The Unjust Steward or The Minister's Debt

Mrs. Mowbray herself had not improved in these years. She had a look of care which contracted her forehead, and gave her an air of being older than she was, an effect that often follows the best exertions of those who desire to look younger than they are. She talked a good deal about her expenses, which was a thing not common in those days, and about the difficulty of keeping up a proper position upon a limited income, with all Frank’s costly habits, and her establishment in London, and the great burden of keeping up the old house in St. Rule’s, which she would like to sell if the trustees would permit her. By Mr. Anderson’s will, however, Frank did not come of age, so far as regarded the Scotch property, till he was twenty-five, and thus nothing could be done. She had become a woman of many grievances, which is not perhaps at any time a popular character, complaining of everything, even of Frank; though he was the chief object of her life, and to demonstrate his superiority to everybody else, was the chief subject of her talk, except when her troubles with money and with servants came in, or the grievance of Mr. Anderson’s misbehaviour in leaving so much less money than he ought, overwhelmed all other subjects. Mrs. Mowbray took, as was perhaps natural enough, Mr. Buchanan for her chief confidant. She had always, she said, been in the habit of consulting her clergyman; and though there was a difference, she scarcely knew what, between a clergyman and a minister, she still felt that it was a necessity to have a spiritual guide, and to lay forth the burden of her troubles before some one, who would tell her what it was her duty to do in circumstances so complicated and trying. She learned the way, accordingly, to Mr. Buchanan’s study, where he received all his parish visitors, the elders who came on the business of the Kirk session, and any one who wished to consult him, whether upon spiritual matters, or upon the affairs of the church, or charitable institutions. The latter were the most frequent, and except a poor widow-woman in search of aid for her family, or, with a certificate for a pension to be signed, or a letter for a hospital, his visitors were almost always rare. It was something of a shock when a lady, rustling in silk, and with all her ribbons flying, was first shown in by the half-alarmed maid, who had previously insisted, to the verge of ill-breeding, that Mrs. Buchanan was in the drawing-room: but as time went on, it became a very common incident, and the minister started nervously every time a knock sounded on his door, in terror lest it should be she.

In ordinary cases, I have no doubt Mr. Buchanan would have made a little quiet fun of his visitor, whose knock and step he had begun to know, as if she had been a visitor expected and desired. But what took all the fun out of it and prevented even a smile, was the fact that he was horribly afraid of her all the time, and never saw her come in without a tremor at his heart. It seemed to him on each repeated visit that she must in the interval since the last have discovered something: though he knew that there was nothing to discover, and that the proofs of his own culpability were all locked up in his own heart, where they lay and corroded, burning the place, and never permitting him to forget what he had done, although he had done nothing. How often had he said to himself that he had done nothing! But it did him no good, and when Mrs. Mowbray came in with her grievances, he felt as if each time she must denounce him, and on the spot demand that he should pay what he owed. Oh, if that only could be, if she had denounced him, and had the power to compel payment, what a relief it would have been! It would have taken the responsibility off his shoulders, it would have brought him out of hell. There would then have been no possibility of reasoning with himself, or asking how it was to be done, or shrinking from the shame of revealing even to his wife, what had been his burden all these years. He had in his imagination put the very words into her mouth, over and over again. He had made her say: “Mr. Buchanan, you were owing old Mr. Anderson three hundred pounds.” And to this he had replied: “Yes, Mrs. Mowbray,” and the stone had rolled away from his heart. This imaginary conversation had been repeated over and over again in his mind. He never attempted to deny it, never thought now of taking his bill and writing fourscore. Not an excuse did he offer, nor any attempt at denial. “Yes, Mrs. Mowbray:” that was what he heard himself saying: and he almost wished it might come true.

The condition of strange suspense and expectation into which this possibility threw him, is very difficult to describe or understand. His wife perceived something, and perhaps it crossed her mind for a moment that he liked those visits, and that there was reason of offence to herself in them: but she was a sensible woman and soon perceived the folly of such an explanation. But the mere fact that an explanation seemed necessary, disturbed her, and gave her an uncomfortable sensation in respect to him, who never had so far as she knew in all their lives kept any secret from her. What was it? The most likely thing was, that the secret was Mrs. Mowbray’s which she had revealed to him, and which was a burden on his mind because of her, not of himself. That woman—for this was the way in which Mrs. Buchanan began to describe the other lady in her heart—was just the sort of woman to have a history, and what if she had burdened the minister’s conscience with it to relieve her own? “I wonder,” she said to Elsie one day, abruptly, a remark connected with nothing in particular, “what kind of mind the Catholic priests have, that have to hear so many confessions of ill folks’ vices and crimes. It must be as if they had done it all themselves, and not daring to say a word.”

“What makes you think of that, mother?” said Elsie.

“It is no matter what makes me think of it,” said Mrs. Buchanan, a little sharply. “Suppose you were told of something very bad, and had to see the person coming and going, and never knowing when vengeance might overtake them by night or by day.”

“Do you mean, mother, that you would like to tell, and that they should be punished?” Elsie said.

“It would not be my part to punish her,” said the mother, unconsciously betraying herself. “No, no, that would never be in my mind: but you would always be on the outlook for everything that happened if you knew—and specially if she knew that you knew. Whenever a stranger came near, you would think it was the avenger that was coming, or, at the least, it was something that would expose her, that would be like a clap of thunder. Bless me, Elsie, I cannot tell how they can live and thole it, these Catholic priests.”

“They will hear so many things, they will not think much about them,” Elsie said, with philosophy.

“No think about them! when perhaps it is life or death to some poor creature, and her maybe coming from time to time looking at you very wistful as if she were saying: ‘Do you think they will find me out? Do you think it was such a very bad thing? do you think they’ll kill me for it?’ I think I would just go and say it was me that did it, and would they give me what was my due and be done with it, for ever and ever. I think if it was me, that is what I would do.”

“But it would not be true, mother.”

“Oh, lassie,” said Mrs. Buchanan, “dinna fash me with your trues and your no trues! I am saying what I would be worked up to, if my conscience was bowed down with another person’s sin.”

“Would it be worse than if it was your own?” asked Elsie.

“A great deal worse. When you do what’s wrong yourself, everything that is in you rises up to excuse it. You say to yourself, Dear me, what are they all making such a work about? it is no so very bad, it was because I could not help it, or it was without meaning any harm, or it was just—something or other; but when it is another person, you see it in all its blackness and without thinking of any excuse. And then when it’s your own sin, you can repent and try to make up for it, or to confess it and beg for pardon both to him you have wronged, and to God, but especially to him that is wronged, for that is the hardest. And in any way you just have it in your own hands. But you cannot repent for another person, nor can you make up, nor give her the right feelings; you have just to keep silent, and wonder what will happen next.”

“You are meaning something in particular, mother?” Elsie said.

“Oh, hold your tongue with your nonsense, everything that is, is something in particular,” Mrs. Buchanan said. She had been listening to a rustle of silk going past the drawing-room door; she paused and listened, her face growing a little pale, putting out her hand to hinder any noise, which would prevent her from hearing. Elsie in turn watched her, staring, listening too, gradually making the strange discovery that her mother’s trouble was connected with the coming of Mrs. Mowbray, a discovery which disturbed the girl greatly, though she could not make out to herself how it was.

Mrs. Buchanan could not refrain from a word on the same subject to her husband. When she went to his room after his visitor was gone, she found him with his elbows supported on his table and his face hidden in his hands. He started at her entrance, and raised his head suddenly with a somewhat scared countenance towards her: and then drawing his papers towards him, he began to make believe that he had been writing. “Well, my dear,” he said, turning a little towards her, but without raising his eyes.

“Claude, my dear, what ails you that you should start like that—when it’s just me, your own wife, coming into the room?”

“Did I start?” he said; “no, I don’t think I started: but I did not hear you come in.” Then with a pretence at a smile he added, “I have just had a visit from that weariful woman, Mrs. Mowbray. It was an evil day for me when she was shown the way up here.”

“But surely, Claude,” said Mrs. Buchanan, “it was by your will that she ever came up here.”

“Is that all you know, Mary?” he said, with a smile. “Who am I, that I can keep out a woman who is dying to speak about herself, and thinks there is no victim so easy as the minister. It is just part of the day’s duty, I suppose.”

“But you were never, that I remember, taigled in this way before,” Mrs. Buchanan said.

“I was perhaps never brought face to face before with a woman determined to say her say, and that will take no telling. My dear, if you will free me of her, you will do the best day’s work for me you have ever done in your life.”

“There must be something of the first importance in what she has to say.”

“To herself, I have no doubt,” said the minister, with a deep sigh. “I am thinking there is no subject in the world that has the interest our own affairs have to ourselves. She is just never done: and all about herself.”

“I am not a woman to pry into my neighbour’s concerns: but this must be some sore burden on her conscience, Claude, since she has so much to say to you.”

“Do you think so?” he cried. “Well, that might perhaps be an explanation: for what I have to do with her small income, and her way of spending her money, and her house, and her servants, I cannot see. There is one thing that gives it a sting to me. I cannot forget that we have something to do with the smallness of her income,” Mr. Buchanan said.

“We to do with smallness of her income! I will always maintain,” said Mrs. Buchanan, “that the money was the old man’s, and that he had the first right to give it where he pleased; but, dear Claude, man, you that should ken—what could that poor three hundred give her? Fifteen pound per annum; and what is fifteen pound per annum?—not enough to pay that English maid with all her airs and graces. If it had been as many thousands, there might have been some justice it.”

“That is perhaps an idea,” said the harassed minister, “if we were to offer her the interest, Mary? My dear, what would you say to that? It would be worse than ever to gather together that money and pay it back; but fifteen pounds a year, that might be a possible thing; you might put your shoulder to the wheel, and pay her that.”

“Claude,” said Mrs. Buchanan, “are you sure that is all the woman is wanting? I cannot think it can be that. It is just something that is on her conscience, and she wants to put it off on you.”

“My dear,” said the minister, “you’re a very clever woman, but you are wrong there. I have heard nothing about her conscience, it is her wrongs that she tells to me.” The conversation had eased his mind a little, and his wife’s steady confidence in his complete innocence in the matter, and the perfect right of old Anderson to do what he liked with his own money, was always, for the moment at least, refreshing to his soul: though he soon fell back on the reflection that the only fact of any real importance in the matter was the one she never knew.

Mrs. Buchanan was a little disconcerted by the failure of her prevision, but she would not recede. “If she has not done it yet, she will do it sometime. Mind what I am saying to you, Claude: there is something on her conscience, and she wants to put it off on you.”

“Nonsense, Mary,” he said. “What should be on the woman’s conscience? and why should she try to put it upon mine? Dear me, my conscience would be far easier bearing the weight of her ill-doing than the weight of my own. We must get this beam out of our own eye if we can, and then the mote in our neighbour’s—if there is a mote—will be easy, oh, very easy, to put up with. It is my own burden that troubles me.”

“Toot,” said Mrs. Buchanan, “you are just very exaggerated. It was most natural Mr. Anderson should do as he did, knowing all the circumstances—and you, what else should you do, to go against him? But you will just see,” she added, confidently, “that I will prove a true prophet after all. If it has not been done, it will be done, and you will get her sin to bear as well as your own.”

CHAPTER XIII.

PLAINTIFF OR PENITENT?

Meanwhile, the reader shall judge by the turn of one of these conversations whether Mrs. Buchanan was, or was not, justified in her prevision. Mrs. Mowbray came tripping up the long stair, which was of stone, and did not creak under foot, though she was betrayed by the rustle of her silk dress, which was in those days a constant accompaniment of a woman’s movements. When she approached nearer, there were other little sounds that betrayed her,—a little jingle of bracelets and chains, and the bugles of her mantle. She was naturally dressed in what was the height of the fashion then, though we should think it ridiculous now, as we always think the fashions that are past. When Mr. Buchanan heard that little jingle and rattle, his heart failed him. He put down his pen or his book, and the healthful colour in his cheek failed. A look of terror and trouble came into his face.

“Here is that woman again,” he said to himself. Mrs. Mowbray, on her side, was very far from thinking herself that woman; she rather thought the minister looked forward with pleasure to her visits, that she brought a sort of atmosphere of sunshine and the great world into that sombre study of his, and that the commonplace of his life was lighted up by her comings and goings. There are a great many people in the world who deceive themselves in this way, and it would have been a shock to Mrs. Mowbray if she had seen the appalled look of the minister’s face when his ear caught the sound of her coming, and he looked up to listen the better, with a gesture of impatience, almost despair, saying to himself, “that woman again.”

She came in, however, all smiles, lightly tapping at the door, with a little distinctive knock, which was like nobody else’s, or so at least she thought. She liked to believe that she did everything in a distinctive way, so that her touch and her knock and all her movements should be at once realised as hers. She had been a pretty woman, and might still indeed have been so, had she not been so anxious to preserve her charms that she had undermined them for a long time, year by year. She had worn out her complexion by her efforts to retain it and make it brighter, and frizzed and tortured her hair till she had succeeded in making it of no particular colour at all. The effort and wish to be pretty were so strong in her, and so visible, that it made her remaining prettiness almost ridiculous, and people laughed at her as an old woman struggling to look young when she was not really old at all. Poor Mrs. Mowbray! looking at her from one point of view, her appearance was pathetic, for it was as much as to say that she felt herself to have no recommendation at all but her good looks, and therefore would fight for them to the death—which is, if you think of it, a kind of humility, though it gets no credit for being so. She came in with a simper and jingle of all the chains and adornments, as if she felt herself the most welcome of visitors, and holding out her hand, said:

“Here I am again, Mr. Buchanan. I am sure you must be getting quite tired of me.” She expected him to contradict her, but the minister did not do so. He said:

“How do you do, Mrs. Mowbray?” rising from his chair, but the muscles of his face did not relax, and he still held his pen in his hand.

“I am so afraid you are busy, but I really will not detain you above a few minutes. It is such a comfort amid all the troubles of my life to come to this home of peace, and tell you everything. You don’t know what a consolation it is only to see you, Mr. Buchanan, sitting there so calm, and so much above the world. It is a consolation and a reproach. One thinks, Oh, how little one’s small troubles are in the light that comes from heaven!”

“I am afraid you are giving me credit for much more tranquillity than I can claim,” said the minister. “I am not without my cares, any more than other men.”

“Ah, but what are those cares?” cried the lady. “I know; the care of doing what you can for everybody else, visiting the poor and widows in their affliction, and keeping yourself unspotted from the world. Oh, how different, how different from the things that overwhelm us!”

What could the poor minister do? It seemed the most dreadful satire to him to be so spoken to, conscious as he was of the everlasting gnawing at his heart of what he had done, or at least left undone. But if he had been ever so anxious to confess his sins, he could not have done it to her; and accordingly he had to smile as best he could, and say that he hoped he might preserve her good opinion, though he had done so very little to deserve it. Perhaps if he had been less conscious of his own demerits, he would have perceived, as his wife had done, that there was a line in Mrs. Mowbray’s forehead which all her little arts could not conceal, and which meant more than anything she had yet told him. Mrs. Buchanan had divined this, but not the minister, who was too much occupied with his own purgatory to be aware that amid all her rustlings and jinglings, and old-fashioned coquetries, there was here by his side another soul in pain.

“You cannot imagine,” said Mrs. Mowbray, spreading out her hands, “what it is to me to think of my poor Frank deceived in his hopes, and instead of coming into a fortune, having next to no money when he comes of age. Oh, that coming of age, I am so frightened, so frightened for it! It is bad enough now to deny him so many things he wants.”

“Do you deny him many things he wants?” said the minister. The question was put half innocently, half satirically, for Frank indeed seemed a spoilt child, having every possible indulgence, to the sturdy sons of St. Rule’s.

Mrs. Mowbray laughed, and made a movement as of tapping the minister’s arm with a fan.

“Oh, how unkind of you,” she said, “to be so hard on a mother’s weakness! I have not denied him much up to this time. How could I, Mr. Buchanan, my only child? And he has such innocent tastes. He never wants anything extravagant. Look at him now. He has no horse, he is quite happy with his golf, and spends nothing at all. Perhaps his tailor’s bill is large, but a woman can’t interfere with that, and it is such a nice thing that a boy should like to be well dressed. I like him to take a little trouble about his dress. I don’t believe he ever touches a card, and betting over his game on the links is nothing, he tells me: you win one day and lose the next, and so you come out quite square at the end. Oh, it all goes on smooth enough now. But when he comes of age! It was bad enough last time when he came of age, for his English money and everything was gone over. Do you think it just, Mr. Buchanan, that a mere man of business, a lawyer, an indifferent person that knows nothing about the family, should go over all your expenses, and tell you you shouldn’t have done this, and you shouldn’t have done that, when he has really nothing to do with it, and the money is all your own?”

“I am afraid,” said Mr. Buchanan, “that the business man is a necessity, and perhaps is better able to say what you ought to spend than you are yourself.”

“Oh, how can you say so? when perhaps he is not even a gentleman, and does not understand anything about what one wants when one is accustomed to good society. This man Morrison, for instance–”

“Morrison,” said the minister, “is a gentleman both by blood and breeding, although he is a simple man in his manners: his family–”

“Oh, I know what you mean,” said Mrs. Mowbray, “a small Scotch squire, and they think as much of their family as if they were dukes. I know he is Morrison of somewhere or other, but that does not teach a man what’s due to a lady, or what a young man wants who is entitled to expect his season in town, and all his little diversions. Morrison, Mr. Buchanan, would have put Frank to a trade. He would, it is quite true. I don’t wonder you are surprised. My Frank, with so much money on both sides! He spoke to me of an office in Edinburgh. I assure you he did—for my boy!”

“I am not in the least surprised,” said the minister; “we are all thankful to put our sons into offices in Edinburgh, and get them something to do.”

“I am sure you won’t think I mean anything disagreeable,” said Mrs. Mowbray, “but your sons, Mr. Buchanan, pardon me—you have all so many of them. And I have only one, and money, as I say, on both sides. I had quite a nice fortune myself. I never for a moment will consent that my Frank should go into an office. It would ruin his health, and then he is much too old for anything of that sort. The folly of postponing his majority till he was twenty-five! And oh, Mr. Buchanan,” she cried, clasping her hands, “the worst of it all is, that he will find so little, so very little when he does come into his property at last.”

There was a look almost of anguish in the poor lady’s face, her eyes seemed full of tears, her forehead was cut across by that deep line of trouble which Mrs. Buchanan had divined. She looked at the minister in a sort of agony, as if asking, “May I tell him? Dare I tell him?” But of this the minister saw nothing. He did not look at her face with any interest. He was employed in resisting her supposed efforts to penetrate his secret, and this concealed from him, under impenetrable veils, any secret that she might have of her own. It was not that he was dull or slow to understand in general cases, but in this he was blinded by his own profound preoccupation, and by a certain dislike to the woman who thus disturbed and assailed his peace. He could not feel any sympathy with her; her little airs and graces, her efforts to please, poor soul, which were intended only to make her agreeable, produced in him exactly the opposite sensation, which often happens, alas, in our human perversity. Neither of them indeed understood the other, because each was occupied with himself.

“I don’t think,” said Mr. Buchanan, roused to resistance, “that you will find things nearly so bad as you seem to expect. I am sure the estate has been very carefully administered while in my friend Morrison’s hands. You could not have a more honourable or a more careful steward. He could have no interest but to do the best he could for you, and I am sure he would do it. And property has not fallen in value in Fife so far as I know. I think, if you will permit me to say so, that you are alarming yourself without cause.”

All this time, Mrs. Mowbray had been looking at him through the water in her eyes, her face contracted, her lips a little apart, her forehead drawn together. He glanced at her from time to time while he was speaking, but he had the air of a man who would very gladly be done with the business altogether, and had no ear for her complaints. The poor lady drew from the depths of her bosom a long sigh, and then her face changed from the momentary reality into which some strong feeling had forced it. It was a more artificial smile than ever which she forced upon her thin lips, in which there was a quiver of pain and doubt.