The Wizard's Son: Volume 2 by Mrs. Oliphant - HTML preview

CHAPTER XVII.

The commonplace world has a strange look to a man who has himself come out of any great personal struggle, out of an excitement which no one knows anything about but himself. When he descends, with still the heave of strong emotion in his breast, there is a mixture of contempt and relief in the manner in which he regards the extraordinary stolidity and unimpressionableness of his fellows. He is glad that they are unaware of what has happened to himself, yet cannot help scorning them a little for their want of penetration; and it is a comfort to him to feel himself surrounded with the calm and indifference of strangers, yet he cannot help feeling that had they been of a higher nature, they must have divined the suppressed agitation with which he moves among them, his nerves all trembling with the strain through which they have passed. Thus Walter, when he landed at the village, met the looks of the country folk with a certain expectation of seeing some traces of the wondering curiosity with which they must be asking themselves what ailed Lord Erradeen? and felt himself at once baffled and disappointed and relieved to find them full of their usual friendliness and hospitality, but nothing more.

"We are real glad to see your lordship back," Mrs. Macfarlane said at the inn, "and I hope you mean to bide, and no just run away when you are getting acquaint with the country-side." Big John, who was looking on while his horses were being cared for, gave a tug to his hat in honour of Lord Erradeen, but scarcely withdrew his eyes from the other more interesting spectacle. And finally the minister, who was setting out upon one of his visitations, met his noble parishioner with the most cheerful good morning, without any indication of deeper insight.

"You are welcome home, Lord Erradeen," he said as the landlady had said, "and this time I hope we'll see more of you. Are you stepping my way? It is just a most beautiful morning for this time of the year, and I am going to one of my outlying corners; but you young gentlemen, what with your shooting, and stalking, and ploys in general, are not generally much addicted to a simple walk."

"I am going your way; I am no great sportsman; I want to see Shaw who lives somewhere in this direction, I think."

"I will show the way with pleasure, Lord Erradeen; but I doubt you will not find him in. He is out upon his rounds before now. He will be tackling you about Peter Thomson, and his farm. And I would be glad to say a word, too, if I might. They had been there all their lives; they never believed it possible that they would be sent away. It is very natural you should want to make the best of your property, but it was a blow; and though he was a little behind in his worldly affairs, he was always good to the poor, and an elder, and well-living person. Such a one is a loss to the country-side; but it is every man's duty, no doubt, to himself and his posterity, to make the best he can of his estate." This the minister said with an air of polite disapproval, yet acquiescence in a doctrine not to be gainsaid. "Political economy," he added, with a laugh, "did not come into my curriculum, although I was at college in Adam Smith's palmy days."

"If you think my actions have anything to do with Adam Smith!" cried Walter. It was a peculiarity of this young man, and perhaps of others beside, to resent above all things the imputation of a prudential motive. "I know nothing about Thomson," he added. "I was absent, and I suppose did—whatever I am supposed to have done—on the impulse of the moment, as I am too apt to do."

"That is a pity," said the minister, "especially when the well-being of others is concerned. You will pardon me, my lord, who am an old-fashioned person. The good of your property (if ye think this is for the good of your property) is always a motive, and some will think a sound one: but to decide what is of great consequence to other folk without thought, because you happen to be tired, or worried, or in an ill way——"

A natural flush of anger came to Walter's face: but notwithstanding all his faults there was something generous in him. He bit his lip to restrain a hasty word which was ready to burst forth, and said, after a moment, "The reproof is just. I had no right to be so inconsiderate. Still, as you say, the advantage of the property is a motive: there are some," he added bitterly, with a sense that he was speaking at some third person, "who think it the best in the world."

"And so it is in the right view," said Mr. Cameron; "that is what I always think when I read what those misguided creatures are wanting in Ireland, to do away with landlords altogether—and some even among ourselves," he added with that sense of the superiority of "ourselves" which dwells so calmly in the Scottish bosom. The last was said regretfully, with a shake of the head.

"I dare say," said Walter, "they have some reason in what they say."

"Some, but not the best. They have the kind of reason that lies on the surface—in so much as to have a thing of your own is better than hiring it from another. But in that way Peter Thomson, honest man, would have been doomed without remedy before your time, Lord Erradeen. He has been getting into troubled waters for some years: he would have had to sell the farm and begone if it had been his: but with a good landlord like what I live in hopes to see—a good man in trouble would be helped over the dangerous moment. He would be backed up when he was feeble. Perhaps it was just at all times an ideal: but that was what the old relationship might be."

"And the ideal is always problematical," said Walter. He was carrying on the same controversy still, taking the other side. "Most men I think would prefer to deal with their own even if it meant selling and losing, than to be subject to another man's will—as it appears Thomson has been to mine. That seems ridiculous indeed," he cried, with a sudden outburst of feeling, "that a good man, as you say, should depend on the fantastic will of—such a fool as I have been."

"My Lord Erradeen!" cried the minister in consternation. He thought the young man was going out of his wits, and began to be nervous. There was something, now he looked at him, wild in his air. "I have no doubt," he said soothingly, "that your decision—must have seemed very reasonable. I would not, though my feelings are enlisted and though I regret, go so far as to blame it myself."

"Why?" said Walter, turning upon him. "Because?—surely every man ought to have the courage of his opinions."

"Not for that reason," said the old minister, with a slight flush. "I have never been one," he went on with a smile, "that have been much moved by the fear of man. No. It is because now they have been forced to make the move it may be better for themselves; they would have struggled on, and perhaps at the end got through, but in Canada they will soon flourish and do well."

"Not without a struggle there either, I suppose," said Walter, with a fanciful disposition to resent the idea that Canada was an infallible cure.

"Not without a struggle—there you are right, my lord. There was first the sore, sore tug to pull up the roots of life that were so deeply implanted here; and the long voyage, which was terrible to the father and mother. It is very likely," he added, "that the old folk will never get over it. Transplanting does not do at their age. But then the young ones, they are sure to thrive: and the old will die all the sooner, which perhaps is not to be regretted when we get to the evening of life."

"That is surely an inhuman doctrine," Walter cried.

"Do ye think so, my young lord? Well! It becomes the young to think so; but for myself I have always seen a foundation of reason in the savage way of making an end of the old and helpless. It is better, far better for the survivors that they should have a horror of it, but for the aged themselves it is not so clear to me. They would be better away. An old man that has outlived all natural love and succour, and that just lives on against his will because he cannot help it, that is a sad sight."

"But not revolting, as it is to think of the other."

"The other does not revolt me. If my heritors, yourself the first, were to look in some fine day and bid me out to the banks of the loch and give me a heave into it—in deep clear water mind, none of your muddy, weedy bits—I stipulate for clean water," the old minister said with a laugh at his own joke.

"If that is all that is to happen to your emigrants," said Walter, "they surely would have been as well here."

"If that had been possible; but you see, Lord Erradeen, though there are few things that ye cannot manage to get your way in, on your level of life, on the lower level when we cannot get what we want, we have to put up with what we can get."

"Why should you think I can get my way? I have to put up with what I can get, as you say, like everybody else."

"Well, yes," said the minister, "it is a kind of universal rule; and it is just a sign of the disposition that conquers the world, that it will accept what it can get without making a moaning and a fretting over it."

"The second best," said Walter with a half-smile of irony: it was strange to come from a teacher so dissimilar to this experienced old man and hear the same doctrine once more repeated. Mr. Cameron nodded his head several times in sign of assent.

"What seems to our blindness often the second best; though you may be sure it is the best for us, and chosen for us by a better judge than we are. This is my way, to the right, up Glen-Dochart, and yonder is Shaw's house, the white one among the trees. I am extremely glad to have had this conversation with you, my lord. And if I can be of use to you at any time in any question that may puzzle ye—oh, I do not stand upon my superior enlightenment, or even on my office, with the like of you that probably belong to another Church; but I am an old man and have some experience. Good day to you, Lord Erradeen." The old minister looked back after he had left him, and waved his hand with a benevolent smile.

Lord Erradeen walked on. He waved back a kindly salutation; the meeting, the talk with a man who was his equal, his superior, his inferior, all in one, in wholesome human inconsistency, was a kind of event for him, separating him by a distinct interval, from the agitation of the night and morning, the terrible mental struggle, the philosophy that had fallen on his despair, not as healing dew, but like a baptism of fire, scorching his heart. Strange that the same reasoning should have come before him in this strange way, so accidental and without premeditation! Mr. Cameron took everything from a different point of view. The second best to him meant manly resignation, devout religious faith. To accept it "because it was chosen for us by a better guide than we," that was a difference almost incalculable. According to the minister's belief, "what we wanted" was a thing to be given up nobly when it was proved to be God's will so. But this point of view was so unlike the other that it brought a smile to Walter's lips as he went on. God's will, what had that to do with petty schemes to enrich a family? If it should so happen that he, driven by persecution, by temptations too strong to be resisted, by the feebleness of a spirit not capable of contending with fate, yielded once more to this influence which had operated so strangely upon his race, would that be God's will?—would it be ever possible to look upon it as "chosen by a better judge"? Walter was not used to the discussion of such problems; and he was weak with mental struggles and want of rest. He lingered for a moment before Shaw's house as he passed it, then rejected, with the sudden capricious impatience of his nature, the intention, only half formed, of seeing Shaw, and walked on with a fantastic sense of relief in having got rid of this disagreeable duty. "Another time will do just as well," he said to himself, and hurried on as if his walk had now a more definite, as well as a more agreeable, aim. But, as a matter of fact, he had no aim at all, and did not know where he was going or what he intended. Indeed he intended nothing. Perhaps he would have said "to think," had he been closely questioned; but it was a stretch of meaning to apply the term to that confusion of his thoughts in which everything seemed to be turning round and round. It was not like the sharp and keen dialogue of last night, in which, though all went on within his own spirit, there were two minds engaged, himself and another. Now he was left to himself; no one contending with him—no one helping, even by contention, to keep him to an actual point, and give energy and definiteness to the mental process going on within him. That process was still going on; but it was as if the wheels of a complicated and delicate machine had lost their guiding principle, and were all circling and whirring in space without an object, with the same show of motion as when fully employed, the same creak, and jar, and grind. Now and then there would come uppermost a phrase made clear out of the confusion—"the second best":—"something very good in its way; with which the majority of mankind is quite content and may be very happy;" "what we call in our blindness the second best": as his two oracles had said to him. Whether it was the practical level which every man must content himself with after the failure of the ideal, or whether it was the real best, chosen for us by "a better judge," this was what both had put before him. The two descriptions, so different, yet both perhaps true, came up before him at intervals with something of strange regularity, as if the words had been printed upon the constantly turning wheels. He walked very quickly along the moorland road, not caring where he went, nor seeing what was round him. The fresh air blew in his face, with the force and keenness which an autumn wind has in a deeply-scooped and somewhat narrow glen among the hills, but seemed only to quicken the pace of the turning wheels, and all that machinery circling giddily, grinding out nothing, making his very soul sick and dizzy as it went on and on.

Suddenly the whirr and movement in his head calmed and stopped. A homely figure, in colour and aspect like an embodiment of those wild, sheep-feeding, rugged, but not majestic slopes that hemmed in the valley on either side, became visible coming down a path that led to the main road on which Walter was. It was that of a man, tall and largely developed, but without any superfluous bulk, roughly clad, roughly shod, lifting his feet high, like one accustomed to bog and heather, with the meditative slow pace of a rustic whose work demanded no hurry, and who had time for thought in all he did. Walter, with the quick senses of his youth, quickened still more by the excitement of the circumstances amid which, once and only once, he had seen Duncan Fraser, recognised him at once, and something like the liveliness of a new impulse moved him. Who could tell but that this man of the hills might be an oracle too, and out of the silence of his lowly life might have brought something to help a soul in peril? Walter waited till the cotter came up to him, who was not on his part so quick to recognise his landlord, of whom he had seen so little, and thought it might be some "tourist," or some other Southland person, ignorant of these parts, and wanting information about the way, which was not inducement enough to make Duncan quicken his steps. When they met, he perceived that he had "seen the face before," but went no further, and awaited with a certain air of stolid gravity what the stranger might have to say.

"You are—Fraser—of that glen up there? I almost forget how you call it—Truach-Glas."

"Ay, I am just sae; Duncan Fraser, at your service," replied the man, not without the slight hauteur of a Highlander interrogated imperatively by a personage in whom he acknowledges no right to do so.

"You don't remember me, apparently," Walter said.

"No, I cannot just say that I do; and yet I've seen your face before," said Duncan, with a curious look.

"Never mind that. I want you to tell me if you are contented now, and happy in your glen—now that you are free of all your trouble about rent?"

Duncan's first impulse was to say, What is that to you, I would like to ken? But the words had already set the slower mechanism of his brain to work; and, after a moment, he took his blue bonnet from his head, and with a bow in which there was a certain rustic dignity, said—

"You'll be the laird, my Lord Erradeen? I have good cause to ken your face that was once to us all just like the face of an angel out o' heaven."

"You make too much of it," said Walter, with a smile; for the expression pleased him in spite of himself. "No one could have done otherwise in my place."

"The auld wives," said Duncan, with a little huskiness in his throat, "do not think sae, sir. They mind you at their Books, morning and night."

Walter did not know very well what "minding him at the Books" meant; but he guessed that somehow or other it must refer to prayers; and he said somewhat lightly—

"Do you think that will do me much good?"

Duncan's honest face turned upon him a look of displeasure. The hill-side patriarch put on his bonnet gravely.

"It should, if there's truth in Scripture," he said, somewhat sternly; "but nae doubt it is just one of the most awfu' mysteries how a wilful soul will baffle baith God's goodwill and gude folk's prayers."

This was so curiously unlike anything he had expected, that Lord Erradeen gave his humble monitor one startled glance, and for the moment was silenced. He resumed, however, a minute after, feeling a certain invigoration come to him from his contact with simple nature.

"I acknowledge," he said, "though you are a little hard upon me, Fraser, that I have brought this on myself. But I want to know about you, how things are going. Are you satisfied with your position now? And is everything made smooth for you by the remittal of the rent?"

At this Duncan became in his turn confused.

"Nae doubt," he said, "it has been a great help, sir—my lord. Ye'll excuse me, but I'm little used to lordships, and I canna get my mouth about it."

"Never mind my lordship. I want to know the real truth. Your minister has been talking to me about Thomson—the man at the farm." Walter pointed vaguely to the hill-side, having no idea where Peter Thomson's farm was, about which so much had been said. "He has been sent away while you have stayed. Let me know which has been the best."

Duncan looked more embarrassed than ever, and shuffled from one foot to the other, looking down upon the wet and brilliant green of the grass on which he stood.

"We were all muckle obliged to you, my lord; and no one of us has grudged to say sae," he said.

"But that is not the question," Walter cried, with a little impatience.

"To flit the old folk would have been impossible," said Duncan, as if speaking to himself. "It was just a deliverance, and the Lord's doing, and wonderful in our eyes. But, sir, there is nothing in this world that is pure good. The soil is cauld: there is little will come out of it: and though we're far out o' the way o' the world in our bit glen, I reckon that what ye ca' progress and a' that, has an effeck whether or no. We want mair than our forbears wanted. No, no just education and advancement: my uncle Willie was brought up a minister, and got a' the education my Robbie is ettling at, though my grandfather had, maybe, less to spare than me. But just there is a difference in the ways o't. And maybe if it had come to the worse, and ye had driven us out, instead of being sae generous——"

"It would have been better for you," said Walter, as his companion paused.

"I'm not saying that. It was just deliverance. I will tell ye mair, my lord. If I had been driven out, me and my auld mother, and my little bairns, I could have found it in my heart to curse ye, sae young, sae rich, sae well off, and sae inhuman. And the auld wife's death would have lain at your door, and the bairns would never have forgotten it, however well they had prospered, no even when they came to be reasonable men, and could see baith sides of the question like me; they would have carried it with them to yon New World, as they call it; it would have grown to be a tradition and a meesery for ever. Now," said Duncan, with a hoarse half-laugh of emotion, "the sting is out of it whatever happens."

"I am glad of that, anyhow," said Walter.

"And so am I—and so am I! When ye have a sense of being wranged in your heart, it's like a burnin' wound, like thae puir Irish, the Lord help them! And what was our pickle siller to the like of you? But——" Duncan said, and paused, not knowing how to proceed with due respect and gratitude for what his landlord had done.

"But—what you expected has not been realised? the rent, after all, made but a small difference—the relief was not what you hoped?"

"I am just incapable, sir, of making ye a right answer," said Duncan, with vehemence. "It's just the effeck of the times, and nae fault o' yours or ours—at least that is all I can make of it. We want mair than our forbears wanted. We are no so easy content. The lads at the college canna live as simple as they once lived. That makes it harder for everybody. The callants! I would not bind them to a life like mine; they would have done better for themselves, though it would have killed granny, and been a sore burden upon Jeannie and me."

"The fact is, Duncan, that to have your own way is not much better than to have some one else's way, and that there is nothing worth making a fight about," Walter said, with a bitterness which his humble companion did not understand, and still less approved.

"No that, my lord," said Duncan, "but just that nothing that is mortal is perfect blessedness, except what is said in the psalm, 'that man—that walketh not astray.' Life is a struggle for the like of us, and maybe for most other folk. We have just to put the evil and the good against one another, and rejoice when the good is a wee predominant over the evil."

He used longer words perhaps than an Englishman of his rank would have used; and there was a something of Celtic fine manners and natural dignity about him which gave importance to his speech.

"That means—a compromise: no ideal in this world, no absolute good, but only a practicable something that we can get along with."

Walter said this with a scorn of it, yet growing belief in it, which gave strange vehemence to his tone. He did not expect his rustic companion to understand him, nor did he think of any response.

"It is just this, sir," said Duncan, "that here we have nae continuing ceety, but look for one to come.”

END OF VOL. II.