“What a miserable life!” she would exclaim at the news of some fresh imbecility, as it seemed to her. “A hundred pounds for a breakfast! Five hundred pounds for a picture to a lady! Oh, Jamie, Jamie, what a master!”
She grieved, indeed, exceedingly about the sinful course of life in which her son was implicated, and more than once, for his soul’s sake, asked him to come back to Scotland, but always he temporised. With Lord Balgowie he enjoyed a comfortable salary; he had no profession at his hands, although he had had the best of educations, thanks to his parents’ self-denial, and he saw himself doomed for a term of years to follow the progress of his rakish patron.
Her only comfort was in the shrewd and sober nature of his comments on his master’s follies. “I have looked at his manner of life in all ways, mother,” he wrote, “and it seems to me deplorable. Once I had the notion to be wealthy for the sake of the independence and the power for good that money can command; now I can see it has a cankering influence on the soul. I have gone with my lord to every part of Europe, looking for content and—in his own state—simple honesty, for friends to trust, and a creditable occupation for the mind. Nothing in all the capitals among the rich but idleness and riot and display, cunning intrigue, self-seeking, and calculation. Thank God that you’re poor!”
Not so very poor, though, for he sent her thirty shillings every week, a benefaction that enabled her to share among the really poor who were her neighbours. For years that sum had come to her with his letters every Saturday, often from towns whose names in their foreign spelling were unknown to her; a sense of opulence that caused her some uneasiness had more than once compelled her to protest. “I am sure you deprive yourself,” she wrote, “and half that money would do me finely. You should be saving, laddie; some day you will want to marry.”
“Marry,” he wrote her back, incontinent; “I am here in a world of mannequins, and have yet to see the woman I could be happy to sit with in auld age by a Scottish fire.”
But he was not always to be of that mind. One day her weekly letter held the fabulous sum of twenty pounds, and a hint of his infatuation for a lady he had met in Paris. His mother read his rhapsodies about the lass; they were, she noticed, more about her wit and beauty than about her heart. And in his letter was an unfamiliar undertone of apprehension, secrecy, evasion, which her mother sense discerned.