And it must be confessed that Katie, sensible as she was, laughed and applauded, and that poor little Patricia, who could find nothing heroical to say on behalf of Clapham, was very much disposed to cry with vexation, and only covered her defeat by a retreat to the carriage, where Joanna followed, only after a few minutes’ additional conversation with Katie, who was by no means disposed to aid the elder sister. When they were gone, however, Katie Logan shook her wise little elder-sisterly head over the pair of them. She thought if Charlie (which diminutive in the manse meant Charlotte) and Isabel grew up like Patricia and Joanna, she would “break her heart;” and the little mistress of the manse went into the kitchen to oversee the progress of a birthday cake and give her homely orders, without once thinking of the superior grandeur of the carriage, as it rolled down the slope of the brae and through the village, the scene of a continued and not very temperate quarrel between the two daughters of Melmar, which was only finished at last by the sudden giving way of Patricia’s nerves and breath, to the most uncomfortable triumph of Joanna. Joanna kept sulkily in her corner, and refused to alight while the other calls were made. On the whole, it was not a very delightful drive.
CHAPTER XXXI
Three months later, in the early sweetness of May, Cosmo Livingstone stood upon an “outside stair,” one of those little flights of stone steps, clearing the half-cellar shops of the lowest story, which are not unfrequent in the High Street of Edinburgh, and which make a handy platform when any thing is to be seen, or place of refuge when any thing is to be escaped from. A little further down, opposite to him, was the Tron Church, with its tall steeple striking up into the sunny mid-day heavens; and above, at a little distance, the fleecy white clouds hung over the open crown of St. Giles’s, with the freshness of recent rain. Many bystanders stood on the other “stair-heads,” and groups of heads looked out from almost every window of the high houses on every side. The High Street of Edinburgh, lined with expectant lookers-on, darkening downwards towards the picturesque slope of the Canongate, with its two varied and noble lines of lofty old houses, black with time, between which the sunshine breaks down in a moted and streamy glory, as into a well, is no contemptible object among street sights; and the population of Edinburgh loves its streets as perhaps only the populations of places rich in natural beauty can love them. A man who has seen a crowd in the High Street might almost be tempted to doubt, indeed, whether the Scottish people were really so reserved and grave and self-restraining as common report pronounces them. The women on the landings of the stairs shrilly claiming here and there a Tam or a Sandy, or else discussing in chorus the event of the moment; the groups of men promenading up and down upon the pavement with firm-set mouth and gleaming eyes—the mutter of forcible popular sentiment saying rather more than it means, and saying that in the plainest and most emphatic words; and the stir of general excitement in a scene which has already various recollections of tumults which are historical, make altogether a picturesque and striking combination, which is neither like a Parisian mob nor a London one, yet is quite as characteristic as either. It was not, however, a mob on this day, when Cosmo Livingstone stood on the stair-head in front of a little bookseller’s shop, the owner of which, in high excitement, came every minute or two to the door, uttering vehement little sentences to the little crowd on his steps:—
“We’ll have it oot o’ them if we have to gang to St. Stephen’s very doors for’t!” cried the shopkeeper. “King William had better mind his crown than mind his wife. We’re no’ to lose the Bill for a German whimsey. Hey, laddies! dinna make so muckle clatter—they’re coming! do ye hear them?”
They were coming, as the increased hum and cluster of the bystanders told clearly enough—an extraordinary procession of its kind. Without a note of music, without a tint of color, with a tramp which was not the steady tramp of trained footsteps, but only the sound of a slowly advancing crowd, to which immense excitement gave a kind of solemnity—a long line of men in their common dress, unornamented, unattended, keeping a mysterious silence, and carrying a few flags, black, and with ominous devices, which only the strain of a great climax of national feeling could have suffered to pass without that ridicule which is more fatal than state prosecutions. Nobody laughed, so far as we are aware, at the skulls and cross-bones of this voiceless procession; and the tramp of that multitude of men, timed and cheered by no music, broken by no shouts, lightened by no gleam of weapons, or glitter of emblems, or variety of color, and only accompanied by the agitated hum of the bystanders, had a very remarkable and somewhat “gruesome” impressiveness. The people who were looking on grew silent gradually, and held their breath as the long train went slowly past. It might not be a formidable band. Punch—if Punch had been in those days—might very likely have found a comfortable amount of laughter in the grim looks of the processionists, who were not likely to do much in justification of their deadly-looking flags. But the occasion was a remarkable occasion in the national history; the excitement was such—so general and overpowering—as no subsequent agitation has been able to equal. The real force of popular emotion in it covered even its own mock-heroics, which is no small thing to say; and there was something solemn in the unanimity of so many sober persons, who were not under the immediate sway and leadership of any demagogue, nor could be supposed to look for personal advantages, and whose extreme fervor and excitement at the same time were not revolutionary, but simply political. The “Bill,” on which the popular hope had fixed itself, had just met with one of its failures, and this was the exaggerated, yet expressive way in which the Edinburgh crowd demonstrated the popular sentiment of the day.
These things can not be judged in cold blood; at that time everybody was excited. Cosmo Livingstone, white with boyish fervor, watched and counted them as they passed, with irresistible exclamations—“twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, a hundred!” the boy cried aloud with triumph, as score after score went past; and the women on the lower steps of the stair began to share his calculations and exult in them. The very children beneath, who were looking on with restless and excited curiosity, knew something about the “Bill,” which day by day, as the coach from the south, with the London mails, came in, they had been sent to learn tidings of; and the bookseller in the little shop could not restrain himself.
“There will be news of this!” he cried, as the last detachment passed; “when the men of Edinburgh take up a matter, nothing can stand before them. There ne’er was a march like it that I ever heard o’ in a’ my reading. Kings, Lords, and Commons—I defy them to stand against it—how many?—hurra for Auld Reekie! Our lads, when they do a thing, never make a fool o’t. Hark to the tramp of them! man, it’s grand!”
“I’ve seen the sodgers out for far less in my day,” said an old woman.
“A snuff for the sodgers!” cried the excited shopkeeper, snapping his fingers; “‘a wheen mercenaries, selling their bluid for a trade. They daur nae mair face a band like that than I dare face Munch Meg.”
“Oh, Cosmo—Cosmo Livingstone!” cried a voice from below; “it’s me—look this way!—do you no’ mind me?—I’m Joanna; come down this moment and tell us how we’re to get home.”
Cosmo looked down through the railings, close to the bottom of which the owner of the voice had been pressed by the crowd. She had a little silk umbrella in her hand, with the end of which, thrust between the rails, she was impatiently, and by no means lightly, beating upon his foot.
An elderly person, looking very much frightened, clung close to her arm, and a girl somewhat younger stood a little apart, looking with bright, vivacious eyes and parted lips after the disappearing procession.
The swarm of lads, of idle women and children, who followed in the wake of the Reformers, as of every other march, had overwhelmed for a moment this little group, which was not like them; and the tumult of voices, which rose when the sight was over, made it difficult to hear even Joanna, clear, loud, and unhesitating as her claim was.
“Miss Huntley!” cried Cosmo, with a momentary start—but it was not so much to witness his recognition as to save his foot from further chastisement.
“It’s no’ Miss Huntley—it’s me!” cried Joanna; “we’ve lost our road—come and tell us how we’re to go. Oh, madame, don’t hold so fast to my arm!”
Cosmo made haste to swing himself down over the railings, when Joanna’s elderly companion immediately addressed herself to him in a long and most animated speech, which, unfortunately, however, was in French, and entirely unintelligible to the poor boy. He blushed violently, and stood listening with a natural deference, but without the slightest hope of comprehending her—making now and then a faint attempt to interrupt the stream. Joanna in the meantime, who was not a great deal more enlightened than he was, vainly endeavored to stay the course of madame’s eloquence by pulling her shawl and elbow.
“He does not understand you! he canna understand you!” cried Joanna, in words which, the Frenchwoman comprehended as little as Cosmo did her address.
During this little episode, the other girl stood by with an evident impulse to laughter, and a sparkle of amusement in her black eyes. At last she started forward with a rapid motion, said something to madame which succeeded better than the remonstrances of Joanna, and addressed Cosmo in her turn.
“Madame says,” said the lively little stranger, “that she can not understand your countrymen—they are so grave, so impassionate, so sorrowful, she knows not if they march in le corétge funêbre or go to make the barricades. Madame says there is no music, no shouts, no voice. She demands what the jeune Monsieur thinks of a so grave procession.”
“The men are displeased,” said Cosmo, hastily; “they think that the government trifles with them, and they warn it how they feel. They don’t mean to make a riot, or break the peace—we call it a demonstration here.”
“A de-mon-stracion!” said the little Frenchwoman; “I shall look for it in my dictionary. They are angry with the king—eh bien!—why do not they fight?”
“Fight! they could fight the whole world if they liked!” cried Joanna; “but they would scorn to fight for every thing like people that have nothing else to do. Desirée and I wanted to see it, Cosmo, and madame did not know in the least where we were bringing her to—and so we got into the crowd, and I don’t know how to get back to Moray Place, unless you’ll show us the way.”
“Madame says,” said the other girl laughing, after receiving another vehement communication from the governess, “that ce jeune Monsieur is to go with us only to Princes Street—then we shall find our own way. He is not to go with you, belle Joanna; and madame demands to know what all the people say.”
“What all the people say!—they’re gossiping, and scolding, and speaking about the procession, and about us, and about their own concerns, and about every thing,” said Joanna; “and how can I tell her? Oh, Cosmo, I’ve looked everywhere for you! but you never walk where we walk; and I saw your mother at the church, and I saw Katie Logan, and I told Katie to write you word to come and see me—but everybody teazes us to death about being proper; however, come along, and I’ll tell you all about everybody—wasn’t it grand to see the procession? Papa’s a terrible Tory, and says it’ll destroy the country—so I hope they’ll get it. Are you for the Reform?”
“Yes,” said Cosmo, but the truth was, the boy felt considerably embarrassed walking onward by the side of Joanna, with the governess and the little Frenchwoman behind, talking in their own language with a rapidity which made Cosmo dizzy, interrupted by occasional bursts of laughter from the girl, which he, being still very young and inexperienced, and highly self-conscious, could not help suspecting to be excited by himself—an idea which made him excessively awkward. However, Joanna trudged along, with her umbrella in one hand, and with the other holding up the skirt of her dress, which, however, was neither very long nor very wide. Joanna’s tall figure might possibly be handsome some day—but it certainly wanted filling up and rounding in the meantime—and was not remarkably elegant at present, either in garb or gait.
But her young companion was of a very different aspect. She was little, graceful, light, with a step which, even in the High Street, reminded Cosmo of Jaacob’s bit of sentiment—“a foot that rang on the path like siller bells"—with sparkling black eyes, a piquant rosy mouth, and so bright and arch a look, that the boy forgave her for laughing at himself, as he supposed she was doing. Desirée!—there was a charm too in the strange foreign name which he could not help saying over to himself—and if Joanna had been less entirely occupied with talking to him, she could not have failed to notice how little he answered, and how gravely he conducted the party to Princes Street, from whence the governess knew her way. Joanna shook hands with Cosmo heartily at parting, and told him she should write to Katie Logan to say she had seen him—while Desirée made him a pretty parting salutation, half a curtsey, with a mischievous glance out of her bright eyes, and madame made him thanks in excellent French, which the lad did not appreciate.
By that time, as he turned homeward, Cosmo had forgotten all about the procession, we are grieved to say, and was utterly indifferent to the fate of the “Bill.”
He was quite confused in his thoughts, poor boy, as he betook himself to his little room and his high window. This half frolic, half adventure, which gave the two girls a little private incident to talk of, such as girls delight in, buzzed about Cosmo’s brain with embarrassing pleasure. He felt half disposed to begin learning French on the instant—not that he might have a better chance of improving his acquaintance with Desirée—by no means—but only that he might never feel so awkward and so mortified again as he did to-day, when he found himself addressed in a language which he did not know.
CHAPTER XXXII
Cosmo saw nothing more of Joanna Huntley, nor of her bright-eyed companion for a long time. He fell back into his old loneliness, with his high window, and his landlady, and the Highland student for society. Cameron, whom the boy made theories about, and wistfully contemplated on the uncomprehended heights of his maturer age, knew a good deal by this time of the history of the Livingstones, a great deal more than Cosmo was aware of having told him, and had heard all about the adventure in the High Street, about Desirée’s laugh and the old French grammar which Cosmo had secretly bought at a book-stall.
“If she had only taken to Latin, as the philosophers used to do at the Reformation time,” cried Cosmo, with a little fun and a great deal of seriousness, “but women never learn Latin now-a-days. Why shouldn’t they?”
“Does it do us so much good?” said Cameron, brushing a little dust carefully from the sleeve of that black coat of his, which it went to his heart to see growing rustier every day, and casting a momentary glance of almost envy at the workmen in their comfortable fustian jackets. Cameron was on his way to knock the “Rudiments” into the heads of three little boys, in whose service the gaunt Highlander tasted the sweets of “private tuition,” so that at the moment he had less appreciation than usual of the learning after which he had toiled all his life.
“If any one loves scholarship, you should!” cried Cosmo, with a little enthusiasm.
“Why?” said the elder man, turning round upon him with a momentary gleam of proud offense in his eye. The Highlander wanted no applause for the martyrdoms of his life. On the contrary, it galled him to think that his privations should be taken into account by any one as proofs of his love of learning. His strong, absolute, self-denying temper wanted that last touch of frankness and candor which raises the character above detraction and above narrowness. He could not acknowledge his poverty, and take his stand upon it boldly. It was a necessity of his nature to conceal what he could manfully endure. But the glance which rested on Cosmo softened.
“Letters may be humane and humanizing, Cosmo,” said the Highland student, with a little humor; “but I doubt if men feel this particular influence of them in teaching little callants. I don’t think, in a general way, that either my genteel boys in Fette’s Row, or my little territorial villains in St. Mary’s Wynd, improve my humanity.”
“Yet the last, at least, is purely a voluntary office and labor of love,” said Cosmo, earnestly.
Cameron smiled.
“I’m but a limited man,” he said; “love takes but narrow bounds with the like of me. Two or three at the most are as many as my heart can hold. Are you horrified to hear it, Cosmo? I’ll do my neighbor a good turn if I can, and I’ll not think ill of him if I can help it; but love, laddie, love!—that’s for one friend—for a mother or—a wife—not for every common man or every bairn I see in the street and have compassion on. No! Love is a different concern.”
“Is it duty, then?” said Cosmo, with a small shrug of his boyish shoulders.
“Hush! If I can not love every man I see, I can love Him who loves all!” said the Highlander, raising his high head with an unconscious loftiness and elevation of gesture. Cosmo made no answer and no comment—he was awed for the moment with the personal reality of that heavenly affection which made this limited earthly man, strong in his own characteristic individualities, and finding it impossible to abound in universal tenderness, still to do with fervor those works of the Evangelist which were for love of One who loved the all, whom he himself had not a heart expansive enough to love.
When Cameron arrived at the house of his pupils, Cosmo wandered back again toward the region of his friend’s unrewarded labors;—ah! those young champions of Maudlin and Trinity!—what a difference between this picture and that. Let us confess that the chances are that Cameron, at the height of his hardly-earned scholarship, would still be a world behind a double-first; and it is likely, unless sheer strength had done it, that nothing earthly could have made a stroke-oar of the Highlandman. If any one could have watched him through the course of one of his laborious days, getting up to eat his rude and scanty breakfast, going out to his lecture and classes, from thence to one quarter and another to his pupils—little boys in the “Rudiments;” from thence to St. Mary’s Wynd to do the rough pioneer evangelist work of a degraded district—work which perhaps his Divinity professor, perhaps the minister of his church urged upon him as the best preparation for his future office—then home to his garret to a meal which he would not have liked any one to see or share, to labor over his notes, to read, to get up his college work for the next day, to push forward, steadily, stoutly, silently, through almost every kind of self-denial possible to man.
Then, when the toilsome session was over, perhaps the weary man went home—not to Switzerland or Wales with a reading party—not to shoot, nor to fish, nor to travel, nor to give himself up to the pure delights of uninterrupted study—perhaps, instead, to return to weary days of manual labor, to the toils of the field, or the trials of the schoolmaster; or perhaps finding the expense of the journey too much for him, or thinking it inexpedient to risk his present pupils, lingered through the summer in Edinburgh, teaching, reading, pinching, refreshing himself by his work in St. Mary’s Wynd. The result of all this was not an elegant divine, nor an accomplished man of the world—very possibly it might be an arbitrary optimist, a one-sided Christian—but it was neither an idle nor a useless man.
Some thoughts of this kind passed through the mind of Cosmo Livingstone as he went through the same St. Mary’s Wynd, pondering the occupations and motives of his friend—the only comparison which he made, thinking of Cameron, was with himself; forgetting the difference of their age entirely, as such a boy was likely to do, Cosmo could not be sufficiently disgusted and discontented with his own dependence and worthlessness. Then he had, at the present moment, no particular vocation for the church. St. Mary’s Wynd, so far from attracting him, even failed at this moment to convey to the visionary lad the sentiment which it wrote with words of fire upon the less sensitive mind of Cameron. Love for the inhabitants of those wretched closes—for the miserable squalid forms coming and going through those high, dark, narrow, winding stairs, down which sometimes a stray sunbeam, piercing through a dusty window, threw a violent glory into the darkness, like a Rembrandt or an indignant angel, seemed something impossible. He believed in the universal love of the Lord, but it only filled him with awe and wonder—he did not understand it as Cameron did—and Cosmo could not see how reaching ultimately into the position of teaching, preaching, laboring, wearing out, for the benefit of such a population, was worth the terrible struggle of preparation which at present taxed all the energies of his friend. He repeated to himself dutifully what he had heard—that to save a soul was better than to win a kingdom—but such words were still only of the letter, and not of the spirit, for Cosmo. And he was glad at last to escape from the subject, and hasten to the fresh and breezy solitude of the hill, which was not a mile from this den of misery, yet seemed as far away as another world.
It was spring, and the air was full of that invigorating hopefulness, which was none the worse to Cosmo for coming on a somewhat chilly breeze. The glory of the broad, blue Firth, with its islands and its bays, and the world of bright, keen, sunny air in which its few sails shone with a dazzling indescribable whiteness, like nothing but themselves—the round white clouds ranging themselves in lines and fantastic groups over the whole low varied line of the opposite coast—and the intoxication of that free, unbroken breeze, coming fresh over miles of country and leagues of sea, lifted Cosmo out of his former thoughts, only to rouse in him a vague heroical excitement—a longing after something, he knew not what, which any tangible shaping would but have vulgarized. The boy spread out his arms with an involuntary enthusiasm, drinking in that wine of youth. What would he do?—he stood upon the height of the hill like a young Mercury, ready to fly over all the world on the errands of the gods—but even the voice of Jupiter, speaking out of the clouds, would only have been prose and bathos to the unconscious, unexplainable poetic elevation of the lad, who neither knew himself nor the world.
A word of any kind, even the sublimest, would have brought him to his feet and to a vague sense of shame and self-ridicule in a moment—which consummation happened to him before he was aware.
The word was a name—a name which he had only heard once before—and the voice that spoke it was at some distance, for the sound came ringing to him, faint yet clear, brightened into a cry of pleasure by the breath of the hills on which it came. “Desirée!” The boy started, blushed at himself in the awaking of his dream, and pausing only a moment, rushed down the slope of Arthur’s Seat toward Duddingstone, where, on the first practicable road which he approached, he perceived a solemn procession of young ladies, two-and-two, duly officered and governed, and behaving themselves irreproachably. Cosmo did not make a rush down through their seemly and proper ranks, to find out Desirée or Joanna; instead, the lad watched them for a moment, and then turned round laughing, and went back to his lodging—laughing the shamefaced rosy laugh of his years, when one can feel one has been a little ridiculous without feeling one’s self much the worse for it, and when it strikes rather comically than painfully to find how different one’s high-flown fancies are, to all the sober arrangements of the every-day world.