Chapter II: The Minister

Time sped the faster that it sped unmarked; and now I had reached that most important and unpleasant period of a boy's life, when the necessity for increased action arrives; and a period it too generally proves to all the delusions, the dreams, and the charms of childhood--I mean the time when grave old gentlemen begin to question us categorically, and, as it often seems, somewhat intrusively, upon our future plans, and to impress upon us the necessity of "doing something for ourselves."

My mother, who had frequently spoken with me on this subject, and seen with regret how my thoughts turned towards the army, of which she had now a terror, as being the too probable means of separating us for ever, resolved to consult Dr. Twaddel, the minister, on the subject; and in Scotland, "the minister" is always esteemed the second person in the parish; so to this consultation I consented, with some outward reluctance and considerable mental repugnance.

Our minister was a good kind of man in his own quiet way, though his excessive views of uprightness and propriety, together with certain severe lectures he had read me for making midnight raids into his orchard, for shooting one of his hens with a penny cannon on the King's birthday (the 4th of June), and for burning "Johnnie Wilkes" in effigy in the churchyard, had made him somewhat of a bugbear to me. He made indifferent sermons, but capital whisky negus, and could take a comfortable share thereof, though eschewing all hearty mirth or levity, and adopting in his deportment that somewhat too solemn gravity and cold, hard external rigidity, with which the mass of the Scottish Lowlanders are tinged, and which makes their most sunny summer Sunday a day of gloom and silence. Like the majority of the northern clergy, he was a humble, meek, and well-meaning man, who, though he preached incessantly against the nothingness of this world and the good things thereof, had taken especial care to provide himself with a remarkably well-dowered helpmate. Without brilliance of talent, he possessed just heart enough to find favour with the poor of his flock; and head enough to accomplish his Sunday task, by emitting a hazy sermon on some old scriptural text, which no one cared a jot about. Yet he was a good man withal, our old parish minister.

I remember, on one occasion, while he was commencing his sermon in the gloomy little village church, an old man propping himself on a staff entered the aisle, and being a stranger, he looked wearily and wistfully round for a seat. Being clad in rather dilapidated garments, and having a canvas wallet for alms, such as meal and broken bread, no attention was paid to him, either by the pew-openers or the congregation. The old man tottered along the aisle, and was about to seat himself humbly on the lower step of the pulpit stair, when the portly minister, with a glance of honest indignation on all around him, descended from the pulpit, and taking the aged mendicant by the hand, led him to his own pew, and placed him on a well-cushioned seat, beside his wife and family, to the no small discomfiture of the Misses Twaddel.

This silent rebuke was worth a thousand homilies; it powerfully affected the whole congregation; and from that moment, the minister, though usually cold and reserved, completely won the esteem of my mother. To consult him on my affairs, we repaired to the manse, which was a handsome and comfortable modern villa, separated from the village church by an orchard and the humble burying-ground, in which "the rude forefathers of the hamlet slept." We were speedily ushered into his presence in a snugly-curtained, richly-carpeted, and fashionably-furnished room, which was so large, that our little cottage might have stood within it altogether. He received us rather kindly than politely, as he had a great esteem for my mother, though, since the advent of the felonious appropriation of a dozen of golden pippins and the slaughter of his best-laying hen, none whatever for me; and while he reclined in an easy-chair and played with a large bunch of gold seals in one hand, or polished his bald head impatiently with the other, my mother, in a voice that was rendered tremulous by her maternal love and anxiety, briefly stated her wishes "concerning her boy Oliver."

After letting her relate her own story unaided, he rather sharply asked me what views I had for myself.

I glanced timidly at my mother; for although now nearly sixteen, I felt like a child in her presence; and at that moment, the influences of her faded cheek, her widow's cap, with its modest crimping, and her sweet sad face, were not lost upon me, though my proud spirit writhed under the humiliation of consulting even such a parish potentate as the minister, concerning me or my affairs.

"What views have you for yourself, sir?" reiterated the minister.

"I wish to be--to be----" I stammered and paused.

"What, sir--speak out!" continued the divine, authoritatively.

"Well, then, I wish to be a soldier."

"A soldier--whew!" he reiterated, with a tinge of surprise and contempt in his tone.

"Like my father before me."

"And leave your poor mother alone in her old age, you ungrateful loon! you should add that," he added, bending his stern grey eyes angrily upon me.

I shrunk at these words, and was silent, for they found an accusing echo in my heart.

"Could you endure his absence, Mrs. Ellis?"

"Alas!" said my poor mother, with her eyes full of tears, "adversity has taught me to endure all things patiently--a bitter art to cultivate; but such a separation would be the hardest of all."

"Then we must put him to some respectable business, where hard work and long hours will knock all silly notions out of his head. What kind of business would you like, young man?"

"I do not know, sir."

"Then who should know, sir? But no doubt you despise all manner of business."

I was silent, and my mother gave me an imploring glance to remain so.

"You are a boy--a mere bairn yet," resumed the minister, in that contemptuous manner often adopted by testy old gentlemen to their juniors; "but the trials of life will teach you the hollowness of those romantic fancies which are fostered by novels, playbooks, and such-like literary trash, of which, I doubt not, you have devoured over many already. You wish to be happy?"

"Of course, sir," said I, with a sigh of impatience; for all this sounded uncomfortably like a lecture, or a scrap of the doctor's sermons.

"Then you will find that it most truly consists in bestowing happiness on others."

I pondered over this remark, for I was too young to understand the application of it.

"Do you know the origin of happiness?" continued the minister.

I could have said, Plenty of money and fun--a fine house, a fine horse, and so forth; but I was silent, or merely said, "No."

"Then hark you, Master Oliver Ellis--the origin of happiness is contentment, and the resources of a mind humbled by the trials with which it pleaseth God to inflict us."

"So I have heard you preach a thousand times," thought I; and while I glanced around the magnificent drawing-room, on his well-cushioned easy-chair, his amplitude of paunch and successive folds of chin, the idea _did_ occur to me, that the apostles were content with fewer of this world's goods; but I was silent again.

In short, the minister talked of morality and duty--of business habits, of close application, and strict honesty, and so forth, until I was heartily weary. I seemed to listen, but heard him not; for my thoughts were running far away on other things, and had soared into the region of sunshine and daydreams, until, after many trite common-places and innumerable pious nothings, he broke the spell by bluntly announcing that "the time was come when I _must_ look about me. I was now sixteen; my mother was getting old; she could not last for ever, and if anything happened to her, what would become of _me_."

This cruel insinuation, so coldly uttered, cut me to the heart, and my mother's sad eyes involuntarily sought mine. She had often--too often in her sad and lonely hours--thought of the separation death might one day make between her penniless children and herself; but to hear it thus roughly alluded to, was too much for her, and the poor woman wept aloud.

The minister tried to console her by some hackneyed scriptural text: that man was made to mourn,--that he was sent into this world to be miserable, and had no business to be anything else; but this burst of emotion on her part stifled every secret aspiration and every strong wish in me, and I assented to any plan his reverence had to propose, resolving to leave to him the onerous office of opening up the path that was to lead me to fortune and to fame.

He promised "to speak anent me to his _doer_," a literal, and often fatally literal phrase, applied by the Scots to their lawyer or "man of business," without consulting whom, many of them will not even vote for an M.P., or do the most trivial thing. "I'll tak' a thought--I'll spier o' my doer," being the answer in the country to almost everything proposed.

Hence, in one week after our visit to the manse, I found myself in Edinburgh, and perched on the leathern summit of a high three-legged stool, in the office of Messrs. Harpy, Quirky, and Macfarisee, solicitors, eminent alike for their "sharp practice" and acute manner of handling all troublesome or cloudy cases of insolvency.