Salted With Fire

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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.

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--

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