COSMO saw nothing more of Joanna Huntley, nor of her bright-eyed companion for a long time. He fell back into his old loneliness, with his high window, and his landlady, and the Highland student for society. Cameron, whom the boy made theories about, and wistfully contemplated on the uncomprehended heights of his maturer age, knew a good deal by this time of the history of the Livingstones, a great deal more than Cosmo was aware of having told him, and had heard all about the adventure in the High Street, about Desirée’s laugh and the old French grammar which Cosmo had secretly bought at a book-stall.
“If she had only taken to Latin, as the philosophers used to do at the Reformation time,” cried Cosmo, with a little fun and a great deal of seriousness, “but women never learn Latin now-a-days. Why shouldn’t they?”
“Does it do us so much good?” said Cameron, brushing a little dust carefully from the sleeve of that black coat of his, which it went to his heart to see growing rustier every day, and casting a momentary glance of almost envy at the workmen in their comfortable fustian jackets. Cameron was on his way to knock the “Rudiments” into the heads of three little boys, in whose service the gaunt Highlander tasted the sweets of “private tuition,” so that at the moment he had less appreciation than usual of the learning after which he had toiled all his life.
“If any one loves scholarship, you should!” cried Cosmo, with a little enthusiasm.
“Why?” said the elder man, turning round upon him with a momentary gleam of proud offense in his eye. The Highlander wanted no applause for the martyrdoms of his life. On the contrary, it galled him to think that his privations should be taken into account by any one as proofs of his love of learning. His strong, absolute, self-denying temper wanted that last touch of frankness and candor which raises the character above detraction and above narrowness. He could not acknowledge his poverty, and take his stand upon it boldly. It was a necessity of his nature to conceal what he could manfully endure. But the glance which rested on Cosmo softened.
“Letters may be humane and humanizing, Cosmo,” said the Highland student, with a little humor; “but I doubt if men feel this particular influence of them in teaching little callants. I don’t think, in a general way, that either my genteel boys in Fette’s Row, or my little territorial villains in St. Mary’s Wynd, improve my humanity.”
“Yet the last, at least, is purely a voluntary office and labor of love,” said Cosmo, earnestly.
Cameron smiled.
“I’m but a limited man,” he said; “love takes but narrow bounds with the like of me. Two or three at the most are as many as my heart can hold. Are you horrified to hear it, Cosmo? I’ll do my neighbor a good turn if I can, and I’ll not think ill of him if I can help it; but love, laddie, love!—that’s for one friend—for a mother or—a wife—not for every common man or every bairn I see in the street and have compassion on. No! Love is a different concern.”
“Is it duty, then?” said Cosmo, with a small shrug of his boyish shoulders.
“Hush! If I can not love every man I see, I can love Him who loves all!” said the Highlander, raising his high head with an unconscious loftiness and elevation of gesture. Cosmo made no answer and no comment—he was awed for the moment with the personal reality of that heavenly affection which made this limited earthly man, strong in his own characteristic individualities, and finding it impossible to abound in universal tenderness, still to do with fervor those works of the Evangelist which were for love of One who loved the all, whom he himself had not a heart expansive enough to love.
When Cameron arrived at the house of his pupils, Cosmo wandered back again toward the region of his friend’s unrewarded labors;—ah! those young champions of Maudlin and Trinity!—what a difference between this picture and that. Let us confess that the chances are that Cameron, at the height of his hardly-earned scholarship, would still be a world behind a double-first; and it is likely, unless sheer strength had done it, that nothing earthly could have made a stroke-oar of the Highlandman. If any one could have watched him through the course of one of his laborious days, getting up to eat his rude and scanty breakfast, going out to his lecture and classes, from thence to one quarter and another to his pupils—little boys in the “Rudiments;” from thence to St. Mary’s Wynd to do the rough pioneer evangelist work of a degraded district—work which perhaps his Divinity professor, perhaps the minister of his church urged upon him as the best preparation for his future office—then home to his garret to a meal which he would not have liked any one to see or share, to labor over his notes, to read, to get up his college work for the next day, to push forward, steadily, stoutly, silently, through almost every kind of self-denial possible to man.
Then, when the toilsome session was over, perhaps the weary man went home—not to Switzerland or Wales with a reading party—not to shoot, nor to fish, nor to travel, nor to give himself up to the pure delights of uninterrupted study—perhaps, instead, to return to weary days of manual labor, to the toils of the field, or the trials of the schoolmaster; or perhaps finding the expense of the journey too much for him, or thinking it inexpedient to risk his present pupils, lingered through the summer in Edinburgh, teaching, reading, pinching, refreshing himself by his work in St. Mary’s Wynd. The result of all this was not an elegant divine, nor an accomplished man of the world—very possibly it might be an arbitrary optimist, a one-sided Christian—but it was neither an idle nor a useless man.
Some thoughts of this kind passed through the mind of Cosmo Livingstone as he went through the same St. Mary’s Wynd, pondering the occupations and motives of his friend—the only comparison which he made, thinking of Cameron, was with himself; forgetting the difference of their age entirely, as such a boy was likely to do, Cosmo could not be sufficiently disgusted and discontented with his own dependence and worthlessness. Then he had, at the present moment, no particular vocation for the church. St. Mary’s Wynd, so far from attracting him, even failed at this moment to convey to the visionary lad the sentiment which it wrote with words of fire upon the less sensitive mind of Cameron. Love for the inhabitants of those wretched closes—for the miserable squalid forms coming and going through those high, dark, narrow, winding stairs, down which sometimes a stray sunbeam, piercing through a dusty window, threw a violent glory into the darkness, like a Rembrandt or an indignant angel, seemed something impossible. He believed in the universal love of the Lord, but it only filled him with awe and wonder—he did not understand it as Cameron did—and Cosmo could not see how reaching ultimately into the position of teaching, preaching, laboring, wearing out, for the benefit of such a population, was worth the terrible struggle of preparation which at present taxed all the energies of his friend. He repeated to himself dutifully what he had heard—that to save a soul was better than to win a kingdom—but such words were still only of the letter, and not of the spirit, for Cosmo. And he was glad at last to escape from the subject, and hasten to the fresh and breezy solitude of the hill, which was not a mile from this den of misery, yet seemed as far away as another world.
It was spring, and the air was full of that invigorating hopefulness, which was none the worse to Cosmo for coming on a somewhat chilly breeze. The glory of the broad, blue Firth, with its islands and its bays, and the world of bright, keen, sunny air in which its few sails shone with a dazzling indescribable whiteness, like nothing but themselves—the round white clouds ranging themselves in lines and fantastic groups over the whole low varied line of the opposite coast—and the intoxication of that free, unbroken breeze, coming fresh over miles of country and leagues of sea, lifted Cosmo out of his former thoughts, only to rouse in him a vague heroical excitement—a longing after something, he knew not what, which any tangible shaping would but have vulgarized. The boy spread out his arms with an involuntary enthusiasm, drinking in that wine of youth. What would he do?—he stood upon the height of the hill like a young Mercury, ready to fly over all the world on the errands of the gods—but even the voice of Jupiter, speaking out of the clouds, would only have been prose and bathos to the unconscious, unexplainable poetic elevation of the lad, who neither knew himself nor the world.
A word of any kind, even the sublimest, would have brought him to his feet and to a vague sense of shame and self-ridicule in a moment—which consummation happened to him before he was aware.
The word was a name—a name which he had only heard once before—and the voice that spoke it was at some distance, for the sound came ringing to him, faint yet clear, brightened into a cry of pleasure by the breath of the hills on which it came. “Desirée!” The boy started, blushed at himself in the awaking of his dream, and pausing only a moment, rushed down the slope of Arthur’s Seat toward Duddingstone, where, on the first practicable road which he approached, he perceived a solemn procession of young ladies, two-and-two, duly officered and governed, and behaving themselves irreproachably. Cosmo did not make a rush down through their seemly and proper ranks, to find out Desirée or Joanna; instead, the lad watched them for a moment, and then turned round laughing, and went back to his lodging—laughing the shamefaced rosy laugh of his years, when one can feel one has been a little ridiculous without feeling one’s self much the worse for it, and when it strikes rather comically than painfully to find how different one’s high-flown fancies are, to all the sober arrangements of the every-day world.