The Country Minister's Love Story

Chapter I Lochtown

A dull little town. A very dull town indeed. This little town lay by the shore of a nearly land locked arm of the sea, a loch — not wild enough to be picturesque or terrible with storm and danger, not smooth enough to be dreamy and romantic. A steamer arrived at the pier ' twice daily ' in summer, once only in the unfairly long half of the year claimed by winter in the North. A few voyagers went to and fro. There was a gal vanic sort of life for an hour or so at noon, and again at nightfall, the life that consists of the puffing of engines, and the beat of paddles, and the scream of the rail way whistle. People came and went in moderate numbers, not in crowds, but no one seemed to wish to stay. ' How charming ! how picturesque ! This reminds B one of Venice ! ' might be the exclamation of a happy bride in the good-nature induced by bridal wear, seeing the row of gas-lamps reflected in the dark water at the pier, and admiring the black spars of a fishing -boat relieved against the amber brightness lingering in the west.

But after a few hours people were apt to tire of the harbour and the faint smell of the sea, the loud voices of the children, the boys wrangling as they dug for bait among the empty preserved-meat tins in the clay pool, and the two coal brigs waiting for cargo. ' Lochtown looks best at night,' said Jane Frederick to the bride ; 'even the cattle-trucks take an air of mystery.' 'I call it all quite lovely,' going away in a little glow of enthusiasm. But Jane had to stay there always, so was not so keenly alive to its charm. Yet she had been content with it for years, all the years of her childhood and her girlhood. She had read a good deal, and thought a good deal, felt too and dreamed, and hoped, and prayed, all in that little town. Now in her womanhood she began to wish to do some thing new.

And amid other surroundings. But the way was barred. ' Sit down and be patient' 'Wait and your turn will come.' So she sat down and was patient — waited and her turn had not yet come. She was now twenty-six years old, she had very good health and a good temper, an honest heart, a fair intelligence, and a pleasant face. LOCHTOWN 3 She had also a delicate mother whom she dearly loved, and who, having married after her first youth was over, was now growing old. Jane's father and little brothers lay in the new ceme tery on the hill, whilst she and her mother lived on a moderate income, and were happy in a quiet way. It is doubtful if Mrs. Frederick, who was an old-fashioned person with a loving heart, had yet given up regarding Jane as her little lamb, her wee lassie, who was the treasure left to her when husband and boys were taken.

Outwardly she was exceedingly sensible, and many people might have thought her strict, but Jane and her mother knew better. ' She would leave Lochtown if I asked her to do it,' thought the good girl, turning the matter of a wider horizon over in her mind during a solitary walk. ' But it would be a terrible wrench to her to leave the ceme tery,' looking down as she mused upon the bare, formally laid out acres of grass, and pebbled walks, and white headstones (crosses were not much in vogue at Loch town), where centred her mother's tenderest thoughts. ' How strange that to a nobly religious person like my mother the grave should be so precious ! ' The loch looked very blue reflecting the sky of the autumnal afternoon ; there was a light breeze blowing in her face, a breeze from the wider world coming between the headlands from the open sea.

The hills seemed like arms that held her prisoned — kind arms, but not the less detaining, like the arms of a mother. It was one of those moments of intuition when the truth is flashed with as clear a light on the eyes of dwellers in small places as in large. She could not leave her mother, and her mother could not leave with out a heart-break that little ugly town, that bare suburban graveyard, that white cemented stone. ' All my best life is wrapped in her, and here her heart is centred.' A chain of reasoning without a flaw that needed no further argument. ' My heart would be desolate without her, will be desolate when I lose her, as I must too soon — too soon for me, too late for other love.' ' 'Tis as well to face facts. I must live in Lochtown while I have my mother. Afterwards I may leave it as soon as I please.

Then to make the best of it. What can I do ? Write a novel, I suppose, as I have not the opportunity (nor the inclination) to be an hospital nurse, nor to travel in Turkestan and Thibet, nor to study painting in Paris like Marie Bashkirtseff, nor to be the head-mistress of a girls' high school. But what to write about ? Ah, here comes a subject ! Here comes the hero ! " The Little Minister." ' What a pity that I have been forestalled in a title. And this little minister is not so quaint as the Thrums one. Though he is a kind of Covenanter, I imagine.' LOCHTOWN 5 She watched him coming towards her between the high, green whin hedges which sheltered the road on either hand, and as she watched she wondered to which division of the dwellers in Lochtown he belonged, — to those who were glad and proud to be there, or to those who longed to get away.

She, a Lochtowner born and bred, was half ashamed to own herself one of the discontented minority. He too was a Lochtowner born, but not always bred. Ah ! no, that was the strange part of it. He had been away, he had been in great cities, he was Master of Arts of a famous University, and yet he had come back to be the ' little minister ' of a little community, a dissenting flock in a corner of the land. Was it sublime or only stupid ? Perhaps it was neither. It may have been the only thing to do in the circumstances. Yet to choose of one's own free will to settle in Lochtown for a lifetime ! Not even to come in a fit of youthful enthusiasm gladly to fill a sphere that opens to receive one's first energies, but to return in cold blood, to return to a place too well known to be taken for magnificent !

Jane Frederick, who was fond of turning over in her mind such problems of life and aspects of character as came in her way, had wondered more than once what could have been Henry Millie's motive. There was really no mystery about it at all, except to the eyes of a girl like Jane, who had a poetic imagination that was quick to see sorrow and strangeness where other people saw none. He had been dedicated from his cradle, by pious parents, to the service of Christ, in that small but proudly-pure section of the Church which claimed for itself the longest and least corrupted Covenanting pedi gree. He had been eagerly and gladly called by the first congregation that was in need of a minister after his college days were over. He had accepted the call as in duty bound, and had been glad to have a roof to offer his mother in her widowhood.

Now he was doing his best for his people ; — and meanwhile enjoying the quick walk he was taking to the sick-bed of one of his far-scattered flock. When one is still under thirty (or above it for that matter), one feels exhilarated by air and exercise. He went quickly past Jane, lifting his felt hat in return for her greeting, and hardly to be distinguished in dress and bearing from the curate of the new Church of St John the Evangelist, down there in the town, although the one was the highest of little High Churchmen, and the other the shepherd of the Covenanting remnant. ' He has his work to do ; I suppose he is happy,' thought Jane as she went homeward and Millie sped on his way. ' But we seem rather to tread on one another's heels in this little place. It must be difficult to keep up an enthusiastic zeal for the Covenant in the face of so LOCHTOWN 7 much competition.

Here comes the priest of St. John's, the Rev. Augustine Hunter, and don't I see Father Fisher stepping out of Biddy M'Taldroch's just at his back? And when one remembers Mr. Ferguson, and at least half a dozen others, and the churches are none of them full And Mr. Millie is to spend all his life in a forlorn hope to make us once more a Covenanted nation, beginning at Lochtown, — where I shall grow old and die, and have hardly seemed to live at all. Yet Mr. Millie looks thrilling with life. I have a good mind to go and hear him preach next Sunday.'

Chapter II The Covenanting Kirk

This is not a story of surprises ; it pretends to be a transcript of life. So you will expect to hear that when next Sunday afternoon came the Covenanting Church of Lochtown had a new hearer within its walls. Jane Frederick had gone with her mother to her own Church in the morning (as is still the dutiful custom of self-respecting people in Scotland), and then, after the early dinner which was almost universal in Lochtown, was free to seek instruction elsewhere. So she stepped along the empty, ill-paved, narrow streets, duller even than usual with the shutters of the shops all closed, to where at the top of a steep lane stood the Covenanting Kirk. An odour of peppermint was already perceptible when she went in, some child with commendable forethought trying to drive away sleep ere yet ' the prayer was up.' Jane sat down and looked about her.

The plain square building had a certain modest dignity of its own, and the people sat quietly, with the satisfied look of those who know they are waiting for something worth listening to. The heavy wooden pulpit, carved by a local artist, was clumsy perhaps, but not unimpressive with its massive curves of foliage. The precentor sat ready in his desk ; and then the minister stepped in. Jane looked at him with critical eyes, as the possible hero of the novel she meant to write. How should she describe him ? A manly-looking young fellow, with a touch of pathos in his air as he stood there without any pomp of surplice or even gown ; the hair and brow and eyes that one sees oftenest under a trencher cap, and on the streets of Oxford rather than of Cambridge ; a well-cut nose, a small mouth, the blue shaven cheeks of a priest with deep lines about the jaws, a beardless, rather retreating chin.

But his voice was the most distinctive point about him. A soft yet plangent voice, the voice with which one imagines Hugh M'Kail sang his death-psalm on the scaffold on the High Street. No wonder if the shop girls in the front pews sat and gazed at him open mouthed, and had put those pink roses in their hats on his behalf. Jane felt herself curiously stirred by that voice, so strangely pathetic yet so natural, even so Scotch in its intonation. The service went on, and her wondering interest deepened. This was a little minister to be sure, but where were the oddities that could be smiled over by half-under standing London readers, who take for burlesque what ever their knowledge of the Thrums dialect leaves obscure ? This was the voice of a cultivated gentleman (or was it a saint ?) speaking to a handful of tradespeople and of sleepy children in this dull backwater of the stream of life, telling them high and beautiful truths in the best words he could find, sparing no pains, pouring out the treasures he had found for them in many places. ' On he goes through life,' thought his latest listener, ' full of his books and his dreams, his head in the clouds — but his heart here among this benighted people.

I wonder if they understand him in the least' Grey old farmers, a grocer or two, a retired sea-captain, a few young men, half of them asleep, mothers with little round headed boys leaning against their comfortable sides, and little lassies sucking sweeties while their bigger sisters cast adoring glances at the minister. And is there any one to reward him by knowing that Christina Rossetti is responsible for those lovely lines, or that Katherine Tynan suggested that other quaint conceit ? Why should he give them all his best while a much coarser porridge would probably suit them as well. It might become a fascinating occupation to come here and verify the poor young man's quotations,' thought Jane as she went quickly home to her mother. ' But is it not the waste of a delicate tool to place him there ?

It is as if one had used a slender penknife to carve the leaves of that clumsy pulpit of his, and after all the proper tool would have done it better, and without half the waste of time and heart-break. ' There is something rather interesting about him. How am I to find out more of his disposition and character before I begin putting him into the book ? ' She walked along the dull little streets, her heart quite touched by what she had heard. ' Poor young man, is there any use of him toiling after those people ? How stupid they looked, how unresponsive, and yet that will be his audience all his life.' It seemed a little tragedy — for him. ' And perhaps for me.' The cold thought came over her as she put her key in the door. After all it was a little place she filled, and if her mother were not there it might be dreadfully bare.

Ah 1 but her gentle voice was heard, and that was welcome enough. Lochtown was not only a dull little place. It was also inhabited by a dull set of people. It is quite easy to say that all human beings are equally interesting if properly regarded. But it is not true. At least it requires the eye of an angel or of a genius to find out the in teresting qualities. They were a remarkably commonplace sort of people, the Lochtowners, and strangers whose opinion was unbiassed often noticed the great lack of personal beauty amongst them, especially amongst the females. There was a dead level of mediocrity in their faces as well as in their circumstances. A number of moderately well-to-do people lived in Lochtown, but hardly any gentlefolks. A floating population, too, of beggars — perhaps the least attractive sort of poor.

Besides Mrs. Frederick (who, though a widow of limited means, was, it must not be forgotten, a daughter of one of the great houses of the shire, and could call cousins if she chose with the Lord-Lieutenant himself), there were but one or two old ladies and gentlemen in the town to maintain the traditions of blue blood. To be sociable in Lochtown one must perforce put aside any prejudices of that sort. But worse still, there was no aristocracy of intellect to make up for the lack of aristocracy of birth ; and worst of all, Jane Frederick used to groan to her mother in half-laughing despair over the still more fatal lack of an aristocracy of worth. ' This is the most pride-feeding place you could have chosen for our abode, mother. I really believe you and I are the best-born and the best-brained and the bestbehaved people in it.

How can I help being a Pharisee when I see how superior my mamma is to all around her, and that her dear daughter makes not a bad second ? ' ' Hush ! hush ! dear,' said the good mother, ' every day I live I see more clearly how I come short in everything.' ' But that just proves what I say. Nobody else in Lochtown is humble like you. That's part of your superiority to them all. Even I have my ideals, but no Lochtowner sees the need of having one. If there was even an intelligent atheist in the town I could respect him, but we are all orthodox and indifferent. We read nothing, and we wish to read nothing, more abstruse than the Strand Magazine and Ally Sloper. Other places have Browning Societies. If Lochtown sets up a society, it will be for the study of Pick-Me-Up or Tit- Bits. The smarter of us read Modern Society, and the sentimental the works of Grace Aguilar and The Wide Wide World.' ' We ought perhaps to have gone away when I lost your father,' said the gentle mother. ' Your uncle urged it, and he may have been right, but I am too old to move now, dear, I am afraid,' and she sighed with the burdened sense of shortcoming, which was more com monly felt by the generation to which she belonged than it is by the self-confident race of to-day. ' No, no, mother,' said Jane good-humouredly, ' I THE COUiVTRY MINISTER'S LOVE STORY 14 don't insist on an immediate flitting.

I am only explain ing to you why I am not to be blamed if " pride, ugly pride " should prove to be my besetting sin. But did my Uncle Frank actually urge you to leave Lochtown ? I did not know he condescended to take such an intelli gent interest in you after you married my papa. I thought the Hays had no dealings with the Fredericks.' ' Oh, your Uncle Frank was never so foolish as that,' said the widow with a simple dignity ; ' he had seen and known your father. And, dear child, I wish you would not fall into that light way of speaking you used just now. I am sure you mean no harm, but it hurts your old mother to hear the words of Scripture turned even into an innocent joke. And I wish we heard oftener of your uncle. He is all you have to look to when I am gone.' ' Now, mother, you forget how old I am,' said Jane, taking her hand and stroking it ' A person of twenty six ought to be able to look to herself with more con fidence than to any uncle, even though he is one of the " handsome Hays," and has the best woman in Scotland for his sister.

And I'll try to give up that bad habit of paraphrasing Scripture ; for, do you know, I believe it is vulgar, and that's almost worse than wicked in the eyes of a Lochtownshire collateral ! ' Oh, mother, you should not have done it ! I am sure my father was a gentleman, but there is the taint of snobbishness about me that comes from the mixture. I am not a thoroughbred like my little mamma. I should find it far harder than you did to marry a country doctor. My heart pines for gentility in a fashion that is humbling to think of. ' I can't help being more interested in swells I don't know than in Lochtowners I do. Even their names are so much more attractive. I am ever so pleased when any one tells me I am like my great-grandmother Lady Jane, or that I favour the old Laird. I don't care to be told I am " quite a Frederick," as Aunt MacLure is so fond of assuring me.' ' But it is quite a mistake, my dear,' said the mother, in whom family affection was still very strong ; ' there is no doubt of your being a Hay, no doubt whatever.

And your father was totally different from the rest of his family in appearance as well as in everything else. No one could have imagined he had a sister like your Aunt MacLure, although she is an excellent woman in her way. But we ought to remember that, as the old motto says, " virtue is the sole nobility " and try to be good rather than long to be great' ' So we ought, mother, so we ought, and so I am sure you do.' Jane Frederick had enough of the questioning spirit of the age not to have left even the myth of her father's commanding superiority undisturbed in its sacredness. She could not help wondering how much of his attract iveness had lain in the innocent eyes of his wife, who, brought up in great quietness by her aunts, two un worldly, godly gentlewomen, in the end of her young womanhood had been asked in marriage for the first time by the doctor, verging also on middle-age, who had admired her gentle ways, and been perhaps a little dazzled by her position in the county.

He may have been a wonderful man, but his daughter sometimes shrugged her shoulders in secret, and was apt to put down all she did not admire in her own character to the score of his fatherhood. Heredity has a broad back, and must be ready to bear many burdens nowadays. ' Now for my novel,' she said to herself, as, having seen her mother safely in bed, she sat at the fire and drew towards her the ink-bottle wherewith to make a beginning. ' My Covenanter shall be hero, but who is to be heroine, and what skill have I in constructing a story ? And if there are to be adventures I shall be quite at a loss. ' " The History of Henry Millie "—it sounds like " Henry Milner," which mother used to read aloud to me in my youth. Oh, what nonsense it is after all, when I know nothing about him ! He may be the most commonplace young man under the sun, a mere echoer of the dainty conceits of others.

For heroine ? Myself I suppose — the only young woman I know well enough to describe. And I don't feel in the least inclined to become Mrs. Covenanter. Don't I ? I certainly do not. ' Well, he has a wonderful voice, so sweet, so piteous, so manly too. I could imagine a person obeying any one who spoke to her in such a voice. Is it possibly true after all that one might become infatuated, and follow a man anywhere for the sake of a voice or some thing in the turn of his head ? ' I don't think so. I really do not think so. Throw aside all one's prejudices, one's sensible thoughts, one's surely right ideas about social distinctions — it would be a little Judgment Day ! And then, after one had stripped oneself bare of every rag of habit and custom for his sake, by and by to find that it was a delusion, and that he was nothing but an ordinary mortal — no better than oneself, only without the small advantages one had held and cast away ! ' Was my mother ever sorry she had left her shelter among the handsome Hays to become the doctor's wife ? ' And there may have been something special about my father, as she believes there was. ' It is an interesting problem.

Could I imagine my self in love with this Covenanter ? Or would the glamour always be wanting that a little gentle blood gives a man c in my eyes ? Am I going to take the plunge at last that every girl in Lochtown takes, or thinks she takes, before she has left her teens? Or have I so cold a heart that I could not love any man ? Is it that the most ordinary people have a power of affection that I do not possess? I who think myself so superior in many ways. ' To be sure, something would have to be allowed for the effect a man's preference might have on one. How much, I wonder ? ' The whole problem of love seems to me to resolve itself into a matter of temperament. If one is hot blooded and ill-educated, one rushes into it blindfold — if one is cautious, and yet imaginative, like the great Jane Frederick, one may keep out of it very easily, or walk into it with rose-coloured spectacles deliberately put on.

But as to the part the heart plays — the heart, that all lovers and poets insist so much upon — I can't be sure about that. And then if the man had a strange, unaccountable voice, and one was fanciful, that would be an unknown quantity that might turn out greater than one foresaw. ' Perhaps it may be only novelty that makes me find his voice interesting. Don't I remember when I was young I thought the English voice of the curate at St. John's Mission quite fascinating ? The poor little cockney twang, I imagined, showed such culture, and I was impressed with the small high-priestly airs. Well, I am old enough to be past that sort of silliness now, yet this new idea may be really not much better. How did he say it ? ' Show me thy ways, O Lord ! Thy paths, O teach Thou me : And do Thou lead me in Thy truth; Therein my teacher be. ' My sins and faults of youth Do Thou, O Lord, forget. ' And then the quaint mixture — ' Into the wood my Master went. ' He seems very fond of poetry.

If his name were different, if his mother had been born a lady like mine, he is the kind of person I might lose my head about. And my heart too — if I have one, and if he showed the slightest desire to have it. If "iss" and "ands" Were pots and pans ' It is perhaps as well that I am not quite a fool. ' And there is surely no harm in finding a little amuse ment where I can. I am not likely to take active steps in pursuit of my new hero. Poor Jane ! I don't think that was ever your failing. ' But the novel does not make much progress.'

Chapter III Why

not ? Now I come to a part of my story which is very pleasant to tell. For I am fond of Jane Frederick, who, it must be understood, is a thoroughly wholesome heroine, and quite good-looking enough to have had plenty more highly-placed admirers than a little minister, however well dowered with a voice like Hugh M'Kail, a person like Patrick Hamilton, or a heart like Renwick, that last and gentlest martyr of the Scottish Covenant. She had not a fitting sphere, as her dear mother would say, ' from a worldly point of view,' in which to display all her good qualities, but at any rate she had found one person to bow to her charms. Her fair and honest face as she sat in the corner pew to which she had been proudly led by Geordie M'Culloch, the High Street baker, had caught the eyes of the young minister, who was a young man as well as a minister, as he lifted them from his Bible, and the arrow of her pleasantness had gone straight to his heart WHY NOT 1 21 She looked so plainly dressed, and yet with such a noble air — and noble airs were not common in Loch town ; and as the service went on and he saw her understanding, and her rapt, reverent listening, what a thrill they sent into the poor eager speaker!

Some one to appreciate his message ! Some one to kindle at his words ! Why, life would be transfigured with such an one, not to share it — his thoughts had not gone yet so fast — but to know even that she was breath ing the same air, tried by the same temptations, in the same spiritual arena as himself. He fell in love with the thought of her there and then. And it was a good thing that happened to him, what ever should come of it in the future. Nothing but good could come to any man from falling in love with her. It is a comfort to me to know that while I am repre senting Jane as sitting in her little room sufficiently interested in the minister to think of making him the hero of her novel (which is yet to be written, and may take some time in the writing), he is doing a good deal more for her.

He is walking about under the stars in the orthodox lover fashion that has come down to us from many generations, and placing her on a pedestal as the lady of his living heart. He is planning how to approach her ; he is arranging scenes in which she shall allow herself to be worshipped, and shall smile upon one who adores her. For he is full of romance although he is not the descendant of knights and gentlemen, and his lot is to preach every Sunday to a handful of tradesfolk. He is charmed with the thought of his mistress's shadowy pretensions to nobility. Half unconsciously they add a glamour to her image in his eyes. He aspires. He would find no pleasure in stooping. 'Tis she who must stoop to reward him if she will. And he is not all unworthy of her regard. He knows himself a scholar, even with some pre tensions to literary culture.