Salted With Fire | Page 5

just as she
did. He was her only son; her heart was full of ambition for him; and
she brooded on the honour he was destined to bring her and his father.
The latter, however, caring less for his good looks, had neither the same
satisfaction in him nor an equal expectation from him. Neither of his
parents, indeed, had as yet reaped much pleasure from his existence,
however much one of them might hope for in the time to come. There
were two things indeed against such satisfaction or pleasure--that James
had never been open-hearted toward them, never communicative as to
his feelings, or even his doings; and--which was worse--that he had
long made them feel in him a certain unexpressed claim to superiority.
Nor would it have lessened their uneasiness at this to have noted that
the existence of such an implicit claim was more or less evident in
relation to every one with whom he came in contact, manifested mainly
by a stiff, incommunicative reluctance, taking the form now of a
pretended absorption in his books, now of contempt for any sort of
manual labour, even to the saddling of the pony he was about to ride;
and now and always by an affectation of proper English, which, while
successful as to grammar and accentuation, did not escape the ludicrous
in a certain stiltedness of tone and inflection, from which intrusion of
the would-be gentleman, his father, a simple, old-fashioned man,
shrank with more of dislike than he was willing to be conscious of.
Quite content that, having a better education than himself, his son
should both be and show himself superior, he could not help feeling
that these his ways of asserting himself were signs of mere foolishness,
and especially as conjoined with his wish to be a minister--in regard to
which Peter but feebly sympathized with the general ambition of Scots
parents. Full of simple paternal affection, whose utterance was
quenched by the behaviour of his son, he was continuously aware of
something that took the shape of an impassable gulf between James and
his father and mother. Profoundly religious, and readily appreciative of
what was new in the perception of truth, he was, above all, of a great
and simple righteousness--full, that is, of a loving sense of fairplay--a
very different thing indeed from that which most of those who count
themselves religious mean when they talk of the righteousness of God!
Little, however, was James able to see of this, or of certain other great

qualities in his father. I would not have my reader think that he was
consciously disrespectful to either of his parents, or knew that his
behaviour was unloving. He honoured their character, indeed, but
shrank from the simplicity of their manners; he thought of them with no
lively affection, though not without some kindly feeling and much
confidence--at the same time regarding himself with still greater
confidence. He had never been an idler, or disobedient; and had made
such efforts after theological righteousness as served to bolster rather
than buttress his conviction that he was a righteous youth, and
nourished his ignorance of the fact that he was far from being the
person of moral strength and value that he imagined himself. The
person he saw in the mirror of his self-consciousness was a very fine
and altogether trustworthy personage; the reality so twisted in its
reflection was but a decent lad, as lads go, with high but untrue notions
of personal honour, and an altogether unwarranted conviction that such
as he admiringly imagined himself, such he actually was: he had never
discovered his true and unworthy self! There were many things in his
life and ways upon which had he but fixed eyes of question, he would
at once have perceived that they were both judged and condemned; but
so far, nevertheless, his father and mother might have good hope of his
future.
It is folly to suppose that such as follow most the fashions of this world
are more enslaved by them than multitudes who follow them only afar
off. These reverence the judgments of society in things of far greater
importance than the colour or cut of a gown; often without knowing it,
they judge life, and truth itself, by the falsest of all measures, namely,
the judgment of others falser than themselves; they do not ask what is
true or right, but what folk think and say about this or that. James, for
instance, altogether missed being a gentleman by his habit of asking
himself how, in such or such circumstances, a gentleman would behave.
As the man of honour he would fain know himself, he would never tell
a lie or break a promise; but he had not come to perceive that there are