CHAPTER V.
OLD PLAY.
A self-willed, proud, ambitious woman, with a strong, clear, bold intellect, a passionate temper, and vehement feelings, Martha Muir had been born. So much education as she had, tended all to reduce her to the due humility of poverty and womanhood, but surrounded always by placid natures, who never fully comprehended the stormy spirit with which they had to deal, Martha, dwelling alone, and hiding in her own heart the secret aspirations which no one round her could have understood, remained as proud, as self-willed, and as ambitious as she had been born.
For hers were not the hopes and fancies common, as people say, to youthful women. Advantages of appearance she had never possessed, and the children who were growing up at her feet absorbed all the passionate affections of their grave sister; but Martha’s hopes were visions of unmitigated ambition, eager to work out for itself a future worthy of its own bold spirit—for it was not of windfalls, or happy chances, or of fortune to be bestowed on her by another, but of that ladder “to which the climber upward turns his face,” that the solitary woman dreamed.
To raise them—these children—to that indefinite rank and honour which exists in the fancy of the young who are poor—to win for them exemption from those carking cares amid which her own youth, a strong plant, had grown green and flourished. Such hopes were strong in the heart of the passionate girl when people round her thought her only a child; and when darker necessities came—when following many little pilgrims, the father and the mother went away, leaving her the head of the sadly diminished family, her strong desire, intensified by great grief, possessed her like a fiery tormenting spirit. She was then a woman of only twenty years, while Harry was but thirteen; and Martha prayed in an agony for means—only means, to let her strong energies forth and labour for her children: but the means never came—how could they? and all she could do in her passion of ambitious love was to toil day and night for their bread.
No one of all her friends knew how to deal with Martha—so that her impatient soul knew no discipline except the inevitable restraints of poverty, and these, if they humble the pride, are but spurs to the eager fancy, burning to escape from their power. Through all the years of romance the wish and hope to do somewhat, had filled Martha’s mind with visions; but then came those slow, gradual, steady years, wherein the light of common day began to blot out the radiant mists of the morning, and as her hopes fell one by one, and one by one the months lengthened, filled with the tedious labour which gave such scope for thought, bitterness came in like deep waters into the fierce heart, which rendered all its strength to that might of disappointment, and wrestled with itself like a caged eagle. To find that after aspiring to do all, one can do nothing—that soaring in fancy into the broad firmament, in the body one must condescend to all the meanest and smallest cares of daily life—to dream of unknown heights to be attained, and to find instead that by the slow toil of every long uninteresting day one must labour for daily bread—it is not wonderful that the awaking was bitter; and all the more, because in both the dream and the awaking she was uncomprehended and alone.
They all lay dead these hopes of her strange solitary youth—but as they died others rose. This boy, in whom the young beautiful life rose with a grace which she knew it never had in herself—what might he not do? and so she set herself to train him. The old lore that is in all hearts, of the brave and of the great, the histories of Scripture, which live for ever; all that God has recorded for us of his servants’ stout lives, and much that men have written in lesser records. The lonely young woman, feeling herself grave and old among her neighbours, poured all her vehement heart into the glowing intelligence of the boy. She began to think it well that those chimeras of her own had fallen like withered leaves to enrich the soil—and in him should be the glorious spring.
How was it now? The deep red flush which sometimes burned on Martha’s cheek, the anger which only one of so dear regard could awaken, and sadder still, the utter heaviness with which her heart sank in the rebound, proclaimed the end of her second harvest. The first time she had sowed in proud wilfulness—it was meet she should reap disappointment; but the second seed-time had been in hope more Christianlike, and with strong crying for the sunshine and the dew—the wonderful sunshine and dew of high heaven, which had never fallen upon her seed.
It seemed that her fate had been born with her. The proud and passionate temper to be thwarted and crossed at every turn—the vehement ambitious mind, to be disgraced and humbled—and with those arrows in her heart, she was now fighting with herself a greater fight than she had ever hazarded before, subduing herself to herself, and to the Higher One, who thus painfully had brought back the rebel soul to His allegiance. It was hard to subdue the old passion—the old pride—but she had begun to sanctify her contest now, when it had come to the bitterest.
No other trial could have been so hard to her as this; it struck at her very life. Misfortunes against which she could struggle would have been happy discipline to Martha, but to look on helplessly while these elements of ruin were developing in the life of her brother; to stand by and see him fall lower and lower into the poor and petty sins which she despised—to watch the slow coming of disgrace and wretchedness which she could not lift a finger to avert—who can wonder that the proud spirit was chafed into passions of fierce anger sometimes, and sometimes into very despair; but Martha never spoke of what she suffered—she only said “Poor Harry!”
“Shall I read my uncle’s letter now?” asked Rose, when Cuthbert was gone.
“Surely,” said Harry, whom some slight incident had restored to perfect good-humour. “Surely, Rosie, let us hear what the old man says.”
“I write this to let you know that I am quite well,” read Rose, “though a little troubled with the rheumatism in my right arm, which always comes on about the turn of the year, as you will all mind; and I am very sorry to hear of Harry’s accident; but there is less matter for lamentation, it being gotten in a good way, as I have no doubt Martha will mind. The town crier, Sandy Proudfoot, broke his leg at Hogmanay, and it’s never mended yet; but I cannot see what better the daidling body had to expect, it being a thing well known, that when the accident was gotten, he was as he should not have been, which is a great comfort in respect of Harry. I hope all the rest of you are well and doing well, and desire to see some of you at Ayr as soon as ever it can be made convenient. If Violet is inclined to be delicate, send her out to me for a change. The guard of the coach would take good care of her, and I will pay her passage myself. I hope she is minding her lessons and learning to help the rest with the opening, and that Rose is eident, as the cottar says, and minds her duty duly, and that Harry is steady and ’grees with his wife. As for Martha, seeing she knows what is right, better than I can tell her, I have nothing to say, but that I hope she keeps up to the mark, which she knows, and has her own judgment in her favour—of which, if she is sure, I know she will be feared for no other in the world. And so I remain, my dear bairns, your affectionate uncle—Alexander Muir.”
“What do you say, Agnes,” said Harry, “do we agree?”
The little wife smiled. “When you behave yourself, Harry,” she said, laying her child in the cradle.
“If we could manage it,” said Martha, “when Harry is able to walk, Agnes, I think you should go down together to see my uncle. You have never been in Ayr.”
Agnes looked up brightly. “And I should like so well to go; and it would do Harry so much good. But then, Martha, how can we afford it?”
Harry winced visibly. Some debts of his own, recklessly and foolishly incurred, had made the long-projected journey to Ayr impracticable a year ago; the fifteen pounds could do so little more than provide for the bare wants of the quarter; and yet again there were other debts waiting for the next payment of salary. Poor Harry!
“I have been thinking,” said Martha, quietly; “I see how we can manage, Agnes; we shall only work the more busily, Rose and I, while you are away, and Harry will be the better of it. I see how we can do it. It will do Harry good to see my uncle and the little quiet house again.”
Harry felt that there was meaning in her voice. To dwell again under the humble roof where all her hopes for his young life had risen; where she had nursed and tended the dawning mind within him, and laboured to lift his eyes, and teach him to look upward bravely, like a young eagle to the sun. Alas, poor Harry! For this revival of the unstained hopes of youth, Martha was willing to toil all the harder at her tedious unceasing toil; and he felt, almost for the first time, how hopeless these hopes were. How different were his expectations and hers.
“It is a shame,” he said, abruptly, “for a rich man like Buchanan to keep us down so. We require a little relaxation, a little ease, as well as them; and I should like to know how it is possible we can get it on sixty pounds a year?”
“Peter McGillivray has only fourteen shillings a week,” said Rose.
“And what then?”
“He keeps a family on it, Harry; at least his wife does; but then she is very thrifty.”
“Thrifty! nonsense. Is not Agnes thrifty too? You are a foolish girl, Rose,” said her brother; “you think a few shillings is a great fortune. There now, a pound or two would take us comfortably down to my uncle’s; but how can we spare that, off the pittance they give me.”
Yet Harry remembered that his own private expenses—the little debts of which his wife and sister knew nothing—amounted to more than that needful pound or two, and the remembrance brought a flush to his face and made him angry.
“There is a meanness attends this mercantile wealth,” he exclaimed hastily; “a want of thought and consideration of others. What are we clerks but the stuff these masters of ours are made of? and yet how they keep us down.”
“They were themselves kept down, and overcame it,” said Martha.
“Well, it is not a very noble art, the art of making money,” said Harry, with assumed carelessness. “Dick Buchanan and the rest of them are shallow fellows in spite of it all. And their father—he has made a fortune—but the honest man is no genius.”
“But it is a noble art to refuse to be kept down,” said the ambitious Martha, with a kindling of her eye. “I am ashamed to think that Mr. Buchanan or any other ordinary person, can keep down my brother; and he cannot, Harry. You have less perhaps than you ought to have now, but win more; that is your refuge. And don’t let us throw the responsibility on other people. We have only to answer for ourselves.”
“Well, Martha,” said Harry, looking up, “we have not much of the mammon of unrighteousness to answer for. I will tell my uncle you have grown charitable; that is, if it be at all possible to get to Ayr.”
“What do you think, Martha?” said Agnes, with some solicitude in her face.
“You must go; that is all,” said Martha.
The little wife was by no means self-opinionated. She had a great reverence for, and faith in, the decrees of Martha, and knew that what her grave sister resolved would be accomplished “some way,” so she returned pleasantly to the cradle.
“And I don’t want to go, Martha,” whispered little Violet, desiring to have her sacrifice appreciated. “My uncle will give the money to Agnes, and I will stay at home and help you to open.”
“But you would like to go, Lettie?” said Rose.
“No; I would rather stay at home with Martha and you. I think, Martha,” whispered Violet again, “that it will be fine to be our lane just for a wee while—when Agnes is with Harry.”
In the elder mind there was a response to the child’s thought—To know that Harry was safe, with the good uncle, and the anxious little wife to guard him, while yet they themselves were left a little while alone, freed from their constant anxiety, to rest and take breath for the future which remained, with all its unknown cares, before them. There was something in the thought which gave Martha relief, and yet oppressed her with a heavier sadness; but Agnes was already gay in anticipation, and eagerly discussing what she should take of her little wardrobe, and how many frocks for baby Harry—for Agnes was still only a girl, and the unusual pleasure filled her with wholesome natural delight—a good and happy contagion which soon spread itself in softened degrees over all the rest.