|
|
|
Prev
| Next
| Contents
CHAPTER XXVI: THE SCHOOLMASTER
Alexander Graham, the schoolmaster, was the son of a grieve, or
farm overseer, in the North of Scotland. By straining every nerve,
his parents had succeeded in giving him a university education,
the narrowness of whose scope was possibly favourable to the
development of what genius, rare and shy, might lurk among the
students. He had laboured well, and had gathered a good deal from
books and lectures, but far more from the mines they guided him to
discover in his own nature. In common with so many Scotch parents,
his had cherished the most wretched as well as hopeless of all
ambitions, seeing it presumes to work in a region into which no
ambition can enter--I mean that of seeing their son a clergyman.
In presbyter, curate, bishop, or cardinal, ambition can fare but as
that of the creeping thing to build its nest in the topmost boughs
of the cedar. Worse than that; my simile is a poor one; for the
moment a thought of ambition is cherished, that moment the man is
out of the kingdom. Their son with already a few glimmering insights,
which had not yet begun to interfere with his acceptance of the
doctrines of his church, made no opposition to their wish, but
having qualified himself to the satisfaction of his superiors, at
length ascended the pulpit to preach his first sermon.
The custom of the time as to preaching was a sort of compromise
between reading a sermon and speaking extempore, a mode morally
as well as artistically false: the preacher learned his sermon by
rote, and repeated it--as much like the man he therein was not,
and as little like the parrot he was, as he could. It is no wonder,
in such an attempt, either that memory should fail a shy man, or
assurance an honest man. In Mr Graham's case it was probably the
former: the practice was universal, and he could hardly yet have
begun to question it, so as to have had any conscience of evil.
Blessedly, however, for his dawning truth and well being, he failed
--failed utterly--pitifully. His tongue clave to the roof of his
mouth; his lips moved, but shaped no sound; a deathly dew bathed
his forehead; his knees shook; and he sank at last to the bottom
of the chamber of his torture, whence, while his mother wept below,
and his father clenched hands of despair beneath the tails of his
Sunday coat, he was half led, half dragged down the steps by the
bedral, shrunken together like one caught in a shameful deed, and
with the ghastly look of him who has but just revived from the faint
supervening on the agonies of the rack. Home they crept together,
speechless and hopeless all three, to be thenceforth the contempt
and not the envy of their fellow parishioners. For if the vulgar
feeling towards the home born prophet is superciliousness, what
must the sentence upon failure be in ungenerous natures, to which
every downfall of another is an uplifting of themselves! But Mr
Graham's worth had gained him friends in the presbytery, and he
was that same week appointed to the vacant school of another parish.
There it was not long before he made the acquaintance of Griselda
Campbell, who was governess in the great house of the neighbourhood,
and a love, not the less fine that it was hopeless from the first,
soon began to consume the chagrin of his failure, and substitute for
it a more elevating sorrow;--for how could an embodied failure,
to offer whose miserable self would be an insult, dare speak of
love to one before whom his whole being sank worshipping. Silence
was the sole armour of his privilege. So long as he was silent, the
terrible arrow would never part from the bow of those sweet lips;
he might love on, love ever, nor be grudged the bliss of such
visions as to him, seated on its outer steps, might come from any
chance opening of the heavenly gate. And Miss Campbell thought
of him more kindly than he knew. But before long she accepted the
offered situation of governess to Lady Annabel, the only child of
the late marquis's elder brother, at that time himself marquis,
and removed to Lossie House. There the late marquis fell in love
with her, and persuaded her to a secret marriage. There also she
became, in the absence of her husband, the mother of Malcolm. But
the marquis of the time, jealous for the succession of his daughter,
and fearing his brother might yet marry the mother of his child,
contrived, with the assistance of the midwife, to remove the infant
and persuade the mother that he was dead, and also to persuade
his brother of the death of both mother and child; after which,
imagining herself wilfully deserted by her husband, yet determined
to endure shame rather than break the promise of secrecy she had
given him, the poor lady accepted the hospitality of her distant
relative, Miss Horn, and continued with her till she died.
When he learned where she had gone, Mr Graham seized a chance of
change to Portlossie that occurred soon after, and when she became
her cousin's guest, went to see her, was kindly received, and for
twenty years lived in friendly relations with the two. It was not
until after her death that he came to know the strange fact that the
object of his calm unalterable devotion had been a wife all those
years, and was the mother of his favourite pupil. About the same
time he was dismissed from the school on the charge of heretical
teaching, founded on certain religious conversations he had had with
some of the fisher people who sought his advice; and thereupon he
had left the place, and gone to London, knowing it would be next
to impossible to find or gather another school in Scotland after
being thus branded. In London he hoped, one way or another, to
avoid dying of cold or hunger, or in debt: that was very nearly
the limit of his earthly ambition.
He had just one acquaintance in the whole mighty city, and no more.
Him he had known in the days of his sojourn at King's College, where
he had grown with him from bejan to magistrand. He was the son of
a linen draper in Aberdeen, and was a decent, good humoured fellow,
who, if he had not distinguished, had never disgraced himself. His
father, having somewhat influential business relations, and finding
in him no leanings to a profession, bespoke the good offices of a
certain large retail house in London, and sent him thither to learn
the business. The result was that he had married a daughter of
one of the partners, and become a partner himself. His old friend
wrote to him at his shop in Oxford Street, and then went to see
him at his house in Haverstock Hill.
He was shown into the library--in which were two mahogany cases
with plate glass doors, full of books, well cared for as to clothing
and condition, and perfectly placid, as if never disturbed from
one week's end to another. In a minute Mr Marshal entered--so
changed that he could never have recognized him--still, however,
a kind hearted, genial man. He received his classfellow cordially
and respectfully--referred merrily to old times, and begged to
know how he was getting on, asked whether he had come to London with
any special object, and invited him to dine with them on Sunday.
He accepted the invitation, met him, according to agreement, at a
certain chapel in Kentish Town, of which he was a deacon, and walked
home with him and his wife.
They had but one of their family at home--the youngest son, whom
his father was having educated for the dissenting ministry, in the
full conviction that he was doing not a little for the truth, and
justifying its cause before men, by devoting to its service the son
of a man of standing and worldly means, whom he might have easily
placed in a position to make money. The youth was of simple character
and good inclination--ready to do what he saw to be right, but
slow in putting to the question anything that interfered with his
notions of laudable ambition, or justifiable self interest. He was
attending lectures at a dissenting college in the neighbourhood,
for his father feared Oxford or Cambridge, not for his morals, but
his opinions in regard to church and state.
The schoolmaster spent a few days in the house. His friend was
generally in town, and his wife, regarding him as very primitive
and hardly fit for what she counted society--the class, namely,
that she herself represented, was patronising and condescending;
but the young fellow, finding, to his surprise, that he knew a
great deal more about his studies than he did himself, was first
somewhat attracted and then somewhat influenced by him, so that at
length an intimacy tending to friendship arose between them.
Mr Graham was not a little shocked to discover that his ideas
in respect of the preacher's calling were of a very worldly kind.
The notions of this fledgling of dissent differed from those of
a clergyman of the same stamp in this:--the latter regards the
church as a society with accumulated property for the use of its
officers; the former regarded it as a community of communities, each
possessing a preaching house which ought to be made commercially
successful. Saving influences must emanate from it of course--
but dissenting saving influences.
His mother was a partisan to a hideous extent. To hear her talk you
would have thought she imagined the apostles the first dissenters,
and that the main duty of every Christian soul was to battle for
the victory of Congregationalism over Episcopacy, and Voluntaryism
over State Endowment. Her every mode of thinking and acting was of
a levelling commonplace. With her, love was liking, duty something
unpleasant--generally to other people, and kindness patronage. But
she was just in money matters, and her son too had every intention
of being worthy of his hire, though wherein lay the value of the
labour with which he thought to counterpoise that hire, it were
hard to say.
Prev
| Next
| Contents
|
|
|