Маргарет Олифант
The Unjust Steward or The Minister's Debt
“Yes,” he replied, “perhaps at that time he did not think of his heir. If it had been his own child—but we must be fair to him. Your son was not a very near relation, and he scarcely knew the boy.”
“Not a near relation!” exclaimed Mrs. Mowbray, “but he was the nearest relation. There was no one else to count at all. A man’s money belongs to his family. He has no right to go and alienate it, to give a boy reason to expect a good fortune, and then to squander the half of it, which really belonged to Frank more than to him.”
“You must remember,” said the minister, with a dreadful tightening at his throat, feeling that he was pleading for himself as well as for his old benefactor, “you must remember that the money did not come from the family—in which case all you say might be true—but from his own exertions; and probably he believed what is also written in Scripture, that a man has a right to do what he will with his own.”
“Oh, Mr. Buchanan!” cried Mrs. Mowbray, “that I should hear a clergyman speak like this. Who is the widow and the orphan to depend upon, if not on the clergy, to stand up for them and maintain their rights? I should have thought now that instead of encouraging people who got round this old man—who probably was not very clear in his head at the end of his life—and got loans from him, you would have stood up for his heirs and let them know—oh! with all the authority of the church, Mr. Buchanan—that it was their duty before everything to pay their debts, all the more,” cried the lady, holding up an emphatic finger, “all the more if there was nothing to show for them, no way of recovering them, and it was left to their honour to pay.”
The minister had been about to speak; but when she put forth this argument he sat dumb, his lips apart, gazing at her almost with a look of terror. It was a full minute before he attempted to say anything, and that in the midst of a discussion of this sort seems a long time. He faltered a little at last, when he did speak.
“I am not sure,” he said, “that I had thought of this: but no doubt you are right, no doubt you are right.”
“Certainly I am right,” she cried, triumphant in her victory. “I knew you would see the justice of it. Frank has always been brought up to believe that he would be a rich man. He has been brought up with this idea. He has the habits and the notions of a man with a very good fortune; and now that I am here and can look into it, what is it? A mere competence! Nothing that you could call a fortune at all.”
Oh, what it is to be guilty! The minister had not a word to say. He looked piteously in her face, and it seemed to him that it was an injured woman who sat before him, injured by his hand. He had never wronged any one so far as he knew before, but this was a woman whom he had wronged. She and her son, and her son’s children to all possible generations,—he had wronged them. Though no one else might know it, yet he knew it himself. Frank Mowbray’s fortune, which was not a fortune, but a mere competence, had been reduced to that shrunken measure by him. His conscience smote him with her voice. There was nothing to show for it, no way of recovering it; it was a debt of honour, and it was this that he refused to pay. He trembled under her eye. He felt that she must be able to read to the bottom of his soul.
“I am very sorry,” he said; “I am afraid that perhaps none of us thought of that. But it is all past—I don’t know what I could do, what you would wish me to do.”
“I would wish you,” cried Mrs. Mowbray, “to talk to them about it. Ah! I knew I should not speak in vain when I spoke to you. It is a shameful thing, is it not, to defraud a truthful, inexperienced boy, one that knows nothing about money nor how to act in such circumstances. If he had not his mother to speak for him, what would become of Frank? He is so young and so peace-making. He would say don’t bother if he heard me speaking about it. He would be content to starve himself, and let other people enjoy what was his. I thought you would tell me perhaps who were the defaulters.”
“No, I certainly could not do that,” he said harshly, with a sound in his voice which made him not recognise it for his. He had a momentary feeling that some one else in the room, not himself, had here interposed and spoken for him.
“You could not? you mean you would not. And you the clergyman, the minister that should protect the orphan! Oh, Mr. Buchanan, this is not what I expected when I braced up my nerves to speak to you. I never thought but that you would take up my cause. I thought you would perhaps go round with me to tell them they must pay, and how badly my poor boy had been left: or that at least you would preach about it, and tell the people what was their duty. He must have lent money to half St. Rule’s,” cried Mrs. Mowbray; “those people that all look so decent and so well-dressed on Sunday at church. They are all as well-dressed (though their clothes are not well made) as any one need wish to be: and to think they should be owing us hundreds, nay, thousands of money! It is a dreadful thing for my poor Frank.”
“Not thousands,” said the minister, “not thousands. A few hundreds perhaps, but not more.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Mrs. Mowbray. “I have heard there was one that got four hundred out of him; at interest and compound interest, what does that come to by this time? Not much short of thousands, Mr. Buchanan, and there may be many more.”
“Did Morrison tell you that?” he asked hastily.
“No matter who told me. How am I to get at that man? I should make him pay up somehow, oh trust me for that, if I could only make out who he was.”
“There was no such man,” said the minister. There breathed across his mind, as he spoke, the burden of the parable: “Take now thy bill, and sit down quickly, and write fourscore.” “I have not heard of any of Mr. Anderson’s debtors who had got so large a loan as that: but Morrison expressly said that it was in the will he had freely forgiven them all.”
“I should not forgive them,” cried the lady, harshly. “Get me a list of them, Mr. Buchanan, give me a list of them, and then we shall see what the law will say. Get me a list of them, Mr. Buchanan! I am sure that you must know them all.”
“I don’t know that I could tell you more than one of them.”
“That will be the four hundred man!” cried Mrs. Mowbray. “Tell me of him, tell me of him, Mr. Buchanan, and I shall always be grateful to you. Tell me the one you know.”
“I must first think it over—and—take counsel,” the minister said.
CHAPTER IX.
MAN AND WIFE
“What did that woman want with you, Claude?” said Mrs. Buchanan, coming in with panting breath, and depositing herself in the chair from which Mrs. Mowbray had risen but a little while before.
The minister sat with his head in his hands, his face covered, his aspect that of a man utterly broken down. He did not answer for some time, and then:
“I think she wants my life-blood,” he said.
“Your life-blood! Claude, my man, are you taking leave of your senses—or what is it you mean?”
Once more there was a long pause. His wife was not perhaps so frightened as she might have been in other circumstances. She was very tired. The satisfaction of having got rid of all her guests was strong in her mind. She had only just recovered her breath, after toiling upstairs. Lastly, it was so absurd that any one should want the minister’s life-blood; last of all, the smiling and flattering Mrs. Mowbray, that she was more inclined to laugh than to be alarmed.
“You may laugh,” said Mr. Buchanan, looking up at her from below the shadow of his clasped hands, with hollow eyes, “but it is death to me. She wants me to give her a list of all old Anderson’s debtors, Mary. I told her I only knew one.”
“Goodness, Claude! did you say it was yourself?”
“Not yet,” he said, with a deep sigh.
“Not yet! do you mean that after the great deliverance we got, and the blessed kindness of that old man, you are going to put your head under the yoke again? What has she to do with it? He thought nothing of her. He let the boy get it because there was nobody else, but he never took any interest even in the boy. He never would have permitted—Claude! those scruples of yours, they are ridiculous; they are quite ridiculous. What, oh! what do you mean? To ruin your own for the sake of that little puppy of a boy? God forgive me; it is probably not the laddie’s fault. He is just the creation of his silly mother. And they are well off already. If old Anderson had left them nothing at all, they were well off already. Claude, if she has come here to play upon your weakness, to get back what the real owner had made you a present of–”
“Mary, I have never been able to get it out of my mind that it was the smaller debtors he wanted to release, but not me.”
“Had you any reason to mistrust the old man, Claude?”
He gave her a look, still from under his clasped hands, but made no reply.
“Which of them were more to him than you,” said Mrs. Buchanan, vehemently; “the smaller debtors? Joseph Sym, the gardener, that he set up in business, or the Horsburghs, or Peter Wemyss? Were they more to him than you?—was this woman, with her ringlets, and her puffed sleeves more to him than you? Or her silly laddie, no better than a bairn, though he may be near a man in years? I have reminded you before what St. Paul says: ‘Albeit, I do not say to thee how thou owest me thine own self besides.’ He was not slow to say that, the old man, when you would let him. And you think he was more taken up with that clan-jamfry than with you?”
“No—no; I don’t say that, Mary. I know he was very favourable to me, too favourable; but I have never felt at rest about this. Morrison would not let me speak; perhaps he thought I had got less than I really had. This has always been in my head.” The minister got up suddenly and began to walk about the room. “Take now thy bill, and sit down quickly, and write fourscore,” he said, under his breath.
“What is that you are saying, Claude? That is what Elsie heard you saying the day of Mr. Anderson’s death. She said, quite innocent, it gave you a great deal of trouble, your sermon, that you were always going over and over–”
“What?” said Mr. Buchanan, stopping short in his walk, with a scared face.
“Dear me, Claude! no harm, no harm, only that, that you are saying now—about writing fourscore. Oh, Claude, my dear, you give it far more thought than it deserves. We could have almost paid it off by this time, if it had been exacted from us. And when that good, kind, auld man said—more than saying—when he wrote down in his will—that it was to be a legacy, God bless him! when I heard that, with thanksgiving to the Lord, I just put it out of my mind—not to forget it, for it was a great deliverance—but surely not to be burdened by it, or to mistrust the good man in his grave!”
The eyes of the minister’s wife filled with tears. It was she who was the preacher now, and her address was full of natural eloquence. But, like so many other eloquent addresses, her audience paid but little attention to it. Mr. Buchanan stopped short in his walk; he came back to his table and sat down facing her. When she ceased, overcome with her feelings, he began, without any pretence of sharing them, to question her hastily.
“Where was Elsie, that she should hear what I said? and what did she hear? and how much does she know?” This new subject seemed to occupy his mind to the exclusion of the old.
“Elsie? oh, she knows nothing. But she was in the turret there, where you encouraged them to go, Claude, though I always thought it a dangerous thing; for the parents’ discussions are not always for a bairn’s ears, and you never thought whether they were there or not. I have thought upon it many a day.”
“And she knows nothing?” said Mr. Buchanan. “Well, I suppose there is no harm done; but I dislike anyone to hear what I am saying. It is inconvenient; it is disagreeable. You should keep a growing girl by your own side, Mary, and not let her stray idle round about the house.”
He had not heard her complain against himself as encouraging the children to occupy the turret. His wife was well enough accustomed with his modes of thought. He ignored this altogether, as if he had no responsibility. And the thought of Elsie thus suggested put away the other and larger thought.
“I should like exactly to know how much she heard, and whether she drew any conclusions. You can send her to me when you go down down-stairs.”
“Claude, if you will be guided by me, no—do not put things into the bairn’s head. She will think more and more if her thoughts are driven back upon it. She will be fancying things in her mind. She will be–”
“What things can she fancy in her mind? What thoughts can she have more and more, as you say? What are you attributing to me, Mary? You seem to think I have been meditating—or have done—something—I know not what—too dark for day.”
He looked at her severely, and she looked at him with deprecating anxiety.
“Claude,” she said, “my dear, I cannot think what has come over you. Am I a person to make out reproaches against you? I said it was a pity to get the bairns into a habit of sitting there, where they could hear everything. That was no great thing, as if I was getting up a censure upon you, or hinting at dark things you have done. I would far easier believe,” she said, with a smile, laying her hand upon his arm, “that I had done dark deeds myself.”
“Well, well,” he said, “I suppose I am cranky and out of sorts. It has been a wearying day.”
“That it has,” cried Mrs. Buchanan, with warm agreement. “I am not a woman for my bed in the daytime; but, for once in a way, I was going to lie down, just to get a rest, for I am clean worn out.”
“My poor Mary,” he said, with a kind smile. When she felt her weakness, then was the time when he should be strong to support her. “Go and lie down, and nobody shall disturb you, and dismiss all this from your mind, my dear; for, as far as I can see, there is nothing urgent, not a thing for the moment to trouble your head about.”
“It is not so easy to dismiss things from your mind,” she said, smiling too, “unless I was sure that you were doing it, Claude; for when you are steady and cheery in your spirits, I think there is nothing I cannot put up with, and you may be sure I will not make a fuss, whatever you may think it a duty to do. And it is not for me to preach to you; but mind, there are many things that look like duty, and are not duty at all, but just infatuation, or, maybe, pride.”
“You have not much confidence in the clearness of my perceptions, Mary.”
“Oh, but I have perfect confidence.” She pronounced this word “perfitt,” and said it with that emphasis which belongs to the tongue of the North. “But who could ken so well as me that your spirit’s a quick spirit, and that pride has its part in you—the pride of aye doing the right thing, and honouring your word, and keeping your independence. I agree with it all, but in reason, in reason. And I would not fly in that auld man’s face, and him in his grave, Claude Buchanan, not for all the women’s tongues in existence, or their fleeching words!”
He had been standing by the table, from which she had risen too, with an indulgent smile on his face; but at this his countenance changed, and, as Mrs. Buchanan left the room, he sat down again hastily, with his head in his hands.
Was she right? or was his intuition right? That strong sense, that having meant wrong he had done wrong, whether formally or not. Many and many a day had he thought over it, and he had come to a moral conviction that his old friend had intended him to have the money, that he was the last person in the world from whom Anderson would have exacted the last farthing. Putting one thing to another he had come to that conviction. Of all the old man’s debtors, there was none so completely his friend. It was inconceivable that all the other people should be freed from the bonds, and only he kept under it. He had quite convinced himself rather that it was for his sake the others had been unloosed, than that it was he alone who was exempt from relief. But it only required Mrs. Mowbray’s words to overset this carefully calculated conclusion. His conscience jumped up with renewed force, and, as his wife had divined, his pride was up in arms. That this foolish woman and trifling boy had a right to anything that had been consumed and alienated by him, was intolerable to think of. Mary was right. It was an offence to his pride which he could not endure. His honest impulses might be subdued by reason, but his pride of integrity—no, that was not to be subdued.
The thought became intolerable to him as he pondered seriously, always with his head between his hands. He began once more to pace up and down the room heavily, but hastily—with a heavy foot, but not the deliberate quietness of legitimate thought. Such reflections as these tire a man and hurry him; there is no peace in them. Passing the door of the turret-room, he looked in, and a sudden gust of anger rose. A stool was standing in the middle of the room, a book lying open on the floor. I do not know how they had got there, for Elsie very seldom now came near the place of so many joint readings and enjoyments. The minister went in, and kicked the stool violently away. It should never, at least, stand there again to remind him that he had betrayed himself; and then it returned to his mind that he desired to see Elsie, and discover how much she knew or suspected. Her mother had said no, but he was not always going to yield to her mother in everything. This was certainly his affair. He went down-stairs immediately to find Elsie, walking very softly on the landing not to disturb his wife, who had, indeed, a good right to be tired, and ought to get a good rest now that everybody was gone; which was quite true. He never even suggested to himself that her door was open; that she might hear him, and get up and interrupt him. There was nobody to be found down-stairs. The rooms lay very deserted, nothing yet cleared from the tables, the flowers drooping that had decorated the dishes (which was the fashion in those days); the great white bride-cake, standing with a great gash in it, and roses all round it. There was nothing, really, to be unhappy about in what had taken place to-day. Marion was well, and happily provided for. That was a thing a poor man should always be deeply thankful for, but the sight of “the banquet-hall deserted” gave him a pang as if it had been death, instead of the most living of all moments, that had just passed over his house. He went out to the garden, where he could see that some of the younger guests were still lingering; but it was only Rodie and the boys who were his boon companions that were to be seen. Elsie was not there.
He found her late in the afternoon, when he was returning from a long walk. Walks were things that neither he himself nor his many critics and observers would have thought a proper indulgence for a minister. He ought to be going to see somebody, probably “a sick person,” when he indulged in such a relaxation; and there were plenty of outlying invalids who might have afforded him the excuse he wanted, with duty at the end. But he was not capable of duty to-day, and the sick persons remained unvisited. He turned his face towards home, after treading many miles of the roughest country. And it was then, just as he came through the West Port, that he saw Elsie before him, in her white dress, and fortunately alone. The minister’s thoughts had softened during his walk. He no longer felt disposed to take her by the shoulders, to ask angrily what she had said to her mother, and why she had played the spy upon him; but something of his former excitement sprang up in him at the sight of her. He quickened his pace a little, and was soon beside her, laying his hand upon her shoulder. Elsie looked up, not frightened at all, glad to be joined by him.
“Oh, father, are you going home?” she said, “and so am I.”
“We will walk together, then; which will be a good thing, as I have something to say to you,” he said.
Elsie had no possible objection. She looked up at him very pleasantly with her soft brown eyes, and he discovered for the first time that his younger daughter had grown into a bonnie creature, prettier than Marion. To be angry with her was impossible, and how did he know that there was anything to be angry about?
“Elsie,” he said, “your mother has been telling me of something you heard me say in my study a long time ago, something that you overheard, which you ought not to have overheard, when you were in the turret, and I did not know you were there.”
Elsie grew a little pale at this unexpected address.
“Oh, father,” she said, “you knew we were always there.”
“Indeed, I knew nothing of the kind. I never supposed for a moment that you would remain to listen to what was said.”
“We never did. Oh, never, never!” cried Elsie, now growing as suddenly red.
“It is evident you did on this occasion. You heard me talking to myself, and now you have remembered and reported what I said.”
“Oh, father!” cried Elsie, with a hasty look of remonstrance, “how can you say I did that?”
“What was it, then, you said?”
He noticed that she had no need to pause, to ask herself what it was. She answered at once.
“It was about the parable. They said you had preached a sermon on it, and I said I thought your mind had been very full of it; because, when Rodie and me were in the turret, we heard you.”
“Oh, there were two of you,” said Mr. Buchanan, with a pucker in his forehead.
“There were always, always two of us then,” said Elsie, with a sudden cloud on hers; “and what you said was that verse about taking your bill and writing fourscore. I did not quite understand it at the time.”
“And do you understand it now?”
“No, father, for it was a wrong thing,” said Elsie, sinking her voice. “It was cheating: and to praise a man for doing it, is what I cannot understand.”
“Oh, I’ll tell you about that; I will show you what it means,” he said, with the instinct of the expositor, “but not at this moment,” he added, “not just now. Was that all that you thought of, when you heard me say those words to myself?”
Elsie looked up at him, and then she looked all round; a sudden dramatic conflict took place in her. She had thought of that, and yet she had thought of something more than that, but she did not know what the something more was. It had haunted her, but yet she did not know what it was. She looked up and down the street, unconsciously, to find an answer and explanation, but none came. Then she said, faltering a little:—
“Yes, father, but I was not content; for I did not understand: and I am just the same now.”
“I will take an opportunity,” he said, “of explaining it all to you” and then he added, in a different tone, “it was wrong to be there when I did not know you were there, and wrong to listen to what I said to myself, thinking nobody was near; but what would be most wrong of all, would be to mention to any living creature a thing you had no right to overhear. And if you ever do it again, I will think you are a little traitor, Elsie, and no true child of mine. It would set you better to take care not to do wrong yourself, than to find fault with the parable.”
He looked at her with glowing, angry eyes, that shone through the twilight, while Elsie gazed at him with consternation. What did he mean? Then and now, what did he mean?
