FROM that day life flew upon celestial wings for Charley Frankland’s tutor. It was not that love-making proved possible, or that existence at Wodensbourne became at all what it had been at Ardmartin. The difference was in the atmosphere, which was now bright with all kinds of gladsome chances, and pervaded by anticipations—a charm which, at Colin’s age, was more than reality. He never knew what moment of delight might come to him any day—what words might be said, or smiles shed upon him. Such an enchantment could not, indeed, have lasted very long; but, in the meantime, it was infinitely sweet, and made his life like a romance to the young man. There was nobody at Wodensbourne to occupy Miss Matty, or withdraw her attention from her young worshipper; and Colin, with his poetic temperament, and his youthful genius, and all the simplicities and inexperience which rendered him so different from the other clever young men who had been seen or heard of in that region, was very delightful company, even when he was not engaged in any acts of worship. Lady Frankland herself acknowledged that Mr. Campbell was a great acquisition. “He is not the least like other people,” said the lady of the house; “but you must take care not to let him fall in love with you, Matty;” and both the ladies laughed softly as they sat over their cup of tea. As for Matty, when she went to dress for dinner, after that admonition, she put on tartan ribbons over her white dress, partly, to be sure, because they were the fashion; but chiefly to please Colin, who knew rather less about tartan than she did, and had not the remotest idea that the many-coloured sash had any reference to himself.
“I love Scotland,” the little witch said to him, when he came into the drawing-room, to which he was now admitted during Sir Thomas’s nap—and, to tell the truth, Lady Frankland herself had just closed her eyes in a gentle doze, in her easy chair—“but, though you are a Scotchman, you don’t take the least notice of my ribbons; I am very fond of Scotland,” said Matty;—“and the Scotch,” the wicked little girl added, with a glance at him, which made Colin’s heart leap in his deluded breast.
“Then I am very glad to be Scotch,” said the youth, and stooped down over the end of the sash till Matty thought he meant to kiss it, which was a more decided act of homage than it would be expedient, under the circumstances, to permit.
“Don’t talk like everybody else,” said Miss Matty; “that does not make any difference—you were always glad to be Scotch. I know you all think you are so much better and cleverer than we are in England. But, tell me, do you still mean to be a Scotch minister? I wish you would not,” said Matty, with a little pout. And then Colin laughed—half with pleasure at what he thought her interest in him, and half with a quaint recollection which belonged only to himself.
“I don’t think I could preach about the twentieth Sunday after Trinity,” he said with a smile; which, however, was a speech Miss Matty did not understand.
“People here don’t preach as you do in Scotland,” said the English girl, with a little offence. “You are always preaching, and that is what makes it so dull. But what is the good of being a minister? There are plenty of dull people to be ministers; you who are so clever—”
“Am I clever?” said Colin. “I am Charley’s tutor—it does not require a great deal of genius—” but while he spoke, his eyes—which Matty did not comprehend, which always went leagues further than she could follow—kindled up a little. He looked a long way beyond her, and no doubt he saw something; but it piqued her not to be able to follow him, and find out what he meant.
“If you had done what I wished, and gone to Oxford, Campbell,” said Sir Thomas, whose repose had been interrupted earlier than usual; “I can’t say much about what I could have done myself, for I have heaps of boys of my own to provide for; but, if you’re bent on going into the Church, something would certainly have turned up for you. I don’t say there’s much of a career in the Church for an ambitious young fellow, but still, if you do work well and have a few friends—. As for your Scotch Church, I don’t know very much about it,” said the baronet, candidly. “I never knew any one who did. What a bore it used to be a dozen years ago, when there was all that row; and now, I suppose, you’re all at sixes and sevens, ain’t you?” asked the ingenuous legislator. “I suppose whisky and controversy go together somehow.” Sir Thomas got himself packed into the corner of a sofa very comfortably, as he spoke, and took no notice of the lightning in Colin’s eyes.
“Oh, uncle! don’t,” said Miss Matty; “don’t you know that the Presbyterians are all going to give up and join the Church? and it’s all to be the same both in England and Scotland? You need not laugh. I assure you I know quite well what I am saying,” said the little beauty, with a look of dignity. “I have seen it in the papers; such funny papers!—with little paragraphs about accidents, and about people getting silver snuff-boxes!—but all the same, they say what I tell you. There’s to be no Presbyterians and no precentors, and none of their wicked ways, coming into church with their hats on, and staring all round instead of saying their prayers; and all the ministers are to be made into clergymen—priests and deacons, you know; and they are going to have bishops and proper service like other people. Mr. Campbell,” said Matty, looking up at him with a little emphasis, to mark that, for once, she was calling him formally by his name—“knows it is quite true.”
“Humph,” said Sir Thomas, “I know better; I know how Campbell, there, looked the other day when he came out of church. I know the Scotch and their ways of thinking. Go and make the tea, and don’t talk of what you don’t understand. But, as for you, Campbell, if you have a mind for the University and to go in for the Church—”
But this was more than Colin, being twenty, and a Scotchman, could bear.
“I am going in for the Church,” said the lad, doing all he could to keep down the excitement at which Sir Thomas would have laughed, “but it did not in the least touch my heart the other day to know that it was the twentieth Sunday after Trinity. Devotion is a great matter,” said the young Scotchman, “I grant you have the advantage over us there; but it would not do in Scotland to preach about the Church’s goodness, and what she had appointed for such or such a day. We preach very stupid sermons, I dare say; but at least we mean to teach somebody something—what God looks for at their hands, or what they may look for at His. It is more an occupation for a man,” cried the young revolutionary, “than reading the sublimest of prayers. I am going in for the Church—but it is the Church of Scotland,” said Colin. He drew himself up with a grand youthful dignity, which was much lost on Sir Thomas, who, for his part, looked at his new tutor with eyes of sober wonderment, and did not understand what this emotion meant.
“There is no occasion for excitement,” said the baronet; “nobody now-a-days meddles with a man’s convictions; indeed, Harry would say, it’s a great thing to have any convictions. That is how the young men talk now-a-days,” said Sir Thomas; and he moved off the sofa again, and yawned, though not uncivilly. As for Miss Matty, she came stealing up when she had made the tea, with her cup in her hand.
“So you do mean to be a minister?” she said, in a half whisper, with a deprecating look. Lady Frankland had roused up, like her husband, and the two were talking, and did not take any notice of Matty’s proceedings with the harmless tutor. The young lady was quite free to play with her mouse a little, and entered upon the amusement with zest, as was natural. “You mean to shut yourself up in a square house, with five windows in front, like the poor gentleman who has such red hair; and never see anybody but the old women in the parish, and have your life made miserable every Sunday by that precentor—”
“I hope I have a soul above precentors,” said Colin, with a little laugh, which was unsteady still, however, with excitement; “and one might mend all that,” he added a minute after, looking at her with a kind of wistful inquiry which he could not have put into words. What was it he meant to ask with his anxious eye? But he did not himself know.
“Oh yes,” said Matty, “I know what you could do: you could get a little organ and marry somebody who would play it, and teach the people better; I know exactly what you could do,” said the young lady with a piquant little touch of spite, and a look that startled Colin; and then she paused, and hung her head for a moment and blushed, or looked as if she blushed. “But you would not?” said Matty, softly, with a sidelong glance at her victim. “Don’t marry anybody; no one is of any use after that. I don’t approve of marrying, for my part, especially for a priest. Priests should always be detached, you know, from the world.”
“Why?” said Colin. He was quite content to go on talking on such a subject for any length of time. “As for marrying, it is only your rich squires and great people who can marry when they please; we who have to make our own way in the world—” said the young man, with a touch of grandeur, but was stopped by Miss Matty’s sudden laughter.
“Oh, how simple you are! As if rich squires and great people, as you say, could marry when they pleased—as if any man could marry when he pleased!” cried Miss Matty, scornfully. “After all, we do count for something, we poor women; now and then, we can put even an eldest son out in his calculations. It is great fun too,” said the young lady, and she laughed, and so did Colin, who could not help wondering what special case she might have in her eye, and listened with all the eagerness of a lover. “There is poor Harry—” said Miss Matty under her breath, and stopped short and laughed to herself and sipped her tea, while Colin lent an anxious ear. But nothing further followed that soft laughter. Colin sat on thorns, gazing at her with a world of questions in his face, but the siren looked at him no more. Poor Harry! Harry’s natural rival was sensible of a thrill of jealous curiosity mingled with anxiety. What had she done to Harry, this witch who had beguiled Colin?—or was it not she who had done anything to him, but some other as pretty and as mischievous? Colin had no clue to the puzzle, but it gave him a new accès of half-conscious enmity to the heir of Wodensbourne.
After that talk there elapsed a few days during which Colin saw but little of Matty, who had visits to pay, and some solemn dinner-parties to attend in Lady Frankland’s train. He had to spend the evenings by himself on these occasions after dining with Charley, who was not a very agreeable companion; and, when this invalid went to his room, as he did early, the young tutor found himself desolate enough in the great house, where no human bond existed between him and the little community within its walls. He was not in a state of mind to take kindly to abstract study at that moment of his existence, for Colin had passed out of the unconscious stage in which he had been at Ardmartin. There, however much he might have wished to be out of temptation, he could not help himself, which was a wonderful consolation; but now he had come wilfully and knowingly into danger, and had become aware of it; and far more distinctly than ever before had become aware of the difference between himself and the object of his thoughts. Though he found it very possible at times to comfort himself with the thought that this was an ordinary interruption of a Scotch student’s work, and noways represented the Armida’s garden in which the knight lost both his vocation and his life, there were other moments and moods which were less easily manageable; and, on the whole, he wanted the stimulus of perpetual excitement to keep him from feeling the false position he was in, and the inexpediency of continuing it. Though this feeling haunted him all day, at night, in the drawing-room—which was brightened and made sweet by the fair English matron who was kind to Colin, and the fairer maiden who was the centre of all his thoughts—it vanished like an evil spirit, and left him with a sense that nowhere in the world could he have been so well; but, when the stimulus was withdrawn, the youth was left in a very woeful plight, conscious, to the bottom of his heart, that he ought to be elsewhere, and here was consuming his strength and life. He went out in the darkness of the December nights through the gloomy silent park into the little village with its feeble lights, where everybody and everything was unknown to him; and all the time his demon sat on his shoulder and asked what he did there. One evening while he strayed through the broken, irregular village-street, to all appearance looking at the dim cottage-windows and listening to the rude songs from the little ale-house, the curate encountered the tutor. Most probably the young priest, who was not remarkable for wisdom, imagined the Scotch lad to be in some danger; for he laid a kindly hand upon his arm and turned him away from the vociferous little tavern, which was a vexation to the curate’s soul. “I should like you to go up to the Parsonage with me, if you will only wait till I have seen this sick woman,” he said; and Colin went in very willingly within the cottage porch to wait for his acquaintance, who had his prayer-book under his arm. The young Scotchman looked on with wondering eyes while the village priest knelt down by his parishioner’s bedside and opened his book. Naturally there was a comparison always going on in Colin’s mind. He was like a passive experimentalist, seeing all kinds of trials made before his eyes, and watching the result. “I wonder if they all think it is a spell,” said Colin to himself; but he was rebuked and was silent when he heard the responses which the cottage folk made on their knees. When the curate had read his prayer he got up and said good-night, and went back to Colin; and this visitation of the sick was a very strange experience to the young Scotch observer, who stood revolving everything, with an eye to Scotland, at the cottage-door.
“You don’t make use of our Common Prayer in Scotland?” said the curate; “pardon me for referring to it. One cannot help being sorry for people who shut themselves out from such an inestimable advantage. How did it come about?”
“I don’t know,” said Colin. “I suppose because Laud was a fool, and King Charles a ——”
“Hush, for goodness sake,” said the curate, with a shiver. “What do you mean? such language is painful to listen to. The saints and martyrs should be spoken of in a different tone. You think that was the reason? Oh, no; it was your horrible Calvinism, and John Knox, and the mad influences of that unfortunate Reformation which has done us all so much harm; though I suppose you think differently in Scotland,” he said with a little sigh, steering his young companion, of whose morality he felt uncertain, past the alehouse door.
“Did you never hear of John Knox’s liturgy?” said the indignant Colin; “the saddest, passionate service! You always had time to say your prayers in England, but we had to snatch them as we could. And your prayers would not do for us now,” said the Scotch experimentalist; “I wish they could; but it would be impossible. A Scotch peasant would have thought that an incantation you were reading. When you go to see a sick man, shouldn’t you like to say, God save him, God forgive him, straight out of your heart without a book?” said the eager lad; at which question the curate looked up with wonder in the young man’s face.
“I hope I do say it out of my heart,” said the English priest, and stopped short, with a gravity that had a great effect upon Colin;—“but in words more sound than any words of mine,” the curate added a moment after, which dispersed the reverential impression from the Scotch mind of the eager boy.
“I can’t see that,” said Colin, quickly, “in the church for common prayer, yes; at a bedside in a cottage, no. At least, I mean that’s how we feel in Scotland—though I suppose you don’t care much for our opinion,” he added with some heat, thinking he saw a smile on his companion’s face.
“Oh, yes, certainly; I have always understood that there is a great deal of intelligence in Scotland,” said the curate, courteous as to a South-Sea Islander. “But people who have never known this inestimable advantage—I believe preaching is considered the great thing in the North?” he said with a little curiosity. “I wish society were a little more impressed by it among ourselves; but mere information even about spiritual matters is of so much less importance! though that, I daresay, is another point on which we don’t agree?” the curate continued, pleasantly. He was just opening the gate into his own garden, which was invisible in the darkness, but which enclosed and surrounded a homely house with some lights in the windows, which, it was a little comfort to Colin to perceive, was not much handsomer nor more imposing in appearance than the familiar manse on the borders of the Holy Loch.
“It depends on what you call spiritual matters,” said the polemical youth. “I don’t think a man can possibly get too much information about his relations with God, if only anybody could tell him anything; but certainly about ecclesiastical arrangements and the Christian year,” said the irreverent young Scotchman, “a little might suffice;” and Colin spoke with the slightest inflection of contempt, always thinking of the twentieth Sunday after Trinity, and scorning what he did not understand, as was natural to his years.
“Ah, you don’t know what you are saying,” said the devout curate. “After you have spent a Christian Year, you will see what comfort and beauty there is in it. You say, ‘if anybody could tell him anything.’ I hope you have not got into a sceptical way of thinking. I should like very much to have a long talk with you,” said the village priest, who was very good and very much in earnest, though the earnestness was after a pattern different from anything known to Colin; and, before the youth perceived what was going to happen, he found himself in the curate’s study, placed on a kind of moral platform, as the emblem of Doubt and that pious unbelief which is the favourite of modern theology. Now, to tell the truth, Colin, though it may lower him in the opinion of many readers of his history, was not by nature given to doubting. He had, to be sure, followed the fashion of the time enough to be aware of a wonderful amount of unsettled questions, and questions which it did not appear possible ever to settle. But somehow these elements of scepticism did not give him much trouble. His heart was full of natural piety, and his instincts all fresh and strong as a child’s. He could not help believing, any more than he could help breathing, his nature being such; and he was half-amused and half-irritated by the position in which he found himself, notwithstanding the curate’s respect for the ideal sceptic, whom he had thus pounced upon. The commonplace character of Colin’s mind was such, that he was very glad when his new friend relaxed into gossip, and asked him who was expected at the Hall for Christmas; to which the tutor answered by such names as he had heard in the ladies’ talk, and remembered with friendliness or with jealousy, according to the feeling with which Miss Matty pronounced them—which was Colin’s only guide amid this crowd of the unknown.
“I wonder if it is to be a match,” said the curate, who, recovering from his dread concerning the possible habits of his Scotch guest, had taken heart to share his scholarly potations of beer with his new friend. “It was said Lady Frankland did not like it, but I never believed that. After all, it was such a natural arrangement. I wonder if it is to be a match?”
“Is what to be a match?” said Colin, who all at once felt his heart stand still and grow cold, though he sat by the cheerful fire which threw its light even into the dark garden outside. “I have heard nothing about any match,” he added, with a little effort. It dawned upon him instantly what it must be, and his impulse was to rush out of the house or do something rash and sudden that would prevent him from hearing it said in words.
“Between Henry Frankland and his cousin,” said the calm curate; “they looked as if they were perfectly devoted to each other at one time. That has died off, for she is rather a flirt, I fear; but all the people hereabouts had made up their minds on the subject. It would be a very suitable match on the whole. But why do you get up? you are not going away?”
“Yes; I have something to do when I go home,” said Colin, “something to prepare,” which he said out of habit, thinking of his old work, at home, without remembering what he was saying or whether it meant anything. The curate put down the poker which he had lifted to poke the fire, and looked at Colin with a touch of envy.
“Ah! something literary, I suppose?” said the young priest, and went with his new friend to the door thinking how lucky he was, at his age, to have a literary connexion; a thought very natural to a young priest in a country curacy with a very small endowment. The curate wrote verses, as Colin himself did, though on very different subjects, and took some of them out of his desk and looked at them, after he had shut the door, with affectionate eyes, and a half intention of asking the tutor what was the best way to get admission to the magazines; and on the whole he was pleased with what he had seen of the young Scotchman, though he was so ignorant of church matters; an opinion which Colin perfectly reciprocated, with a more distinct sentiment of compassion for the English curate, who knew about as much of Scotland as if it had lain in the South Seas.
Meanwhile Colin walked home to Wodensbourne with fire and passion in his heart. “It would be a very suitable match on the whole,” he kept saying to himself, and then tried to take a little comfort from Matty’s sweet laughter over “Poor Harry!” Poor Harry was rich and fortunate, and independent, and Colin was only the tutor; were these two to meet this Christmas time and contend over again on this new ground? He went along past the black trees as if he were walking for a wager; but, quick as he walked, a dog-cart dashed past him with lighted lamps gleaming up the avenue. When he reached the Hall-door, one of the servants was disappearing up stairs with a portmanteau, and a heap of coats and wrappers lay in the Hall.
“Mr. Harry just come, sir—a week sooner than was expected,” said the butler, who was an old servant and shared in the joys of the family. Colin went to his room without a word, and shut himself up there with feelings which he could not have explained to any one. He had not seen Harry Frankland since they were both boys; but he had never got over the youthful sense of rivalry and opposition which had sent him skimming over the waters of the Holy Loch to save the boy who was his born rival and antagonist. Was this the day of their encounter and conflict which had come at last?