Маргарет Олифант
The Unjust Steward or The Minister's Debt
“I’ll away west,” Rodie said, as soon as he was visible. “There’s Mowbray. I’m not going to stay here, and see him fawning upon you. It is disgusting,” Rodie said, severely. He had not yet himself begun to “fawn” upon any one, and was still intolerant of everything of this kind.
“You are not going away, just after he has seen that we saw him,” cried Elsie, gripping her brother’s arm, in the intensity of her feeling, “letting him see how ill you take it, and that you cannot forget! Man, Rodie, will you run away?”
“I am not running away,” cried Rodie, red with wrath and shame.
“You shall not,” cried Elsie, holding him with a vigorous young grip, almost as strong as his own, out of which he was still attempting to wriggle, when Frank came up, all smiling and beaming.
“Johnny Wemyss has found a new beast,” he reported with a little excitement. “It is not in all the books, there has been none discovered like it. You should see his eyes just jumping out of his head.”
Elsie’s eyes gave a jump too; a warm flush ran over her face. Unconsciously, she held her head high.
“Oh,” she said, softly, “I am not surprised! I am not surprised!”
At this Frank looked at her half alarmed, half suspicious, not quite easy in his mind, why she should take so much interest in Johnny. But after all, he was only Johnny, a fellow wrapped up in “beasts,” and no competitor for anybody’s favour.
Meanwhile, Rodie had twisted his elbow out of Elsie’s hold, who had too much respect for appearances to continue the struggle before strangers.
“I’m away to see it,” cried Rodie. “You’ll come when you are ready,” and off he rushed like a wild deer, with a sulky nod at Frank.
“It appears I have offended Rodie without meaning it,” said Frank, taking the wise way of forestalling any reproach. “I hope he has not prejudiced you against me, Miss Elsie; for all I said that vexed him, was only that I was coming to ask your father’s advice, and I have always heard that everybody asks the minister’s advice. May I walk with you, and tell you about it? I don’t know what he thought I meant.”
“So far as I understood,” said Elsie, “he thought you wanted to make my father betray some poor bodies that trusted in him.” Elsie, too, thought it was wiser to forestall any other statement. But she put forth this bold statement with a high colour and a quaking heart.
“Betray!” cried Frank, growing red, too, “oh, I assure you, I had no such thought.”
“You wanted my father to tell upon the poor folk that had borrowed money, and were not able to pay.” Elsie averted her head for the reason that, sorely troubled by her own guesses and doubts, she could not look Frank in the face: but he interpreted this action in quite another way. He took it for a gesture of disdain, and it roused a spirit even in the bosom of Elsie’s slave.
“Justice is justice,” he said, “Miss Elsie, whether one is poor or rich. To hunt the poor is what I would never do; but if they are right who told me, there are others passing themselves off under the shield of the poor, that are quite well able to pay their debts—more able than we are to do without the money: and that is just what I want to ask Mr. Buchanan, who is sure to know.”
It seemed to Elsie that the sands, and the rocks, and the cliffs beyond were all turning round and round, and that the solid earth sank under her feet. “Mr. Buchanan, who is sure to know,” she said to herself under her breath. Oh yes, he was sure to know. He would look into the face of this careless boy, who understood nothing about it, and he would say—what would he say? It made Elsie sick and faint to think of her father—her father, the minister, the example to all men—brought face to face with this temptation, against which she had heard him struggling, which she had heard him adopting, without knowing what it meant, six years ago. No, he had not been struggling against it. He had been struggling with it, trying to convince himself that it was just and right. This came upon her like a flash of lightning, as she took a few devious steps forward. Then Frank’s outcry, “You are ill, Miss Elsie!” brought her back to herself.
“No, I am not ill,” she said, standing still by the rocks, and taking hold of a glistening pinnacle covered with seaweed, to support herself for a moment, till everything settled down. “I am not ill: I am just thinking,” she kept her head turned away, and looked out upon the level of the sea, very blue and rippled over with wavelets in its softest summer guise, with a faint rim of white showing in the distance against the red sand and faint green banks of the Forfar coast. Of all things in this world to make the heart sick, there is nothing like facing a moral crisis, which some one you love is about to go through, without any feeling of certainty that he will meet it in the one only right way. “Oh, if it was only me!” Elsie sighed, from the bottom of her heart.
You will think it was the deepest presumption on her part, to think she could meet the emergency better than her father would. And so it was, and yet not so at all. It was only that there were no doubts in her mind, and there were doubts, she knew, inconceivable doubts, shadows, self-deceptions, on his. A great many thoughts went through her mind, as she stood thus looking across the level of the calm sea—although it was scarcely for a minute altogether, that she underwent this faintness and sickening, which was both physical and mental. The cold touch of the wet rock, the slipping tangles of dark green leathery dulse which made her grasp slip, brought her to herself, and brought her colour rushing back. She turned round to Frank with a smile, which made the young man’s heart beat.
“But I am awfully anxious not to have papa disturbed,” she said. “You know he is not just like other folk; and when he is interrupted at his writing it breaks the—the thread of his thoughts, and sometimes he cannot get back the particular thing he was meditating upon (it seemed to Elsie that the right words were coming to her lips, though she did not know how, like a sort of inspiration which overawed, and yet uplifted her). And then perhaps it will be his sermon that will suffer, and he always suffers himself when that is so.”
“He has very little occasion to suffer in that way,” cried Frank, “for every one says—and I think so myself, but I am no judge—that there is no one that preaches like him, either in the town or through all Fife. I should say more than that—for I never in London heard any sermons that I listened to as I do to his.”
Elsie beamed upon her lover like the morning sun. It was strictly true to the letter, but, whether there might be anything in the fact, that none of these discredited preachers in London were father to Elsie, need not be inquired. It gave the minister’s daughter a keen pang of pleasure to hear this flattering judgment. It affected her more than her mother’s recommendation, or any of her own serious thoughts. She felt for a moment as if she could even love Frank Mowbray, and get to think him the first of men.
“Come and let me see the new beast,” she said, with what was to Frank the most enchanting smile.
CHAPTER XVIII.
JOHNNY WEMYSS
Johnny Wemyss was not perhaps at that moment a figure precisely adapted to please a maiden’s eye, nor would any other lad in St. Rule’s have cared to present himself before a young lady whom he regarded with interest, under his present aspect. His trousers were doubled up as far as was practicable, upon legs which were not models of shapeliness nor even of strength, being thin and wiry “shanks,” capable of any amount of fatigue or exertion, but showing none of these qualities. His arms, much like these lower members, were also uncovered up to the elbow, his blue pea-jacket had a deposit of sand in every wrinkle, and the broad blue bonnet on his head had scraps of very vivid green sea-weed clinging to it, showing how Johnny’s head, as well as his arms and legs, had been in contact with the recesses of the rocks. It was pushed back from his forehead, and he was holding out at the length of his hairy, sinewy arm, a thing which was calculated to call forth sentiments rather of disgust than of admiration, in persons not affected with that sympathetic interest in the researches of Johnny, which St. Rule’s in general was now beginning to feel. It was a variety of that family of the Medusa, called in St. Rule’s jelly fish, which fringe all the sands along that coast after a storm. Elsie had got over the repugnance to touch the clammy creatures, which is common to uninstructed persons, and was eager to have the peculiarity in its transparent structure pointed out to her, which marked it as a discovery. But Johnny was neither so animated in its exposition, nor so enthusiastic over the beauty of his prize, as he had been on many previous and less important occasions. He had been a witness of Elsie’s progress, since Frank Mowbray had joined her. He had seen her pause by the rocks to recover herself from something, he could not tell what. Was it not very likely at least that it was a more full disclosure of Frank’s sentiments—which, indeed, nobody in St. Rule’s had any doubt about the nature of—which suddenly overcame a vigorous, healthful girl like Elsie, and made her lean against the wet rocks which were under water at full tide, and grasp the tangles of the dulse for support? Nothing could be more probable, nay, certain. And when Elsie turned towards her lover with that smile which the other half saw, and most clearly divined, and led him back with her triumphant, what other hypothesis could account for it? Johnny could follow with the most delicate nicety the conclusions that were to be drawn from the transparent lines of colour in the round clammy disc he held quivering in his hand; but he could not tell, how could he; having no data to go upon, and being quite incapable, as science will probably always continue to be of such a task, to decipher what was in a single quivering heart, though it might be of much more consequence to him. He watched them coming along together, Frank Mowbray suddenly changed from the commonplace comrade, never quite trusted as one of themselves by the young men of St. Rule’s, though admitted to a certain cordiality and good fellowship—coming along transfigured, beaming all over, his very clothes, always so much more dainty than anybody else’s, giving out a radiation of glory—the admired yet contemned spats upon his feet, unconsciously stepping as if to music: and altogether with a conquering hero aspect, which made Johnny long to throttle him, though Johnny was perhaps the most peaceable of all the youths of his time. An unconscious “confound him” surged up to the lips of the naturalist, himself so triumphant a minute ago in the glory of his discovery; and for one dreadful moment, Johnny felt disposed to pitch his Medusæ back into the indifferent water, which would have closed over it as calmly as though it had been the most lowly and best known of its kind. For what was the good of anything, even an original discovery, if such a thing was permitted to be under the skies, as that a girl such as Elsie Buchanan should elect out of all the world the like of Frank Mowbray, half-hearted Scot, dandy, and trifler, for her master? It was enough to disgust a man with all the courses of the earth, and even with the finest unclassed Medusæ newly voyaged out of the heart of the sea.
“Oh, Johnny,” Elsie said, hurrying towards him in all that glow and splendour of triumph (as he thought). “I hear you have made a discovery, a real discovery! Let me see it! and will it be figured in all the books, and your name put to it? Wemyssea—or something of that kind.”
“I had thought of a different name,” said Johnny, darkly, “but I’ve changed my mind.”
“What was that?” said Elsie, lightly taking hold of his arm in the easy intimacy of a friendship that had lasted all her life—in order that she might see more clearly the object limply held in his palm. “Tell me the difference,” she said, throwing down her parcel, and putting her other hand underneath his to bring the prize more distinctly within her view. The young man turned deeply red up to his sandy hair, which curled round the edge of his blue bonnet. He shrank a little from that careless touch. And Frank, looking on with a half jealousy, quickly stifled by the more agreeable thought that it was Elsie’s now distinctly identified preference of himself which made her so wholly unconscious of any feeling on the part of the other, laughed aloud out of pure delight and joy of heart.
“What are you laughing at?” said Johnny, gruffly, divining only too well why Frank laughed.
“Show me,” said Elsie, “I think I can see something. You always said I was the quickest to see. Is it this, and this?” she said, bending over the hand which she held.
“Let me hold it for you,” said Frank.
“I can hold up my hand myself,” said Johnny; “I am wanting no assistance. As I found it myself, I hope I am able to show it myself without anybody interfering.”
Elsie withdrew her hand, and looked up surprised in his face, with one of those appeals which are so much less answerable than words. She stood a little aside while he began to expound his discovery. They had all caught a few of the most superficial scientific terms from Johnny. Elsie would never have spoken of the new thing being “figured” in a book, but for those little technicalities of knowledge which he shed about him. And he had said that she was the one of all his interested society who understood best. She was the only one who knew what observation meant, the naturalist said. I think that this was a mistake myself, and that he was chiefly led away by her sympathy and by certain other sentiments of which it is unnecessary to speak.
In the meantime, he explained with a mingled gruffness and languor which Elsie did not understand.
“Oh, it’s perhaps not so great a discovery after all,” Johnny said. “I daresay some fellow has noted it before. That’s what you always find when you take it into your head you have got something new.”
“But you know all about the Medusæ,” said Elsie, “and you would be sure to know if it had been discovered before.”
“I’m not sure that I know anything,” said Johnny, despondently. He cast the jelly fish out of his hand upon the sand. “We’re just, as Newton said, like bairns picking up shells on the shore. We know nothing. It is maybe no new thing at all, but just a variety that everybody knows.”
“Oh, Johnny, that is not like you!” cried Elsie, while the two young men standing by, to whom this mood on Wemyss’s part was quite unknown, gaped at him, vaguely embarrassed, not knowing what to say. Rodie had a great desire to get away from a problem he could not understand, and Frank was feeling a little guilty, he could scarcely tell why. Elsie got down on her knees upon the sand, which was firm though wet, and, gathering a handful of the dulse with its great wet stalks and hollow berries, made a bed for the Medusæ, which, with some repugnance, she lifted on to the little heap.
“You will have to give me a new pair of gloves,” she said, looking up with a laugh, “for I have spoilt these ones that are nearly new; and what will my mother say? But though you think it is very weak, I cannot touch a jelly fish—I am meaning a Medusa, which is certainly a far bonnier name—with my bare hands. There now, it will go easy into a basket, or I would almost carry it myself, with the dulse all about it; but to throw it away is what I will never consent to, for if you think it is a discovery, I know it must be a discovery, and it will be called after you, and a credit to us all.”
“It is a discovery,” cried Johnny, with a sudden change of mien. “I was a fool. I am not going to give it up, whatever happens. The less that comes to me in this world, the more I’ll keep to the little I’m sure of.” When he had uttered this enigmatical sentence, which was one of those mystic utterances, more imposing than wisdom, that fill every audience with confused admiration, he snapped his fingers wildly, and executed a pas of triumph. “It will make the London men stand about!” he said, “and I would just like to know what the Professor will say to it! As for the name–”
“Oh, yes, Johnny, the name?”
“It will be time enough to think of that,” he said, looking at her with mingled admiration and trouble. “Anyway, it is you that have saved it for me,” he said.
“Frank,” said Rodie, “are you meaning to play your foursome with Raaf and Alick, or are you not?”
“I thought you had turned me out of it,” said Frank.
“Oh, go away and play your game!” Elsie commanded in a tone of relief. “It is just the thing that is best for you idle laddies, with never a hand’s turn to do in this world. I am going home as soon as I have seen Johnny take up his new beast like a person of sense, after taking the pet at it like a silly bairn. You are all silly, the whole tribe of you, for so much as you think of yourselves. If you’re late, Alick and Raaf will just play a twosome, and leave you out.”
“That’s what they’ll do,” Rodie pronounced, authoritatively. “Come along, Frank.”
And Frank followed, though torn in pieces by attractions both ways. It was hard to leave Elsie in so gracious a mood, and also with Johnny Wemyss, who had displayed a quite unexpected side to-day: but Johnny Wemyss did not, could not count, whatever he might feel: surely if there was anything a man could calculate upon, it was that. And Frank was sincerely pleased to be taken into favour again by that young despot, Rodie, who in his capacity as Elsie’s brother, rode roughshod over Ralph Beaton and was more respected than he had any right to be by several more of the golf-playing community. So that it seemed a real necessity in present circumstances, with the hopes of future games in mind, to follow him docilely now.
“Why were you so petted, Johnny?” said Elsie, when reluctantly her wooer had followed her brother in a run to the links.
“I was not petted,” said Johnny, with that most ineffectual reply which consists of simple contradiction. In those days petted, that is the condition of a spoilt child, was applied to all perverse moods and causeless fits of ill-temper. I do not think that in current Scots literature, of which there are so many examples, I remember the same use of the word now.
“Oh, but you were,” cried Elsie, laughing, “in a pet with your new beast, and what could go further than that? I would not have been so much surprised if you had been in a pet with Rodie or me.”
“There was occasion,” said Johnny, relapsing a little into the clouds. “Why were you such friends with that empty-headed ass? And coming along the sands smiling at him as if—as if–”
“As if what?” said Elsie. She laughed again, the laugh of conscious power. She was not perhaps so fine a character as, considering all things, she might have been expected to be.
“Elsie,” said the young man, “it’s not me that shall name it. If it really turns out to be something, as I think it will, I am going to call it after you.”
“A grand compliment,” cried the girl, with another peel of laughter. “A jeely fish! But,” she added, quickly, “I think it is awfully nice of you, Johnny; for those are the sort of things, I know, that you like best in the world.”
“Not quite,” said the naturalist. “There are things I care for far more than beasts, and if you don’t know that, you are not so quick at the uptake as I have always thought you; but what is the good when I am nobody, and never will be anybody, if I were to howk and ferret for new beasts till I die!”
“Bide a wee, bide a wee,” said Elsie, laughing, but confused; “you will be a placed minister, and as good as any of them; and what could ye have better than that?”
“I am the most unfortunate man in the world,” said Johnny, “for you know that, which is the only way for a poor lad like me, it is not what I want.”
“And you are not blate to say so to me that am a minister’s daughter, and very proud of it,” cried Elsie, with a flush of offence.
“That’s just the worst of it,” said Johnny, sadly, shaking his head, “for maybe you, and certainly other folk, will believe indeed I am not blate, thinking too much of myself, not to be content with a kirk if I could get one. But you should know it isn’t that. I think too little of myself. Never could I be a man like your father, that is one of the excellent of the earth. It is the like of him, and not the like of me, that should be a minister. And then whatever I was, and wherever I was,” he added, with a humility that was almost comic, “I would always have something inside teasing me to be after the beasts all the same.”
“What are you going to do with it now?” said Elsie, looking down at the unconscious object of all this discussion, which lay semi-transparent, and a little dulled in the delicate mauve colour of its interesting markings, on the bed she had made of the tangles of the dulse at her feet.
“The first thing is, I will draw a picture of it, the best I can,” said Johnny, rousing to something of his usual enthusiasm, “and then I will dissect it and get at its secrets, and I will send the drawing and the account of it to London—and then–”
“And then?” repeated Elsie.
“I will just wait,” he said. His eyes which had been lighted up with eagerness and spirit sank, and he shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. “Just as likely as not I will never hear word of it more. That’s been my fate already. I must just steel myself not to hope.”
“Johnny, do you mean that you have sent up other things like this, and got no good of them?”
“Aye,” he said, without looking up. He was not a cheerful figure, with his head bent on his breast, and his eyes fixed on the strange prize—was it a mere clammy inanimate thing, or was it progress, and fame, and fortune?—which lay at his feet. Elsie did not know what to say.
“And you standing there with wet feet, and everything damp and cold about you,” she cried, with a sudden outburst. “Go home this moment, Johnny Wemyss; this time it will be different. I’m not a prophet and how should I know? But this time it will be different. How are you to get it home?”
He took his blue bonnet from his head, with a low laugh, and placed the specimen in it.
“Nobody minds,” he said, smoothing down his sleeves. “I am as often without my bonnet as with it. They say it’s only Johnny Wemyss: but I’m not fit to walk by the side of a bonnie princess like you.”
“I am coming with you all the same,” Elsie said.
They were, indeed, a very unlikely pair. The girl in all her prettiness of summer costume, the young man, damp, sandy, and bareheaded, carrying his treasure. So far as the sands extended, however, there was no one to mark the curious conjunction, and they went lightly over the firm wet sand within high-water mark, talking little, but with a perfect familiarity and kindness of companionship which was more exquisite than the heats and chills through which Frank Mowbray had passed, when Elsie for her own purposes had led him back. Elsie kept step with Johnny’s large tread, she had an air of belonging to him which came from the intimate intercourse of years; and though the social distinction between the minister’s daughter and the fisherman’s son was very marked, externally, it was evidently quite blotted out in fact by a closer fraternity. Elsie was not ashamed of him, nor was Johnny proud of her, so far as their difference of position was concerned. He was proud of her in another sense, but she quite as much of him.
“I will call it ‘Princess Elsie,’” he said at last. “I will put it in Latin: or else I will call it ‘Alicia:’ for Elsie and Alison and all are from Alice, which is just the bonniest name in the world.”
“Nonsense,” she said, “there are many that are much bonnier. I don’t think Alison is very bonny, it is old-fashioned; but it was my grandmother’s name, and I like it for that.”
“It is just the bonniest name in all the world,” he repeated, softly; but next moment they had climbed from the sands to the smooth ground near the old castle, and from thenceforward Johnny Wemyss was the centre of a moving group, made up of boys and girls, and an occasional golfer, and a fisher or two, and, in short, everybody about; for Johnny Wemyss was known to everybody, and his particular pursuits were the sport, and interest, and pride of the town.
“He has found a new beast.”
“Oh, have you found a new beast? Oh Johnny, let us see it, let us see it! Oh, but it’s nothing but a jeely-fish,” cried, in a number of voices, the little crowd. Johnny walked calmly on, his bare head red in the sunshine, with crisp short curls surrounding a forehead which was very white in the upper part, where usually sheltered by his bonnet, and a fine red brown mahogany tint below. Johnny was quite at his ease amid the encircling, shouting little crowd, from out of which Elsie withdrew at the garden gate, with a wave of her hand. He had no objection to their questions, their jests, their cries of “Let us see it, Johnny!” It did not in the least trouble him that he was Johnny to all the world, and his “new beast” the diversion of the town.
