Salted with Fire

CHAPTER XIII

It must be remembered that Blatherwick knew nothing of the existence of his child: such knowledge might have modified the half-conscious satisfaction with which, on his way home, he now and then saw a providence in the fact that he had been preserved from marrying a woman who had now proved herself capable of disgracing him in the very streets. But during his slow journey of forty miles, most of which he made on foot, hounded on from within to bodily motion, he had again, as in the night, to pass through many an alternation of thought and feeling and purpose. To and fro in him, up and down, this way and that, went the changing currents of self-judgment, of self-consolement, and of fresh-gathering dread. Never for one persistent minute was his mind clear, his purpose determined, his line set straight for honesty. He must live up—not to the law of righteousness, but to the show of what a minister ought to be! he must appear unto men! In a word, he must keep up the deception he had begun in childhood, and had, until of late years, practised unknowingly! Now he knew it, and went on, not knowing how to get rid of it; or rather, shrinking in utter cowardice from the confession which alone could have set him free. Now he sought only how to conceal his deception and falseness. He had no pleasure in them, but was consciously miserable in knowing himself not what he seemed—in being compelled, as he fancied himself in excuse, to look like one that had not sinned. In his heart he grumbled that God should have forsaken him so far as to allow him to disgrace himself before his conscience. He did not yet see that his foulness was ingrained; that the Ethiopian could change his skin, or the leopard his spots, as soon as he; that he had never yet looked purity in the face; that the fall which disgraced him in his own eyes was but the necessary outcome of his character—that it was no accident but an unavoidable result; that his true nature had but disclosed itself, and appeared—as everything hid must be known, everything covered must be revealed. Even to begin the purification without which his moral and spiritual being must perish eternally, he must dare to look on himself as he was: he would not recognize himself, and thought he lay and would lie hid from all. Dante describes certain of the redeemed as lying each concealed in his or her own cocoon of emitted light: James lay hidden like a certain insect in its own gowk-spittle. It is strange, but so it is, that many a man will never yield to see himself until he become aware of the eyes of other men fixed upon him; they seeing him, and he knowing that they see him, then first, even to himself, will he be driven to confess what he has long all but known. Blatherwick’s hour was on its way, slow-coming, but no longer to be shunned. His soul was ripening to self-declaration. The ugly self must blossom, must show itself the flower, the perfection of that evil thing he counted himself! What a hold has not God upon us in this inevitable ripening of the unseen into the visible and present! The flower is there, and must appear!

In the meantime he suffered, and went on in silence, walking like a servant of the Ancient of Days, and knowing himself a whited sepulchre. Within him he felt the dead body that could not rest until it was laid bare to the sun; but all the time he comforted himself that he had not fallen a second time, and that the once would not be remembered against him: did not the fact that it was forgotten, most likely was never known, indicate the forgiveness of God? And so, unrepentant, he remained unforgiven, and continued a hypocrite and the slave of sin.

But the hideous thing was not altogether concealed; something showed under the covering whiteness! His mother saw that something shapeless haunted him, and often asked herself what it could be, but always shrank even from conjecturing. His father felt that he had gone from him utterly, and that his son’s feeding of the flock had done nothing to bring him and his parents nearer to each other! What could be hidden, he thought, beneath the mask of that unsmiling face?

But there was a humble observer who saw deeper than the parents—John MacLear, the soutar.

One day, after about a fortnight, the minister walked into the workshop of the soutar, and found him there as usual. His hands were working away diligently, but his thoughts had for some time been brooding over the blessed fact, that God is not the God of the perfect only, but of the growing as well; not the God of the righteous only, but of such as hunger and thirst after righteousness.

“God blaw on the smoking flax, and tie up the bruised reed!” he was saying to himself aloud, when in walked the minister.

Now, as in some other mystical natures, a certain something had been developed in the soutar not unlike a spirit of prophecy—an insight which, seemingly without exercise of the will, sometimes laid bare to him in a measure the thoughts and intents of hearts in which he was more than usually interested; or perhaps it was rather a faculty, working unconsciously, of putting signs together, and drawing from them instantaneous conclusion of the fact at which they pointed. After their greeting, he suddenly looked up at his visitor with a certain fixed attention: the mere glance had shown him that he looked ill, and he now saw that something in the man’s heart was eating at it like a canker. Therewith at once arose in his brain the question: could he be the father of the little one crowing in the next room? But he shut it into the darkest closet of his mind, shrinking from the secret of another soul, as from the veil of the Holy of Holies! The next moment, however, came the thought: what if the man stood in need of the offices of a friend? It was one thing to pry into a man’s secret; another, to help him escape from it! As out of this thought the soutar sat looking at him for a moment, the minister felt the hot blood rush to his cheeks.

“Ye dinna luik that weel, minister,” said the soutar: “is there onything the maitter wi’ ye, sir?”

“Nothing worth mentioning,” answered the parson. “I have sometimes a touch of headache in the early morning, especially when I have sat later than usual over my books the night before; but it always goes off during the day.”

“Ow weel, sir, that’s no, as ye say, a vera sairious thing! I couldna help fancyin ye had something on yer min’ by ord’nar!”

“Naething, naething,” answered James with a feeble laugh. “—But,” he went on—and something seemed to send the words to his lips without giving him time to think—“it is curious you should say that, for I was just thinking what was the real intent of the apostle in his injunction to confess our faults one to another.”

The moment he uttered the words he felt as if he had proclaimed his secret on the housetop; and he would have begun the sentence afresh, with some notion of correcting it; but again he knew the hot blood shoot to his face.—“I must go on with something!” he felt rather than said to himself, “or those sharp eyes will see through and through me!”

“It came into my mind,” he went on, “that I should like to know what you thought about the passage: it cannot surely give the least ground for auricular confession! I understand perfectly how a man may want to consult a friend in any difficulty—and that friend naturally the minister; but—”

This was by no means a thing he had meant to say, but he seemed carried on to say he knew not what. It was as if, without his will, the will of God was driving the man to the brink of a pure confession—to the cleansing of his stuffed bosom “of that perilous stuff which weighs upon the heart.”

“Do you think, for instance,” he continued, thus driven, “that a man is bound to tell everything—even to the friend he loves best?”

“I think,” answered the soutar after a moment’s thought, “that we must answer the what, before we enter upon the how much. And I think, first of all we must ask—to whom are we bound to confess?—and there surely the answer is, to him to whom we have done the wrong. If we have been grumbling in our hearts, it is to God we must confess: who else has to do with the matter? To Him we maun flee the moment oor eyes are opent to what we’ve been aboot! But, gien we hae wranged ane o’ oor fallow-craturs, wha are we to gang til wi’ oor confession but that same fallow-cratur? It seems to me we maun gang to that man first—even afore we gang to God himsel. Not one moment must we indulge procrastination on the plea o’ prayin! From our vera knees we maun rise in haste, and say to brother or sister, ‘I’ve done ye this or that wrang: forgie me.’ God can wait for your prayer better nor you, or him ye’ve wranged, can wait for your confession! Efter that, ye maun at ance fa’ to your best endeevour to mak up for the wrang. ‘Confess your sins,’ I think it means, ‘each o’ ye to the ither again whom ye hae dene the offence.’—Divna ye think that’s the cowmonsense o’ the maitter?”

“Indeed, I think you must be right!” replied the minister, who sat revolving only how best, alas, to cover his retreat! “I will go home at once and think it all over. Indeed, I am even now all but convinced that what you say must be what the Apostle intended!”

With a great sigh, of which he was not aware, Blatherwick rose and walked from the kitchen, hoping he looked—not guilty, but sunk in thought. In truth he was unable to think. Oppressed and heavy-laden with the sense of a duty too unpleasant for performance, he went home to his cheerless manse, where his housekeeper was the only person he had to speak to, a woman incapable of comforting anybody. There he went straight to his study, but, kneeling, found he could not pray the simplest prayer; not a word would come, and he could not pray without words! He was dead, and in hell—so far perished that he felt nothing. He rose, and sought the open air; it brought him no restoration. He had not heeded his friend’s advice, had not entertained the thought of the one thing possible to him—had not moved, even in spirit, toward Isy! The only comfort he could now find for his guilty soul was the thought that he could do nothing, for he did not know where Isy was to be found. When he remembered the next moment that his friend Robertson must be able to find her, he soothed his conscience with the reflection that there was no coach till the next morning, and in the meantime he could write: a letter would reach him almost as soon as he could himself!

But what then would Robertson think? He might give his wife the letter to read! She might even read it of herself, for they concealed nothing from each other! So he only walked the faster, tired himself, and earned an appetite as the result of his day’s work! He ate a good dinner, although with little enjoyment, and fell fast asleep in his chair. No letter was written to Robertson that day. No letter of such sort was ever written. The spirit was not willing, and the flesh was weakness itself.

In the evening he took up a learned commentary on the Book of Job; but he never even approached the discovery of what Job wanted, received, and was satisfied withal. He never saw that what he himself needed, but did not desire, was the same thing—even a sight of God! He never discovered that, when God came to Job, Job forgot all he had intended to say to him—did not ask him a single question—knew that all was well. The student of Scripture remained blind to the fact that the very presence of the Living One, of the Father of men, proved sufficient in itself to answer every question, to still every doubt! But then James’s heart was not pure like Job’s, and therefore he could never have seen God; he did not even desire to see him, and so could see nothing as it was. He read with the blindness of the devil in his heart.

In Marlowe’s Faust, the student asks Mephistopheles—

   How comes it then that thou art out of hell?

And the demon answers him—

   Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it;

and again—

                    Where we are is hell;    And where hell is there must we ever be:    … when all the world dissolves,    And every creature shall be purified,    All places shall be hell that are not heaven;

and yet again—

   I tell thee I am damned, and now in hell;

and it was thus James fared; and thus he went to bed.

And while he lay there sleepless, or walked in his death to and fro in the room, his father and mother, some three miles away, were talking about him.

CHAPTER XIV

For some time they had lain silent, thinking about him by no means happily. They were thinking how little had been their satisfaction in their minister-son; and had gone back in their minds to a certain time, long before, when conferring together about him, a boy at school.

Even then the heart of the mother had resented his coldness, his seeming unconsciousness of his parents as having any share or interest in his life or prospects. Scotch parents are seldom demonstrative to each other or to their children; but not the less in them, possibly the hotter because of their outward coldness, burns the causal fire, the central, the deepest—that eternal fire, without which the world would turn to a frozen clod, the love of the parent for the child. That must burn while the Father lives! that must burn until the universe is the Father and his children, and none beside. That fire, however long held down and crushed together by the weight of unkindled fuel, must go on to gather heat, and, gathering, it must glow, and at last break forth in the scorching, yea devouring flames of a righteous indignation: the Father must and will be supreme, that his children perish not! But as yet The Father endured and was silent; and the child-parents also must endure and be still! In the meantime their son remained hidden from them as by an impervious moral hedge; he never came out from behind it, never stood clear before them, and they were unable to break through to him: within his citadel of indifference there was no angelic traitor to draw back the bolts of its iron gates, and let them in. They had gone on hoping, and hoping in vain, for some holy, lovely change in him; but at last had to confess it a relief when he left the house, and went to Edinburgh.

But the occasion to which I refer was long before that.

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.