Shona MacLEAN - The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

Matthew put down his tankard, pleased. ‘That is all I wanted to hear, Alexander. A lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth is a waste of an able man. Be mortified in your conscience if you must, but do not throw away the gifts God gave you because of it. There is a passage in Joel, is there not?’

John came to his assistance, ‘“And rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the Lord your God: for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness, and repenteth him of the evil.”’ Sometimes it was too easy to forget that beneath Matthew’s bluster lay a simple but firm humanity. How could I ever have hoped to be a minister, when I was such a poor judge of even my own old friends?

A little before two our party broke up. A group of Huntly’s men arrived, bound for the South, and Matthew was to ride with them on the marquis’s business. William was returning home to Elizabeth for the afternoon. John and I walked over to the college together. He, who had always been gentle and diligent, knew he would never be a bishop. He had been a hard-working student and was a competent teacher, but he did not have the sharpness of mind needed to distinguish him from so many others. Yet John was not ambitious, and was content to study and to teach within the safety of the college. I had used to wonder at his lack of ambition, but now I believe I envied it.

We were soon at the entrance to the college, beneath the chapel’s great crown tower, symbol of our nation’s now slumbering imperial hopes. We went in under the gateway and John pointed out to me a door across the quadrangle where Dr Dun could be found. He embraced me again, and I promised that it would not be so long until we saw each other once more, then he hurried off to take his afternoon class.

I found myself a little nervous as I approached Dr Dun’s door. He would know little of me, I hoped, but I knew much of him. Principal of the Marischal College, he was Mediciner here at King’s as well, a friend and support to the bishop in his efforts to reform the college and stamp out abuses where they might be found. In addition to these already heavy responsibilities, he carried out a busy medical practice amongst the wealthy landed families in the countryside about. He was all that Jaffray might have been, had my old friend not been content to fight his daily fight against pain, malnourishment and disease in our own small town.

A student showed me to Dr Dun’s room, where I was greeted by a tall and spare-looking man of little more than forty. He dismissed the student and bade me sit down while he finished off the piece of work he was engaged upon. After a few moments he looked up. ‘Now, Mr Seaton, you are here on the matter of the bursaries?’

Thankful for the lack of preliminaries, I launched gratefully into my well-rehearsed speech. ‘I have a young scholar of great promise in Banff, who, through his mother, has a claim to one of Dr Liddel’s bursaries at the Marischal College. I know there may well be several boys competing for the benefit. I am anxious that he should not be disadvantaged through some want on my part. In particular, I would like to know the standard of Greek that is required of petitioners for the bursaries. My own scholars are at an elementary stage in their Greek studies, but I am confident that with extra tuition I might be able to make up any deficiency.’

Dun smiled broadly and put down the pipe he had been turning over in his hands. ‘Mr Seaton, if your scholars have any Greek at all, then they will be at no disadvantage against the town boys. We have, of course, excellent masters, but they have a great press of duties upon them and do not always attend to the school as much as might be required. Yet schooling is the most important work our kingdom has to offer. If we are to build the godly Commonwealth here in Scotland, schooling must be our foundation.’ I had heard this before, in many quarters, but Dun spoke with true conviction. If there were more such men the great project of our reformers might have a chance. He got up and lit his pipe from the fire. ‘Tell me, do you have another occupation, or aspirations, as well as your schoolmastering in Banff?’

‘I have no other occupation,’ I said, with, I hoped, sufficient finality that he should not press me further.

Dun, however, was not to be put off. ‘And aspiration?’

I shifted in my seat. ‘Whatever aspirations I might once have had are finished with.’

Still he persisted. ‘You had some other calling?’

There was little point now in further prevarication; he should have what he was asking for. ‘I had hopes once of being a minister. At my final trials I was accused of a wrongdoing I could not deny. The passage of time will not right that wrong. I will not recommence on my trials for the ministry.’

He returned to his desk, the tips of his fingers pressed against one another. ‘And you have found another calling now, as a schoolteacher?’

It would perhaps have been politic to have obliged him, but I was resolved to be done with such dishonesty. ‘Schoolmastering will never be a calling to me, but it is what I did before, while I was a divinity student on my trials, and it is something I can do; a man must eat. And I know, as you will tell me, that it performs a necessary role in society, and for that, and for the affection I bear my scholars, I do it as well as I am able, but for myself I have no great love for the task and derive no great satisfaction from it.’

‘I am sorry to hear that, Mr Seaton, for I think that a schoolmaster who will travel fifty miles for the sake of one pupil, who takes the time to teach Greek to the sons of a small burgh such as Banff, and of whose proficiency in many disciplines I had already heard, has much to offer. If, as you say, you will never return to the pursuit of your first calling, it is a great pity that you derive little comfort from your second. For myself, I do not believe that God gives a man such gifts as you have been given only to condemn him to repeated failures.’ He did not call for his servant to show me out, but rose and accompanied me out into the quadrangle himself. ‘The trials for the bursary take place at the end of June, when I trust we will meet again. May God go with you until then.’ He turned away and I watched him disappear beyond the cloister into the darkness of the college. I walked over to the well and drew up some water. It was cool and clear, and the taste of it brought me back to this place several years ago, when the future had been a realm of possibility, and the past a thing not considered.

I finished the ladle of water I had drawn from the bucket and was about to move on when I heard footsteps coming towards me from the college gateway. I knew those footsteps. Had I not stopped to indulge my thirst I could have been away out of this place by now – the college gateway was not ten yards from the road. Instead I was here, in the centre of my gilded past, with no means of avoiding the eye of the one man in the whole of Aberdeen, new town and old, whom I had most wished not to meet. I looked up, waiting for the reckoning to come. The face coming towards me broke into a smile of genuine joy; a hand reached out and grasped mine.

‘Alexander Seaton, it is truly you? I had not thought to see you here again, though I have often wished and prayed for it. What has brought you back to us? Why did you not tell me you were coming? Have you been waiting on me long? I have been kept busy the whole morning on college business with my father.’ Dr John Forbes of Corse, son of the bishop and Professor of Divinity in the King’s College of Aberdeen, the most learned man I knew, stood before me, his face filled with affection. He was a man of the deepest spirituality and had had greater hopes for me than even I had ever done. There can have been few teachers more disappointed by the failure of a pupil than he had been by mine.