Effie Ogilvie: The Story of a Young Life (Complete‪)‬

The family consisted of Effie’s father, her stepmother, her brother Eric who was in the army, and a little personage, the most important of all, the only child of the second Mrs. Ogilvie, the pet and plaything of the house. You may think it would have been more respectful and becoming to reverse this description, and present Mr. and Mrs. Ogilvie first to the notice of the reader, which we shall now proceed to do. The only excuse we can offer for the irregularity of the beginning consists in the fact that it is the nature of their proceedings in respect to the young people, and particularly to Mr. Ogilvie’s daughter Effie, which induces us to disturb the decorous veil which hangs over the doors of every respectable family, in the case of these worthy persons.

In their own lives, had we time and space to recount all that befell them, there would, no doubt, be many interesting particulars, as in the lives of most other people: but when a country gentleman has attained the age of fifty or a little more, with enough of money for his necessities, and no more ambition than can be satisfied by the regulation of the affairs of the parish, it is inevitably through the fortunes of a son or daughter that he comes within reach of the sympathies of the world. These troublesome productions, of whom we take so little thought at first, who are nothing but playthings and embellishments of our own estate for so many years, have a way of pushing us out of our commanding position as the chief actors in our own lives, setting us aside into a secondary place, and conferring upon us a quite fictitious interest as influences upon theirs. It is an impertinence of fate, it is an irony of circumstance; but still it is so. And it is, consequently, as Effie’s father, a character in which he by no means knew himself, that Mr. Ogilvie of Gilston, a gentleman as much respected as any in his county, the chief heritor in his parish, and a deputy-lieutenant, has now to be presented to the world.

He was a good man in his way, not perfect, as in the general he was himself very willing to allow, though he did not, any more than the rest of us, like that niggling sort of criticism which descends to particulars. He was a man who would have suffered a little personal inconvenience rather than do anything which he was convinced was wrong, which most of us, who are old enough to be acquainted with our own ways, will be aware is no small thing to say. But, ordinarily, also like most of us, his wrong acts were done without taking time to identify them as wrong, on the spur of the moment, in the heat of a present impulse which took from them all the sting of premeditation.

Thus, when he gave good Glen, the virtuous collie, as he came forward smiling and cheerful, with a remark upon the beauty of the morning glistening in his bright eyes and waving majestically in his tail, that sudden kick which sent the good fellow off howling, and oppressed his soul all day with a sense of crime, Mr. Ogilvie did not do it by intention, did not come out with the purpose of doing it, but only did it because he had just got a letter which annoyed him. Glen, who had a tender conscience, lived half the day under a weight of unnecessary remorse, convinced that he must himself have done something very wicked, though a confused moral sense and the absence of a recognized code made him sadly incapable of discovering what it was; but his master had not the slightest intention of inflicting any such mental torture.