It was some time before Colin recovered his composure, or found it possible to console himself for the failure of his hopes. He wrote a great deal of poetry in the meantime—or rather of verses which looked wonderfully like poetry, such as young men of genius are apt to produce under such circumstances. The chances are, that if he had confided them to any critic of a sympathetic mind, attempts would have been made to persuade Colin that he was a poet. But luckily Lauderdale was not at hand, and there was no one else to whom the shy young dreamer would have disclosed himself. He sent some of his musings to the magazines, and so added a little excitement and anxiety to his life. But nobody knew Colin in that little world where, as in other worlds, most things go by favour, and impartial appreciation is comparatively unknown. The editors most probably would have treated their unknown correspondent in exactly the same manner had he been a young Tennyson. As it was, Colin did not quite know what to think about his repeated failures{62} in this respect. When he was despondent he became disgusted with his own productions, and said to himself that of course such maudlin verse could be procured by the bushel, and was not worthy of paper and print. But in other moods the lad imagined he must have some enemy who prejudiced the editorial world, and shut against him the gates of literary fame. In books all the heroes, who could do nothing else, found so ready a subsistence by means of magazines, that the poor boy was naturally puzzled to find that all his efforts could not gain him a hearing. And it began to be rather important to him to find something to do. During the previous summers Colin had not disdained the farm and its labours, but had worked with his father and brothers without any sense of incongruity. But now matters were changed. Miss Matty, with her curls and her smiles, had bewitched the boy out of his simple innocent life. It did not seem natural that the hand which she consented to touch with her delicate fingers should hold the plough or the reaping hook, or that her companion in so many celestial rambles should plod through the furrows at other times, or go into the rough drolleries of the harvest field.

Colin began to think that the life of a farmer’s son at Ramore was inconsistent with his future hopes, and there was nothing else for it but teaching, since so little was to be made of the magazines. When he had come to himself and began to see the surrounding circumstances with clearer eyes, Colin, who had no mind to be dependent, but meant to make his own way as was natural to a Scotch lad of his class, bethought himself of the most natural expedient. He had distinguished himself at college, and it was not difficult to find the occupation he wanted. Perhaps he was glad to escape from the primitive home, from the mother’s penetrating looks, and all the homely ways of which the ambitious boy began to be a little impatient. He had come to the age of discontent. He had begun to look forward no longer to the vague splendours of boyish imagination, but to elevation in the social scale, and what he heard people call success in life. A year or two before it had not occurred to Colin to consider the circumstances of his own lot;—his ambition pointed only to ideal grandeur, unembarrassed by particulars—and it was very possible for the boy to be happy, thinking of some incoherent greatness to come, while engaged in the humblest work, and living in the homeliest fashion. But the time had arrived when the pure ideal had to take to itself some human garments, and when the farmer’s son became aware that a scholar{63} and a gentleman required a greater degree of external refinement in his surroundings. His young heart was wounded by this new sense, and his visionary pride offended by the thought that these external matters could count for anything in the dignity of a man. But Colin had to yield like every other. He loved his family no less, but he was less at home among them. The inevitable disruption was commencing, and already, with the quick insight of her susceptible nature, the mistress of Ramore had discovered that the new current was setting in, that the individual stream of Colin’s life was about to disengage itself, and that her proud hopes for her boy were to be sealed by his separation from her. The tender-hearted woman said nothing of it, except by an occasional pathetic reflection upon things in general, which went to Colin’s heart, and which he understood perfectly; but perhaps, though no one would have confessed as much, it was a relief to all when the scholar-son, of whom everybody at Ramore was so proud, went off across the loch, rowed by two of his brothers, with his portmanteau and the first evening coat he had ever possessed, to Ardmartin, the fine house on the opposite bank, where he was to be tutor to Mr. Jordan’s boys, and eat among strangers the bread of his own toil.

The mistress stood at the door shading her eyes with her hand, and looking after the boat as it shot across the bright water. Never at its height of beauty had the Holy Loch looked more fair. The sun was expanding and exulting over all the hills, searching into every hollow, throwing up unthought-of tints, heaps of moss, and masses of rock, that no one knew of till that moment; and with the sunshine went flying shadows that rose and fell like the lifting of an eyelid. The gleam of the sun before she put up her hand to shade her face fell upon the tear in the mistress’s eye, and hung a rainbow upon the long lash, which was wet with that tender dew. She looked at her boys gliding over the loch through this veil of fairy colours, all made out of a tear, and the heart in her tender bosom beat with a corresponding conjunction of pain and happiness. “He’ll never more come back to bide at home like his father’s son,” she said to herself, softly, with a pang of natural mortification; “but, eh, I’m a thankless woman to complain, and him so weel and so good, and naething in fant but nature,” added the mother, with all the compunction of true love; and so stood gazing till the boat had gone out of hearing, and had begun to enter that sweet shadow of the opposite bank, projected far into the loch, which plunged the whole landscape into a dazzling uncertainty,{64} and made it a doubtful matter which was land and which was water. Colin himself, touched by the loveliness of the scene, had paused just then to look down the shining line to where this beatified paradise of water opened out into the heaven of Clyde. And to his mother’s eyes gazing after him, the boat seemed to hang suspended among the sweet spring foliage of the Lady’s Glen, which lay reflected, every leaf and twig, in the sweeter loch. When somebody called her indoors she went away with a sigh. Was it earth, or a vision of Paradise, or “some unsubstantial fairy place?” The sense of all this loveliness struck intense, with almost a feeling of pain, upon the gentle woman’s poetic heart.

And it was in such a scene that Colin wrote the verses which borrowed from the sun and the rain prismatic colours like those of his mother’s tears, and were as near poetry as they could possibly be to miss that glory. Luckily for him he had no favourite confidant at hand to persuade him that he was a poet; so the verse-making did him nothing but good, providing a safety-valve for that somewhat stormy period of his existence.

Mr. Jordan was very rich and very liberal, and, indeed, lavish of the money which had elevated him above all his early friends and associations. He had travelled, he bought pictures, he prided himself upon his library, and he was very good to his young tutor, who, he told everybody, was “a lad of genius;” and though naturally, even with all this, Colin’s existence was not one of unmingled bliss, the change was good for him. As soon as he had left Ramore he began to look back to it with longing, as was natural to his years. The sense that he had that home behind him, with everybody ready to stand by him whatever trouble he might fall into, and every heart open to hear and sympathize in all the particulars of his life, restored the young man all at once to content and satisfaction with the homely household that loved him. When he was there life looked gray and sombre in all its sober-coloured garments; but when he looked across the loch at the white house on the hillside, that little habitation had regained its ideal character. He had some things to endure, as was natural, that galled his high spirit, but, on the whole, he was happier than if he had still been at Ramore.

And so the summer passed on. He had sent his answer to Sir Thomas without any delay—an answer in which, on the whole, his father concurred—written in a strain of lofty politeness which would not have misbecome a young prince. “He was destined for the Church of Scotland,” Colin wrote, “and{65} such being the case, it was best that he should content himself with the training of a Scotch university. Less perfect, no doubt,” the boy had said, with a kind of haughty humility; “but, perhaps, better adapted to the future occupations of a Scotch clergyman.” And then he went on to offer thanks in a magnificent way, calculated to overwhelm utterly the good-natured baronet, who had never once imagined that the pride of the farmer’s son would be wounded by his proposal. The answer had been sent, and no notice had been taken of it. It was months since then, and not a word of Sir Thomas Frankland or his family had been heard about the Holy Loch. They seemed to have disappeared altogether back again into their native firmament, never more to dazzle the eyes of beholders in the west country. It was hard upon Colin thus to lose, at a stroke, not only the hope on which he had built so securely, but at the same time a great part of the general stimulation of his life. Not only the visionary budding love which had filled him with so many sweet thoughts, but even the secret rivalry and opposition which no one knew of, had given strength and animation to his life—and now both seemed to have departed together. He mused over it often with wonder, asking himself if Lauderdale was right; if it was true that most things come to nothing; and whether meetings and partings, which looked as if they must tell upon life for ever and ever, were, after all, of not half so much account as the steady routine of existence? The youth perplexed him............