Salted with Fire

The two children were in bed and asleep, and the parents were lying then, as they lay now, sleepless.

“Hoo’s Jeemie been gettin on the day?” said his father.

“Well enough, I suppose,” answered his mother, who did not then speak Scotch quite so broad as her husband’s, although a good deal broader than her mother, the wife of a country doctor, would have permitted when she was a child; “he’s always busy at his books. He’s a good boy, and a diligent; there’s no gainsayin that! But as to hoo he’s gettin on, I can beir no testimony. He never lets a word go from him as to what he’s doin, one way or anither. ‘What can he be thinkin aboot?’ I say whiles to mysel—sometimes ower and ower again. When I gang intil the parlour, where he always sits till he has done his lessons, he never lifts his heid to show that he hears me, or cares wha’s there or wha isna. And as soon as he’s learnt them, he taks a buik and gangs up til his room, or oot aboot the hoose, or intil the cornyard or the barn, and never comes nigh me!—I sometimes won’er gien he would ever miss me deid!” she ended, with a great sigh.

“Hoot awa, wuman! dinna tak on like that,” returned her husband. “The laddie’s like the lave o’ laddies! They’re a’ jist like pup-doggies till their een comes oppen, and they ken them ‘at broucht them here. He’s bun’ to mak a guid man in time, and he canna dee that ohn learnt to be a guid son to her ‘at bore him!—Ye canna say ‘at ever he contert ye! Ye hae tellt me that a hunner times!”

“I have that! But I would hae had no occasion to dwall upo’ the fac’, gien he had ever gi’en me, noo or than, jist a wee bit sign o’ ony affection!”

“Ay, doobtless! but signs are nae preefs! The affection, as ye ca’ ‘t, may be there, and the signs o’ ‘t wantin!—But I ken weel hoo the hert o’ ye ‘s workin, my ain auld dautie!” he added, anxious to comfort her who was dearer to him than son or daughter.

“I dinna think it wad be weel,” he resumed after a pause, “for me to say onything til ‘im aboot his behaviour til ‘s mither: I dinna believe he wud ken what I was aimin at! I dinna believe he has a notion o’ onything amiss in himsel, and I fear he wad only think I was hard upon him, and no’ fair. Ye see, gien a thing disna come o’ ‘tsel, no cryin upo’ ‘t ‘ll gar ‘t lift its heid—sae lang, at least, as the man kens naething aboot it!”

“I dinna doobt ye’re right, Peter,” answered his wife; “I ken weel that flytin ‘ill never gar love spread oot his wings—excep’ it be to flee awa’! Naething but shuin can come o’ flytin!”

“It micht be even waur nor shuin!” rejoined Peter.”—But we better gang til oor sleeps, lass!—We hae ane anither, come what may!”

“That’s true, Peter; but aye the mair I hae you, the mair I want my Jeemie!” cried the poor mother.

The father said no more. But, after a while, he rose, and stole softly to his son’s room. His wife stole after him, and found him on his knees by the bedside, his face buried in the blankets, where his boy lay asleep with calm, dreamless countenance.

She took his hand, and led him back to bed.

“To think,” she moaned as they went, “‘at yon’s the same bairnie I glowert at till my sowl ran oot at my een! I min’ weel hoo I leuch and grat, baith at ance, to think I was the mother o’ a man-child! and I thought I kenned weel what was i’ the hert o’ Mary, whan she claspit the blessed ane til her boasom!”

“May that same bairnie, born for oor remeid, bring oor bairn til his richt min’ afore he’s ower auld to repent!” responded the father in a broken voice.

“What for,” moaned Marion, “was the hert o’ a mither put intil me? What for was I made a wuman, whause life is for the beirin o’ bairns to the great Father o’ a’ gien this same was to be my reward?—Na, na, Lord,” she went on, checking herself, “I claim naething but thy wull; and weel I ken ye wouldna hae me think siclike thy wull!”

CHAPTER XV

It would be too much to say that the hearts of his parents took no pleasure in the advancement of their son, such as it was. I suspect the mother was glad to be proud where she could find no happiness—proud with the love that lay incorruptible in her being. But the love that is all on one side, though it may be stronger than death, can hardly be so strong as life! A poor, maimed, one-winged thing, such love cannot soar into any region of conscious bliss. Even when it soars into the region where God himself dwells, it is but to partake there of the divine sorrow which his heartless children cause him. My reader may well believe that father nor mother dwelt much upon what their neighbours called James’s success—or cared in the least to talk about it: that they would have felt to be mere hypocrisy, while hearty and genuine relations were so far from perfect between them. Never to human being, save the one to the other, and that now but very seldom, did they allude to the bitterness which their own hearts knew; for to speak of it would have seemed almost equivalent to disowning their son. And alas the daughter was gone to whom the mother had at one time been able to bemoan herself, knowing she understood and shared in their misery! For Isobel would gladly have laid down her life to kindle in James’s heart such a love to their parents as her own.

We may now understand a little, into what sort of man the lad James Blatherwick had grown. When he left Stonecross for the University, it was with scarce a backward look; nothing was in his heart but eagerness for the coming conflict. Having gained there one of its highest bursaries, he never spent a thought, as he donned his red gown, on the son of the poor widow who had competed with him, and who, failing, had to leave ambition behind him and take a place in a shop—where, however, he soon became able to keep, and did keep, his mother in what was to her nothing less than happy luxury; while the successful James—well, so far my reader already knows about him.

As often as James returned home for the vacations, things, as between him and his parents, showed themselves unaltered; and by his third return, the heart of his sister had ceased to beat any faster at the thought of his arrival: she knew that he would but shake hands limply, let hers drop, and the same moment be set down to read. Before the time for taking his degree arrived, Isobel was gone to the great Father. James never missed her, and neither wished nor was asked to go home to her funeral. To his mother he was never anything more or less than quite civil; she never asked him to do anything for her. He came and went as he pleased, cared for nothing done on the farm or about the house, and seemed, in his own thoughts and studies, to have more than enough to occupy him. He had grown a powerful as well as handsome youth, and had dropped almost every sign of his country breeding. He hardly ever deigned a word in his mother-dialect, but spoke good English with a Scotch accent. Neither had he developed any of the abominable affectations by which not a few such as he have imagined to repudiate their origin.

His father had not then first to discover that his son was far too fine a gentleman to show any interest in agriculture, or put out his hand to the least share in that oldest and most dignified of callings. His mother continued to look forward, although with fading interest, to the time when he should be—the messenger of a gospel which he nowise understood; but his father did not at all share her anticipation; and she came to know ere long that to hear him preach would but renew and intensify a misery to which she had become a little accustomed in their ordinary intercourse. The father felt that his boy had either left him a long way off, or had never at any time come near him. He seemed to stand afar upon some mountain-top of conscious or imagined superiority.

James, as one having no choice, lived at home, so called by custom and use, but lived as one come of another breed than his parents, having with theirs but few appreciable points of contact. Most conventional of youths, he yet wrote verses in secret, and in his treasure-closet worshipped Byron. What he wrote he seldom showed, and then only to one or two of his fellow-students. Possibly he wrote only to prove to himself that he could do that also, for he never doubted his faculty in any direction. When he went to Edinburgh—to learn theology, forsooth!—he was already an accomplished mathematician, and a yet better classic, with some predilections for science, and a very small knowledge of the same: his books showed for the theology, and for the science, an occasional attempt to set his father right on some point of chemistry. His first aspiration was to show himself a gentleman in the eyes of the bubblehead calling itself Society—of which in fact he knew nothing; and the next, to have his eloquence, at present existent only in an ambitious imagination, recognized by the public. Such were the two devils, or rather the two forms of the one devil Vanity, that possessed him. He looked down on his parents, and the whole circumstance of their ordered existence, as unworthy of him, because old-fashioned and bucolic, occupied only with God’s earth and God’s animals, and having nothing to do with the shows of life. And yet to the simply honourable, to such of gentle breeding as despised mere show, the ways of life in their house would have seemed altogether admirable: the homely, yet not unfastidious modes and conditions of the unassuming homestead, would have appeared to them not a little attractive. But James took no interest in any of them, and, if possible, yet less in the ways of the tradesmen and craftsmen of the neighbouring village. He never felt the common humanity that made him one with them, did not in his thoughts associate himself at all with them. Had he turned his feeling into thoughts and words, he would have said, “I cannot help being the son of a farmer, but at least my mother’s father was a doctor; and had I been consulted, my father should have been at least an officer in one of his majesty’s services, not a treader of dung or artificial manure!” The root of his folly lay in the groundless self-esteem of the fellow; fostered, I think, by a certain literature which fed the notion, if indeed it did not plainly inculcate the duty of rising in the world. To such as he, the praise of men may well seem the patent of their nobility; but the man whom we call The Saviour, and who knew the secret of Life, warned his followers that they must not seek that sort of distinction if they would be the children of the Father who claimed them.

I have said enough, perhaps too much, of this most uninteresting of men! How he came to be born such, is not for my speculation: had he remained such, his story would not have been for my telling. How he became something better, it remains my task to try to set forth.

I now complete the talk that followed the return of the simple couple to bed. “I was jist thinkin, Peter,” said Marion, after they had again lain silent for a while, “o’ the last time we spak thegither aboot the laddie—it maun be nigh sax year sin syne, I’m thinkin!”

“‘Deed I canna say! ye may be richt, Mirran,” replied her spouse. “It’s no sic a cheery subjec’ ‘at we sud hae muckle to say to ane anither anent it! He’s a man noo, and weel luikit upo’; but it maks unco little differ to his parents! He’s jist as dour as ever, and as far as man could weel be frae them he cam o’!—never a word to the ane or the ither o’ ‘s! Gien we war twa dowgs, he couldna hae less to say til’s, and micht weel hae mair! I s’ warran’ Frostie says mair in ae half-hoor to his tyke, nor Jeemie has said to you or me sin’ first he gaed to the college!”

“Bairns is whiles a queer kin’ o’ a blessin!” remarked the mother. “But, eh, Peter! it’s what may lie ahint the silence that frichts me!”

“Lass, ye’re frichtin me noo! What div ye mean?”

“Ow naething!” returned Marion, bursting into tears. “But a’ at ance it was borne in upo me, that there maun be something to accoont for the thing. At the same time I daurna speir at God himsel what that thing can be. For there’s something waur noo, and has been for some time, than ever was there afore! He has sic a luik, as gien he saw nor heard onything but ae thing, the whilk ae thing keeps on inside him, and winna wheesht. It’s an awfu’ thing to say o’ a mither’s ain laddie; and to hae said it only to my ain man, and the father o’ the laddie, maks my hert like to brak!—it’s as gien I had been fause to my ain flesh and blude but to think it o’ ‘im!—Eh, Peter, what can it be?”

“Ow jist maybe naething ava’! Maybe he’s in love, and the lass winna hear til ‘im!”

“Na, Peter; love gars a man luik up, no doon at his ain feet! It gars him fling his heid back, and set his een richt afore him—no turn them in upo his ain inside! It maks a man straucht i’ the back, strong i’ the airm, and bauld i’ the hert.—Didna it you, Peter?”

“Maybe it did; I dinna min’ vera weel.—But I see love can hardly be the thing that’s amiss wi’ the lad. Still, even his parents maun tak tent o’ jeedgin—specially ane o’ the Lord’s ministers—maybe ane o’ the Lord’s ain elec’!”

“It’s awfu’ to think—I daurna say ‘t—I daurna maist think the words o’ ‘t, Peter, but it wull cry oot i’ my vera hert!—Steik the door, Peter—and ticht, that no a stray stirk may hear me!—Was a minister o’ the gospel ever a heepocreete, Peter?—like ane o’ the auld scribes and Pharisees, Peter?—Wadna it be ower terrible, Peter, to be permittit?—Gien our ain only son was—”

But here she broke down; she could not finish the frightful sentence. The farmer again left his bed, and dropt upon a chair by the side of it. The next moment he sank on his knees, and hiding his face in his hands, groaned, as from a thicket of torture—

“God in haven, hae mercy upon the haill lot o’ ‘s.”

Then, apparently unconscious of what he did, he went wandering from the room, down to the kitchen, and out to the barn on his bare feet, closing the door of the house behind him. In the barn he threw himself, face downward, on a heap of loose straw, and there lay motionless. His wife wept alone in her bed, and hardly missed him: it required of her no reflection to understand whither he had gone, or what he was doing. He was crying, like King Lear from the bitterness of an outraged father’s heart, to the Father of fathers:

“God, ye’re a father yersel,” he groaned; “and sae ye ken hoo it’s rivin at my hert!—Na, Lord, ye dinna ken; for ye never had a doobt aboot your son!—Na, I’m no blamin Jeemie, Lord; I’m no cryin oot upo him; for ye ken weel hoo little I ken aboot him: he never opened the buik o’ his hert to me! Oh God, grant that he hae naething to hide; but gien he has, Lord, pluck it oot o’ ‘im, and him oot o’ the glaur! latna him stick there. I kenna hoo to shape my petition, for I’m a’ i’ the dark; but deliver him some gait, Lord, I pray thee, for his mither’s sake!—ye ken what she is!—I dinna coont for onything, but ye ken her!—Lord, deliver the hert o’ her frae the awfu’est o’ a’ her fears.—Lord, a hypocreet! a Judas-man!”

More of what he said, I cannot tell; somehow this much has reached my ears. He remained there upon the straw while hour after hour passed, pleading with the great Father for his son; his soul now lost in dull fatigue, now uttering itself in groans for lack of words, until at length the dawn looked in on the night-weary earth, and into the two sorrow-laden hearts, bringing with it a comfort they did not seek to understand.

CHAPTER XVI

But it brought no solace to the mind of the weak, hard-hearted, and guilty son. He had succeeded once more in temporarily soothing his conscience with some narcotic of false comfort, and now slept the sleep of the houseless, whose covering was narrower than he could wrap himself in. Ah, those nights! Alas for the sleepless human soul out in the eternal cold! But so heartless was James, that, if his mother had come to him in the morning with her tear-dimmed eyes, he would never have asked himself what could ail her; would never even have seen that she was unhappy; least of all would have suspected himself the cause of her red eyes and aching head, or that the best thing in him was that mental uneasiness of which he was constantly aware. Thank God, there was no way round the purifying fire! he could not escape it; he must pass through it!

CHAPTER XVII

Little knows the world what a power among men is the man who simply and really believes in him who is Lord of the world to save men from their sins! He may be neither wise nor prudent; he may be narrow and dim-sighted even in the things he loves best; they may promise him much, and yield him but a poor fragment of the joy that might be and ought to be his; he may present them to others clothed in no attractive hues, or in any word of power; and yet, if he has but that love to his neighbour which is rooted in, and springs from love to his God, he is always a redeeming, reconciling influence among his fellows. The Robertsons were genial of heart, loving and tender toward man or woman in need of them; their door was always on the latch for such to enter. If the parson insisted on the wrath of God against sin, he did not fail to give assurance of His tenderness toward such as had fallen. Together the godly pair at length persuaded Isobel of the eager forgiveness of the Son of Man. They assured her that he could not drive from him the very worst of sinners, but loved—nothing less than tenderly loved any one who, having sinned, now turned her face to the Father. She would doubtless, they said, have to see her trespass in the eyes of unforgiving women, but the Lord would lift her high, and welcome her to the home of the glad-hearted.

But poor Isy, who regarded her fault as both against God and the man who had misled her, and was sick at the thought of being such as she judged herself, insisted that nothing God himself could do, could ever restore her, for nothing could ever make it that she had not fallen: such a contradiction, such an impossibility alone could make her clean! God might be ready to forgive her, but He could not love her! Jesus might have made satisfaction for her sin, but how could that make any difference in or to her? She was troubled that Jesus should have so suffered, but that could not give her back her purity, or the peace of mind she once possessed! That was gone for ever! The life before her took the appearance of an unchanging gloom, a desert region whence the gladness had withered, and whence came no purifying wind to blow from her the odours of the grave by which she seemed haunted! Never to all eternity could she be innocent again! Life had no interest for her! She was, and must remain just what she was; for, alas, she could not cease to be!

Such thoughts had at one period ravaged her life, but they had for some time been growing duller and deader: now once more revived by goodness and sympathy, they had resumed their gnawing and scorching, and she had grown yet more hateful to herself. Even the two who befriended and comforted her, could never, she thought, cease to regard her as what they knew she was! But, strange to say, with this revival of her suffering, came also a requickening of her long dormant imagination, favoured and cherished, doubtless, by the peace and love that surrounded her. First her dreams, then her broodings began to be haunted with sweet embodiments. As if the agonized question of the guilty Claudius were answered to her, to assure her that there was “rain enough in the sweet heavens to wash her white as snow,” she sometimes would wake from a dream where she stood in blessed nakedness with a deluge of cool, comforting rain pouring upon her from the sweetness of those heavens—and fall asleep again to dream of a soft strong west wind chasing from her the offensive emanations of the tomb, that seemed to have long persecuted her nostrils as did the blood of Duncan those of the wretched Lady Macbeth. And every night to her sinful bosom came back the soft innocent hands of the child she had lost—when ever and again her dream would change, and she would be Hagar, casting her child away, and fleeing from the sight of his death. More than once she dreamed that an angel came to her, and went out to look for her boy—only to return and lay him in her arms grievously mangled by some horrid beast.

When the first few days of her sojourn with the good Samaritans were over, and she had gathered strength enough to feel that she ought no longer to be burdensome to them, but look for work, they positively refused to let her leave them before her spirit also had regained some vital tone, and she was able to “live a little”; and to that end they endeavoured to revive in her the hope of finding her lost child: setting inquiry on foot in every direction, they promised to let her know the moment when her presence should begin to cause them inconvenience.

“Let you go, child?” her hostess had exclaimed: “God forbid! Go you shall not until you go for your own sake: you cannot go for ours!”

“But I’m such a burden to you—and so useless!”

“Was the Lord a burden to Mary and Lazarus, think ye, my poor bairn?” rejoined Mrs. Robertson.

“Don’t, ma’am, please!” sobbed Isy.

“Inasmuch as ye did it to one of the least of these, ye did it to me!” insisted her hostess.

“That doesna apply, ma’am,” objected Isy. “I’m nane o’ his!”

“Who is then? Who was it he came to save? Are you not one of his lost sheep? Are you not weary and heavy-laden? Will you never let him feel at home with you? Are you to say who he is to love and who he isn’t? Are you to tell him who are fit to be counted his, and who are not good enough?”