixteenth or seventeenth year, was in every respect the most interesting object at Daisybank. To a mind highly cultivated for her years, she united many of those personal graces and attractions which command little homage in the crowd, but open upon us in the shade of retirement, and lend to the domestic circle its most irresistible charms. In stature she scarcely reached the middle size. To the beauty derived from form and colour she had few pretensions; yet when her fine blue eyes moistened with a tear at a tale of distress, or beamed an unaffected welcome to the stranger or the friend, he must have been more or less than man who felt not for her a sentiment superior to admiration. Hers, in a word, was the beauty of expression—the beauty of a mind reflected, in which the dullest disciple of Lavater could not for a moment have mistaken her real character. Her education had been principally conducted under the eye of her parents, and might be termed domestic rather than fashionable. Not that she was entirely a stranger to those acquirements which are deemed indispensable in modern education. She had visited occasionally the great metropolis, though, owing to the prudent solicitude of her parents, her residence there had been comparatively short, yet probably long enough to acquire all its useful or elegant accomplishments, without any admixture of its fashionable frivolities.

From this hasty portraiture of Miss Coventry, it will be easily believed that it was next to impossible for a youth nearly of the same age, and not dissimilar in his dispositions, to remain long insensible to charms that were gradually maturing before his eyes, and becoming every day more remarkable. Fortunately, however, the idea of dependence attached to his situation, and a temper naturally diffident determined him to renounce for ever a hope which he feared in his present circumstances would be deemed ungrateful and even presumptuous. But this was waging war with nature, a task which he soon found to be above his strength. He had now, therefore, to abandon the hope of victory for the safety of retreat, and content himself with concealing those sentiments he found it impossible to subdue. Yet so deceitful is love, that even this modest hope was followed with disappointment. One fine evening in June, when he was about to unbend from the duties of the day, and retire to muse on the amiable Mary, he encountered the fair wanderer herself, who was probably returning from a similar errand. He accosted her in evident confusion; and, without being conscious of what he said, invited her to join him in a walk to a neighbouring height. His request was complied with in the same spirit it had been made in, for embarrassment is often contagious, particularly the embarrassment arising from love. On this occasion he intended to summon up all his powers of conversation, and yet his companion had never found him so silent. Some commonplace compliments to the beauty of the evening were almost the only observations which escaped his lips, and these he uttered more in the manner of a sleep-walker than a lover. They soon reached the limit of their walk, and rested upon an eminence that commanded the prospect of an extensive valley below. Day was fast declining to that point which is termed twilight, when the whole irrational creation seem preparing for rest, and only man dares to intrude upon the silence of nature. Miss Coventry beheld the approach of night with some uneasiness, and dreading to be seen with William alone, she began to rally him upon his apparent absence and confusion, and proposed that they should immediately return to the house. At mention of this, William started as from a dream, and being unable longer to command his feelings, he candidly confessed to her the cause of his absence and dejection. He dwelt with much emotion upon his own demerit, and voluntarily accused himself for the presumption of a hope which he never meant to have revealed until the nearer accomplishment of his views had rendered it less imprudent and romantic. He declared that he would sooner submit to any hardship that incur the displeasure of her excellent parents, and entreated that, whatever were her sentiments with regard to the suit he was so presumptuous as to prefer, she might assist him in concealing from them a circumstance which he feared would be attended with that consequence. To this tender and affectionate appeal, the gentle Mary could only answer with her sighs and blushes. She often indeed attempted to speak, but the words as often died upon her lips, and they had nearly reached home before she could even whisper an answer to the reiterated question of her lover. But she did answer at last; and never was a monarch more proud of his conquest, or the homage of tributary princes, than William was of the simple fealty of the heart of Mary.

In the bosom of this happy family William now found his hours glide away so agreeably that he looked forward with real regret to the termination of his engagement. His condition was perhaps one of those in which the nearest approach is made to perfect happiness; when the youthful mind, unseduced by the blandishments of ambition, confines its regards to a few favourite objects, and dreads a separation from them as the greatest of evils. The contrast between the patriarchal simplicity of his father’s fireside, and the comparative elegance of Mr Coventry’s parlour, for a season dazzled him with its novelty; while the ripening graces of Mary threw around him a fascination which older and more unsusceptible minds than his might have found it difficult to resist. In his domestic establishment Mr Coventry aimed at nothing beyond comfort and gentility. William was therefore treated in every respect as an equal, and was never banished from his patron’s table to make room for a more important guest, or condemned to hold Lent over a solitary meal, while the family were celebrating a holiday.

All our ideas are relative, and we estimate every thing by comparison. Upon this principle, William thought no female so lovely or amiable as Miss Coventry, and no residence so delightful as Daisybank. And he would not have exchanged his feelings, while seated on a winter evening amidst his favourite circle, scanning, for their amusement, a page of history, or the columns of a newspaper, while the snugness and comfort that reigned within made him forget the storm that pelted without, for the most delicious paradise an eastern imagination ever painted.

It will thus readily be imagined, that the saddest day of our tutor’s life was that on which he parted from this amiable family. He had here, he believed, spent the happiest moments of his existence, and instead of rejoicing that he had passed through one stage of his apprenticeship, he dwelt upon the past with pleasure, and looked forward to the future with pain.

Fortune, however, presented an insuperable obstacle to his spending his days in the inaction of private study; and he knew that he could neither gain, nor deserved to gain, the object of his affection, without establishing himself in life, by pursuing the course which had been originally chalked out to him. After, therefore, “pledging oft to meet again,” he bade adieu to Daisybank, loaded with the blessings of the best of parents, and followed with the prayers of the best of daughters. He now paid a farewell visit to his own parents; and, after remaining with them a few days, he proceeded to Edinburgh, and for a short period felt his melancholy relieved, by the thousand novelties that attract the notice of a stranger in a great city. But this was only a temporary relief, and as he had no friend in whom he could confide, he soon felt himself solitary in the midst of thousands. Often, when the Professor was expatiating upon the force of the Greek particles, his imagination was hovering over the abodes he had forsaken; and frequently it would have been more difficult for him to have given an account of the lectures he had been attending, than to have calculated the probability of what was passing at a hundred miles’ distance. But this absence and dejection at last wore off; and as he possessed good natural talents, and had been an industrious student formerly, he soon distinguished himself in his classes, and before the usual period was engaged as a tutor in one of the best families in Scotland.

This event formed another important era in his life. His prospects were now flattering; and as vanity did not fail to exaggerate them, he soon dropped a considerable portion of his humility, and began to regard himself as a young man of merit, to whom fortune was lavish of her favours. In his leisure hours he was disposed to mingle much in society, and, as his manners and address were easy and engaging, scarcely a week elapsed that that did not add to the number of his friends. The affections, when divided into many channels, cannot run deep in any, and, probably, for every new acquaintance whom William honoured with his esteem, it required a sacrifice of friendship at the expense of love, and produced some abatement of that devotion of soul which accompanies every true and permanent attachment. At Daisybank he had seen a simple favourite of the graces, but here he beheld the daughters of wealth and of fashion, surrounded with all the gloss of art, and soon began to waver in his attachment, and even to regard his engagement as little more than a youthful frolic. Still this temper of mind was not attained without many struggles between love and ambition, honour and interest; nor could he ever for a moment commune with himself, without feeling remorse for his inconstancy and ingratitude. He could not annihilate the conviction, that Miss Coventry was as faithful and worthy as ever, and had she been present to appeal to his senses, it is probable he might have been preserved from the crime of apostasy. But these were fits of reflection and repentance which repetition soon deprived of their poignancy. The world, the seductive world, returned with all its opiates and charms, to stifle in his bosom the feelings of honour, and obliterate every trace of returning tenderness. After this he became less punctual in his correspondence with Miss Coventry, and in place of anticipating the arrival of her letters, as he was wont to do, he allowed them to be sent slowly to his lodgings, opened them without anxiety, and read them without interest. Of all this inconstancy, ingratitude, and neglect, the simple Mary remained a silent, though not unconcerned spectator. Kind and generous by nature, and judging of others by herself, she framed a thousand excuses for his negligence; and when he did condescend to write to her, answered him as though she had been unconscious of any abatement in his attentions.

Matters remained in this uncertain state for the space of three long years—at least they seemed long to Miss Coventry—when William received his licence as a preacher. He now therefore thought of redeeming a pledge he had given to the minister of his native parish, to make his first public appearance in his pulpit; and after giving due intimation, he departed for the parish of ——, with his best sermon in the pocket of his best coat. The account of his visit spread with telegraphic despatch, long before telegraphs were invented, and was known over half the county many days before his arrival. This was another great and eventful day for his mother. She blessed Providence that she had lived to see the near fulfilment of her most anxious wish, and rising a little in her ambition, thought she could now die contented, if she should see him settled in a living of his own, and be greeted by her neighbours with the envied name of grandmother.—As William was expected to dine with his parents on his way to the parsonage, or, as it is called in Scotland, the manse, of ——, great preparations were made for his reception, and for the appearance of the whole family at church on the following Sunday. Mrs Arbuthnot drew from the family-chest her wedding-gown, which had only seen the sun twice during thirty summers; and her husband, for the first time, reluctantly applied a brush to his holiday suit, which appeared, from the antiquity of its fashion, to have descended, like the garments of the Swiss, through many successive generations of the Arbuthnots.

The little church of H—— was crowded to the door, perhaps for the first time, long before the bellman had given the usual signal. Mr Coventry, though residing in a different parish, had made a journey thither with several of his family, for the purpose of witnessing the first public appearance of his friend. In this party was the amiable Mary, who took a greater interest in the event than any one, save the preacher, was aware of.