CHAPTER VI.
A HOUSEHOLD CONTROVERSY.
NOTWITHSTANDING the great sobriety of her views, as disclosed above, Marion, on the eve of her marriage, was no doubt the most interesting member of the Buchanan family; and, if anything could have “taken off” the mind of Elsie from her own misfortune, it would have been the admiring and wondering study she was quite unconsciously making of her sister, who had come to the climax of a girl’s life, and who regarded it with so staid and middle-aged a view. Marion had always been a very steady sort of girl all her life, it was common to say. There was no nonsensical enthusiasm about her. Even when in love—that is, in the vague and gaseous period, before it has come to anything, when most girls have their heads a little pardonably turned, and the excitement of the new thing runs strong in their veins—even then, her deportment had been everything that could be desired in a minister’s daughter, and future minister’s wife. There had been no contrivings of meetings, no lingering on the links or the sands. Never once, perhaps, in that period when even a lassie is allowed to forget herself a little, had Marion failed to be at home in time for prayers, or forgot any of her duties. She was of the caste of the Scotch minister, in which the woman as well as the man belongs more or less to a sacred profession, and has its character to keep up. But, no doubt, it was owing to the sober tone of her own mind that she took at so early an age, and so exciting a moment of her career, the very sensible and unexalted views which she expressed so clearly. The Rev. Matthew Sinclair was neither cold nor negligent as a lover; he was limited by duty, and by a purse but indifferently filled. He could only come to see her after careful arrangement, when he could afford it, and when he could secure a substitute in his work. He could not shower presents upon her, even daily bouquets or other inexpensive luxuries. In those days, if you had a garden at your hand, you might bring your beloved “a flower”—that is, a bunch of flowers—roses and southernwood, and bachelor’s buttons and gilly-flowers, with a background of the coloured grasses, called gardener’s garters in Scotland, tightly tied together; but there were no shops in which you could find the delicate offerings, sweet smelling violets, and all the wonders of the South—which lovers deal in nowadays. But he did his part very manfully, and Marion had nothing to complain of in his attentions. Yet, as has been made apparent, she was not deceived. She did not expect, or even wish, to attach him to her apron strings. She was quite prepared to find that, in respect of “company,” that is society, he would prefer, as she said, his own kind. And she did not look forward to this with any prevision of that desolate sense of the emptiness of the world and all things, which was in the mind of Elsie when her brother told her that he wanted no lassies there. Marion knew that if she went into her husband’s study when two or three of the brethren were gathered together, her entrance would probably stop a laugh, and her husband would look up and say, “Well, my dear?” interrogatively, with just the same meaning, though less roughly than that of Rodie. She had seen it in her mother’s case; she accepted it as quite natural in her anticipations of her own. This curious composure made her, perhaps, all the more interesting—certainly a more curious study—to Elsie, who had fire and flame in her veins incomprehensible to the elder sister. Elsie followed her about with that hot iron to facilitate the marking, and drank in her words with many a protest against them. Let it not be supposed that Marion marked her own “things” with the vulgarity of marking-ink; but she marked the dusters and the commoner kinds of napery, the coarser towels and sheets, all the inferior part of her plenishing in this common way, an operation which occupied a good many mornings, during which there went on much edifying talk. Sometimes, while they sat at one end of the large dining-table in the dining-room,—for it was not permitted to litter the drawing-room with this kind of work,—Mrs. Buchanan would be seated at the other, with her large basket of stockings to darn, or other domestic mendings, and, in that case, the talk was more varied, and went over a wider field. Naturally, the mother was not quite philosophic or so perfectly informed as was the young daughter on the verge of her life.
“I hear,” said Mrs. Buchanan, “that old Mr. Anderson’s house in the High Street is getting all prepared and made ready for young Frank Mowbray and his mother. She is not a very wise woman, and very discontented. I fear that the old man left much less than was expected. When I think how good he was to us, and that Willie’s outfit and your plenishing are just, so to speak, gifts of his bounty, I feel as if we were a kind of guilty when I hear of his mother’s complaint. For, if he had not given us, and other people as well as much as he did, there would have been more for her, or at least for her Frank.”
“But she had nothing to do with it, mother,” said Marion; “and he had a good right to please himself, seeing it was all his own.”
“All that is quite true,” said Mrs. Buchanan; “I made use of the very same argument myself when your father was so cast down about it, and eager to pay it back, and James Morrison would not listen to him. I just said, ‘It’s in the very Scripture—Shall I not do what I like with my own?’ And then your father tells me that you must not always take the words of a parable for direct instruction, and that the man who said that was meaning—but if you ask him, he will tell you himself what we were to understand.”
“Was it the one about the unjust steward?” asked Elsie, suddenly looking up, with the heated iron in her hand.
“What would the unjust steward have to do with it?” said Mrs. Buchanan, astonished. “Neither your father nor Mr. Anderson would go for instruction to the unjust steward. Your father had a fine lecture on that, that he delivered about a year and a half ago. You never mind your father’s best things, you bairns, though one would think you might be proud of them.”
“I mind that quite clearly,” said Marion; “and, mother, if you’ll no be angry, I would like to say that it did not satisfy my mind. You would have thought he was excusing yon ill man: and more than that, as if he thought our Lord was excusing him: and, though it was papa that said it, that was what I could not bide to hear.”
It may be supposed how Elsie, with her secret knowledge, pricked up her ears. She sat with the iron suspended in her hand, letting Marion’s initials grow dry upon the linen, and forgetting altogether what she was about.
“I am astonished that you should say that,” said the mother, giving a little nod; “that will be some of Matthew’s new lights—for, I am sure, he explained as clear as could be that it was the man’s wisdom, or you might say cunning, that the Lord commended, so to speak, as being the best thing for his purpose, though his purpose was far from being a good one. Your father is not one that, on such a subject, ever gives an uncertain note.”
“It is an awfu’ difficult subject for an ordinary congregation,” said Marion. “Matthew is just as little a man for new lights as papa; but still he did say, that for a common congregation——”
“I thought it would be found that Matthew was at the bottom of it,” said Mrs. Buchanan, with a laugh; “though it would set a young man better to hold his peace, and make no comments upon one that has so much more experience than himself.”
“You are a little unjust to Matthew,” said Marion, nodding in her turn; “he made no more comment than any of the congregation might have done—or than I did myself. He is just very careful what he says about papa. He says that theology, like other things, makes progress, and that there’s more exegesis and—and other things, since my father’s time—which makes a difference; but he has always a great opinion of papa’s sermons, and says you may learn a great deal from them, even when——”
“I am sure we are much beholden to him,” said Mrs. Buchanan, holding her head high. “It’s delicate of him to spare your feelings; for, I suppose, however enlightened you may be beyond your fellows, you must still have some kind of objection to hear your father criticised.”
“Oh, mother, how can you take it like that?” said Marion; “there was no criticism. If anything was said, it was more me than him. I said I could not bide to hear a word, as if our Lord might have approved such an ill man. And he said it was dangerous for a mixed congregation, and that few considered the real meaning of a parable, but just took every word as if it was instruction.”
“And that was just your father’s strong point. He said it was like taking another man’s sail to fill up a leak in a boat. You would praise the man for getting the first thing he could lay his hands on to save himself and his crew, but not for taking his neighbour’s sail—that was just his grand point; but there are some folk that will always take things in the matter-of-fact way, to the letter, and cannot understand what’s expounded according to the spirit. That, however, has always just been your father’s special gift,” said the minister’s wife, de facto. She, who was only a minister’s wife in expectation, ought to have bowed her head; but, being young and confident, even though so extremely reasonable, Marion could not subdue herself to that better part.
“That was just what Matthew said—dangerous for a mixed congregation,” she repeated; “the most of them just being bound by nature to the letter, and very matter-of-fact——”
“No doubt Matthew is a great authority,” said Mrs. Buchanan, with a violent snap of her big scissors.
“Well, mamma,” said Marion, with the soft answer that does not always take away wrath, “you’ll allow that he ought to be to me——”
And there then ensued a deep silence; a whole large hole in the heel of Rodie’s stocking filled up, as by magic, in the mother’s hands, quickened by this contrariety, and the sudden absorption in her work which followed, and Marion marked twelve towels, one after the other, so quickly that Elsie could scarcely follow her with the iron in time to make them all shine. It was she who took up the thread of the conversation again, but not wisely. Had she been a sensible young person, she would have introduced a new subject, which is the bounden duty of a third party, when the other two have come to the verge of a quarrel. But Elsie was only sixteen, and this discussion had called back her own strange experience in the turret-room.
“It must have given papa a great deal of thinking,” she said. “Once me and Rodie were in the turret as—as he never comes now——” This was very bad grammar, but Elsie’s heart was full of other things. “We were reading Quentin Durward, and very, very taken up with all that was going on at Liege, if you mind.” Liége had no accent in Elsie’s mind or her pronunciation. “And then you came into the study, mother, and talked. And after he began again with his sermon. It was a long time ago, but I never forgot, for it was strange what he said. It was as if he was learning the parable off by heart. ‘Take now thy bill, and sit down quickly, and write fourscore’—or ‘write fifty.’ He said it over and over, just those words—sometimes the one and sometimes the other. It was awfu’ funny. We both heard it; both me and Rodie, and wondered what he could be meaning. And we dared not move, for though he knew we were there, we did not like to disturb him. We thought he had maybe forgotten us. We were so stiff, we could scarcely move, and that was always what he said, ‘Take now thy bill, and sit down——’”
Mrs. Buchanan had dropped her work and raised her head to listen; a puzzled look came over her face, then she shook her head, slightly, unable to solve the problem which she dimly felt to be put before her. She said, at last, with a change of countenance:
“I came into the study and talked?—and you there? What was I talking about? do you mind that?”
“Oh, nothing,” said Elsie. “Old Mr. Anderson; it was just before he died.”
“And you were there, Rodie and you, when I came in to talk private things with your father! Is that the kind of conduct for children in a decent house?”
Mrs. Buchanan had reddened again, and wrath, quite unusual, was in her tone.
“Mamma, when it was raining, and we had a book to read, we were always there, and father knew, and he never said a word!”
“You knew too, mother,” said Marion; “the two little things were always there.”
“Little things!” cried Mrs. Buchanan, almost with a snort—Rodie’s heel, stretched out upon her hand, and now filled up with a strong and seemly web of darning in stout worsted, was quite as big as his father’s. And Elsie was taller than either of the two women by her side. “They were little things with muckle lugs,” she said, with a rather fierce little laugh; “if you think, Elsie, it was right to spy upon the private conversation of your father and mother, that is not my opinion. Do you think I would have spoken to him as I did if I had known you two were there?”
“Mother, about old Mr. Anderson?” cried Marion, meditating; “there could be nothing so private about that.”
She gave them both a look, curious and anxious; Marion took it with the utmost composure, perhaps did not perceive it at all. Elsie, with a wistful but ignorant countenance, looked at her mother, but did not wince. She had no recollection of what that conversation had been.
“Oh, mamma,” she said, “we spying!” with big tears in her eyes.
“I am not saying you meant it,” said her mother; “it was a silly habit, but I must request, Elsie, that it never may happen again.”
“Oh!” cried Elsie, the big tears running over, “he never will come now! He is not caring neither for me nor the finest book that ever was written. There is no fear, mother. It breaks my heart to sit there my lane, and Rodie never will come now!”
“You are a silly thing,” said Mrs. Buchanan; “it is not to be expected, a stirring laddie. Far better for him to be out stretching his limbs than poring over a book. But I can understand, too, it’s a disappointment to you.”
“Oh, a disappointment!” Elsie cried, covering her face with her hands: the word was so inadequate.
To be disappointed was not to get a new frock when you want it, or something else, unworthy of a thought: but to be forsaken by your own brother! You wanted for that a much bigger word.
“All the same,” the mother said, “I have often things to say to your father that are between me and him alone, and not for you. You must not do this again, Elsie. Another time, if you hear me go in to speak to your papa, you must give warning you are there. You must not sit and hold your breath, and listen. There are many things I might say to him that were never intended for you. Now, mind what I say. I forgive you because I am sure you did not mean it; but another time——”
“There will never be another time, mother,” said Elsie, with a quivering lip.
“Well, I am sure I hope so,” said her mother, and she finished her stockings carefully, made them into round balls, and carried them away to put them into their respective drawers. At this particular moment, with all that was going on, and all that was being prepared in the house, she had very little time to spend with her daughters in the pleasant exercise of sewing, virtuous and most necessary as that occupation was.
“Do you remember what they were saying about old Mr. Anderson?” said Marion; “for I have always thought there was something about that—that was—I don’t know what word to say. He died, you know, when they were in his debt, and he freely forgave them; and that was why I got such a good plenishing, and Willie the best of outfits, and I would like to know what they said.”
“I do not mind what they said,” said Elsie; “and, if I did mind, I would not tell you, and you should not ask me. Rodie and me, we were not heeding about their secrets. It was just after, when my father went on and on about that parable, that we took any notice what he said.”
“And what was he saying about the parable?”
“Oh, I have told you already. He just went on and on—‘Take thy bill, and write fourscore’—you know what it says—till a person’s head went round and round. And we dared never move, neither me nor Rodie, and very glad we were when he went down-stairs.”
“Poor bit things, not daring to move,” said Marion. “But that was a strange thing to say over and over: he said nothing about that in his sermon, but just how clever the man was for his purpose, though it was not a good purpose. But Matthew is of opinion that it’s a dangerous thing to treat the parables in that way.”
“And how should Matthew know better than my father?” cried Elsie, in indignation. “He may just keep his opinion; I’m of the same opinion as papa.”
“It is not of much consequence what your opinion is,” said Marion, imperturbably; “but Matthew has been very well instructed, and he has all the new lights upon things, and the exegesis and all that, which was not so advanced in my father’s day. But it was a fine sermon,” she added, with an approving nod, “though maybe dangerous to the ignorant, which was all we ever said.”
As for Elsie, she ceased altogether to think of the mystery of that afternoon, and the sound of her father’s voice—which was such as she had never heard before—in her hot indignation against Matthew, who dared to be of a different opinion from papa.