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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79371 ***




                           SAINT MUNGO’S CITY

                                A Novel

                            BY SARAH TYTLER

         AUTHOR OF ‘THE BRIDE’S PASS,’ ‘WHAT SHE CAME THROUGH,’
                      ‘BEAUTY AND THE BEAST,’ ETC.

                        [Illustration: colophon]

                            IN THREE VOLUMES
                                VOL. I.

                                 London
                     CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY
                                  1884
                        [_All rights reserved_]




                          SAINT MUNGO’S CITY.




CHAPTER I.

YOUNG MACKINNON’S MARRIAGE CONTRACT.


Nearly thirty years ago, three highly-respectable ‘single ladies,’
sisters, of the name of Mackinnon, the youngest of them already turned
forty, the eldest over fifty, and showing decided tokens of what had
been from the beginning a sort of ready-made old-maidishness, dwelt in
what was still a commodious house in one of the old squares of Glasgow.
It was a region which had fallen down in the world, since the days when
its substantial houses--their line broken here and there by low-browed,
covered-in ‘pends’--were occupied by more than one of the ‘Tobacco
Lords’--the ancient autocrats of the West, sprouts from the great
Highland houses who had pocketed their pride and stooped to prosecute
trade in St. Mungo’s city instead of levying blackmail on the Lowland
borders. These adventurous spirits had amassed great fortunes, and had
strutted on the ‘plainstanes’ in their huge wigs and scarlet cloaks, as
haughtily as in the days of their youth they had climbed their native
braes in bonnets and kilts. Such magnates had long passed away. The tide
of trade and fashion had altered more than once in the interval since
sugar had got the better of tobacco, and cotton had rivalled sugar, and
iron distanced cotton.

As for the cotton and iron lords, they were no longer content with
gloomy houses near the old College and the Cathedral, from which the
dweller could patronize learning and hold intercourse with the
professors and clergy--ignoring their comparative poverty because they,
too, were of gentle birth, while book-knowledge has always had its value
in Scotland. Far less were the modern traders satisfied with country
houses by the Kelvin or down near the Broomielaw. Glasgow was spreading
out north and south, and east and west. The old houses, which had become
centres of a great population, instead of standing on the outskirts of a
town, were constantly passing into lower hands or changing their
character. The buildings were occupied by shopkeepers and warehousemen,
or let out in lodgings, or, after sustaining a gutting-out process,
flourishing anew as shops, where in former days no shops, however
select, had broken in upon the genteel retirement of ‘family mansions.’

Like houses, like people; many of the proud, prosperous old families had
fallen from their high estate, and stood on an inferior footing, forced
to yield in wealth and influence to new men coming to the front in new
branches of industry--men frequently not drawn from the gentler ranks,
either of the Highlands or Lowlands, who had been ‘hands’ before they
were ‘heads,’ and, along with the sterling qualities which had raised
their owners, were apt to retain much of the original clay with which
they had been clogged.

The class which was superseded had only the pride of their superior
antiquity and gentility to console them, and naturally clung tenaciously
and not very amiably to these antecedents. The Miss Mackinnons were come
of the outstripped, borne-down rulers of the past. Their father had been
a man in a better position than the one they filled. Their grandfather
had been far before their father. As for their great-grandfather, ‘a’
Glasgy,’ as Miss Janet was wont to say, ‘trim’led at the wag o’ his
finger.’ Unfortunately, his descendants had little more than his memory
to plume themselves upon.

But it seemed as if the fortunes of the Mackinnons were about to
revive--not in the persons of the ladies, whose prospects of
advantageous matrimonial alliances, never great, were slipping slowly
but surely from the reluctant women’s grasp--but in the case of their
eldest nephew, the head of their branch of the family. Gavin Mackinnon
was about to marry an heiress in her own right--not such an heiress as a
Glasgow Mackinnon might once have aspired to--but a lass whose family
was not without drawbacks and little mortifying objections, which the
ladies, if not their nephew, swallowed with a manifest effort of
complacence.

Still, here was an undoubted heiress who had succeeded through her
mother to a small landed property, the worth of which was increased
tenfold by calico-printing and dye-works built on the land, also the
property of Miss Craig, when such works had come into repute as sources
of trade and wealth that would hold their own against the cotton
industries thus supplemented.

No Mackinnon had married a bride with so promising a patrimony for the
last two generations. Certainly the trumpeters of the family recoiled a
little from the obligation of their nephew to take up calico-printing
and dying as a calling, which was something widely different from
possessing estates in Virginia, that furnished broad Scotland, and
England to boot, with wholesale supplies of the crop of the country.

In addition, the elder ladies could have wished that Miss Craig had been
able to claim more commercially aristocratic kindred; nevertheless, she
and her dowry were by no means to be despised. ‘There would be plenty of
the cotton and iron dirt’--Miss Janet was guilty of indicating the
_nouveaux riches_ in these terms--‘who, for all their bragging that they
were rolling in wealth, would jump fast enough at Maggie Craig, with her
cash and Drysdale--her grand-uncle-by-marriage’s auld farm-house,
print-factory, and dye-vats.’

It was more of a recommendation than the reverse to the Mackinnons, that
Miss Craig, who had been sent home from India for her education, had few
relations in this country, and was so far dependent on the good offices
of the Glasgow kinswoman of her future husband. It was a matter of
resignation, to say the least, to these fairly humane and
well-intentioned persons, that Miss Craig’s mother, from whom she
inherited her property, had died when she was an infant, and that her
father had married again since she left India. It would have been a
thousand pities for her to return there to her strange step-mother,
especially when the tenant to whom the calico-printing works were let,
who had made a good thing out of them, was retiring at the end of his
lease on a competence, leaving the business with the works to a
successor, who might or might not be the husband of the owner.

The Craigs were nobodies; and the Drysdales who were before them at
Drysdale Haugh were little better, ‘farming bodies’ of a homely kind,
though the land had been their own; while calico-printing and dyeing had
not yet reached such a magnitude as to elevate calico-printers and dyers
to the rank that the tobacco-traders had held--they were hardly on a
level with cotton and iron manufacturers.

But when Gavin Mackinnon turned up, crossed Miss Craig’s path, proposed
for her, and on her acceptance of his hand boldly undertook to become a
printer and dyer on his own account, his aunts were not so destitute of
the shrewdness of a trading population as to fail to hail the windfall
which had come to the family, and the staff which had been put into
Gavin’s not too capable hand.

It was a pleasure to the gradually aging women that the marriage should
take place in their house. In addition to the lively interest which
women in general find in all that belongs to a wedding, intensified to
the highest pitch of excitement when the actors by proxy are past their
grand climacteric and have lost the sanguine expectation of becoming
brides themselves, the Miss Mackinnons had a natural liking, seldom
gratified, for dispensing counsel, and ordering and presiding in matters
of consequence.

They were all three tall, stout women, rather imposing-looking in their
very plainness. It was an advantage to the two elder sisters that they
assumed the matronly style in dress which ought to have been theirs, had
fortune been kinder, and men more solicitous of their favour. They wore,
if not caps, at least a sufficient quantity of lace disposed about
their heads to shade what was gaunt or heavy. Pelerines and huge falling
collars had gone out for young women, but older people still indulged in
them, and they were not without a certain dignity which suited large
proportions. The third sister, Miss Bethia (pronounced with the accent
on the ‘i’) did herself less justice. She put on gowns of gayer colours
and flimsier materials, and arranged her unsheltered hair in a much more
youthful fashion of elaborate plaits and braids.

Miss Mackinnon was developing deafness which she declined absolutely to
acknowledge, and the greater part of her time was spent in clearing up
the misconceptions--the inevitable growth of habitually hearing and
speaking at cross purposes. She had grown both tart and stupid under the
process, otherwise she would not have been less intelligent and
agreeable than her sisters, which, perhaps, was not saying much, for
the Miss Mackinnons had been brought up under desperately narrowing
influences and with overwhelming prejudices. Miss Janet had come to the
front as the result of Miss Mackinnon’s deafness; she was left to lay
down the law, while her long tongue and restless energy kept her from
granting her victim a moment’s respite.

Miss Bethia represented the accomplishments of the ladies. She was
fondly believed to be one of the best piano-players in Glasgow, which
meant that she thundered through half-forgotten pieces with stunning din
and astounding celerity, and played reels with more spirit than
delicacy. In spite of the family’s income, she worked indefatigably for
pleasure, and at considerable cost, in wools and silks, heaping up
trophies only too gorgeous in the shape of cushions and stools and
screens, in the otherwise faded and antiquated drawing-room. She had a
simper hovering about her large mouth which was absent from her
sisters’ faces, and seemed to say that in spite of Miss Bethia’s
ponderous nose, light blinking eyes, with barely visible eye-lashes, and
tow-like hair, much on the pattern of the other members of the family,
she laboured under the delusion that she was the beauty no less than the
genius of her race. It is hardly necessary to say that Miss Bethia was
the most foolish of the sisterhood.

There was a redeeming feature in the Miss Mackinnons’ characters which
did something to make up for their intolerable conceit and tendency to
constitute themselves and their opinions the centre of the universe,
before which all mankind was to bow. They were strongly attached to each
other. None deferred more loyally to Miss Mackinnon than did Miss Janet
and Miss Bethia; a fond mother could hardly have been prouder of a
cherished daughter’s performances than were the elder sisters of the
younger’s prowess on the ‘piany’ and in fancy-work.

One of the peculiarities of the female Mackinnon mind was that it
scorned any attempt in Scotch people to speak ‘high English.’ As the
ladies’ voices were naturally loud, and they had accustomed themselves
to speak still more loudly to suit Miss Mackinnon’s infirmities, the
effect of their homely Scotch shouted to each other or to any visitor
was decidedly startling to a new-comer. Another thing the sisters could
not abide was a silly pretence at polished instead of plain manners.
Such weak copying of their neighbours, or yielding to changes which were
no improvements, were for ‘the cotton and iron dirt.’ Such trifles were
far beneath the attention of the Mackinnons. These favoured mortals
needed no artificial props. The family’s claims to precedence were so
unanswerable that a Mackinnon might do exactly as he or she liked,
within the bounds of the moral law, for the maiden representatives of
the house were respectable Christians and staunch Presbyterians, assured
that the name would grace any speech or action, and confer, not derive,
lustre from it.

Only a small moiety of the world took the Miss Mackinnons at their own
estimation, and the moiety was ever decreasing. Strange to say, Maggie
Craig, a simple yet aspiring girl, was among the worshippers at the
nearly deserted shrine. These absurd elderly women contrived to throw
dust in her young eyes. Her chief inducement to marry Gavin Mackinnon
was that he was the first man who had made her an offer, and that he was
big--big in various ways--in speech as well as in bodily inches, and so
filled a certain space in her world. But her next reason was that in
marrying him she would enter into one of the oldest and best Glasgow
families, which to Maggie signified as much as if she had referred to
one of the patriarchal houses of ancient Rome, and that she might
thenceforth hold up her head in the light of being closely allied to the
unapproachable cream of the inhabitants of her father’s native city.

Therefore the bride-elect was highly gratified instead of being
intensely bored by the invitation from her future husband’s aunts to
make their house her home, and be married from it, rather than from the
house of a business correspondent of her father’s or of a
school-companion of her own, nearly all the choice she could command.

Mr. Craig had sent home a formal consent to the marriage. It was little
more than a form, since Maggie was of age and could please herself. He
dimly remembered the Mackinnons as something beyond the common and above
his mark when he left Scotland. He had not known anything of them in
later days so as to modify his opinion. At the same time, his parental
interest in Maggie, and his impression that she was doing well for
herself, did not go the length of tempting him to return before his
time. He had younger children, who, as they had never been separated
from him, had eclipsed the first-born in his affections, and he was at
once easy-going and slow to be moved from the plans of his whole life.
He left Maggie to her own discretion, and trusted her to her new
friends. He would come home, if he lived, at the date he had originally
fixed.

It was the night before the wedding--a frosty winter night, which caused
a slight shudder in the minds of stay-at-home people at the thought of
the railway journey to London--the sum-total of the bridal tour. A jaunt
to London in winter, and to the Highlands or Ireland in summer, were the
stereotyped wedding-trips which had always floated dimly before the Miss
Mackinnons’ imaginations; and it is needless to say the sisters had
imposed their standard on the younger generation by sheer strength of
will and loudness of tongue. Gavin Mackinnon was something of sounding
brass himself, but he was quiet and yielding compared to the redoubtable
aunts. Maggie was a cipher in their hands in the meantime.

In spite of what might have been supposed to be the Miss Mackinnons’
skill and experience as tacticians in a general way, they had as a
matter of course not been familiar with marriages. The grey house in the
weather-beaten, smoke-darkened square was in the greatest disorder.
There was not a room clear of bride’s-cake, or white gloves--‘livery,’
the elder ladies called them--or new gowns, or travelling trunks. There
was hardly a place in which to receive the two lawyers who came for the
important purpose of reading and getting the signatures to the marriage
contract. The Miss Mackinnons had talked so much for the last ten days
that they were not fit for anything else. The bridegroom, finding it
less trouble to agree than to contradict, had acquiesced accordingly--in
spite of his pompousness. Maggie was only occupied in considering how
soon she would be a Mackinnon, with all the privileges of the race.

The marriage settlement, which was as necessary for the dignity of the
family as for the safety of Miss Craig, was left to take care of itself
or to be concocted by the aunts. Luckily they were perfectly honest, and
had no thought of taking advantage of their new relative. Luckily, too,
for the sense and reason of the document, Miss Craig’s lawyer was on the
spot, and had been invited to join another member of the profession--the
Mackinnon family lawyer--in drawing up the deed. Miss Janet was
persuaded that none of the preparations would prosper unless she were,
as she said, ‘at the heels of them.’ But she was now entertaining a
visitor who had come on a call of congratulation and inspection.

Miss Carstairs was a little woman, a contemporary and old friend of the
Miss Mackinnons--one who had come within the charmed circle of old
Glasgow. She now sat coolly and contentedly in the middle of the
confusion, where old silver dishes and ‘dead-fine’ table linen, hunted
out of ‘presses’ to do honour to the occasion, lay about among
railway-rugs, leather straps and time-tables on the little ebony tables
and bamboo chintz-covered chairs and couches of the drawing-room. The
dining-room, with its heavy mahogany and horse-hair furniture, and fine
old punch-bowl below the sideboard, pointing back to the days when
Glasgow punch had been famous, was given up, as a place of superior
gravity and masculine simplicity, to the lawyers with their pen and ink,
and the young couple who were to profit by these appliances.

‘Our marriage settlements,’ said Miss Janet in her powerful voice to her
crony, as if she and her sisters had been married two or three times
over, ‘were aye made siccar, though in the making they covered ever so
many pages of parchment. My great-grandfather’s was, like his will, as
big as a sma’ book. He married a Fenton--Jean Fenton--and it is through
her me and my sisters have an interest in Strathdivie--that is, if ever
the Fentons of Strathdivie fail, we’ll come in for our share as heirs
female through my great-grandmother, Jean Fenton. Oo aye, this
settlement between my nephew Gauvin and Miss Craig is but a flea-bite
compared to our former settlements. But that is no reason it should not
be made richt and ticht, with a lawyer on our side, Dauvit Milne--we’ve
always employed that firm--and a lawyer on hers, new graith [growth],
but a decent enough man, I believe, a Mr. Dalgleish. Do you ken him,
Miss Carstairs?’

‘I should think so,’ said Miss Carstairs, a little drily; ‘you’ve
forgotten, Miss Janet, he married my niece Tina. They’ve a place in the
Highlands, where I stayed three weeks with them last summer.’

Miss Janet did not trouble herself to apologize for what might have been
a slip of the tongue; on the contrary, she rushed upon a fresh offence.
‘A place in the Hielants, and he a writer body that lives by pen and
ink, and cannot date back two generations!’ she exclaimed, in a high,
protesting key. ‘After that Dauvit Milne may have his London mansion,
and his shooting-box in the Sooth.’ The irony was more plain than
gracious; but graciousness was not a quality in which Miss Janet
Mackinnon excelled. ‘Weel,’ she added with emphasis, after a pause, as
if the world’s verdict hung on her sentence, ‘I’ve nothing particular to
say against it--save that “dockens will aye be waggin’,”’ she ended with
admirable candour.

Miss Carstairs gave an indignant sniff, but she knew Miss Janet too
well to resent her unconscionable rudeness. Besides, it was the
Dalgleishes who were stigmatized as ‘dockens.’ Miss Carstairs was as
well descended as any Mackinnon of them, and could afford to overlook
the sneer.

‘It was touch-and-go with that will,’ remarked the eldest Miss
Mackinnon, with her usual irrelevancy, for she had caught only stray
fragments of the conversation. ‘If she had died an hour or twa suner,
our Miss Craig would have lost every penny. It would have been maist
unnatural that she should not have profited by her mother’s succession,
but auld Drysdale never mentioned heirs. He was a hot-headed stubborn
man, and though he had a great work with Beenie Pryde, he never liked
Jock Craig. It was not with the uncle’s will that the niece made the
marriage. But, as I said, it was a mercy she died when she did, though
I’ve heard tell that if she had so much as given a pech or sech [groan
or sigh] after his breath was out, the property would have been hers,
and would have come in the course of nature, as it has done, to her
dochter, her heiress.’

‘She’s speaking of how Miss Craig’s mother came into her inheritance,’
Miss Janet hastened to explain, carefully lowering her voice; ‘she’s
thinking of wills and deaths, instead of settlements and marriages, no
that they’re so far apart. Yes, it was just so, auld Drysdale left his
money to his niece by marriage. He had no near relations, and though he
had the word of being hard, he had aye a soft heart for the memory of
his young wife who pined and died long before she saw her prime. He took
her sister’s dochter, Beenie Pryde, and brocht her up to keep his house,
and was as fond of her as if she had been his ain bairn. But there was
an odds for all that; he could never altogether forgive her for marrying
Jock Craig, and though he left her his means, as he had come bound to
do, when he took her to rear, he did not trouble to mention her wean,
that had not a drop of his blude in its veins.’

‘Well, I mind something of the story, but I never heard all the ins and
outs of it before. The Drysdales were not in our set, Miss Janet,’ said
mild Miss Carstairs, not without what these old-fashioned ladies would
have called a ‘fling’ at her hostess, in return for Miss Janet’s
treatment of Miss Carstairs’ niece Tina and her ‘writer body’ of a
husband.

‘Who said the Drysdales were in our set, Kate Carstairs?’ demanded Miss
Janet defiantly.’ They were not such fules as to set themselves up so
far beyond their standing. They kenned their place and keepit it, which
was more to their credit. But that did not prevent auld Drysdale’s being
a man of some substance,’ composing herself to resume her story. ‘When
the news of his death and his inheritance was sent out to where the
Craigs had gone, it was found that she had died after giving birth to a
lass bairn--our Miss Craig--the very same day that the auld man her
uncle’s breath went out at Drysdale Haugh. I tell you, Miss Carstairs,
it was nothing short of a dispensation of Providence that he was gone
before her by the space of three hours, or Maggie Craig could not have
touched plack or penny of his,’ ended Miss Janet, excited by the crisis
of her narrative.

‘She would have had to hurry if she would overtake him in his journey,’
remarked Miss Mackinnon, with a smile that was a little ghastly, as a
commentary on the conversation.

‘What’s she after now?’ inquired Miss Janet, fairly mystified. ‘Oh, I
mind,’ her face clearing up; ‘she’s so keen to lose nothing we say.
Meye’s very sharp, but she’s apt to jump from subject to subject, by all
the world like a bird from branch to branch. She’s off, as she thinks we
are, to a joke we had among oursel’s this morning, of the bride’s
remaining behind to look after the gear, and the presents that had not
made their appearance in time, while the bridegroom went the first stage
in solitary state. But I must awa’ to keep Gauvin and Miss Craig in
countenance while they hear the settlement read--a trial to young folks
in their position--and to append my signature as witness. I’ll leave
nothing undone that I put my hand to. You’ll forgive me for leaving you,
Miss Carstairs. You know, it’s not an ordinary occasion. If you like to
stop till I come back, Meye here can be showing you Gauvin’s “traps,” as
he calls them, his dressing-case and the studs and things in it, for I
think you’ve looked over the bride’s paraphernely, or Betheye--I hear
her coming in, she has been awa’ about the cards--will give you a tune.’

‘No, thank you very much, Miss Janet,’ said Miss Carstairs, rising and
expressing all the more gratitude because of the positiveness of her
refusal. ‘I must run away myself--you will forgive me for having
detained you so long, at such an important time, with so much on your
mind as I see you have. The bride can have nothing to think of in
comparison.

‘I dare say no,’ Miss Janet accepted the implied compliment
unhesitatingly, and without limitation. ‘What has a young thing like her
to take up her mind about but to look bonnie and please Gauvin? It is me
and my sisters that have to care for them baith and see that nothing’s
forgotten, and to keep the cook and confectioner, the session-clerk and
the minister, up to the mark.’

‘I can feel for you, Miss Janet. When my niece Tina was married, though
it was out of her father’s house, not mine, and it was not quite the
same thing’--Miss Carstairs corrected herself hastily, catching a
warning flicker of Miss Janet’s light blue eyes; ‘for Tina did
condescend a wee bit, though Mr. Dalgleish’s a steady lad, and getting
into a fine business, and there’s something to be allowed for a lassie’s
choice--my very heels were sore, and I could not sleep for a week.’

‘What are you saying about quadreels, or was it reels, Miss Carstairs?’
asked Miss Mackinnon. ‘No, we’re to have no dance, only a degoonay in
the French fashion.’

‘I’ll not forget a bit of the cake with your cards,’ Miss Bethia assured
the departing guest. ‘I’m to have charge of the cakes and cards, and you
must promise to dream upon the cake.’

‘Hoots! Miss Betheye, I’m done with dreams, which does not mean that you
should be, you that can give us “Wooed, an’ married, an’ a’” so that our
feet can hardly keep still, while I’m “timber-tuned.” You have so many
more pretty pieces of work than those you’ve so handsomely presented to
Miss Craig that she may get them made up for her drawing-room, it would
be a real pity they should be wasted.’

‘Awa’ with you, Kate Carstairs!’ cried Miss Janet, while Miss Bethia’s
simper passed into a giggle; ‘would you rather have Bethia wasted than
the ottomans and cushions, however elegant or creditable to her taste
and industry? You would not have Betheye stoop to a man not in every way
worthy of her and her family; and where is such a man to be found at
this time of the day, I should like to hear?’




CHAPTER II.

TIME’S CHANGES.


Seven-and-twenty years had passed with all their changes since the
winter night on which Gavin Mackinnon and Margaret Craig’s marriage
contract was signed. Six-and-twenty years had intervened since Mr. David
Milne--the solitary representative of an old firm of Glasgow
‘writers’--had wound up their century-long business, disposed of what
was left, and retired with the accumulated gains to buy an estate in
Kirkcudbright, and begin a new life as the founder of a family of
Galloway lairds. Four-and-twenty years had elapsed since Mr. Dalgleish,
the husband of Miss Carstairs’ niece Tina, finding the field too well
occupied already, or that law was not so profitable in the West of
Scotland as it had been, accepted a colonial appointment, and sailed
with his family for New Zealand, to sit on endless boundary questions
and judge the rights and wrongs of Maoris and settlers.

Seven-and-twenty years, with all their vicissitudes--vigorous, full
lives vanished like shadows, leaving no traces behind; new lives which
had dawned and risen above the horizon, advancing to the hot glow of
their noon; old stranded lives lingering on, apparently without use or
purpose.

The superannuated house in the old square was little changed, except
that the narrow means of its occupants had grown narrower, until they
pinched with the sharp pinch of poverty. Each one of the Miss Mackinnons
was in her place, though it was becoming always harder and more
comfortless. There had been a business speculation--soon coming to
grief--into which the ladies had rashly let themselves be drawn, with
the urgent desire of getting higher interest for their small capital.
The end had been that the disaster which followed had swallowed up the
larger part of the Miss Mackinnons’ pittance.

The poor ladies had eked out what was left by the secret sale, bit after
bit, extending over a period of years, of what they had been accustomed
to cling to fondly as the proofs of their old gentility--quaint silver
plate, a few jewels, a considerable quantity of fine lace--until the
disposal of the family’s effects had come down to table and bed linen,
and articles of furniture in daily use, which would fetch little money,
while their absence would be severely felt. And always as the
surreptitious sale approached its conclusion, starvation or the
workhouse stared the unfortunate gentlewomen more fully in the face.
Still they lived on, though the middle age of twenty-seven years ago was
the old age of to-day--old age without its privileges and indulgences;
while Miss Mackinnon was stone-deaf, and could only be communicated with
by means of the slate and slate-pencil which hung behind her chair, or
through a set of signs which the patient ingenuity of faithful affection
had invented and maintained for her use.

Miss Bethia, after a futile attempt to teach her antiquated system of
music, had relinquished her piano and laid aside her embroidery, which
proved unsaleable, to work at plain sewing, secretly disposed of at the
very shop where the Mackinnons’ custom had still been an esteemed
compliment in the days of Miss Bethia’s youth. Miss Janet did a
servant’s work behind backs, in addition to taking her place before the
world among the ladies of the house.

Withal something heroic had crept in with the suffering into these
narrow lives--something of Spartan endurance of hardship, of generous
self-denial, of steadfast submission to the Providence that knew best
what was fit for all. The Miss Mackinnons were frequently absurd enough,
and in the increasing isolation of their experience they were getting
homelier and more rugged and uncouth, falling back more and more on
their old Scotch and their primitive manners, which they had always
declined to lay aside, as something which had been good enough for
former Mackinnons, so was good enough for their descendants and for the
world till the end of time. But the women had never been so like ladies
as in their silent, desperate fight with overpowering odds.

A grain of hope remained at the bottom of this Pandora’s box. The
Fentons of Strathdivie had not been so tenacious of existence as the
Mackinnons in St. Mungo Square. One after another had dropped into his
or her grave without direct heirs, till at last there was but one ailing
man between the ladies and their share of Strathdivie.

It had better be said at once that Strathdivie in its entirety was
nothing more than a moorland farm in one of the wards of Lanarkshire,
which, in the present state of agriculture, was anything save a
flourishing possession; and it had not the supplement of dye-works or
bleachworks, or coal or iron seams, to multiply its worth. Divided into
portions, the allotment that might come to the Miss Mackinnons was so
trifling that no man need have led a grudged life because of it. Yet
that pittance meant such comparative ease and security to these
hardly-bested souls that they could not help contemplating it afar off
with longing eyes. It was the hidden burden on the consciences of all
the three that they were wishing ill to poor Archie Fenton, not caring
to hear that he had any chance of getting hale and hearty again,
privately calculating on the probable length of days of a man who was
younger than two of the sisters.

To intensify the cruel uncertainty, it was suspected that on the few
occasions on which Mr. Fenton and the Miss Mackinnons had met, for the
connection between the families had belonged not to the present but to
former generations, the two elder sisters--Miss Janet especially--had
been so unfortunate as to give offence to the disposer of Strathdivie.
She had interfered, as usual, where it was a particular want of tact and
taste to interfere; and she had perhaps betrayed only too unmistakably
what were her expectations with regard to the farm in the Middle Ward;
while, it was believed, Archie Fenton was not without some power to
‘will away’ from his distant cousins their share of his property.

But surely he could not be so unnatural and unjust, the Miss Mackinnons
argued with whitening lips. Blood was thicker than water, and a dying
man would not dare to face his Maker after he had robbed his kindred,
however remote, of their lawful patrimony.

Where were Gavin Mackinnon and his wife that they did not come to the
help of their aged kinswomen? One might as well ask where were last
year’s leaves that they did not continue to clothe with fresh green the
gaunt grey boughs of some venerable tree. The years which had spared the
Miss Mackinnons had been as fatal to their nephew and niece as to the
Fentons of Strathdivie. Both had gone to their long home many a day
before. Ere their deaths the dyeing and calico-printing had thriven so
badly in his incapable hands that first he had tried a partner in the
concern, and that device not succeeding, he had, in the course of three
or four more years, got from his wife the power of selling the property
to the same purchaser to whom he had, in conjunction with his partner,
already disposed of the business. The buyer of both was the son of a
cousin of old Drysdale’s, the original laird of Drysdale Haugh. The
younger Drysdale was a man whose father had sunk to a very inferior
position. The son, on the contrary, had risen through every grade, till
he was not only the sole proprietor of works and farm, but had improved
and extended them, had made them a great concern, and had ended by
building a fine mansion-house as an addition to the old farmhouse.

Neither Gavin Mackinnon nor his wife had lived to hear what another
man’s sagacity and energy had made of what they had let slip through
their fingers. She had not seen the fifth anniversary of their marriage,
and he had not survived her as many more years. There were people who
said the couple had been done to ruin and death by the Miss Mackinnons’
powers of talking and interference in their nephew’s private affairs.
But everybody who knew anything about it was aware that Gavin Mackinnon
could never have made anything of a trade to which he was not bred; and
what was she fit for save to spend or spare as much of her own money as
came into her hands? Then she died, as her mother had done before
her--in giving birth to an only child, about whose arrival in this world
his grand-aunts had certainly made as much fuss as if he were the heir
to an earldom. Still, all things considered, these were circumstances
over which the Miss Mackinnons could not have had much control. Neither
ought they to have been held accountable for their nephew’s premature
demise, seeing that no amount of enlarging even on disagreeable topics,
and putting fingers into other people’s pies, could cause a wet autumn,
telling considerably on a man who had never been alert about anything in
his life save sport. In this particular instance he pursued it in
soaking rain, till he caught a violent cold, which settled on his lungs
and carried him off in ten days.

During the lives of the husband and wife the sale of Drysdale Haugh had
furnished them with a considerable sum in ready money, which they had
not had time to spend, though he especially had done his best to get rid
of what was so unfamiliar to him. What was left fell to their son, who
had been reared, so far, under the care of his grand-aunts. But while he
was a minor he could do nothing for them, and by the time he was of age
so much of his patrimony had been spent on his education--worthy the
last of the St. Mungo Square Mackinnons--and so much more in gratifying
his kinswomen’s shortsighted pride and his own boyish fancy by the
purchase of a commission for him in an infantry regiment, that there was
little left to spare from his small income.

Lieutenant Eneas Mackinnon was the pride and delight of his old
relatives, the one cause of congratulation in the middle of their
reverses, the single gleam of light in their far-spent, darkening days!
For his credit and advantage they would sacrifice the little that
remained to them, while he had only a dim idea of the straits to which
the old ladies were reduced. He had wished to do something for them out
of his chronic impecuniosity, and it was in a great measure their fault
that they would accept next to nothing at his hands, lest the dear lad
should be stinted and not able to make a fair show among his brother
officers.




CHAPTER III.

TAM DRYSDALE IN HIS OFFICE.


There is no street in the whole city of bells and chimney-stacks with a
greater and richer mercantile traffic, containing more offices in which
business is conducted on a larger scale, than one of the side streets
running parallel to the handsome thoroughfare of Buchanan Street. At
certain business hours the street is as crowded with merchants and
merchants’ clerks, warehousemen, wholesale dealers in all the
commodities under the sun, as the Broomielaw is with porters and
sailors, the Sautmarket and the Gorbals with naturalized Highlanders and
Irish, or the different yards and lanes with craftsmen and mill-hands.
When the swarm of dark-coloured ants hurry along the pavement, it is
clear they mean business, hearty though the greetings are which burst
from the deep-throated, deep-chested pedestrians, worthy of the warm
hearts and frank tongues--careless of sing-song _patois_--of the mighty
men of Clydesdale. They will not tarry on their errands; they have to
put their shoulders to the wheel with a will, to bear up the load
imposed upon them. No doubt these sons of Anak, like their servants the
porters bearing the material bales and boxes, carry the burden of
engagements and obligations unflinchingly, well-nigh swaggeringly. Still
the giants show an inclination to get their work done as soon as may be,
to allow greater time for play. Carriage, or dogcart, or steamer--the
last in summer especially--whirl or puff the men away to the
country-houses, with their trim avenues and well-kept parks; or the
villas, luxurious as those of Roman citizens, by some mountain-girt
loch of the blue Clyde, where pines replace the olive trees and heather
the roses.

At such early hours as are devoted to the patron saint of
business--shall we say St. Luke?--few women, even when tucked under the
wing, or following in the wake of husband, brother, or son, venture to
bring the light incongruous flutter of their gowns, and the disturbing
element of their unabsorbed faces into the rank and file of the workers.
Heads of famous houses, young men with their fortunes yet to make, press
on as if they would trample down all obstacles, and protest in
self-defence ‘the de’il tak’ the hin’most!’

Who would think that within a day’s journey from that striving,
money-making mass of humanity the solemn Atlantic breaks on wild, lone
shores, where the cry of the seamew is the only voice to break the awful
stillness?

Within a certain solidly handsome door, over which a porter of
substance held sway, up a good staircase, under the circumstances
singularly spotless, any stranger invading the territory would find
another door, or rather pair of folding-doors, standing open. One of the
doors bore a brass plate on which had been engraved the
address--‘Messrs. Mackinnon & Murray, Dyers and Calico-Printers.’ The
engraver’s tool had passed over three of the words, and the place knew
its owners no more. The name which had replaced the others was that of
‘Drysdale.’ But though so much change had been made, the word ‘Messrs.’
was left to read like a foolish grammatical blunder, or as if the
remainder of the address hung in suspense, which was the true
explanation. The omission was not by accident, but by design.
‘Let a-be’ the present master of the office had charged the
respectfully-remonstrating engraver. ‘That may stand till another Tam
makes up his mind, and then “& Son” can easily be added.’ He referred
with would-be carelessness to his only son, and to the chance on which
he had set his heart, that his one boy might join him in his career,
might take up and extend the threads of all his projects, and, when he
laid them down, might hand them over to a third generation. There was a
little lurking superstition in the sparing of the ‘Messrs.’ already
inscribed there, inappropriate as it was in the meantime. There was also
the economy, almost parsimony, in trifles, which, in view of a future
exigency, would save the smallest risk of unnecessary expense.

Yet this was a man whose intelligence and enterprise had enabled him to
supersede his masters, rising gradually to their level, and then soaring
far beyond it, building up from a moderate foundation such a great
business of its kind, as any man of his type might have been proud to
claim for his individual handiwork. His daily business transactions
involved questions of thousands. He did not think twice of signing a
cheque for one or two of those thousands, to get possession of a picture
that caught his untutored fancy rather than his cultivated taste. His
wife’s diamonds were as brilliant as any to be met with in her circle,
which was saying a good deal. He would have given a hundred for a hunter
for his son, if Tam junior would have hunted with his compeers, the
young swells of the mercantile world. He did give as much for a pony
phaeton in perfect keeping, in which Claribel, or even little Eppie,
could drive out her mother. But he objected all the same to the small
waste in effacing the ‘Messrs.’ which might have ample significance in
the years yet to be born.

Tam Drysdale’s office not only held a large staff, it displayed every
modern improvement and well-considered plan for their accommodation.
Never were clerks better housed, stooled, or desked; blessed with more
regular, if long, hours in a press of business; ensured greater
punctuality at meal-times, or granted in turn more unfailing, if
limited, holidays. But woe betide any of these ‘pets’ of Tam Drysdale’s,
as they were sometimes termed derisively by less conscientious masters,
if a subordinate was discovered shirking a duty or slurring over a task.
These acts of cowardly, lubberly omission were treated as greater
offences than what might have seemed heavier sins of commission, in the
shape of occasional fits of folly and dissipation. Tam Drysdale had the
scorn for prodigality and the disgust at intemperance which might be
expected from a man whose rise in the world had been, in some degree,
the result of his prudence and sobriety from youth to middle age. But he
had mercy on a feather-headed lad who had got into debt for a gold watch
and chain before he had earned them, or a suit of clothes the price of
which was beyond the depth of his pocket. The employer had also a
considerable amount of rueful pity for a middle-aged sinner who had at
one time stood several steps higher than Tam on the social ladder, but
who had lost heart, and sought desperately to console himself for the
slowness of fortune in favouring him, by buying Dutch courage and
oblivion, in swallowing the enemy that stole away his brains. On the
other hand, for the lad or man who trifled or idled, and cheated his
master of his services, Tam Drysdale was apt to have judgment without
mercy. No wrathful words of ‘lazy blackguaird’ or ‘useless scoondrel’
were hot and sharp enough to launch at the culprit.

Tam Drysdale sat, like the king in the nursery rhyme, counting over his
money, in the inner sanctum, which in many respects reflected the man.
The various articles it contained--desk, table, chairs, carpet--were at
once the very best and the very plainest of mahogany, morocco, and
Kidderminster. The place was the essence of commercial comfort, and
even neatness, as if a woman and not a man drew up the blinds, set the
chairs at the proper angles, arranged the ledgers, and filed the papers.
The room was almost ostentatiously complete, but there was an absence of
luxury, a failure to recognise or claim any article that was out of the
ordinary catalogue of office furniture, an impatience, bordering on
contempt, of finery or frippery here, though it might be very well at
Drysdale Hall.

Tam Drysdale, leaning back in his chair, summing up an account with a
little knit in his brow, was not far above fifty years of age, and in
spite of all he had done before he reached his half-century he did not
look older. He was a hale man still, not beyond abundantly capable
middle life. He was below the ordinary standard of his native district
with regard to size. He was not the ‘braw man’ whose stature alone
ensures him popular admiration in the west of Scotland. He was little
above the middle height, and he was so finely built that he looked less
than he was. But it was a wiry slightness, and a delicacy that was
tempered like the keenness of steel. There were force and activity in
every well-knit, cleanly cut limb and feature; and the time had been
when, in spite of his antagonists’ greater height and weight, Tam
Drysdale had excelled in various muscular sports calling for more than
accuracy of eye and speed of foot, such as quoits, shinty, etc.

Tam’s clothes were of the best broadcloth, but old-fashioned and
somewhat clumsy, as well as out of date. There was a suspicion of
uncouthness in the style of the coat and vest, down to the very shoes
which were not boots, that vexed the soul of Mrs. Drysdale, and even of
Claribel, though young Eppie never could see that her father was
anything save perfect, both in his outer and inner man. The truth was
that Tam--very indulgent to his womankind in most particulars--became
restive and utterly unmanageable when he was pursued into the holes and
corners of what he reckoned his own affairs. He would not desert his old
tailor, who had made Tam’s wedding suit and risen in the world with him,
so far as a one-horse chaise and a villa at Gourock, though the poor
fellow did not follow all the freaks of fashion, and could not please a
parcel of fools of women. Tam would not make a puppy or an ass of
himself by dressing in a manner which would better befit his son. This
was supposing that young Tam ever condescended, nowadays, to appear in a
coat superior to the last year’s shooting-jacket, which was decidedly
the worse of the wear, as his father’s coats never were.

In like manner, no power, less than his Queen’s command, would have
induced Tam to drive in his well-appointed carriage to the door of his
office. He stuck to the point that better men than he contented
themselves with arriving at their places of business on their feet, or
at most in their dogcarts, and he would never shame himself and them by
instituting an odious comparison. He would not make himself a
laughing-stock to his fellows--including his old cronies and his very
clerks, who would be fully justified in saying that Tam Drysdale was as
vain as a peacock, and had forgotten the nest he had sprung from.

The carriage was in Glasgow several days a week with Mrs. Drysdale and
the girls, and, for the sake of their company, the owner of the equipage
would consent to meet it at some appointed place, as far out of the way
of his ordinary haunts and associations as possible, and would drive
home in a species of incognita with his family. However, this was a
weakness to be carefully concealed. None of Tam’s vainglory--rampant
enough elsewhere--broke forth in this direction. He positively hid his
diminished head, and shrank out of sight when he was detected in the
deed. He would no more have been guilty of driving in solitary state
through those familiar Glasgow streets, where he had been wont to walk
in fustian, than he would have worn a feather or a jewel in his hat.

‘Me in a carriage for my convenience! humph! a cadger’s cart would set
me better,’ he would say ironically. ‘What would folk think? What would
folk say?’ (Tam was apt to regard himself as the cynosure of every eye,
a source of endless interest and speculation to his public.) ‘Plenty of
them to see that knew a’ about me when I had not a couple of bawbees to
rub upon one anither. No, no! I’m not such a gowk as that comes to. I’ll
not set a pack of impident fellows jeering and sneering. A carriage is
all very well for mother, who is a woman and has married a rich man.
Moreover, she deserves the best, and she shall have it, as sure as my
name’s Tam Drysdale, as nice a turn-out as is to be seen in Glasgow.
Neither the Provost nor Sir James can beat it. For the young folk,
they’ve been born with silver spunes in their mouths, if that dour
deevil, young Tam, would only sup oot of his spune and be thankful. But
I was born to nothing better than a horn cutty [spoon], and a dugcart
will serve my turn, as it has served mony a better man and mony a real
gentleman born and bred.’

Tam had a great deal of appreciation, almost tender in its kind, of real
gentlemen and ladies. He never ‘evened’ himself to be one of them; he
never ‘evened’ ‘mother,’ much as he thought of her, and proud as he was
of her achievements in social life. Certainly he was inclined to put an
inordinate value on his success; he hugged himself on all that money
could procure and bestow. He boasted that no duke, no prince, need come
before him in the excellence and costliness of his surroundings. Money
would buy the best, and the best Tam Drysdale, who had risen and
thriven, would have in house and stud and cellar.

More than that--and Tam justly laid emphasis on the consideration--money
would enable a man to benefit his fellow-creatures, to give them work,
to insist that they should not live like brutes, to take measures for
their higher civilization. But, in estimating the power of money, he
drew the line with regard to what it could do beneath inherited gentle
breeding. He never failed in the respect which belonged by right in his
judgment to ancient gentility, however reduced in circumstances. He
testified instinctively and unhesitatingly his honour for that to which
neither he nor ‘mother’ could ever attain.

Nay, Tam had his doubts whether his very children could pretend to be a
real gentleman and real ladies till another generation or two had lived
and died. They might not do it--not young Tam, who was clever and
college bred, and, if he did not awe, troubled his father considerably;
not Claribel, who was as independent, had as fine a time of it, and was
as innocent of considering anything beyond her own will and pleasure, as
the American girls to whom she bore some resemblance; not even little
Eppie, who was as kind and guileless as her mother, and was both her
father and mother’s darling. Young Tam and the rest of them were on the
way to what was beyond auld Tam’s aspirations; but they had not yet,
with all the advantages their father had been proud to buy for them,
reached the desirable goal.

Gentlemen and ladies, pure and simple, were removed several degrees from
common clay in Tam Drysdale’s eyes. This implied no sycophancy or
slavishness on the man’s part. He could assert his claims, if anything,
a trifle too loudly. It belonged rather to a broad sense of justice
which would be fair to every man, and own in another what he himself
could not win--just as he expected that other to admit Tam Drysdale’s
superior achievements in his own line. It might have something to do
with Tam’s nationality; with the feudal element, the loyalty to heads of
houses and clans which long survived in some form in Scotch society;
with the slight but indestructible strain of poetry which often
underlies the prosaic matter-of-factness of Lowland Scotch natures.
Anyhow, there was found in the man this relieving trait of generous
admiration and regard for what was not tangible property, and for what,
unlike tangible property, could not be taken by assault on the part of
the _nouveau riche_, the conqueror of modern times. The sentiment formed
part of a composite character, and unquestionably it softened, to a
wonderful extent, the vulgarity of the contrasting traits of
self-sufficiency and ostentation.

Tam Drysdale’s face was so clean shaven that it not only rejected beard
and moustache, it barely admitted of the most modestly cropped and
abridged rather stubbly brown whisker to match the brown hair, hardly
dashed with grey. It was a decidedly handsome face, of a massive type,
with a square jaw, a square forehead, a good straight nose, and a good
full mouth, which no self-indulgence had spoilt; while neither had a
humid climate nor the apples and pears of the Clydeside orchards done
anything to impair the whiteness and regularity of the strong even
teeth, one of the many signs of health about the man. The colouring of
the face was fresh, with its native ruddiness just toned down by
office-work; but the hands, which had once been stained all the colours
of the rainbow in the dye-vats, were now only too white and soft--not
brown and hacked like young Tam’s, or even like those of young Eppie,
who had a weakness for playing at boy’s games.

Taken all in all, the aspect of the calico-printer was wholesome and
attractive, and it had much of the quiet power and burgher dignity which
are to be found in many Dutch and Flemish portraits.




CHAPTER IV.

TAM DRYSDALE’S ALLIES.


It was impossible to stand aside and watch what went on in Tam
Drysdale’s office, without seeing that he was a man of mark and
influence in his sphere, not only by the number of men and of letters,
in the interests of calico-printing and Turkey-red dyeing, constantly
appearing on the scene, but by the tone which each speaker and writer
adopted in approaching Tam. He was virtually acknowledged a leader of
men in his calling. His opinion was consulted, his arbitration asked,
his decision accepted. His word was in a manner law. He sat or stood
there, a king in his domain. All who entered it paid him homage. His
clerks were on the alert to meet his requirements. His wishes were
anticipated. When he moved, everyone figuratively stood up; though
literally no one hated form and ceremony more heartily than Tam Drysdale
hated them. He was simple--one would say personally unassuming and
unexacting in his habits, even in his greatest vanity. It was not that
the man was a tyrant, or a martinet, or a fool, that he was so served
and observed. It was a curious tribute to the natural strength of
character, and a certain trust--inspiring, uncompromising honesty, which
had always distinguished him.

Tam Drysdale’s _clientèle_ were of an agreeably varied description. They
did not come all on the same day, but specimens of them turned up
frequently. Old city magnates, much more imposing and fashionable than
the man they called on, who gave his broad shoulders a shake, and termed
his visitors ‘new-fangled;’ grave and reverend signors, pursy and fussy,
in the sister trade of cotton, who could have cut huge slices from the
national debt, swallowed them wholesale, and not felt themselves
seriously the worse. Bankers and lawyers who have always an interest in
a man of capital; clergymen who feel bound in duty to themselves to
avail themselves of the command of the mammon of unrighteousness, in
return for their oversight of a parishioner’s soul. Young fops and bucks
who condescended to know something of the mysteries of bleaching,
dyeing, and printing, that these might procure the sinews of war
wherewith to wage a feud to death with the fishes in the sea, the foxes
on the hillsides, the grouse on the moors, or to keep up without stint
or stay the luxuries of the gentlemen’s yachts, the amenities of their
clubs, the splendour of their balls.

One of the richest of these young men sauntered in, and was treated with
unmistakable coolness and stiffness; while the proposal that he was
there to make was curtly rejected. There had been a question of a
lawsuit of no great moment in which both men were engaged. The dispute
referred to an encroachment on a patent in which they were equally
interested. The abuse had not gone far, and the penalty which might be
exacted would only amount to a moderate sum of money, of little
consequence to a man with Tom Drysdale’s income. On the other hand, the
suit was likely to be both troublesome and prolonged, and all the other
persons engaged in it, with the exception of the lawyers, sought to
quash it at this stage. But this Tam flatly refused to do.

‘I wull not, sir,’ he said, his politeness becoming more marked, while
his dialect grew broader, under the provocation. ‘It is the principle I
care for; it is justice I want; I will have the knavish trick exposed.
Base loons, who knew perfectly well what they were about when they used
the stamp! Punish a starving man for picking my pocket, and let off
lazy rascals who have not the wit to know a good discovery when it is
laid before them, but are cunning enough to set themselves to steal it,
and grow rich at the expense of others! Never.’

The young man had to return more quickly than he came, muttering between
his teeth, when he had passed out of the inner office, ‘A dour old
brute. Grist to the lawyers’ mill.’

The last of Tam Drysdale’s levée were honest practical bleachers and
dyers, who came to report progress in contract, to seek employment, to
enter into an alliance offensive and defensive with the master of the
Drysdale Haugh Works. Of this class, though of a different sex from the
other members, was a respectable modest-looking young woman, not more
than comely in her personal appearance, and, though clean and neat in
her dress--a calico gown, black cape, and straw bonnet--altogether sober
and out of date beyond her three or four and twenty years. To her Tam
Drysdale turned with marked courtesy, and showed a reflection of
fatherly kindness in his manner, as he rose up, waved her to a chair in
his private room, and closed the door behind her.

‘Come awa’ in, Mary, my woman; I’m very gled to see you. Sit you down
and rest you: you’ve had a long drive this dull grey day. How’s your
father? Eh lass! but I mind him a fine man, the buirdliest [most
stalwart] bleacher far and near. Well,’ in a more subdued, sympathetic
tone, in answer to a sorrowful shake of the young woman’s head, ‘the
strongest of us must grow weak as water when our time comes, and he is
well off to have a gude dochter like you, Mary, since his gudewife is
gone, to hold together the bit bleaching-ground, and keep the pot and
the kettle boiling, and mind the other mitherless weans. I’ll tell you
what, Mary Coates, though you should not hear it, maybe, you’re the very
picture of your mither; you’re a fine, discreet, eydent kimmer
[diligent girl] that any father might be proud of, and that some lad
will be blithe, as well he may be, to call his marrow some day. You
shall never want any small help that I can give you in your most
honourable career, both for your father and mither’s sakes and for your
ain!’ exclaimed Tam Drysdale, striking his hand on his desk in the
determined manner of a man who had long been unaccustomed to
contradiction, and who could rise to enthusiasm on occasions.

‘Oh, sir, sir, bide a wee [wait a little] till you hear a’ before you
praise me so,’ cried Mary Coates, who instead of sitting down in the
comfortable chair offered to her, stood disconsolately by the table,
crushing a passbook between her trembling cotton-gloved fingers. ‘I have
not brocht you back a penny of the loan you were so gude as to gie us,
that should have been paid this last term. I have tried my best, but
trade has been slack and wages high, and father’s doctor and medicines
mak’ sic a hole in what is laid by, that I have got no farther than the
interest, which I think you’ll find correct. Father said I was bauld to
come wi’ that alane, when it was the principal that should have been
paid, and you were aye a man who stood by your word and your day. But I
thocht the interest was better than naething. It would show at least,’
with the faintest dry sob, which decent reserve stopped in her throat,
‘that I was trying--that I would fain pay a’, if I could.’

‘That you would, Mary, my fine lass!’ cried Tam almost fiercely, with a
suspicion of moisture in his own keen, clear eyes, ‘and so would your
mither before you--a gude stock, root and branch, that’s what you are;
and what’s a term or half a dozen of terms’ credit more or less between
me and your father and mither’s dochter? But I’ll take the interest,
because I think that will be best, and I ken it will go nearest to
contenting you. Then you’ll tell me what I can do to put a job into your
father’s hands, without letting on [mentioning it]; it will be a secret
between you and me--after you’ve given me the news of him and the weans.
Now, no thanks, Mary; I cannot abide them,’ he stopped to say
peremptorily, ‘least of all from a gude young lass like you; you’ll
oblige me by leaving them out, while you sit down there till I write you
a receipt.’

Before Mary Coates left, Tam Drysdale went into the outer office and
called one of his senior clerks to speak aside with him.

‘Mr. Dunlop, I’ve Miss Coates of the Cairnie Burn Bleaching Green with
me. I want you to take her round to Fergusson’s, and see that she has
the best luncheon that can be had in the place. She has a long road to
drive back to Cairnie Burn. Then I want you to look over the orders and
see if there is any job within Coates’s powers that you can hand over
to him.’

‘Very well, sir,’ answered Mr. Dunlop, a dapper little man with a top of
hair, not ten years younger than his master.

He spoke more resignedly than with the briskness natural to him. He had
been taught by his grown-up daughters (Glasgow men in his class marry
young) to estimate women who were not intimately connected with him a
good deal by the quality and style of their dress; and he did not relish
passing through the busiest streets of Glasgow, where he was well-known,
to the restaurant, in company with ‘a countrified, common-looking lassie
like Mary Coates,’ at the hour when a multitude of other clerks were
going to their dinners.

Tam Drysdale was quick to perceive the reluctance and fiery to resent
the slight to the object of his attentions.

‘Dod, man!’ he cried, with an angry snort, using the familiar form of
address that cropped up in his speech occasionally to the older clerks,
who had been fellow-servants with him in ‘Mackinnon and Murray’s,’
before there was any thought of a clerk becoming a master, or Drysdale
Haugh returning to the hands of a Drysdale. ‘If you have any serious
objections I’ll rax down my hat and go mysel’. Willie and Jean Coates’s
dochter--as fine a lass as ever stepped--shall not be looked down upon
or held at arm’s length, so long as I can prevent it.’

‘I have no serious objection, Mr. Drysdale,’ said Dunlop hastily, but
still a little drily; ‘why should I? I’ll do my best for the party you
mention, and I’ll see to the orders,’ seeking to change the subject, and
at the same time not without a malicious desire to hit a weak point in
his superior’s armour. ‘I thought, sir, you objected to giving them out;
that you held the small bleaching and dyeing works were a mistake--a
sort of snare to the petty bleachers and dyers, who came to loss and
ruin in the end, so that the whole of them--works and men--should be
suffered to die a natural death.’

‘There is no rule without an exception,’ said Tam shortly, for he hated
inconsistency either in himself or in another. ‘Never mind what I
said--I suppose I may speak at random, like my neighbours, when I do not
choose to wale [choose] my words, as if they were said in the hearing of
an enemy. But you are nobody’s enemy, Geordie Dunlap, that I ever heard
tell of’--he corrected himself with recovered good humour--‘unless your
ain whiles. For you’re a gabby [talkative] creature, and will speak up
for your way of the matter, in season and out of season, as long as the
breath is left in your body. Do as I bid you, and let us hear nae mair
o’t.’

Tam Drysdale turned on his heel, and when he was in his room and the
door shut on Mary Coates and her escort, he reflected for a moment,
with his hands in his pockets, before he dismissed the whole subject,
and gave his mind to some of the many other questions demanding his
attention.

‘Set Geordie Dunlap up!’ he mused--‘a gusedib laddie, a ragged callant
no so lang syne. No doubt it’s all the more credit to him to have worked
his way up to a gude coat on his back, a gude house at Pollokshields, an
elder’s seat in a U. P. Kirk, and lodgings for his family for a month at
a time, instead of just the Fair-days, down the water. But he’s of
another stock to the Coates; as well even them to the Duke’s race. I’m
not come from the dirt myself. There were Drysdales in the Loaning, not
so far from Drysdale Hall, as soon as there were Coates in Cairnie Burn,
and Lamonts in the Crook. But the Coates and the Lamonts were a cast
above the Drysdales when I came into the world. They had kept their bits
of crofts when my father, though he was next-of-kin to Drysdale of
Drysdale Haugh and the dye-works, had gone to the dogs. I mind when I
would have been a proud man to have counted myself fit to walk by Jean
Lamont’s side through the streets of Glasgy. Yet Geordie Dunlap, the
auld puppy, thinks shame to be seen with Jean’s wiselike dochter Mary.
Bowls run round, no doubt, and I grant, though I’ve the greatest--the
very greatest--respect for the fine lass who is so like her douce, sonsy
mither, I am not free to say, after all, that I would have cared to
convoy her myself through the streets to the eating-house, or the inn
where her beast is put up. A man is forced to mind the look of the thing
and what belongs to his position. I might have met Clary with some of
her fine graith, and it might have put the bairn about; though she’s not
given to mind, which I, who have lifted her up to a higher footing, have
no right to do. It’s all for the best. Jean Lamont chose Willie Coates,
as she had every right to do--I said it at the time, before I had won
any title to speer her price, and ask her if she would not look at me.
There was no wrong done, and Willie was my friend, puir chiel’, that
never reminded me how a Drysdale had fallen out of the ranks, and was no
longer a mate for him any more than for Jean Lamont. I could not wish
him harm, though harm enough--death, sickness, and poverty--have long
had him in their grip, without any wish of mine. And I have thriven, and
married bonnie Eppie Mercer--than whom a better and a bonnier wife, and
a kinder soul, could not have been given to a man. She has borne me
three wiselike bairns, and I’m content if they’ll but be pleased,’ with
a sigh spared from his complacency for young Tam, who was unreasonably
ill to please.




CHAPTER V.

TAM DRYSDALE AT DRYSDALE HALL.


This was not one of the days when any of Tam Drysdale’s womankind were
in the town with the carriage, laying an obligation on him to make his
way to them; for he did not care that they should come to him, unless
they walked to the office and accompanied him on foot to the private
corner at which he was to sink Tam Drysdale the city man, and take up
Tam Drysdale the proprietor of Drysdale Hall and of its sundry
equipages, who was bound to show himself sometimes in the second
character. On the present occasion he could drive out to his country
house in the modest state which, as a matter of personal propriety and
taste, he preferred--starting from the office door, not without a
little commotion within and a little flourish without, nodding to the
various acquaintances he met, and looking about him like a man at his
ease.

Tam had driven along that road almost every lawful day for a number of
years. He knew and noticed all the landmarks both in town and country.
He was at leisure to observe them, for although, like most countrymen,
in whatever station they have been reared, he could drive, the practice
did not recommend itself to him, as it would have lent itself to a
younger, more self-conscious or more restless man. He liked his own
particular groom, a steady old countryman like himself, to drive. The
master was on the best terms with the servant, unless when Simpson, for
the sake of his horse, his honour, or the principle of the thing, like
his master, felt bound to cry out against a bad habit of Tam Drysdale’s.
This was a practice of letting the children that he passed twice every
day on the road, going to and from the parish school, hang on behind the
dogcart during the slow progress of the horse, after it had slackened
its pace to accomplish the ascent of a hill which was in convenient
proximity to the children’s village.

‘Sir, it’s what no ae beast in a thousand would put up wi,’ remonstrated
Simpson, every time, looking grimly over his shoulder, and fingering his
whip with the strongest inclination to lash out behind, though he was a
man and a father when he did not happen to be touched in a professional
quarter. ‘What will folk think of our driving wi’ sic a tail at our
heels? It’s not respectable. Forbye, these bairns will go to the
mischief some day, through being let tak’ such unwarrantable liberties
with a gentleman’s dugcart and horse.’

‘And driver,’ added Tam Drysdale, with a twinkle in his eyes. ‘Do you no
mind, Simpson, how grand sic a ride was lang syne? How it tasted all the
sweeter because there was the risk of a backward cut across your
fingers and your face, and you left dancing with the pain of the worst
pawmy you ever got, in the middle of the road. I cannot find it in my
heart to deprive the puir bit things of the pleasure. There, be aff,
bairns!’ he admonished his tail, as the curricle reached the brow of the
hill. ‘The horse will be awa’ again like a fire-flaucht in a couple o’
minutes, and ha’e some of you down in the stour, wi’ broken banes, if ye
dinna tak’ care.’

The dull, grey spring day cleared up when the heavy pall of city smoke
was left behind, and the sun shone in a blue sky, dappled with white
clouds over a green country--a fair morsel which had escaped the pits
and blast furnaces that honeycomb and blacken the earth, and burn with a
red glare throughout the night, for many a mile around Glasgow. Here was
left a remnant of the orchards and woods which once made the whole of
Clyde’s banks ‘bonnie.’ The humid air that comes on the wings of the
west wind promoted verdure, and rendered the spring vegetation early and
luxuriant beyond any standard it attained on the bleak east coast.

But it was not a spot given up to Pallas and Pomona. Their province was
not uninvaded. Tam Drysdale’s works were within a mile of his house, or
hall as he had chosen to call it; but whatever their offences, they were
mild by comparison with those of the coal and iron plagues. The stretch
of meadows devoted to bleaching glistened white in the spring sunshine,
as if strewn and silvered with millions of gowans. The dyeing and
printing operations either did not include all the chemical abominations
of St. Rollax’s, or dispersed them over so large an area that they were
little felt. They might colour with a sanguine hue, for the most part,
the water of Aytoun--the tributary of the Clyde on which the works were
built--and poison the fishes, at least so anglers complained; but the
compounds did not impregnate the air with hideous odours, or disfigure
the landscape with blights.

Indeed, as Tam Drysdale drew near the house he had made for himself,
just as Geordie Dunlap had been figuratively the architect of his ‘bien’
house at Pollokshields, Tam held up his head and snuffed the air with a
great increase of satisfaction. The fields and hedgerows on each side of
the road were part of the inheritance to which, though it had belonged
to his forefathers, he had _not_ succeeded by ordinary succession from
his father and his father’s cousin, the old laird of the land and owner
of the dye-works. What was far better in Tam’s eyes, he had won them
back by the sweat of his brow and the wit of his brain, and valuing them
by the cost of the acquisition, he did not believe there were fields or
hedgerows like them in Lanark--nay, in broad Scotland. The cattle and
sheep in the pastures, the horses in the furrows, were his. It is
doubtful whether he did not also claim the crows in the air. If the
office in Glasgow was a spot to which his mind went out, for which he
started with a will, to be in the swing of business, Drysdale Hall, down
to every clod of its clay and stone of its walls, was the pride of his
heart, like his wife Eppie and his son Tam. The latter, though he
thwarted and galled his father because he was his son, his only son, his
might and the beginning of his strength, ‘the excellency of dignity and
the excellency of power,’ however contumacious he might prove, came
nearer to Tam’s heart than either of his daughters--even than his young
pet Eppie.

It is hard, after all, to say whether a man loves more profoundly, with
a more passionate attachment, the paternal acres which have belonged to
his race from time immemorial, on which he first saw the light, that
have been associated with every act of his life, or the land which he
has bought by the hard toil of his youth and manhood, the fruits of
which are the fruits of his own labours, the reward of his
self-devotion. Drysdale Haugh had in some measure both of these claims
on Tam Drysdale.

Drysdale Hall had only escaped being a huge staring pile of white
masonry from the circumstance that Tam, proud as he was to have built up
a house, was also proud, with the Scotch hankering after gentle birth,
that the place had belonged to Drysdales long before it had come into
the hands of Mackinnons or Murrays, and that these Drysdales had not
simply been respectable yeomen-farmers--they had been enterprising
enough to erect dye-works on their property, and they had been
undeniably ‘sib’ to his less flourishing branch of the Drysdales. For
this reason Tam had spared the old farmhouse of Drysdale Haugh, and left
it the nucleus of the new building, rendering it more incongruous
certainly, but less raw and purely aggressive.

The farmhouse had been, and was still, a two-storied building of
substantial freestone, with a heavy stone porch, the whole grown over
with ivy, which, luckily, its present proprietor had spared, not so much
from a sense of its beauty, as because of its memories, especially one
tender recollection linked with it. He had been held up by his mother to
see his first bird’s-nest under the glossy, dark-green leaves on a
Sunday evening, one of the rare occasions when the poor relative had
been invited to visit the rich. To this ivied centre, with its small
windows and narrow door, no longer suitable for a main entrance, Tam had
tacked on two spacious wings fit to fly away with the body of the house
between them. The hall, with its big door, was in one of these wings;
the other ran out in a long one-storied building which was, in fact,
Tam’s picture-gallery, where he stored the specimens of art he had
taken pains and delight in collecting.

Originally the farmhouse stood in a little garden on the edge of a
stackyard, built, for winnowing purposes, on the side of a hill. Garden
and stackyard, with the old farm-offices, had alike disappeared, and the
ground was converted into a really fine terrace, commanding not only
Tam’s snow-white bleach-fields, but much of the adjoining country. The
hillside, which had been transformed into the terrace, had descended
naturally into a little wooded den that remained enclosed in the
grounds, and served for a short avenue. A somewhat perking porter’s
lodge, guarding gorgeously wrought iron gates, led from the high-road
into the carriage-drive that now ran through the den, and terminated
with a broad sweep on the terrace. Nature had done something for Tam’s
mansion; and his architect had availed himself of nature in a
praise-worthy manner.

On the opposite side of the house were the gardens and greenhouses, of
some extent, maintained with a sovereign disregard of expense. Beyond
the gardens lay the stables, coach-house, kennels, and servants’ offices
generally; and there, whatever drainage, ventilation, encaustic tiles,
and every recent invention could do for the comfort and well-being of
man and beast, was done thoroughly, to the credit of Tam Drysdale and
his myrmidons--be they builders, grooms, or grieves.

So perfect was the smooth order in every department, where money, freely
used without abuse, served to oil the wheels of the domestic machine,
that the Drysdale Hall farm-offices, like the Drysdale Haugh Works,
figured as models for men to copy. Strangers would bring introductions,
and request to be taken over the place. Sir James Semple, of Semple
Barns, who was Tam Drysdale’s next neighbour, and on the best terms with
him, brought three-fourths of his visitors to wonder and admire.

As Tam Drysdale drove along the terrace, at the well-known sound of his
wheels, greetings met him from two different quarters, with a swiftness
suggestive of the pleasant explanation that he had been watched and
waited for.

In the porch of the old part of the house, which now sheltered a side
door, there suddenly stood, framed by the ivy and rose boughs, which
were only sending out green shoots as yet, Eppie the elder, Eppie the
matron. Mrs. Drysdale was already dressed for dinner, like a rose in
full bloom, in her rich dark silk, and always with fluttering lace and
pink ribands about her head and throat--unless when she went into
company, and replaced the ribands by flowers, dew-dropped with diamonds.
She was persuaded that they ‘set’ her, and that Tam liked her with pink
bows and strings, such as she had worn in her Sunday bonnet (she called
it ‘hat,’ though it was no hat), long before the days that she put on
caps, when he had come to the kirk where her family worshipped, to meet
and court her in the face of the congregation--like an honest man--as
well as to pray to his Maker like a good Christian.

Mistress Eppie was buxom and bonnie still, of a type of
beauty--dark-haired, dark-eyed, white-skinned, with summer roses on the
cheeks, and teeth white as milk, between ripe red lips--which, if not
peculiar to Clydeside, is oftener met there than elsewhere. It belongs
to strapping lasses who are matches for stalwart men, though in this
case the wife was not more strapping than the husband was stalwart; both
had missed the superior stature which is the frequent accompaniment of
their style of good looks. Mrs. Drysdale was accustomed to say, with
apologetic regret, that her Tam and herself were but ‘sma’ bouket’ (of
short stature), matched with many of their compeers. Husband and wife
were alike in this respect, as in many another. If the type has little
of what is purely intellectual or spiritual, it has, as has been said
with regard to Tam Drysdale’s comely person, a great deal that is
wholesome and full of health and vigour, that will endure, and, what is
more, will retain much of its attractiveness after the black or auburn
hair is grey, and the fresh, firm cheek withered and shrunken in its
wintry red.

Mrs. Drysdale came out to meet her husband, as she had come, unless
necessity was laid upon her to be elsewhere, ever since the two had
become one. She had done it when Tam had taken her first to a
four-roomed house in a village street, when she had but to cross the
threshold into the hallan, to greet the young working-man trudging home
after his day’s toil. She had known the sound of his foot then, as she
knew the sound of his horse’s feet to-day. She never failed him when she
had a grand staircase and a long corridor to traverse, instead of a
doorstep to cross. He was still the light of her eyes, whom it was as
natural for her to hail, as it is for the newly-awakened sleeper, after
the hours of darkness have passed, to turn instinctively to catch the
first stray beams of light. A contented and happy woman in most
respects, as she found herself, it was still her night when Tam was up
in Glasgow at his office, or even over at his bleach-fields and
dye-works; her day when he came home with the sunset or the starlight to
her and the bairns, to be theirs till the next morning rose and called
him forth to play his man’s part of making a great business, earning a
heap of money, and being a prince among his fellows. And she was sure
that Tam was glad to see her standing there, the first to welcome him,
though in his proud, shy, Scotch way he said no more than, ‘Well, are
you there, mother?’--as if he ever expected her to be elsewhere!--‘What
have you all been about the day?’

The pink bows and ends of her ribands were a little too much like a
reflected glow from her cheeks, brighter and less delicate than of yore.
Her dress had a tendency to rustle. There was an excess of trimness
about it in every plait and pucker. She was too smart. The very apron
which she wore, though she was dressed for dinner, was embroidered in
silks all over, and she had too many and too costly rings on her plump
white fingers.

She had somehow managed, with misdirected ambition, to give an
undesirable varnish to the native Doric of her tongue, which, in robbing
it of its simple rusticity, lent it a false lustre that by no means
improved its quality. She shared with her husband a positively
exasperating exuberance of satisfaction with their acquisitions and
surroundings, so as to tempt the world into seeking to lower the
couple, were it only by an inch, from their pinnacle of self-conceit. It
served as a mortifying reminder to their friends that Mr. and Mrs.
Drysdale, in spite of their many virtues, were made of common clay after
all: for if man and wife had been composed of finer, rarer stuff, they
would have understood for themselves that a man’s life does not consist
in the things he possesses; they would have known that wealth can do no
more than confer the lower gratifications, and would have ceased to be
infatuatedly elated by their outward prosperity.

The other person, who opened a French window on the ground-floor of the
new part of the building, and came skipping out of it, the faster to
reach and greet Tam Drysdale on his arrival, was likewise a woman. She
also had been wonderfully constant in her attentions since she had been
able to toddle, with or without her mother or nurse’s consent, into
dangerous proximity to the horse’s feet, sidling up to the dogcart,
standing confidently, her little face one broad grin, which cast out the
smallest conception of fear of repulse, till she should have her reward.
It was to get the whip, twice as long as herself, to hold, or to be
caught up and tossed in strong arms, placed in the seat of honour, and
driven up and down the terrace, shrieking with delight at the promotion.
This was Eppie the younger, who had grown from a lovely child to a slim
and beautiful girl of sixteen--such a juvenile copy of her mother in
hair, eyes, complexion, teeth, smile, in her very fondness for soft
pink, like the colour of her own cheeks--that the striking likeness
between the mature matron and the slender lass became almost comical in
the points of agreement and of difference in the two versions of the
same original.

Little Eppie, in the changed circumstances into which she fitted, had
even caught up something of the broad Scotch which--varnished or
unvarnished--fell, as a matter of course, from the elder lips, but
sounded so quaintly on the younger. Eppie’s brother and sister were free
from this lingering distinction. Mrs. Drysdale could pride herself on
the fact that her son, young Tam, and her elder daughter, Clary, spoke
as if they were reading out of a printed book. Young Tam did so from
sheer earnestness; Claribel from set purpose, in all moods. It was not
so in Eppie’s case; and with traces of the speech she had inherited a
portion of the rustic tastes in which the heads of the house now only
indulged as a relaxation--a private relaxation. To eat oat-cake and
drink buttermilk, when they might have had the richest of plum-cake and
the dryest of champagne; to sup on new potatoes and salt herrings, when
the eaters might have dined at the same hour on turbot and turkey, or
salmon and lamb, were treats to Eppie no less than to her father and
mother--only the girl, if she had got her own way, would not have taken
them surreptitiously.

There were other enjoyments for which Eppie had an hereditary
inclination, though the knowledge of them could only have come to her by
hearsay. She would have liked to work in the harvest-field, to seek and
find hens’ nests and bring in the eggs, to carry home every sick chicken
and deserted lamb she could come across, and become its foster-mother.
She would have liked to milk the cows, and in default of so high and
hopeless an attainment, she haunted the dairy to skim the milk in the
basins and press the whey from the curd in the cheese-tubs. She would,
if there had been any chance of her gaining permission, have sought to
ride her pony bare-backed, and tried to groom him with her own little
hands.

Claribel cared for none of these practices any more than if she had been
born a duchess; indeed, the chance was that if she had been her Grace,
she would have looked at them longingly, as Princess Elizabeth looked at
the milkmaid carrying her pails.

If Claribel Drysdale suffered herself to feel aggrieved by any of the
manifold contradictions in the bearing of the family, it was by her
younger sister Eppie’s perverse disposition ‘to run wild,’ as Claribel
called it emphatically, in aping primitive sayings and doings which were
all very well, or at least excusable, in her father and mother, who were
elderly, and had been more plainly brought up. Claribel would never
allow herself to approach nearer to the hole whence she had been dug
than such a vague phrase as this. But it was wrong as well as absurd in
Eppie--such folly would damage her prospects if she were let alone--her
conduct might even prove injurious to the fortunes of the rest of the
family.

As it had happened, this was one of the instances in which Claribel’s
power failed. Her mother, to whom she was polite, sometimes even
affectionate, stood greatly in awe of her elder daughter, still more so
than of her son Tam. Claribel had also an odd double influence over her
father. He respected in her the education and tastes which were beyond
him: and he felt bound to support her, in the career which he had opened
up for her, by removing, as far as possible, every hindrance out of her
path. Altogether, Mr. and Mrs. Drysdale might have been worked upon to
the painful extent of denying themselves a good deal of Eppie’s society,
checking her in the very expressions and practices she had learnt
through love for them and sympathy with them, and sending her away to
the finishing school of which Clary so often spoke.

But Eppie was a tower of strength in herself. She proved too much for
them here. She had no more fear of her sister Clary than their brother
young Tam had. She laughed at and defied her. Clary was all very well
sometimes, when Eppie had toothache and Clary nursed her, or when Clary
was in a communicative mood, and chose to give the details of her
parties; then she was ‘a dear,’ and quite nice and amusing. At other
times she was ‘prideful and upsetting,’ and had little time or attention
to spare for home. But in neither case was she ever to come between
Eppie and her father and mother. She would not yield her consent to
being sent away from her happy home, Drysdale Hall, neither would her
father and mother have the heart to force her.

Why, what would they do without her? Who would bring father his slippers
and his posy? Who would cut his hair and read the newspapers to him? Who
would be mother’s companion when father was at business, help her to
give her orders, and see the stores weighed out, and be her little
‘prentice housekeeper? No doubt Clary pretended there was no need for
mother to keep house when Mrs. Wood was so clever and experienced, and
had been housekeeper as well as cook to Lady Semple’s brother--as if
mother could live without a house to keep, although there were twenty
Mrs. Woods to do it for her! Who would walk to the gardens and the
washing-green with mother, and gather the lavender, and pull and shell
the peas, and fold the clothes, as she was fond of doing; and surely
mother could please herself, and do what she chose, else where was the
good of her being married to father, a rich man, Eppie would like to
know?

Why, mother would feel quite lonesome and eerie in a great big house
like Drysdale Hall, though Tam and Clary were both ‘to the fore.’ Little
good they were--Tam buried in his books and papers, and Clary away with
her grand friends. Mother must have her silly little daughter Eppie to
sit and sew beside her, and get her to tell stories about the
sewing-school and the singing-school mother attended when she was
young; and how she had sold her mother’s butter and cheese so well that
she had been granted a quarter at the dressmaking, where she had been
clever, and picked up enough of the trade to make all Tam and Clary’s
frocks when the children were little, which was more than Clary, with
her accomplishments, could do for herself, now that she was big.

Eppie did not hesitate to assert that she would rather learn dressmaking
from mother, and perhaps some day make a gown which mother herself would
be proud to wear, and to say, ‘My daughter Eppie made it for me,’ than
jabber all the French which mademoiselle could stuff into her. For Eppie
had possessed governesses, both native and foreign, and it was from no
want of such polite literature as they could impart that she had
developed an out-of-date rusticity and homeliness.

In the end, Eppie’s own strenuous, indignant, tender will, coinciding
with her parents’ secret strong inclinations, carried the day against
the wishes of ‘Madam,’ as Eppie and her mother--the latter with bated
breath and sundry twinges of her tender conscience and pricks of her
soft heart--were sometimes driven to call Clary.




CHAPTER VI.

MORE OF THE DRYSDALES.


So Eppie was at home, to run out, in sweet rivalry with her mother, to
claim her father’s first look and word.

‘Oh, father, I’m so glad you’ve come! I’ve been wanting you this whole
afternoon. Dr. Peter and Athole have been here, and they can give me one
of their Newfoundland pups; and will you walk over with me, after
dinner, and fetch it, for mother cannot leave the house, in case the
Carricks should call, and Tam will come in ower late, and be
cross-tired? And, oh, father, how long has “White Breeks” taken to do
the road to-day? Simpson--now, Simpson, you need not make a face, I’m
not going to say any ill, and you know that you said he would beat Dr.
Peter’s “Lady Fair,” if you, father, would only let Simpson lick aff the
bairns, when they hang on behind, at the Birlie Brae.’

‘And how would you like your licks yourself?’ demanded her father, with
an assumption of grave reproach. ‘Was that the way I brocht up my last
little girl?’

‘Well, but I would not lick them sore, father,’ explained Eppie, in
earnest good faith; ‘only such a skelp [slap] as I would not have minded
taking myself. But you will walk over to Barley Riggs with me for the
pup?’

‘Bairn, your father will be tired,’ remonstrated her mother. ‘The pup
and you can bide a night apart, sewerly,’ with the little mincing
pronunciation which served as the queerest finish to her broad speech.

‘Oh! if father is tired, I can wait; I’ll not mind the pup,’ said Eppie
heroically, without being able to carry out the heroism effectually, so
as to conceal that the twelve hours’ delay in the appropriation of the
puppy would be as twelve years to her. Tam could not keep up the joke to
the hurting of his favourite.

‘Feint a hair am I tired!’ he exclaimed triumphantly; ‘I could walk to
Glasgy, let alone to Barley Riggs. But I’m thinking, my lassie,’ he
added more seriously, surveying his daughter, while Simpson drove away
with the dogcart, and the family group were left on the terrace, ‘you’ve
little need of a towsy tyke [rough dog] to set you an example in
rouchness; you’re more like a Newfoundland dug yourself than a young
leddy, sitting with your hands in your lap in your mammaw’s
drawing-room.’

In truth, Eppie’s silky black hair, at which her father glanced with
mingled admiration and disapprobation, was more after the fashion of a
furze-bush than even the style of the day required. Her thin pink gown,
designed to replace her morning-gown with something more akin to
evening-dress, was decidedly creased and tumbled, and two neglected ends
of white tape were straying disconsolately down from her waist behind.

Eppie looked only a little abashed, however, as she made two conscious
clutches at the ends of the tape.

‘It’s just my strings that I’ve forgotten. Why should a lassie have
strings as well as hooks and eyes to fasten? I believe dress-makers send
them on purpose to plague their customers and make life a burden to
them. I was in a hurry in case you should be back before I was ready.
No, mother, I had not Nicol to look after me. Do you not mind she was
dressing Clary for the first tennis-party this year? I do not care for
tennis, with young ladies and gentlemen running about flourishing bats
and keppin’ [catching] balls, but never forgetting their steps and their
carriages; and I know young Tam hates the whole thing as much as I do.
I used to like croquet when I was little, and you and father came out
and played too, and helped me through the girds [hoops]. I have been
giving wee Willie Finlay such a grand jow [swing] in the jow father put
up for me lang syne, between the saughs at the end of the osier-beds.’

‘But, my lamb, you’re getting ower big for a jow,’ her mother
remonstrated gently; ‘and Willie Finlay’s an impident little sorry, to
let you jow him,’ with a quick flash of indignation--‘the manager’s
wean, and you the maister’s dochter!’ for the worthy woman was by no
means without the sensitive feelings of the employé who has become the
employer, especially where her children were concerned.

‘Mother, you’ve forgotten,’ said Eppie, with soft reproach, and a shade
of gravity on her round rosy face. ‘Poor Willie is as deaf as a horn,
and cannot play with the other bairns.’

‘No doubt the little chappie’s afflicted,’ granted Mrs. Drysdale
relentingly, ‘and you may send him in to Wood or me for a jelly-piece
whenever you like; but it’s time you let jowing alane.’

‘Why, mother, I’m just sixteen,’ protested Eppie in her turn, with a
swift resumption of her light-hearted gaiety: ‘I have heard you say that
you and my aunties had a jow fixed between two of grandfather’s stacks,
and that many a time when you had gone out to play hide-and-seek in the
gloamin’, father here would give you the best jow you ever had, till
grandmother called you in to your supper.’

‘Bairn, it’s not canny to tell you tales,’ said Mrs. Drysdale, with one
of her old bright coy blushes. ‘Manners have changed since then,’ she
said, seeking to dismiss the subject, with a disturbed sense of how it
would sound to Clary, her own eyes glistening at the same time at the
remembrance of the innocent ‘daffing,’ which was so much freer and
merrier than anything she saw now among young people--some of them
doucer and more doleful than their elders.

But Tam Drysdale struck in, inspired by the recollection:

‘Weel do I mind it, Eppie, my doo [dove]; many a brave jow I gave her,
without her saying so much as “hooly” [stop]. If the coast were clear
and the rope stout enough, I would give you both a fine jow, though
mother there is not so licht as she was in the auld days.’

‘Fie for shame, Tam!’ cried Mrs. Drysdale, as the other Eppie laughed in
high glee; ‘you maun be daft to speak such nonsense. What would Clary
think, and poor young Tam, who is so solid, if they heard you? What
would the maids and the men, and Sir Jeames and my leddy say, forbye
Captain Mackinnon, who is in the same regiment as young Semple, and is
paying a visit to Semple Barns--no less?’

‘I do not care a bawbee what any of them say, if I am doing no harm,’
maintained Tam stoutly. ‘I may surely give my ain wife a jow or a
kiss--it’s a’ ane which--if it pleases me, an’ hip ower what the world
says about it. But it’s true, mother, we’re growing ower auld for play;
we had better leave it to the young anes, if they were but as spunky
[spirited] and blithe as we were a score of years syne. Are you two
women to keep me waiting here all night? Do you know I’m as hungry as a
hawk, and I’m to sort myself before the gong sounds?’

Eppie and her mother retreated obediently to the drawing-room--an
apartment gorgeous in satin damask, ebony, gilding, mirrors, and
china--which Clary had striven in vain to subdue according to the Queen
Anne standard. The redeeming features of the room were its good
pictures--several landscapes of the last schools--French and Belgian, as
well as English and Scotch--in addition to a presentable family group,
taken by a clever artist when the children were still young, and an
abundance of flowers, of which both the Eppies were very fond.

Claribel was absent; young Tam did not make his appearance till the last
clash of the gong. He had inherited the good looks of both father and
mother on a larger scale. He was a big, bearded fellow of
three-and-twenty, with his father’s square forehead and massive face,
and his mother’s brown eyes. But there the resemblance ceased. There was
either a load of care or a burden of discontent, or both, in his low
knit brows and the drooping corners of his mouth. For whatever reason,
he was at war with himself and with his world. He looked even as if he
had dressed against his will, and with some scorn for the operation. He
ate sparingly, and as it were with reluctance and self-disgust, of the
plainest food that was to be had at the sumptuously provided table. He
drank nothing save water. He hardly joined in the conversation,
answering briefly the observations addressed to him. He either bestowed
no attention on Eppie’s liveliest sallies, or repulsed them with pained
sharpness--a treatment which she requited by not minding it.

Withal there was a determined gravity approaching to solemnity, and a
certain self-consciousness about young Tam, which did not imply that he
was not in earnest; it simply hinted that without knowing it he was
playing a part, and however worried and perplexed, was receiving
considerable high-flown, melancholy satisfaction from the sense of an
heroic performance. His whole aspect belonged to his age, and could
hardly have existed at any other stage of existence. It had an aroma of
exaltation and self-martyrdom about it, which had its comical side for
those who could see it. Unfortunately the audience were blinded. They
did not understand the phenomenon with which they had not before come
in contact, and it affected them too nearly for them to measure it
correctly. The young man withdrew on the earliest opportunity, muttering
an excuse about a lecture he had to prepare.

‘That fellow gets worse and worse every day,’ said Tam Drysdale, holding
up his glass of port and staring into it as the door closed on his son.
The elder man spoke with a mixture of gloom, displeasure, and wounded
feeling, which, unhappily, is a tone not altogether new or strange to
fathers. ‘What would he have? What would he be at? One would think he
has all that the heart of a young man could desire, if he would only see
it. A fell difference in what I had to do and to bear when I was his
age. No choice of dishes for me to despise. No wine standing untouched
at my elbow. By George! I was glad of a whang of bread and cheese, and
my pull at a jug of sma’-beer to wash it down, many a day; or I went
without, hungry and dry, till I could pay my way, and lay by a penny to
rise in the warld, provide for a family, buy back the auld place, and
make my own out of it, as I have done. No turning up my nose at gude
victuals, preferring the worse to the better, and turning upon my heel
like a lord--or an ass,’ ended Tam, with a snort of resentment.

‘His books and his lectures,’ he began again, with strong disdain. ‘Is
the lad never to have done with his edication? I have not grudged it to
him. I could call the whole town of Glasgy to witness that he has got
the best I could find for him at home and abroad, and welcome. But what
is he the better for it? In my day a man was fain to be out of his
‘prenticeship and start as a journeyman, once and for all. But Maister
Tam, there, seems willing to bide in his ‘prenticeship till he’s
grey-headed, and what he’s to do then I’m not likely to see. He’s such a
clever hair-splitter that he can’t make up his mind. Well, he is a
bauld beggar! As fine a business as any of its kind in Glasgy,
ready-made to his hand, and he stands aside and casts laiths [corn] at
it. Ah! if I had gotten the tenth part of his chances!’ he finished,
with angry emphasis.

His wife and daughter were listening in respectful silence--not awed,
but daunted, as the kindest of men will daunt his womankind, when the
men begin, in contrast to their usual indulgence, to launch vials of
wrath at domestic grievances.

‘Maybe, Tam, you were better without the chances,’ his wife ventured at
last to say mildly. ‘It’s finer to win your success than to have it
gifted to you. The gift maun have its drawbacks and temptations. It’s
just that our Tam, poor chiel, has ower kind a heart and tender a
conscience. He’s no easy about the rich and the poor, though I’m clear
the Bible owns them baith. He cannot bide that the one should be so well
aff and the other perishing for lack of the necessaries of life, though
there does seem a needcessity for the inequality. Yet it whiles troubles
me mysel’ that we should be sitting here, not to say aboon the danger of
want, but with our wines and wa’nuts, hiz that were not bred to anything
great, and folk we have kenned not worse than ourselves, maybe a hantle
better, and used to different treatment, are ill aff, and trembling for
what’s to come.’

‘We’re not here to mend the whole economy of things,’ said Tam gruffly.
‘We can but make the best of what we find, and well for us if we do as
much.’

‘Folk did not ask so many questions when we were young,’ poor Mrs.
Drysdale went on, with what was in fact a crafty defence of her son.
‘The most feck had not the time, if they had been gude enough to have
had the will. You need not screw your face,’ a little angrily. ‘Our lad
is gude--we may be thankful for that, Tam Drysdale; no just decent
outwardly, but gude at the heart, for as little as his father thinks of
it. It is his gudeness partly that torments him. I could trust him far
and near. I maist think,’ with a sigh, ‘that though it would have been a
sore wrench, and it is hard for you, poor auld lad, that your son you
thought so muckle of should not consort with you and succeed you in the
works and the Hall here, that you’ve wrocht so hard to bring to
perfection--it would have been better, since you twa are not like to
agree, to have let young Tam go out to Australia as he had a mind to
do.’

‘And what would he have done there, I should like to know?’ inquired Tam
contemptuously. ‘I have yet to learn that Australia, though it offers an
opening for shepherds and blacksmiths, has a market for book-learning.’

Mrs. Drysdale held up her head. There was a crimson spot on each cheek,
and she ceased to mince her words. No one--not even his father--should
sneer at her son in her hearing, and she not speak up for her bairn.

‘He could fecht his way as well as anither. He’s young and strong, has
wit, and is as steady as a rock, and can thole [endure] like his
neighbours. None could tant him there with the fine chances and the
dainty faring that he flings awa’--not because he’s saucy, but because
he thinks shame to take what he has ne’er earned, when he kens there are
hard-working men fain to be content with a soup of thin kail or a bit of
fat pork, a crust of dry bread or a cauld potatie at mony a meal. There
may be mair britherliness--were it but of hardship--out yonder; and it
might help him to be at peace with God and man--my braw lad!’

‘And what does your son think himsel’?’ retorted Tam, in the irony of
the question disowning his relationship to the culprit; ‘that he is to
redress the wrongs of the world, and flee in the face of his Maker? I’ll
tell you what: he must have consorted at his colleges--I wish he had
never seen their faces--with a pack of blackguaird demagogues and
democrats that never earned an honest penny, and so cannot bear to see a
decent man enjoy what he has striven and spared for, but would take it
from him, or by their tales go share and share alike--a grand piece of
generosity with another man’s goods--whenever they had the luck. I’ve
always had my doubts of your superfine friends of their kind, that ken a
lot better and are a deal more disinterested than ordinary mortals.
Trust me, that those extraordinary gentlemen will come out at the tail
of the cart, morals and all, before they have done.’

‘Oh, Tam! you’re ne’er evening young Tam, your ain flesh and blude, to
such gentry?’ cried Mrs Drysdale, ready to break down in her distress.

Then young Eppie, having finished her grapes, put her oar into the
entanglement. She had been a spoilt child, accustomed to give her
opinion, and it was seldom that she remained so long silent in any
discussion between her father and mother when she was present.

‘If I were you, father, I would let young Tam alone, and take no notice
of his strum. He always comes round sooner to what I want, if I just let
him alone.’

‘Hold your tongue this moment, Eppie!’ exclaimed her father with
unwonted asperity, for he could not bear even his favourite daughter to
interfere between him and his son. ‘What does a bairn like you ken o’
such matters? It is true what Clary says, that you’re ower forward in
some things and ower backward in others.’

‘Oh! if it’s Clary I’m to please, and if it is her word that is to be
taken for what I ought to say or do---- ’ protested Eppie, with a lump
in her throat that prevented her from speaking further.

‘Tam, you’ve hurt the bairn. I do not know what has come ower you,’ said
Mrs. Drysdale reproachfully, turning again upon her husband. ‘What harm
has she done? Is it so great an offence that she should speak up for her
brither? You let her have her head out the one moment, and you curb her
the next. What justice is there in that? Yet you men pretend to be sae
just!’ with a fine scorn that sat as strangely on her as wrath on a
mother-hen.

Thus sat upon on all sides, Tam Drysdale began to find himself in the
wrong, and to give way.

‘I did not mean--- ’ he said, growing abashed before his wife and
daughter; but before he could get any further, Eppie sprang from her
seat and flung her arms round his neck.

She could no more bear to hear her father reflected upon--and it was all
the worse that it should be on her account--than her mother could stand
an attack upon young Tam.

‘Say what you like, father; scold me if you please; who has so good a
right? You have been ower kind to your youngest lassie, and to us all.
Tam will not be the last to see that, some day. But I did not mean to be
forward; only I thought I would like to tell you how I managed Tam.’

‘Managed him, you gipsy! you’ll be managing me next,’ protested the head
of the house; but it was said fondly, harmony was restored, and the bone
of contention dropped.

In the course of the evening, when after all Eppie and her father did
not go to Barley Riggs--for the engagement slipped out of his mind, and,
at a hint from her mother, Eppie docilely let it go--Claribel came in
from her tennis-party, which had merged into a dinner. A dinner-dress
had been sent to her, the carriage had followed the dress, and she
returned in it in full array, and joined the others for half-an-hour.
She was a decidedly handsome young woman to those who put full weight
on a tall, broad-shouldered figure, regular if somewhat strongly-marked
features, and a neck and arms like alabaster. There was also something
in the girl’s expression that recommended itself to many people--not
without reason--something resolute and fearless. There was nothing weak,
nothing in keeping with her sentimental Christian name, which, to tell
the truth, Mrs. Drysdale, in the dawn of the family prosperity, had
borrowed from the title-page of a sheet of music. Claribel knew her own
mind, and obeyed its dictates without hesitation. There was an absence
of anything either faltering or paltering, unstable or underhand, about
her. She was a person to be comfortably relied upon, so far as she went.

Claribel Drysdale was a year younger than her brother, and six years
older than her sister. She had prized the worldly advantages which were
hers as highly as her father or mother could prize them, and she had
never had any warring inclinations or lingering first loves to dispute
the sway. She had made the best of being a handsome girl, and a rich and
popular man’s daughter, in a society of wealthy and pleasure-loving
people. She had young-ladied it as a man might lord it, with all her
heart and soul, not so much arrogantly as with an agreeable
forgetfulness of any other state of being. She had been incapable of
being deliberately unkind or unfeeling, but she had been full of herself
and the good time she had of it, her dress, her jewels--many and costly
to belong to a young girl--her horses; the dances, dinners, and picnics
in which she joined; the plays, operas, charity bazaars and sermons at
which she figured, to the exclusion of all besides.

But this was only a stage in Claribel’s existence; as she had soon grown
up, so she had soon passed beyond her earliest development. She had
quickly grown dissatisfied with the fruits of mere wealth, and taken to
the products of rank and generations of culture instead. She had
inherited her father’s respect for real ladies and gentlemen, without
his contented hopelessness of ever attaining to their merits. Nothing
was beyond Claribel Drysdale’s ambition, and the neighbourhood and
friendship of Lady Semple afforded her an opening for gratifying her
tastes.

Beyond this she was, as her father said, ‘not minding.’ She had the
grace not to interfere much with the others, unless on Eppie’s behalf.
She left young Tam to his ‘Radical fads,’ contented that time would cure
him of them. She swallowed down lightly, with no more than a slight
grimace at times, the discrepancies, which no one saw more keenly than
she did, between her father and mother and the style in which they
lived. If she did not show great filial respect and regard, and never
dreamt of rushing out to meet her father, or being never so happy as
when she was with her mother, like Eppie, Claribel did not fail
signally in her duty and affection to her elders. She behaved with
proper deference, and acted with far more philosophy and apparent
good-humour than her brother, young Tam, displayed.

Fine feathers were not wanting to set off a fine bird. Miss Drysdale, of
Drysdale Hall, was too well instructed and paid too much heed to
details--for she was one of those strong women, wise in their
generation, who never neglect a detail--to dress for dinner as she would
have dressed for a ball. But while she complied with established rules
and stopped short at the appointed limits, she gratified her natural
liking for what was not so much soft or bright, elegant or exquisite, as
for what was rich and magnificent. Claribel wore a pale moire, with lace
trimmings and such a set of coral as a countess might have envied. She
was quite a splendid figure in her shimmering silk and red and gold
necklace, as she presented herself without her opera-cloak in the
drawing-room, where Eppie was initiating her mother into the mysteries
of ‘bézique’ to replace ‘birkie’ and ‘catch-the-ten,’ coming in natural
succession, which the two had played together, of an evening, ever since
the younger Eppie was old enough to hold a card, while Tam Drysdale read
his newspaper.

It was comprehensible that the father and mother should look with pride
on such a daughter, that even Eppie, whose bright eyes were more
critical, should bestow her meed of approval on her sister. Here was
something to show for the parents’ pains that was not to be found in
young Tam, though the lad was a scholar, and out of the ruck of ordinary
young men. Here was a more satisfactory conclusion, if it were a
conclusion; neither was the satisfaction fatally qualified.

True, as a rule, Mrs. Drysdale was not quite at ease before her elder
daughter; less so than before her son, who seemed to be above noticing
trifles. Even Tam senior, though too manly and too much of a philosopher
in his way to have any serious apprehensions of what Clary might think
of his sayings and doings, was troubled with an amount of respectful
consideration for her which on special occasions was apt to hamper him
in her company.

But the effect she produced on her father and mother was rather the
result of the working of their minds than of hers. Claribel was
reasonably good-natured. She had a general friendly, if somewhat
condescending, wish to have her family share in her pleasures, though
they could not always comprehend them. She was a fair talker, when she
was disposed to talk, and as she sat discoursing lightly on the company
she had just quitted, indicating the individualities of its different
members, touching upon their eccentricities, here and there mimicking,
not very maliciously, their defects--how Mr. Muir stumped about as he
walked; the constant use Sir James made of the epithet ‘ridiklous;’ the
manner in which Colin Hunter contrived to look past the epergne at Mary
Campbell--though the gossip was superficial, sometimes a little hard and
caustic, never indicative of height or depth or fine sensitiveness,
beyond dispute it was entertaining.

‘And what did you think of Captain Mackinnon, Clary? What was he like? I
mind well his father was master of the Haugh when your father came back
here and brought me with him. I mind his mither too. She died when he
was born, poor woman! They said she had murned for want of a bairn, and
she laid down her life for this one,’ said Mrs. Drysdale
compassionately.

‘If you mind Gavin Mackinnon,’ said Tam, ‘you mind a feckless, incapable
man; a sort of fellow with a grand manner and big words, if that were
enough.’

‘Well, his son is not like him,’ said Claribel, with a laugh. ‘He is too
lazy, and has too much “pride that apes humility.” I dare say he’s not a
bad sort of young man. Dick Semple seems to have a regard for him, and
Lady Semple says he is the tamest cat she ever had about the house. The
last curate did not efface himself half so effectually. Only it is not
modesty in this case; it is pride and poverty. He has not a captain’s
commission, mother; he is only a lieutenant yet, like Dick Semple--a
rank which does not count.’

‘What do they call him, then?’ inquired Mrs. Drysdale; ‘an offisher used
to be muckle thought of in Glasgy, and the power to put Captain or Major
or even Lieutenant before the name was prized next to the uniform.’

‘Uniform has become mufti,’ said Clary, ‘and is only worn on parade; and
lieutenants have disappeared, unless in the Gazette. They have fallen
back among the civilians, and are heard of only as plain Mr. Semple, or
Mr. Mackinnon.’

‘Keep me! I would have thought I had been insulting the lads if I had
not given them all their honours,’ said Mrs. Drysdale, musing upon what
would have been the consequence of the two young gentlemen’s calling at
Drysdale Hall, while she had laboured under such a mistaken impression.

‘They get honour enough,’ said Tam, ‘even without their uniform and the
handles to their names. All the silly lads and lasses--and aulder folks
that should know better--are fain to run after them, because the trade
of war is genteel, and a prince may be a cornet, or whatever you like to
call him.’

‘But you like to read about battles, father,’ interposed Eppie, ‘and
you’ve helped at the presentations of swords to officers.’

‘Of course, my lass, of course. The wabster [weaver] and the dyer in
the wabster’s train, could not weel do without the warrior, and there’s
many a good sodger come from Glasgy, forbye Lord Clyde and Sir John
Moore. But the warrior must be the genuine article, and not a carpet
knight, like a good wheen of the soldiers we see in the piping times of
peace--the heroes of Glasgy drawing-rooms. The worst of it is that some
of the puppies look down on their entertainers, laugh at them to their
faces, and would give them the cauld shoulder any day if they met them
at Semple Barns, or Pollock, or Blantyre.’

‘Mr. Mackinnon could not very well do that, father, with his father
before you in the works here,’ remarked Clary carelessly; ‘neither would
he if he could--he is too much of a gentleman. All the same, I think his
mother will be the only woman to die for Mr. Eneas Mackinnon, which is
but fair, since if the _rôle_ were reversed I do not believe he would
take the trouble of dying for any woman under the sun.’

Clary had not heard of the old aunts in St. Mungo’s Square, and she was
an entertaining young woman when she was in glib speech. She promised to
be as great a social success as any woman could aspire to be; while her
brother Tam, in his own room, engaged in reading up for one of the
lectures which would come to nothing, threatened to be as great a social
failure.




CHAPTER VII.

RORY OF THE SHELTIES.


The Broomielaw has not borne a broom ‘cow’ for many a year. ‘Ane little
quay’ has gradually extended to a long line of wharves, where traffic
reigns. Warehouses abound with goods from the four quarters of the
globe, shops with a seafaring flavour, though the sea is not at hand,
and they deal in the common necessaries of shore life; the homely
dwellings of these humbler shopkeepers, sailors’ lodging-houses,
commercial hotels, look down upon the busy thoroughfare and the river
highway.

Among the crowd of shipping, steamboats, multiplied mightily since Henry
Bell’s little _Comet_ plied between Glasgow and Greenock, and was the
wonder of the day--arrive at all hours at the Broomielaw. Many of them
are Highland boats from ‘Glasgow down the water,’ the villa settlements
that fringe the Clyde and the lochs. And far beyond the islands that
begin with Bute and Arran is a Scotch archipelago--shaggy, heathery,
rocky, castle-crowned here and there, guarded by savage mountains and
wild sounds. That is the region of green Morven near thunder-haunted
Knapdale, pillared Staffa, sacred Iona, lonely Barra and Canna, and the
primitive, desolate Western Hebrides, in which Stornoway ranks as a big
town.

The communication between all these places and the more civilized south
is by water, and mainly by steamboat. The passengers and the cargo in
these Highland boats, when the first do not consist of enterprising
English and American tourists, and the second of their baggage, are
sometimes strange enough, but they are sufficiently common in that
quarter of the world to attract little attention. Besides, people are
too much engrossed with their own affairs to have notice to spare for
those of their neighbours. Thus nobody looked and nobody cared, when, on
a rainy April afternoon, an odd figure stepped out of one of the boats
that touched at some of the farthest-off islands, shook himself,
clutched an ancient knapsack that might have seen service in the
Peninsular War, and stumbled along, casting wary glances out of the
red-lashed eyes, right and left, like a spy reconnoitring a new country.

The stranger was a man a little over thirty, weather-beaten, and with
the shambling gait that often accompanies a defective intellect, which
makes up in cunning what it lacks in strength. The Highlander did not
wear the kilt, which he perhaps regarded as inappropriate in the low
country. He had compounded with the claims of the Sassenach in his own
territory, by assuming one of his few remaining articles of dress--a
pair of tartan trews, in which the greens and reds were faded into
sickly olives and dingy browns. With these he had on a little tartan
coat originally made for a much smaller man, so that the waist was
between his shoulders, and the sleeves ended not far below his elbows.
The dress was completed by a Glengarry of the same set, perched on the
wearer’s shock head of red hair. His face was as ugly as a ferret
complexion, high cheek bones, a wide mouth twisted slightly to one side,
and the longest chin on record, could make it.

But in the middle of this man’s ugliness and the guile which blinked out
of his eyes, there was a strain of simplicity and patience in the whole
aspect of the creature. There was also a manifest determination not to
betray any surprise at whatever he might see, but to affect that his
native clachan was as fine a place as Glasgow any day. He glanced at the
long lines of houses that opened from the quay, and betrayed, by the
blankness of his gaze, that he did not expect to see a living soul he
knew, amongst the thousands in the great city. He instinctively turned
his eyes from the eating-houses and provision-shops, conveying a
suspicion that he was both hungry and thirsty, but dare not indulge in a
supererogatory meal, till he had ascertained where he should find and
what he should pay for the cheapest and humblest of suppers and beds.

He wandered along Clyde Street, not caring to ask his way, past the old
Gaol, giving a doubtful, almost timorous look at its sombre exterior,
and came out upon the Green--the glory of East-End Glasgow. If the Earl
of Moray were to see it now, would he know it to be the same Green on
which he encamped his army before he crossed the river to win, under
Mary’s despairing eyes, the battle of Langside? Would Prince Charlie
recognise the spot where he reviewed his Highlanders on their return
from Derby, after their rags had been exchanged for the twelve thousand
linen shirts, the six thousand cloth coats, and the thousand blue
bonnets required by the rebels from the Whig town which flourished by
the preaching of the Word? Even the Chartists, who not more than thirty
years ago gathered there, ten thousand strong, with wolfish
famine-pinched faces and bony hands, brandishing the iron bars torn from
the railing, or the guns snatched from the locksmiths, would not have
felt themselves at home on the smooth turf, amidst the flower-beds,
resting on the seats provided for wayfarers, gazing their fill at the
water which, though it is less clear than when Moray and Prince Charlie
crossed it, is still dear to the born and bred Glaswegian.

Rory of the Shelties, who had travelled all the way from the farther
Uist, where he had left his charge of rough ponies behind him, was much
puzzled by the Green. He thought he had strayed into some gentleman’s
grounds, and with due consideration for the gloomy building he had
passed near the entrance, he behaved himself most gingerly, and sought
anxiously for the nearest mode of exit. Then he remarked the style of
the occupants of some of the benches, and proceeded far enough to come
on the spot set aside for the operation of carpet-beating, which was
going on briskly; and even his dull brain took in the conception that
those fine walks were somehow free after the fashion of his own bare
hills, and that he might, without fear of being called to order, sit
down, as he could not do in the street, and consider what should be his
next movement.

Rory dropped promiscuously on a seat, and stared rather vacantly at an
empty and stationary merry-go-round, which waited for the Fair, to
revolve with a noisy load. Rory had never seen anything like it before,
and was inclined to think it was some new-fangled threshing mill,
though why put down so far from any trace of a farm, he could not
pretend to say. The only sign he had given that he observed a
fellow-sitter near him, was his clutching more tightly his old knapsack.

Rory’s neighbour was an aged man with a nut-cracker face, and his
fustians so clean as to suggest an infirmary or a poorhouse, or at least
that their wearer was beyond work, with possibly a notable wife or
daughter who took pride in the respectability of a well-washed and
whole, though patched, suit for the ‘man body’ of the house. But if the
bent body and feeble, wrinkled hands, grasping and sustaining themselves
on a blackthorn stick, were beyond labour, the bleared eyes were not
beyond observation or the tongue seen between the shrivelled lips and
nearly toothless jaws destitute of the power of wagging whenever the
opportunity of ‘a crack’ presented itself. With a little cough by way of
introduction, the patriarch began the conversation most affably:

‘Frien’, I’m no a Gaelishioner myself; but my faither’s auntie married a
Dumbarton chap, so that I’ve cousins on the edge of the Hielants. But
you maybe canna speak the English?’ he interrupted himself to ask, led
to do it by the stony suspicious look of the new-comer in return for his
politeness.

‘Ye’re wrang there,’ said Rory half-haughtily, half with a childish
satisfaction; ‘I have the English.’

‘That’s lucky, for the Gaelic is deein’ oot, though there’s mony a
Hielant man an’ woman that could understand you in your ain tongue in
the Sautmarket or the Gallowgate; still, ye ken, ye michtna licht on
them without a deeficulty.’

‘I telled ye I had the English,’ said the stranger, with dry offence in
his tones.

‘Weel, I said the better aff ye were the day,’ returned the other,
declining to be offended in turn, or held at arm’s length. ‘Ye’ll hae
come for the hairst? but ye’re fu’ soon, Tonalt.’

‘My name’s not Tonalt,’ snarled the Highlander; ‘and I’m not for the
hairst.’

‘Ye’ll be seeking a porter’s job? that’s aye in season,’ persisted the
untroubled questioner. ‘There was a rowth [plenty] o’ Hielant porters
when I was a young lad; but we haena so mony now. We rear a breed o’ oor
ain, I’m thinking;’ and he finished by a cackling laugh.

Rory glared at his tormentor.

‘I’m no a porter any more than a shearer,’ he spluttered indignantly.
‘You’ll ask, perhaps, if I’m a beggar-man next. When I’m at home I’m
Rory o’ the Shelties, no less, to Maclean of Cairnbreck; and I’m come to
Glasgy on my ain private business.’

‘I wish it may thrive,’ said the old man, still with a suspicion of
mischief and mockery in his words. ‘Is it with the Lord Provost, or ony
of the great shipbuilders or boilermakers? I was an engineer aince on a
time mysel’, my lad; and I could work long hours at a stretch when
orders were thrang and men scarce. Whiles, as I sit here doing naething,
a dream comes ower me, and I hear the rattle of the locomotives, and the
whiz of the steam-valves, and the swing and ring of the hammers, and
it’s like the sweetest music I ever heard. But it never comes to you,
man, I see by your face.’ His own old face, which had lighted up, lost
its faint glow, and the former monkey-like mischief hovered again about
its lines and furrows. ‘Your erran’ maun be to the sugar-trade or the
cotton-mills, or aiblins to the whisky-shops to spier whether Campbelton
or Glenlivat’s maist in favour.’

Rory hunched rather than shrugged his shoulders, then suddenly rose up
and walked away, lugging his knapsack.

‘I think he has his fortune in that bit boxie,’ reflected the humble
student of mankind sardonically, ‘but I jalouse he’s no better than a
born natural. However, I maun hame to Jenny for my fower-hours, and syne
it will be time for my bed.’

Rory quitted the Green, where, in place of an inspiration coming to him,
he had been badgered by an impertinent fool, old enough to be his
grandfather--as old as his grandmother Morag when she left him the kit
and the treasure which was to make his fortune. It was not his fortune
yet which he carried in the soldier’s kit that might have been at the
wars with some old Maclean, it was only the materials of which that
fortune was to be made.

He strayed up the Saltmarket and got into the Gallowgate. There, in the
dirt and din and crush, he saw an occasional man with a Glengarry, or a
bareheaded woman with a tartan plaid over her head, or round her
shoulders, frequently binding a child to her--Highland fashion. The
sight bore out the statement of Rory’s single acquaintance in Glasgow,
that here were countrymen and women who might listen to his story and
take an interest in his fortunes. But the stranger was bent on keeping
his secret as far as he could, lest the sharers in it should steal a
march on him and rob him of its price.

As he wandered on, he noticed, side by side with the whisky-shops of
which he had been told, so many milk-shops and dairies, that the days
when the Cowcaddens received its name might have returned, and Glasgow
again have had its staple article of produce in the milk which the
students at the college and the brethren in the religious houses
consumed. It might be the most baseless scandal that mountaindew flowed
freely there, and as many crowns were cracked on Saturday night as in
any city in the kingdom; while luckless wights, boasting that the moon
would ‘bide a wee,’ before she served as their lantern to guide them
home, staggered blindly into the brimming Clyde, and the waters closed
sullenly over human loves and hates, hopes and fears.

At the most crowded and noisy crossing, where waggons, carts and
barrows, and a stray cab or two were in lively contest with the
pedestrians, Rory was unexpectedly brought up by one of the women who
still retained the tartan screen--though no longer the honourable curch
of old custom:

‘What pairt of the country are ye frae? It’ll no be Ballachulish? Ye’ll
no ken M‘Leish--the auld sodger wi’ the wudden leg up at the big hoose,
ye ken?’ She put her questions in rapid succession, without waiting for
a separate answer, till she had opened out the whole budget.

Rory, who was taken aback, while he was now both tired and faint in the
unaccustomed scene, stared at her in silence with a dazed look. She was
untidy, but not sordid or wretched in her dress. There was a certain
lingering comeliness and kindly impulsiveness in her middle-aged face,
though the lines had worn stronger, and the fresh colour grown mottled
and hard. She broke the silence by a laugh at herself, in which there
was no bitterness.

‘I’m an auld fule,’ she said. ‘I daur say ye never heard of Ballachulish
or Col M‘Leish--that’s the uncle who was gude to me when I was a
mitherless bairn with a randy of a step-mother. I’ll no say she had
nocht to complain o’ though, for I’ve grown a hantle wiser since I had a
man and bairns of my ain. But, eh, I wuss I could hear tell o’ the auld
man, gin he be in the land of the living yet, and how he’s farin’. They
would mind his comforts up at the big hoose; but maybe, ye see, they’re
a’ gane too. My man winna let me write--no that I’m a scholar, but I
micht manage a scrape o’ the pen--only he threeps [insists] I micht
bring a burden upon mysel’ and him, and there’s seven mooths o’ bairns
to fill, and the farther he wull gang on the strike, though I were to
lay the hairs o’ my head aneath his feet to prevent it. I’m aye speerin’
and speerin’ whenever I can get the chance, but I never hear a word.’

The speaker bestowed her confidence with the utmost candour on the
bewildered listener, who had enough to do to protect himself and his
knapsack from the jostling occasioned by the two stopping the way.

‘Losh! man, can ye no speak?’ she asked in sudden surprise, not
unmingled with consternation. ‘You’re a Hielanter, by the cut o’ ye. It
is mony a day since I ran awa’ from Ballachulish, and my tongue has lost
the Gaelic; but my ears can tak’ it in yet, gin it’s yeer only speech.’

‘No,’ said Rory, piqued once more by not getting credit for the
education he had acquired; ‘I have the English as well as any man in
North Uist. But I div not know Ballachulish or any M‘Leish, and my head
is bizzin’ a bit, what with comin’ aff the water and this confounded
whirl.’

‘Puir chiel!’ said the good-natured woman, with a quick change to
patronizing pity in her accent, ‘ye’ll be strange to a muckle toon. I
mind the feeling mysel’. Hae ye ony acquaintance here, or ony hole to
gang to? If ye like, ye can come my gate--I live in the next street--and
have a bite, till ye see what ye’re to do. Andry Sed--that’s my
man--canna find faut wi’ a ca’, forbye he’s no at hame at this hour. Noo
when I think o’t, ye’ll meet anither lad frae the hills, a ludger we’ve
had for as gude as a week; but he’s bund for his maister’s place the
morn. He’s weel-to-do, a credit to the North; he’s at the head of the
kennels at Semple Barns--no less!’

Roaming at random as he was in the deafening smothering city, without a
clue to his object, Rory could not resist the frank invitation, though
he was not guiltless of a suspicion that his countrywoman had
penetrated somehow into the bowels of his knapsack, and was cherishing
insidious designs upon its contents.

Mrs. Sed or Seth’s house made up in heartiness and ease for what it
lacked in dignity and refinement. That wet blanket, her Lowland husband,
did not turn up to extinguish her Celtic hospitality. The bairns were at
school or at their various trades, and so were not in the way to engross
their mother’s energies. The ‘ludger,’ a profitable guest, crammed into
a space cleared out for him, gave himself no airs, though he had
attained the high degree of being the supreme authority over the dogs at
Semple Barns. He was pleased with himself and with the world--this
strapping, black (instead of red) headed, kilted man, an effusive,
gossiping Highlander, a male example of the type to which Mrs. Seth
belonged, with the same inclination to find his heart warm to any ‘John
Hielantman,’ the rawer the better, whom he met among the crowds in the
Low country.

Under these benign influences, including whangs of a goat-milk kebbock,
a ‘stack’ of oat-cakes, a newly-baked loaf, a couple of bottles of ale,
and sundry tastings of the peat-reekiest whisky, Rory thawed
perceptibly. He did not yet tell his errand, but he began to throw out
dark hints of its importance, and to fish for such straws of information
as he could gather from the talk of his companions, better versed than
he was in the intricacies of Lowland and city life.

‘You’ll be knowing most o’ the fine folk in Glasgow?’ he addressed Mrs.
Seth insinuatingly.

‘The deil’s in the man! is he makin’ fun of me?’ exclaimed his hostess,
with a dash of anger in her tones; ‘or is his ignorance just past
believing? What trade have I wi’ leddies in their carriages, or wi’
gentlemen that dine aff cheeny and silver?’

‘By name, mistress; I was only meaning by name!’ exclaimed the inquirer,
in some alarm.

‘Oo, I ken a feck [number] o’ them by name, whatever,’ she granted
placably, the moment she was relieved from the disgrace of being laughed
at by a ‘bogle’ like her new acquaintance. ‘I was in gude enough places
when I was at service afore I took a man, and sair fashed I was with
fikes [finical ways] about keeping mysel’ clean and tidy.’

‘As if dirt didna bode [promise] luck, and there was no sic saw [saying]
in braid Scots--not in Gaelic--as “the clartier the cosier.” [the more
sluttish the warmer],’ interposed the keeper of the kennels, glancing
down at the kilt he wore, which was by no means spotless, and having a
fellow-feeling derived from similar trials.

‘Deed, ay, Sandy Macnab, if ye’re no ower muckle up in the buckle [too
proud] to be ca’d Sandy by a woman that kenned your mither--moreover,
she was living in a land [a pile of building] in this very street, and
you were a loon no bigger than wee Andry, who’s that dour he’ll reive
his faither’s bannet some day. But what need they have made sic a stour
aboot jappet tails [muddy skirts] or a wheen blades on a brat [spots on
an apron] or bauchled shoon [shoes down at heel]!’ exclaimed Mrs. Seth,
with a broad smile of superior wisdom.

Then she began to tell of her great employers. ‘There were the Gilroys,
where I was bairn’s-maid. He was in the hoose-pentin’ business, and he
made a heap o’ money, and left her a rich widdy, to fling hersel’ awa’
on a fule of a lad from Ayr. There were the Leishmans, where I was
under-kitchen maid. He was a grosser with a grand connection, and his
sons at college, and his dochters in furrin pairts for an eddication
they would have been better without. And there were the Ores in the
ship-chandler line, with a braw hoose at the West-End and a villy on
the Clyde, where I gaed for a day at a time after I was married, when
there was nae bairn in my arms, and they were oot o’ servants or
changing them at term-time. But eh! man, it would take a year to gang
owre the bare names o’ the big Glasgy folk.’

Rory’s face fell a little, as if he were overpowered with the number of
the great of the earth.

‘But even among so mony,’ he said again, after a pause, ‘you micht come
across certain titles.’

‘Speak oot, man, among your country-folk and frien’s, and dinna gang for
ever about the buss!’ the man of dogs adjured him. ‘Wha are you
seekin’?--name him.’

‘I div not want ony man,’ insisted Rory; ‘only I micht like to hear a
name.’

‘Weel, whatna name, and be hanged to ye for a sly, half-daft deevil!’
Sandy Macnab muttered the last half of his sentence in his beard.

Thus pressed, Rory took heart, stroked his long chin, and suggested,
‘You’ll have heard of Mackinnon?’

‘There’s a wale [choice] o’ Mackinnons,’ announced Mrs. Seth; ‘not that
I pretend to be thick wi’ ony of them. But whilk Mackinnon are you
after?’

‘It micht be Mackinnon of Drysdale Haugh,’ admitted Rory, but, if
possible, more reluctantly and dubiously than ever.

‘You’re wrang there,’ Sandy Macnab contradicted him flatly. ‘I ken about
Drysdale Haugh. It is the bleaching and dye-works that belong to the
maister of Drysdale Ha’. He’s a friend of my maister’s. His young leddy
dochter was biding with us at Semple Barns last week. She’s thrang
[intimate] with my leddy. There’s no Mackinnon of Drysdale Haugh, but
Drysdale of Drysdale Ha’ and Haugh an’ a’.’

Mrs. Seth confirmed the tale.

‘They are braw warks. I kenned a lass that married a bleacher; and I
took my fit in my hand and gaed out and see’d her aince.’

‘There micht have been mention of a Drysdale,’ said Rory cautiously,
‘but it was ane Mackinnon of Drysdale Haugh that the concern was wi’.’

‘It’s Drysdale the noo, onyway,’ maintained Sandy, unshaken in his
testimony. ‘I’m as sure of that as that my head’s on my shoulders. But
there’s Captain Mackinnon, a sodger lad, a frien’ of the young
maister’s, if that will serve you.’

Rory shook his head, but did not absolutely reject the suggestion.

‘What will be his whole name?’

‘How should I ken? Stop, it was half furrin, but I’ve heard it in the
North; “Eneas,” “captain,” or “major,” I’m not pertikler about the
milintary handle to the name. “Eneas Mackinnon”--I’ve read it on his
valise. He kens a dug when he sees him, and he’s often doun at the
kennels when he’s at Semple Barns.’

‘No, it will not be Eneas,’ said Rory, letting his head fall
disconsolately on his breast.

‘Cheer up, auld shaver!’ cried the brotherly Sandy, using a term which
was not strictly of Gaelic origin, but, to tell the truth, borrowed from
the slang vocabulary of the young master of Semple Barns. Sandy punched
Rory in the chest with a vigorous arm as he spoke. ‘You’ve hit on
Drysdale Haugh, and that’s the main thing, I’m thinking, and Drysdale
Ha’ is end on to Semple Barns. I’ll gie you a leg up for the sake of the
North and auld lang syne. But you maun mind what ye’re after, and behave
yoursel’, or I swear I’ll have naething to do with you. I’m an honest,
‘sponsible man, and I’ll no fling aboot my maister’s money like
chuckie-stanes [pebbles] without work in return. We’re wantin’ a
dug-laddie, and you may do as weel as anither gin you’ll obey orders.
You’re an able-bodied chiel enough, and you’ve as muckle wut as a
hafflin callant [half-grown lad], I daur say. Whatever berth you’ve had
in the Uist, ye’re no like to get a better offer here. You’ll be cheek
for jowl with Drysdale Ha’, and can mak’ up your mind wha and what you
want without starving in the street, or being coupet [overturned] back
the road you came to your muirlan’ pariss--just when the minister, and
the dominie [school-master], and the bethel [church officer] think
they’re weel quit of you. Is’t a bargain?’

‘Eh! you’ll be a fule gin you refuse,’ chimed in Mrs. Seth, with
benevolent urgency. ‘Sandy Macnab’s a gude sort, and Semple Barns is a
canny doon-sitting--even among the dugs. My laddies are wild to get a
day there when the haws and the hips are ripe, and the gentlemen are oot
with their guns, and there’s pappin’ o’ shot and drappin’ o’ birds on a’
hands. That’s a’ very weel at a time, but the faither says the big
toon’s the place to lippen [trust] to for laddies that want to mak’
their way in the world, unless maybe they come from the hill-country and
lo’e their freedom in the open air better than ony wage, and are as keen
as the gentles on the sport, like Sandy there.’

       *       *       *       *       *

Rory of the Shelties accepted the good advice, not seeing how he could
make any better of his quest, till he had tracked his game. He was
promised one thing, he would be set down ‘end on’ to Drysdale Haugh.




CHAPTER VIII.

FRIENDS MEET AT BARLEY RIGGS.


Barley Riggs was an old-fashioned country-house, left stranded among the
bleach-fields of Drysdale Haugh. Instead of surroundings of woodland
pasture or corn-land, it was encircled by acres of white webs,
Turkey-red webs, or webs of divers colours, the aspect being something
like that of a rainbow brought down from the skies and spread out on the
dull earth.

For convenience the house had been appropriated, at different times, by
the different partners in the works. The original Drysdale had never
dwelt in it; but the Mackinnons on their marriage had preferred it to
the old farmhouse. Soon Gavin Mackinnon had ceased to take any active
interest, or rather to do any active mischief, in the business; then
Barley Riggs had been made over to his partner, Mr. Murray, a fussy,
fault-finding man, whose continual meddling and rating had been little
more to the purpose than Mackinnon’s helplessness. After Tam Drysdale’s
purchase of the place, he had come there while Drysdale Hall was
building round the nucleus of the farmhouse. Finally, Barley Riggs was
again occupied by a Murray, though no longer as proprietor or tenant of
the works, which had grown and spread till the buildings, vats,
cylinders, and blocks were nearly doubled, like the men, women, and
children who earned their bread by them, compared to what they had been
five-and-twenty years before.

Dr. Peter Murray had been born at Barley Riggs when it overlooked a far
smaller colony of working-rooms, machinery, and working people’s
cottages, when the ground-rainbow was but a handbreadth to the size it
had reached now. He had come back to his first nest, as some men will,
while others avoid their early homes with dogged dislike or nervous
repugnance. He bore no grudge against the prosperity in which he had no
share. He maintained that he had been so soon inured to the smell of
chemicals that he rather liked it, though it was stronger now than in
his young days.

Dr. Peter had been bred a doctor, and had earned his little independence
as a medical man at a foreign station. But he said that he could
practise nowhere so well nor feel so much at ease with his patients as
among the hands at the old works, of which he was now the doctor by the
appointment of Tam Drysdale. Many of the people had stayed long enough
for them to have been known to Dr. Peter in his and their calf-days. He
could tell yet whom he had first bled, whose tooth he had tried his
‘prentice hand at pulling, what baby had led the troop of his babies,
so that it had been christened ‘Peter’ in compliment to him; and he had
still the pleasure of bailing ‘Peter Murphy’ out of a Glasgow or local
police court at least three times a year.

Dr. Peter Murray was a philosopher whose character was a puzzle to Tam
Drysdale, just as some of Tam’s idiosyncrasies bewildered Dr. Peter,
though he understood his man much the better of the two. Yet the two men
had not only a high esteem for each other--they had many points in
common, such as their scientific bent, particularly with regard to
chemicals, in which they had both dabbled more or less since their
boyhood, and their humane feeling for their fellow-creatures,
represented by the workpeople at Drysdale Haugh. But how Tam Drysdale
could build a great showplace and pretend to be comfortable in it, and
how Dr. Peter could be satisfied to dose away the end of his days in a
shabby house without a single modern improvement, were samples of
riddles which neither man could read to his satisfaction.

Dr. Peter was not alone at Barley Riggs, though his wife was long dead
and his family out in the world, married, and scattered far and wide,
with one exception. This was his youngest child--the daughter
Athole--who kept her father company, took care of his house, and was as
pleased with her position as he could be with his.

At Barley Riggs, Dr. Peter and his daughter practised what people are
told in these days has all but gone out of the world--‘plain living and
high thinking.’ They had to be frugal, for the income of the head of the
house was not large, and he had determined to leave a sufficient
provision for his unmarried daughter, though she had besought him with
tears in her merry eyes not to stint himself on her account, in the
modest indulgences he craved. She could work for herself at any time. He
had taught her both how to be independent and how to be easily
satisfied.

But even if necessity had not been laid upon the Murrays to be frugal,
their inclination pointed that way. They were disposed to be simple, not
luxurious in their habits. They had so many higher enjoyments that the
couple could hardly wait or stoop to occupy themselves much with the
gratification of the senses. So long as books were left--they allowed
themselves great scope in books, which are the finest and cheapest
luxury--they did not object to faring simply. It did not trouble them
that the furniture at Barley Riggs, which Dr. Peter had carried across
the globe and back again, was almost as out of date and lawfully worn as
that of the Miss Mackinnons in St. Mungo’s Square. Rivalling books, in
the estimation of father and daughter, was life in every aspect--human
life, animal life, plant life. It afforded them treasures beyond price.
It was a divine problem they were never weary of seeking reverently to
work out for themselves.

The old-fashioned parlour at Barley Riggs was somewhat hard in angular
forms and cold in neutral tints, such as were in fashion a good many
years ago. The chairs and tables were of mahogany, black with age; the
carpets and hangings, in colour, held chiefly by drabs and browns. There
were here and there foreign touches which told of Dr. Peter’s long
residence abroad--a cabinet of strange shells which he had gathered on a
distant seashore; specimens of primitive pottery in dull red and thick
yellow; a curious weapon or two hanging on the walls; but the place was
marvellously homelike. It was a sitting-room lived in, where most things
were for service and in constant use. It was scrupulously clean and
bright, for cleanness and brightness not only cost little--they were
conscientious duties and joys to Athole Murray, which she felt bound to
discharge and cherish, and to hand on to her single handmaiden Jeannie,
culled from the Drysdale Haugh working-girls. To have failed in these
respects would have been to risk something by the admission of dust and
gloom in spoiling a candidate for life’s blessings and immortal gains.

Bookshelves, carved by Dr. Peter’s skilful hands, and full to running
over, occupied every inch of vantage-ground, and relieved the homely
style of the rest of the furniture. For though the volumes were not
chosen on account of their binding, and were mostly well-worn, buff
calf, and red and blue cloth, they did brighten up with soft and gay
tints the Quaker-like groundwork. Summer and winter the room was never
without green leaves and very often flowers, which Dr. Peter and Athole
managed to rear in perfection, to the piqueing of the pride of the
gardeners at Drysdale Hall, and even to the smothered mortification of
Tam Drysdale. Tam was generous, but he desired as his right to have the
best that money could produce; and was not money the engine of engines,
even in the delicate domain of lilies and roses?

Above all, the Barley Riggs parlour had a wealth of pets, remarkable,
considering its narrow bounds and constant occupation by the family--a
dog, a cat, and a kitten lived on the best of terms with a variety of
birds. But these were only the indoor stock. Outside, pigeons fluttered
on the roof of the house and on the window-sills; swallows built in the
eaves; tame pheasants sat on the branches of the nearest trees; a couple
of hedgehogs scuttled away across the walks. In the paddock a goat and
its kid were tethered; and Dr. Peter’s pony, and an old Shetland pony,
which Athole had ridden as a child, roamed at their own sweet will,
sharing the pasture with an Alderney cow and her calf. A large family of
poultry looked out from behind the wire-net fencing their poultry-yard,
like nuns from the other side of a grating. The whole little territory
was teeming with life, and the occupants took the keenest interest in
it all--down to the butterflies and beetles among the wallflowers and
irises, the caterpillars on the cabbage-leaves, the bees on the thyme.
If it be true that

    ‘He prayeth best who loveth best
     All things both great and small,’

then surely Dr. Peter and his daughter Athole prayed well.

He was a long, lean man, very brown and very grey, whose coats had a
trick of looking shabby, yet who had something positively noble in his
air, he was so entirely beyond being touched by circumstances, so
sufficient for himself and those he belonged to, so born to confer
benefits of their kind on all with whom he came in contact.

Athole was very like him in being thin and brown and dark-haired, as he
had been before he became grey. Her features were refined, but so
irregular as to be positively bizarre. Her chief beauty lay in her grey
eyes. For reasons of her own, Athole Murray was fond of dressing in grey
of all shades, from slate to silver, in linen or silk occasionally, and
frequently in woollen stuffs with the texture shifting to suit the
different seasons, and with names significant of demureness and
retirement from the world--Carmelite nun’s cloth; and yet nobody could
be less demure or nun-like than Athole Murray. She was a busy, cheerful
girl, a little over twenty. She had an amount of humour and fun, liable
to mislead her neighbours with regard to her earnestness, which made
men’s hearts glad, and cost her some pains to keep within reasonable
bounds.

On the evening of an April day, Athole was sitting in the parlour at
Barley Riggs, at a little table which was peculiarly hers, diligently
drawing designs for the calico-printers. She had lithe, capable hands
which could not be idle. They had been early trained to a variety of
occupations. Athole could not only sew all manner of needle-work, cook
daintily, clean deftly: she could carve in wood better than her father
could. She could etch like a second-rate etcher; she could paint on
china, not merely for exhibitions of amateur performances, but so
cleverly that a china manufacturer of some reputation had offered her
regular work and good wages. She had compounded with her father for his
persistence in making a provision for her future, by taking upon her a
share of the present household expenses, and supplying the necessary
funds from a neat little income which she gained by being the most
original designer employed at the Drysdale Haugh Works.

Athole was in grey as usual, but she had a blue knot where her little
white collar met the neck of her gown, and companion blue knots where
her sleeves terminated above her slim round wrists. She had told her
father in confidence--these two were great friends--that were it not for
the hindrance they would offer to her going out to look after the beast
tribe, and the temptation the fashion might present to Jeannie, their
handmaiden, she (Athole) would sport another pair of blue bows in her
shoes. She was entitled to compensation for always appearing as ‘a grey
lady’ when all the colours of all the Drysdale Haugh dye-vats were
perpetually before her eyes.

What made her do so? It was so oblivious and so like a man to ask. Of
course familiarity bred contempt. Of course she chose to be out of the
common in plainness, since she could not witch the world with splendour
like Clary Drysdale; and it would not suit her complexion to be always
in pink like Eppie. Did he not know green was the complement of red, and
if she figured in any tinge of rose-colour she would come out as the
Green Woman. She would be solicited by half a dozen caravans to give
them the benefit of her unique charms for Glasgow Fair. How would he
like that?

No, grey was her safeguard. Besides, grey had nothing to lose, and did
not fade, and many cheap materials were considerately dyed that colour.
It was her duty as a sensible woman, especially in relation to their
handmaid Jeannie, to set before her an example of economic and rational
clothing, not unbecoming under the difficult circumstances. It was
little she could do; but, like the man who would not wear a miller’s hat
though it cost him his life, she was prepared to make a stand--to go to
the scaffold if she were sent there in a righteous cause, in a protest
against the extravagance--whether in art-colours or in aniline dyes, in
straight lines or in puffs and folds--of her sex, in the matter of dress
in this generation.

As Athole drew in her particular window, her father entertained a
visitor. The stranger’s presence did not disturb the young lady in her
occupation, not even though that stranger was young Tam Drysdale, the
son of the master of the calico printing-works. She did not stop her
work. She made no pretence of concealing the pattern on which she was
engaged. She did not even go on stiffly and awkwardly, as if she ignored
a spectator.

She asked him once to look at what she was doing. ‘Are you acquainted
with this geometrical flower, Mr. Tom? I am afraid it “never grew,” like
the tree in the city arms.’

When he answered, a little put out by her appeal, that he had no doubt
her design was an excellent one for the purpose, she knew better than he
did, she acquiesced quietly with a laugh that had some pleasure and no
annoyance in it. ‘I dare say I do. I have worked for eighteen months in
this way, and if I have not failed in my reckoning, I have done this
pattern with variations twenty-two times. No, don’t pity me, I beg,’
she interrupted young Tam as he prepared to address her with a
portentously grave face. ‘I am not an object of pity. I am not a
struggling artist nipped in the bud, or a martyr to the wants of a
numerous family. I think that I am neat-handed, have some notion of
colour, and some idea of what a calico-pattern ought to be, if you will
allow me to say so; but that is the extent of my capacity. And it is not
a hardship in other respects to work like this for two or three hours a
day from choice for liberal pay, considering the nature of the work. It
rather soothes than wearies me. My father has trained me to do something
of the kind to keep me in order, lest I should get so audacious that I
should not be fit to live with.’

She told him this easily and composedly, but for the twinkle in her grey
eyes. It did not enter into her head that there was anything unworthy in
itself or disparaging to her in working for pay--working for his
father. She was more than his equal by birth, for the Murrays were of
gentle descent as far back as they could count, and his equal by
education, though she did not dress in purple and fine linen, or fare
sumptuously every day. She was his mother’s and sisters’ friend, though
Clary, with her own engagements, did not come half so often to Barley
Riggs as Eppie came. It did not seem to Athole Murray that any drawing
of patterns, though it had been ever so repugnant to her, while, as it
chanced, she liked it, could alter these facts.

Young Tam took one part of her speech seriously, and answered her,
standing, looking a protesting giant by her side:

‘I beg your pardon, Miss Murray; I was not going to pity you. I agree
with Goethe that life is earnest, and work, so that it is real, is about
the best thing we have. I only pity the workers who have no advantage
from their work, or, if they have, advantage of the grossest kind or in
the scantiest degree. I pity still more the men and women who think
they are profiting by toil that is done by proxy, while they are simply
pampering what is lowest in their own natures and reducing themselves to
the _rôle_, if not of brutes, of fools and dolls.’

Young Tam spoke with bitterness, but with freedom, as he could not do at
home. He was in another atmosphere--more congenial, nay, with a
fascination for him, widely as his hearers differed from him.

Dr. Peter took the trouble to contradict his visitor most decidedly, to
remonstrate with him strongly. The elder man’s life-long friendship with
Tam senior, in spite of their divergences, warranted the step. Besides,
Dr. Peter had known young Tam more or less for years, entertained a
considerable regard for him, and would not let him go far wrong if he
(Dr. Peter) could help it.

‘Come, come, young Tam Drysdale, you are going a great deal too far.
Communism--not to say Nihilism--has been proved rank folly over and
over again. If you think so little of wealth, ease, and luxury, why need
you grudge them to the favoured few, and cry out like a bairn or a
fanatic against the want of them in the many?’

‘Well, sir,’ said Tam, with a grim smile, ‘you are about the last person
I should have expected to find upholding riches, with the power they are
supposed to confer and the sacrifices they entail.’

Dr. Peter shrugged his narrow, stooping, student’s shoulders. ‘I suppose
that is a hit at me because I have not made a fortune with my lancet and
stethoscope. To tell the truth, I do not greatly miss it. Athie and I
can get along famously with what we have; we’ll not say how much or how
little, lest I should make you open your eyes, Maister Tam. But I don’t
want to compel all the world to have our tastes; the uniformity would be
inconvenient, to say the least, and a trifle tiresome.’

‘You don’t mean to say that you approve of keeping some noses at the
grindstone in order that the same feature in other people may be cocked
in the air,’ said Tam satirically--‘that you, who are a medical man and
expound the laws of health, give your consent to cellars and garrets on
the one hand, to match palatial mansions on the other? You are something
of a reformer, and you are a church-going man. Are you satisfied as a
patriot and a Christian with the physical, moral, and intellectual
condition of the two great classes in a commercial centre like Glasgow?’

‘How so? In what light?’ asked Dr. Peter cautiously.

‘Take the well-to-do,’ young Tam explained. ‘They are never weary
boasting what they can get for their money. They lay themselves out to
spend at the greatest rate. They glory in the reversal of their early
practice--not merely where a little cheap refinement and higher
education are concerned. They turn their backs on the past, and load
themselves with burdens too heavy to be borne, of altered habits, late
hours, unpalatable arrangements, uncongenial associates. They make asses
of themselves in dress, at table, with their hunters and hounds, their
plate, their pictures and books--all for the sake of showing what fine
gentlemen they have grown, when the truth is they were a deal nearer
being gentlemen, if gentlemen were true men, in the rough guise in which
they started.’

‘You are going a great deal too far, Tam,’ repeated Dr. Peter severely;
‘but what of the other class?’ very much in the tone in which the
prisoner at the bar interrupted the summing-up of the judge with ‘It’s a
lie, my lord; but go on.’

‘Do I need to tell the poor men’s doctor, who attends them more for love
than for money, what their case is like?’ asked young Tam, with his
voice softening a little. ‘While they are toiling in the sweat of their
brows, without hope of rising to greater ease and leisure, their hearts
are eaten through and through with envy at the distant sight and sound
of good things which the audience is too ignorant to understand are no
better than fairy gifts--glittering pinchbeck and spun glass. They are
worse--heavy clogs to weigh down men and women unaccustomed to lives of
parade and sensuous indulgence, cankers to destroy the bravest manliness
and the sweetest womanliness. The working class, with their desperate
strikes, their fits of starvation and their fits of excess, their gross
materialism, their worn-out bodies and trampled-down souls, their
conceited atheism--you know better what they are than I do, Dr. Peter
Murray.’

‘I should think so, lad--I should hope so; and the rich too, for I am
happy to say I have some of them for my patients and friends also,
though it may lower me in your estimation to hear it. Young Tam, you
are flying in the face of Providence, you are counting the spots in the
sun, and challenging its lustre. There are such things as faults that
lean to virtue’s side, and vanities which are but the dust of the earth
that gathers on some of the noblest works of God and man. No man, be he
rich or poor, is bound to be a slave either to his gains or his
deprivations. Tam Drysdale, you have no more respect for the poor than
for the rich. You do not honour all men. What do you take the poor for,
that you should speak of them as if they were debased helots, instead of
honest men and women who call no man master, in one sense? Every sturdy
dyer and patient bleacher, every hammerer and weaver and mill girl among
them, has his or her destiny in his or her hands, in all essentials as
much as you or I have. A poor man or woman can be as decent and
intelligent as you or I, with the intelligence of mother-wit, which is
infinitely higher than the thin veneer of education that, to tell the
truth, sometimes covers up and wastes what finer grace and natural
polish the wood ever had.’

Tam looked taken aback, and remained silent, while Dr. Peter waxed more
and more indignant.

‘The times are hard, indeed, and things have come to a pretty pass, if a
respectable working man or woman--it is all one--who is not a fool and
can practise self-denial, like a man or like a woman, cannot earn
independence. Such independence means comfort and the power of showing
you a bien [comfortable] house and a canty [cheery] fireside, whose
owner has no cause to grow green with envy at the masters, no call to
ruin himself or herself in a wild attempt to pull them down and reign in
their stead. No doubt, trials are rained on some poor sinners; it
happens so occasionally, and shuts our mouths. But we cannot see the
end from the beginning, and even then the back is made for the burden.
No, spare your pity, sir, or pity yourself,’ ended Dr. Peter, flinging
himself back in his chair.

‘Never mind him, Mr. Tom.’ Athole looked up from her drawing to come to
the rescue. ‘You have rubbed him the wrong way, as I often do. Nobody is
to pity, rich or poor, except yourself, father--is that not it?’

‘Bairn, I see a great deal to pity, and I have no objection to my
neighbours sharing that luxury, if they find it such. But I will not
have wholesale condemnation, or stock of abuse in the guise of pity.
Maister Tam, you who are fresh from the schools should know a trick
worth two of that. Surely the philosophy of all the centuries has found
out something better than to keep on pitting the classes against each
other, and setting them by the ears when their strength is in the
union--not of the men alone, but of the men and the masters, in making
the best and not the worst of each other.’

‘Then you judge trades’ unions to be a mistake in social economy? You
condemn them in the face of all they have got for the people, which was
only their just right?’ said young Tam, eager to catch at the inference
and nail down his adversary.

‘I neither judge nor condemn. The question is beyond me, and may be
beyond you too, if you will allow me to say so,’ Dr. Peter excused
himself, with a comical twinkle replacing the gleam of indignation in
his eyes. ‘There are great difficulties here, as there are in every
human problem. However, I can see that many, both rich and poor, are
doing their best, and I for one won’t quarrel with them, though they do
not find the solution at once, or blunder in the search as their fathers
have done before them. I have seen great changes and improvements in my
day.’

‘Of what kind?’ inquired young Tam dubiously.

‘For instance, here at Drysdale Haugh, I remember when there were few
cylinders in comparison with the blocks. The work was ten times harder
than it is now, and took ten times as long to do. There was no thought
then of machines to relieve the men who had to keep and turn the yarn on
the rods, hanging for hours over the cisterns of boiling dye liquor. As
for the houses or hovels for the hands, you might have had occasion for
your attacks in those days, Maister Tam. I tell you that your father has
been nothing less than a benefactor to his folk, and I’m proud to say
you’ll not find better quartered, more fairly and liberally treated
workpeople on this side of Glasgow. I only hope you may do as much for
your neighbours when your time comes.’

‘I don’t wish to smother my father’s honour,’ said young Tam, with a
faint smile and a slight increase of colour. ‘There is one thing, he
knew by experience what the people lacked. What I regret is that he was
not content to remain one of them, to share the joys and sorrows he was
so well acquainted with--to raise them if you will, but not to break off
from them and put himself into a position which is not natural to him.
Well, it sits ill upon him, and makes him lose his proper dignity. It
brings out what is least admirable in him--there can be no disrespect in
saying that,’ observed young Tam with some ingenuousness; ‘and it
exposes him to the ridicule of people who are immeasurably his
inferiors.’

‘If they are his inferiors, why need anybody heed? Fools will laugh
whether you give them cause or not--not that I see anything to laugh at
in your father, or any laughter going. He is one in a thousand, who has
not only done well by himself, but by all around him. He is held in very
high and general respect, as he deserves to be, I would have you to
understand, Maister Tam. As for not rising above his original footing,
or not taking the benefit of the labour of his hands, supposing he holds
it to be a benefit, and not occupying the post he is fitted for and
called to fill, you are speaking arrant nonsense. You would have castes,
in hard and fast lines, in Christian England as in heathen India. Fine
sources of progress they have proved in the East! You would remove one
of the greatest inducements for ordinary men to struggle and endure, and
bring the work of their lives to perfection.’

‘And if every man acted as he spoke,’ retorted Tam, ‘you should be a
court physician at least.’

‘I square no man’s life by my rule. If I have found that my tastes are
all of a homely kind, it is my own look-out. In point of fact,
artificial and complicated forms interfere with what I like and can do.
Athole and I flourish best on a moderate income, in a plain old house,
with a single servant-lass.’

‘Speak for yourself, father,’ asserted Athole from her coign of vantage.
‘How do you know that I would not prefer to be a Turkish sultana, or an
Arcadian shepherdess, or the principal of a Ladies’ College? But there,
speak of angels--I see Mr. Drysdale and Eppie--her visit is to the
Newfoundland puppy--at the gate.’

There was a little commotion of welcome as old Mr. Drysdale and Eppie
entered Barley Riggs house, in which young Tam Drysdale fell into the
background. His father’s eyes followed him, and then glanced with a
quick suspicion from his son to Athole. Was there any loadstone here
which drew Tam from his useless studies and might serve to make or mar
him, independent of his other vagaries? No; it could not be a brown,
shilpet, plainly-dressed lassie, working as a designer, though she was a
lady born and bred--auld Tam did not deny that. Tam never addressed
Athole, even in giving her his views on printed calico patterns, without
calling her ‘Miss Murray, mem,’ paying the respect due to her in double
measure, as it were. Still, though she had not forfeited her young
ladyhood in his eyes, he was alive to the light in which many people
would regard her; he fully recognised her disqualifications as a
possible match for his son. She would have no more than a penny or two,
if Dr. Peter could scrape together that for her, and young Tam might
have a fine girl like Clary, with as good a tocher. If ‘Sir Jeemes’ had
owned a daughter, Tam might even have pretended to her. No, he could not
be so blind and besotted. Dr. Peter’s daughter was a good lassie and a
clever lassie, and auld Tam rather liked her on his own account; but she
was not for young Tam. His eccentricity could not go the length of
fancying her.

Eppie was come after the Newfoundland dog, and without the smallest
disguise she announced her errand, drew Dr. Peter out to the stable, and
was presently seen in the distance hugging a black fluffy ball in her
arms; while her companion, nothing loth, for both of the Eppies were
pets of his, marshalled her round the paddock, introducing her in
succession to every member of his numerous family.

Auld Tam remained where he was. In spite of his boast the night before
of being able to walk to Glasgow and back, he was tired enough to be
glad to rest in one of the heavy, roomy Barley Riggs parlour chairs.
Athole was under the necessity of bearing him and young Tam company.

She had no objection; she had as great a liking for the elder Tam as her
father had for Mrs. Drysdale and Eppie. She seemed to know exactly what
suited him, as if she belonged to him. She brought him with her own
hands, in spite of his protest, such a glass of draught ale and such a
water biscuit as he had been wont to refresh himself with twenty years
before, and still liked from old association. While he drank the ale and
munched the biscuit, to his evident solace, she chatted with him about
the weather, about her flowers and his, admitting herself fairly beaten
in polyanthuses before she claimed the superiority in white primroses.
She gave him her lively report of the pattern-room, and the good effect
with which the last designs were likely to come out. It was she who,
before the others returned, introduced the subject which lay very near
Tam Drysdale’s heart. This was certain experiments he was making in
mordants and pastes. He grew radiant in describing the improvements he
hoped to bring about in dyeing and printing, until young Tam was stirred
up to ask a question or two, and to offer a sensible suggestion. As a
boy he had gone considerably beyond the ordinary boyish stage of
dabbling in chemicals, and threatened to blow himself and his family to
atoms in gratifying his taste. There had been a time when young Tam, to
his proud father’s delight, had shown decided promise in what might have
been called the paternal field. The son had mortified the father deeply
by abandoning the laboratory for the library; but to-night, with Athole
Murray for a link between the two men, young Tam testified some of his
old interest in the subject.

Eppie came in crying, ‘Father, I have seen such a heap of beasts;’ but
auld Tam did not heed her. The fascination of the theme entrapped Dr.
Peter also. The three men engaged in a conversation in which the words
‘retort,’ ‘deposit,’ ‘affinity,’ ‘discharge,’ ‘hold fast,’ were for ever
coming to the surface.

Athole fell out of the talk, apparently without being missed. She set
herself to entertain Eppie, who was too much entranced with her baby
Newfoundland to stand in need of amusement.

The discussion was not ended when the party of Drysdales left together.
For the moment the division between the father and the son had been so
bridged across by the sympathetic warmth of the interest evoked, that
auld Tam as he walked away plucked young Tam by the sleeve in a way he
had not done for months. The action was for the better emphasizing of an
additional reason for the course the experimenter was taking in order to
get an unsurpassable tint of orange, which by a junction with an
unapproachable blue was to lead to an unassailable green; but the motive
did not signify, the result was everything.

Athole Murray smiled as her eyes followed the departing figures. Then
she came and stood by her father’s side on the hearthrug and assailed
him for an opinion.

‘Don’t you think, father, that some day young Tam Drysdale will go heart
and soul into his father’s business; that he will pull down Drysdale
Hall and build it up bigger and grander, or have another place in finer
taste, which will cost a great deal more, and take twice the pains to
create its delicate harmonies? and don’t you imagine that, earnest as
Goethe found life, young Tam will take heart before all is done, and
dance the night out and the morning in, as many times as there are hairs
in his head, without regard to the excusable occasions of Clary’s and
Eppie’s weddings.’

‘I don’t know about the dancing and the building, Athie; but the young
fellow will ripen, and lose his sour flavour, and be wholesome social
food in the course of nature, if he does not contrive to make a mess of
himself and his life in the meantime, before they have righted
themselves. He is in a transition state and a morbid frame, disgusted
with himself and the world. He has come into auld Tam’s gains without
going through the process of earning them, and he cannot digest them.’

‘Are they so ill to digest?’ inquired Athole incredulously.

‘So it seems. Young Tam has approached the question of employers and
employed without practical knowledge, and he is all at sea. Yet it is to
the honour of the lad that he will not leave the question alone. But he
sees every discrepancy magnified and distorted. He has an honest regard
for his father and mother--that thrawn chiel [cross fellow]--you heard
what he said of auld Tam; but that is just why it galls him past bearing
to see them make themselves ridiculous. Between you and me they do it
oftener than I like to think when poor Tam brags and blaws [boasts and
puffs] of his fields and gardens, his sheep and cattle, his table and
his cellar, his man-servants and his maid-servants, and brings forward
their prices; and when she mince-minces her words, and tries some
“lang-nebbet” [long-nosed] name that trips her up. I do not wonder at
young Tam. I could shake the kindly auld fules myself.’

‘But young Tam need not see it,’ maintained Athole, with her head held
high and her eyes alight, ‘I should like him a thousand times better if
he were deaf and blind, if his honour for his father and mother were a
shield to screen them from his own over-critical eyes, as well as his
neighbours’ carping tongues.’

‘That is a woman’s way of thinking,’ said Dr. Peter, at the same time
giving his daughter’s hair a not disapproving stroke. ‘All feeling and
no reasoning--all heart and no head. Some people would call it “high
fantastic,” but I never object to a good woman’s flights--least of all
am I likely to do it here, where I profit by them, being a father
myself, my dear.’

‘But, father,’ interrupted Athole quickly and indignantly, ‘you are not
like that.’

‘I can only say I have not been tempted,’ he answered, with a laugh.
‘But remember it is not easy for young Tam when, as he hints, there are
people mean enough to “sorn” [trespass] on the hospitality of Drysdale
Hall, and jeer and laugh at its master and mistress. I take it that men
are different from women here--I’ll not say that it is to their gain,
with sharper eyes, harder to blind, rougher tongues that go straighter
to the mark, and a greater tendency to use the scalpel though they cut
into their own flesh.’

‘He knows how good and kind they are, and that should be enough for
him,’ said Athole stoutly. ‘I admit they are laughable sometimes; they
force me to laugh to their faces, and then I am “black ashamed” of my
heartlessness, and could bite my tongue out if I have said anything.’

‘But he does not laugh, lassie; he leaves that to Miss Clary, if any of
them is guilty of such light laughter. Ay, if you must do either in the
circumstances, it is a mighty deal better to greet [weep] if you are a
woman, and gloom [frown] if you are a man, than to mock with
the mockers, as it is safer--taking a certain parable into
consideration--though I grant you less pleasant, to be disgusted than to
be charmed with yourself.’

‘Young Tam will never be half so nice as his father,’ said Athole, still
betraying tokens of discontent, while she arrived at her conclusion
meditatively. ‘I’m fond of auld Tam.’

‘So am I, Athole. But young Tam, with all the expense bestowed on his
education, has not had the same chance; and he’s a chip of the old block
in many respects. He may be led, but he will not be driven; yet that
auld fule Tam, who knows himself, and ought to know his son, seeks to
drive him.’

‘He’s so horribly self-conscious; he has mounted such a very tall
hobby-horse, and he rides it so pragmatically and unmercifully. He
rejoices so in his superiority and consequent martyrdom; he is so
ridiculously young in his grievances.’

‘That is a fault which will mend every day,’ her father told her
hopefully. ‘I think of many of the young men of his class, of their
entire engrossing satisfaction with their pretty selves, their bit toy
yachts and hunters, club dinners, and dances such as you propose for
young Tam Drysdale’s heavy head and exercised heart. I reckon up these
gentlemen’s small ambitions of being noticed by the country gentry, of
pushing themselves up to marry into the higher ranks, and have wives as
silly as themselves, that despise their commercial partners. And the
conclusion I come to is that such fellows are but a parcel of spoilt
boys compared to a lad, ill-conditioned you may say as yet, but who has
the making of a man in him. More than that, you must remember, Athole,
all that I have mentioned is innocent enough, but there are other
ways--not to be spoken of to ears like yours, while it is right that
you should know of their existence. There are means of selfishly
indulging in prosperity, and wildly rioting in the days of a man’s
youth, that end--as surely as the rivers run to the sea--in the foul
wallowing of swine in the mire, or in the wickedness of devils. Contrast
young Tam and his troubles with such rich men’s sons and their brutal
experiences, and his father and mother may thank God for the day that he
was born to them.’

The conversation had grown too serious to be prolonged, and it had taken
a turn which rendered it impossible for Athole to contradict her father
further.




CHAPTER IX.

LIEUTENANT ENEAS MACKINNON DUE IN ST. MUNGO’S SQUARE.


The Miss Mackinnons were as loth to deprive their grand-nephew of his
military title as Mrs. Drysdale had shown herself. Indeed, they
persisted, in spite of his protests, in giving it to him whenever they
spoke of him. Even among themselves it was as often the ‘Lieutenant’ as
‘Eneas.’

It would have been hard to deprive the old ladies of one of the scanty
rewards of a step for which both he and they paid dearly--how dearly in
his case they had happily no idea. It would have gone far to break their
hearts if they had guessed that he had cause to rue sorely the boyish
delusion and the family pride--to which they had ministered--that had
ended by placing him in his present position. It was at once a great
deal less and a great deal more than what was in the Miss Mackinnons’
eyes the gallant calling of a gentleman, which transferred him instantly
to the society of his equals, and raised him triumphantly above all
further difficulty, with nothing to do save ‘wear his regimentals,’
which, to their great regret, the grand-aunts almost never saw him do;
‘go where her Majesty and his country ca’ed him,’ which as yet had only
been to a tame routine of town and country quarters, not even to any
corner of Africa; ‘fecht like a hero,’ for which there was literally no
opportunity; and wait for promotion which was never likely to come.

The abolition of the purchase system was not calculated to be of any
service to Lieutenant Eneas Mackinnon. He had neither special military
ability, nor spirit, nor heart to urge him to study theoretically the
art of war, go in for a series of competitive examinations, and come out
with a new brevet rank from every encounter. And if it were possible for
him to remain thirty years a lieutenant, like Havelock, it was certainly
very improbable that he would complete the similitude, and end by dying
a victorious general. He would need to be as lucky as Sir Frizzle
Pumpkin to accomplish such a feat, for though Eneas was brave enough not
to be a disgrace to his Trojan namesake, he had no head for organizing
and manœuvring bodies of men--not even on a chess-board. He was a great
improvement on his father, but was still a reflection of the paternal
nature in its slowness and heaviness. The best thing about him was his
honesty and modesty, the ingrained attributes of a real, not an
imitation, gentleman, which he had acquired somehow from some far-off
Mackinnon. He was true, he was unassuming in place of being pompous
like Gavin Mackinnon.

Eneas was silent and long-suffering in the thorny path of poverty on
which he had been launched among richer men, without the smallest hope
of bettering himself. He was as inoffensive a member of a family as Lady
Semple had described him, winning sympathy and a certain amount of
respect by the magnanimity which caused him to bear his own burden
without inflicting it on the shoulders of another. The forbearance might
be due to pride as much as to generosity or veritable humility; still,
it was a respectable quality, and one to be thankful for. He was one of
the passive young men of the period, who looked on and smiled a little
languidly--even without complaint changed his course in a leisurely
manner, to suit that of his neighbour, and did not do more than shrug
his shoulders at what went against the grain with him. He formed a
complete contrast to young Tam Drysdale, who was naturally of the
aggressive order, in danger of doing something desperate, in the rash
arrogance of youth, which burns to set right the world that has been
rolling on its path thousands of years before he came into being.

Eneas Mackinnon, as he was more of a gentleman, was also handsomer than
any of his race who had appeared for two generations. The clumsy
features of his great-aunts had in him taken a symmetrical mould. He was
less large for a man than they were for women; still, he was
broad-shouldered and long-limbed enough for a soldier. He had borrowed
from the plebeian Craigs chestnut instead of tow-coloured hair, with
blue eyes, which had a certain bucolic mildness and softness in them. As
he stood in a doorway or on a flight of steps, or leant his back against
a tree on a lawn, or propped himself upon a table or the arm of a couch,
he was a little like a statue of a fine phlegmatic Englishman, but it
was a statue which would have done the sculptor fair credit.

The Lieutenant, supposing he ever became a general, would be a general
without a penny of private fortune, who must at the same time support
the increased dignity of his rank. He must continue a bachelor, and by
so doing restrict his expenses to his personal wants, ‘collaring’ the
increase of income through the grades of captain, major, etc., to
furnish him, and him alone, with an increase of comforts proportionate
to the advance of age and the infirmities of age. If he permitted
himself to marry, perhaps to bring into the world a small clamorous
family, in addition to an exacting wife, he would be as painfully put to
it, in spite of his laurels--as pressed, worried, stinted--as
threadbare--as miserably anxious for the future not only of himself, but
of those connected with him, as any light-pursed subaltern writhing
under the yoke of bondage he had unwittingly assumed. This was an age
of luxurious living and regardless extravagance, a commercial age, when
a pseudo-working man like Tam Drysdale of Drysdale Hall set up an
establishment fit for a laird of many acres or a peer of the realm, and
left gentlemen and officers far behind.

Eneas Mackinnon submitted to destiny with the fatalism of the Gael. His
regiment was now quartered at Dumbarton. He was often in Glasgow as well
as at Semple Barns. The last opportunity had been decidedly a boon to
him. The former was the occasion of his being extensively taken out in
the richest, and sometimes the vulgarest houses of certain gorgeous
circles in Glasgow. He had availed himself of the chance, even while he
rebelled in a stony fashion against the infliction, as a lawful means of
relieving his over-taxed resources. He despised himself for it, but what
could he do?--especially if he were to bestow small gifts on the
‘aunties,’ who were certainly growing more penurious every day, and
beginning to deny themselves the very necessaries of life in an
exasperating manner, not uncommon with old women, he had heard. Better
that he should stand being fêted by pipe-makers and retired
spirit-dealers, and have to hobnob with their bumptious sons and dance
with their bouncing daughters, than that he should run into debt and
shoot himself, and bring his particular tabbies to the grave with horror
at the catastrophe. As yet the notion that he might some day have to
sell himself bodily by marrying one of these tochered lasses to keep
body and soul together, only loomed before his imagination as a dark
necessity in the distance.

The young man groaned inwardly over his visits to St. Mungo’s Square, as
he groaned over most of the acts of his purgatorial life. To his credit
he paid the visits with tolerable frequency and regularity, though
latterly he had been plagued by an unaccountable rule established by
Miss Janet, that he should always send them an intimation of his coming
beforehand.

‘Your auntie Meye is getting frail, you see,’ Miss Janet had the excuse,
‘and a wee thing starts her; and me or your auntie Betheye might be out
of the road and miss you, which would be a thousand peeties.’

So, with one more of his many smothered groans, Lieutenant Eneas was in
the habit of perpetrating small notes and despatching them as _avant
couriers_ every time that he descended on St. Mungo’s Square.

‘It is making such a fuss about a fellow’s movements, and one feels as
if one ought to bring handsome presents,’ he reflected, glancing
deprecatingly at the little parcel of gloves--women always wanted
gloves--his own size suited ‘the aunties.’ His cast-off Hexhamians would
have been better than new pairs, for the last had been surreptitiously
exchanged as misfits, by Miss Bethia, for more of the yarn she was
constantly knitting now, in the intervals of the white seam which was
kept in the background. The gentleman’s socks might be for ‘the
Lieutenant,’ though soon after entering his regiment he had, somewhat to
his aunties’ mortification, declined politely further services from
their knitting-needles, or the woollen articles might be muffatees and
_what-nots_ for the Dorcas table at a bazaar; but plain needle-work was
more difficult to explain away. Shirtmaking had gone out of fashion as a
becoming attention from ladies to their male relations, and it might
well be thought that the Miss Mackinnons had each an ample stock to last
her all her days of under-linen of her mother’s bleaching and her
grandmother’s spinning.

Eneas would add to the gloves a brace of partridges of his own shooting,
or a basket of grapes from the Semple Barns vineries, or from other and
less aristocratic mansions--the contents of which were at his disposal
if he chose. The grapes went the same way as the gloves, the luxuries
were exchanged for necessities. But the partridges, if they were not
adroitly confiscated to the use of the donor, made a feast-day in the
old house in St. Mungo’s Square. They constituted what the ladies called
‘a flesh denner,’ a gross meal in which the eaters had ceased to indulge
every day.

The whole establishment always put on its best face. The blanks and
deficiencies were hidden by a series of elaborate manœuvres which
sometimes took an hour or two to carry out. The Miss Mackinnons wore
their company gowns and caps on the days when they expected their
grand-nephew. It was a temporary return, however halting, to the glories
of the past, and though the effort cost trouble, it refreshed the jaded
spirits and put new life into the drudging, sordid existence of the
hard-tried women.

‘I wonder if he’ll notice that anything more is missing,’ suggested Miss
Janet mysteriously. ‘There’s the clock and the ile picture of the
Pretender, whom our great-grandfather waited on at Shawfield House,
though he had no thocht of going out with the Prince. Both the clock and
the picture are gone since Eneas was here. The last time, you mind, we
took him up to Auntie Meye’s bedroom, where less has been lifted. But
men are not noticing, and if the Lieutenant minds the twa things, he may
think the one is at the watchmaker’s and the other at the
picture-cleaner’s, and put no questions. But mind, Betheye, you maun be
ready with your answer that he maun have forgotten we have a spring
cleaning, when we pu’ things about. It’s just a divert to
out-of-the-world auld leddies like us. It’s true in the main, and for a
white lee or twa--they cannot be helped--I trust we may be forgi’en in a
gude cause. Better tell them than break a fine lad’s spirit. The
Mackinnons--the men of them--had high spirits, that would not have
brooked what we could tell.’

‘How could they have helped brooking it, Janet?’ asked Miss Bethia a
little stolidly; and then, without waiting to learn the result of an
idle inquiry to which Miss Janet vouchsafed no reply, Miss Bethia
continued--‘What I’m maist feared for is Meye coming out with some piece
of information she should keep to herself. I have signalled to her to
ca’ canny [be prudent], in case o’ mistakes, till she’s grown dorty
[cross] about it, and she wonders if I want her, the auldest, to be dumb
as well as deaf.’

‘Puir Meye!’ said Miss Janet in accents of loud commiseration, which,
however, did not penetrate the sealed ears of what looked like the image
of a woman huddled up in shawls, with eyes that, in place of showing the
dimness of age, had a bird-like brightness about them as they darted
swiftly, trying to do the work of two senses, from the one to the other
of the speakers.

‘Preserve us a’, she’s reproaching us at this minute,’ said Miss Janet,
as she rose with some signs of rheumatic stiffness, went to the slate
hung on the wall behind her sister’s chair, took it down, and wrote on
it in large letters, as if Miss Mackinnon were blind as well as deaf,
‘We’re feared for you letting out anything before the Lieutenant.’

‘Do you tak’ me for an eedit?’ Miss Mackinnon retorted with asperity,
while Miss Janet was heedfully erasing in the most primitive manner what
she had written.

‘Since the Beelyie has lent us back the punch-bowl to lie for the day in
its auld place below the sideboard,’ reflected Miss Janet with some
complacency, ‘and Kate Carstairs has sent ower her cut crystal claret
joog, which is the marrow o’ what ours used to be, the room may pass.’

‘If he’ll not draw up the blinds,’ said Miss Bethia anxiously; ‘men
have aye such a wark with licht. I’ll be sitting on eggs lest he should
find out that half of the chairs now are bedroom chairs.’

‘Hoots! he’ll be at the fit of the table, and he never moves aince he
has set down. Eneas is not a jumping-jack--he gangs about his business
with deliberation, as befits a gentleman, and no a waiter that’s aye
bobbin’ up at your elby. I wish he had gotten something better than the
toasted cheese that nane of us can touch even in the middle of the day,
for our stamacks,’ ended Miss Janet, half unconsciously committing a
pious fraud on herself and her sisters, and not caring to recall that,
for the price of the cheese and such-like dainties, the family had been
obliged to go without a scraping of butter on their bread for more than
one breakfast and tea--their principal meals lately. ‘But it is only his
lunch before his mess denner, and there’s jeely and bread--he had a
great troke [trade] with jeely and bread when he was a laddie--and the
claret in the claret-joog to set aff the table.’

There was a pause, during which a kind of scared look came into Miss
Bethia’s pallid and haggard, no longer simpering face.

‘If everything gangs bit by bit, Janet,’ she said with a little catch in
her breath, ‘and we eat them a’ up, there will sune be--not to say not a
table to set a meal upon, there will not be a meal left--the very
parritch and trecle will fail. How will we keep it from the Lieutenant,
and what will we do then?’

‘Wheesht! things will never come to that pass,’ said Miss Janet with
whitening lips, but still speaking resolutely. ‘You never ken what may
happen--a silly [delicate] man cannot last for ever.’

‘Oh, Janet, if you mean Archie Fenton of Strathdivie,’ cried Miss
Bethia, to whom a nod was not as good as a wink, and every innuendo
must be made a plain statement, ‘it’s ill countin’ on dead men’s shoon,
and he’s younger than either you or Meye.’

‘I ken that without your telling me,’ Miss Janet said snappishly. ‘But
none of us, auld or young, can live for ever. Surely he may dee as well
as another. Forbye, we’ve been telled the insurance offices refused a
policy on his life when his sister was still to the fore ten years
syne.’

‘But, oh, it’s fearsome to speak of it!’ murmured Miss Bethia, as if the
next act in the drama would be a plotted murder.

‘I’m sure I’m not wanting to think or speak about it,’ protested Miss
Janet.

‘And I’m not sure but we’ve gane the wrong way,’ said Miss Bethia,
hanging her head, not so much with conscious guilt as at finding fault
with her elder sisters. ‘If, before we had let the furniture gang, we
had tried a gentleman lodger or twa--- ’

‘Betheye Mackinnon, do you ken what you’re sayin’?’ demanded Miss
Janet, in a voice the sternness of which was awful in the culprit’s
ears. ‘Is this like a common lodging-house? I mind the day when for the
word “lodgers” to have been breathed in St. Mungo’s Square would have
been for all Glasgy to be up in arms. Are we like lodging-house keepers?
Does the trade fit the auld Virginian Mackinnons? And what of the
Lieutenant’s honour, I should like to ken?’

‘Well, I’m sure, Janet, I meant no harm,’ said Miss Betheye, almost
reduced to tears; ‘and folk were not so nice lang syne. I aye mind how
our mother used to speak of Leddy Mary and Leddy Betty Bogle, who thocht
no shame to be dress-makers, though their father claimed an earldom.’

‘The earldom claimed or allowed made all the difference in the world,’
said Miss Janet oracularly. ‘Not that the Mackinnons have not their
richts as well as the Bogles. Forbye, the mantua-making and millinery
was held a genteel trade. But a lodgin’-house with maiden leddies
waitin’ on strange men! I wonder at you, Betheye!’

The last stroke overwhelmed Miss Bethia.

‘Eh! I didna think,’ she cried so falteringly that her judge was
mollified.

‘Weel, you maun mind another time and not be so heedless with your
words. You’re not a bairn now, Betheye. But say no more about it. Let me
hear about the order that Walkingshaw’s has given you for hand-made
nicht-gowns. I micht manage the hemming of the tails [skirts] and the
running up of the seams, though even with my glasses I cannot attempt
the stitching.’

‘I could manage it all fine mysel’, and let you lie down in the
afternoons; you’re that troubled with the fires, and the flures, and the
beds, and only auld Tibbie to wash out the door-steps and carry awa’
the aiss. Then Meye’s winter hoast [cough] is not awa’, so that ye
cannot get rested in the nicht. Oh, I could manage fine! But they say
there’s little demand for hand-sewing, so muckle is done now with the
machine. The feck o’ folk are pleased even though the ends are not
fastened and the sewing does not last. They have ta’en fourpence aff the
price, and they find faut with the heathering,’ ended Miss Bethia, in a
deplorable voice. ‘The very thing that I prided myself on--me that was
sic a gude worker of sprigged and heathered collars--do you mind?’

‘Set them up!’ cried Miss Janet indignantly. ‘They suld be proud to have
a leddy sew for them, that was the best fancy-worker, as well as the
best piany-player, in Glasgy. But they ken nae better. What suld some
auld mill lass, ganging trailing now in silks and satins, understand of
heathering and sprigging? It is a disgrace to the auld shop-folk that
they humour sic low gentry. I wonder what Walkinshaw’s would say if I
sent Eneas to them, ganging tramping into the shop, and maybe drawing
his swurd, if he were in his regimentals, because of the insult to his
auntie?’

‘Na, na, Eneas maun never hear a cheep [whisper] about it; you would be
the last to tell him. It would be a fell-like thing for him if it were
ever jaloused that ane of his aunties--auld Eneas Mackinnon’s
great-grand-dochters--wrocht for a shop. Sirs! my heart came into my
mouth the last time he was here, and spoke of the Macmasters’ ball, and
me kennin’ all the time, and having only the word of Walkinshaw’s it
would be kept secret, that I had just sent to the shop a set of
slip-bodies--cammysoles, they ca’ them now--for the Miss Macmasters!’

‘_Miss_ Macmasters! quo she,’ echoed Miss Janet, in the highest key;
‘_Lass_ Macmasters would be liker the thing. Why, her faither was the
lamp-lichter in the Square, and his faither a ferryman up the water. I
thocht, when he spoke, offishers mak’ theirselves cheap noo-a-days, and
the Macmasters’ was not a house for Eneas Mackinnon to set his foot
intil.’

‘For a’ that, he said it was the brawest house on that side of the Park,
and the Miss Macmasters were not ill-lookin’, and did their
dancing-maister credit, if they could but get rid of the Glasgy tongue.
I wonder what there is in the Glasgy ony mair than in the Edinburgh or
the Perth speech. But they’re no leddies, or it wouldna signify how they
spoke.’

‘Leddies! Rab Macmaster’s dochters leddies! Are you daft, Betheye? But
it is aboot Eneas’s hour. Meye’s watch--the last we have left--is not to
be depended on, and we havena the knock [clock] to correct it by. I wish
we were nearer a toon knock. There are the factory bells in the
morning, and at the denner hour, and the sun on the wa’; but when one
has not been bred to lippen [trust] to them, they’re apt to be
deceitful. I maun see to the cheese. Yes, you’ll do,’ as Miss Bethia
brushed down her shabby, turned silk gown. ‘You’re looking uncommonly
weel, Betheye, and I’ve just to draw on my gloves before I go to the
front door.’

‘The Lieutenant thinks you’re getting pridefu’, Janet, with your
gloves.’

‘What for no?’ asked Miss Janet, between jocoseness and defiance. ‘I was
entitled to my pride in my youth, and sae may I be yet. But I mauna
forget a parting word of caution to Meye.’

She crossed to the stationary, isolated sister, and began an
incomprehensible pantomime of pointing with her finger, moving her jaws,
shaking her head, and waving her hand. When it seemed lost on Miss
Mackinnon, Miss Janet had again recourse to the slate and slate-pencil,
saying regretfully, ‘Poor Meye! she’s no sae gleg [quick] as she was
wont to be; we’re so ta’en up, she’s left ower muckle to hersel’.’ Miss
Janet wrote--‘If you please, Meye, you’ll not touch the cheese, lest
there should not be ower muckle for the gentleman. We’ll have some of
the bread and jelly, which is the proper lunch for ladies. If there is
any cheese left in the dish, it will toast up again for your tea.’

Miss Mackinnon understood now, and answered in a voice hoarse and harsh
from the absence of modulation--she did not appear propitiated. ‘I think
I ken what is fit for leddies eating either at lunch or denner, without
you giving me a lesson. But you and Betheye are for ever whispering and
colleagin’ thegither, like a pair of ill-bred bairns. I wish you had
found some other lunch for our nephew than what makes the smell of a
moose-trap all over the house. You micht have had ham and eggs.’

‘And the ham so dear, and the eggs extortion!’ broke in Miss Janet, in
an aside to Miss Bethia.

‘Or a chop; it is long since I have tasted a chop,’ Miss Mackinnon
continued to complain.

‘Puir body! you would not have been likely to taste it. The Lieutenant
would have eaten ane, maybe twa, for his ain share, having a healthy
young appetite, and being without a care,’ commented Miss Janet once
more.

Then Miss Mackinnon relented a little: ‘Dinna fash [trouble] to keep
cheese for me. It is kind of you to think of it, but I would not touch
it if you and Betheye had not your share, though it were but a curran’
[a crumb]. ‘Deed, when I come to think of it, I believe it does disagree
with my stamack; but you, with your housework, and Betheye with her
walks back and forwards to Walkinshaw’s, should be able to digest
whin-stanes.’




CHAPTER X.

FAMILY TALK.


Eneas arrived at the appointed time. He was enough of a gentleman not to
keep people waiting, though he was also a male version of that
unfortunate princess on whom the lines were written:

    ‘There was no hurry in her hands,
       No hurry in her feet;
     For life had brought no joy to her
       That she should run to meet,’

As yet, life had brought little joy to Lieutenant Eneas. He was a
stranded young fellow, who had to keep a tight hold of the most innocent
inclination. He ate the sparse meal of enforced self-denial and petty
economy, without any higher aim than to keep himself afloat in an
irksome position. He saw no end to his slavery to circumstances, while
it was rendering him hopeless and spiritless, though the youth still
left in him asserted itself by fits and starts. He might turn his face
to the wall and knock under any day. It is men like him who, when
sickness comes, though they are or ought to have been in the flush and
vigour of their days, make little fight for life.

He was received with open arms, like a conquering hero. But happily he
was not overpowered with caresses, for the Miss Mackinnons were of the
old tough Scotch fibre that disdained fondling. He was grateful to them
for it, and put up with other inconveniences, such as their perpetual
satisfaction with his position and crow of exultation over his lot. It
was not for him to undeceive them; besides their world was not his
world, they would never appreciate his difficulties--he could hardly
dignify them by calling them trials.

He had a vague impression that the old grey house looked emptier and
more cheerless, as well as more haunted than formerly, and that his
aunts were liker scare-crows than they used to be. The young sisters
dressed alike now, finding that, as they were very much of one size,
they could manage better by borrowing and exchanging articles of dress,
so that a presentable suit of clothes might be said to do duty for both
ladies so long as only one appeared at a time. This was impossible in
the present instance, but it would not strike Eneas if little bits of
_déshabillé_ peeped out here and there. The two wore the same
arrangement of lace--alas! it was imitation in these latter
days--disposed about the gaunt drab heads; the same old-fashioned
collars reaching to the shoulders, turned up cuffs, and ‘belts’ round
their short waists. But what Miss Bethia had gained in imposing style
she had lost in the quality of the materials.

By the time Lieutenant Eneas was established at the foot of the table,
and the aroma of a dozen mouse-traps had assailed his delicate nostrils,
he felt a good deal exercised by the necessity of divulging a step he
had taken. He was half ashamed of its origin, and he was afraid his
aunts might suspect and resent the liberty. But there was no retreat.

He had already presented mits, which Lady Semple had suggested as an
appropriate gift to old ladies. The offering had met with approval, been
received with plaudits indeed; only Miss Janet had failed to remove her
gloves, to try her muffles, as she termed them, on her scarred and
disfigured hands.

Now he drew a carefully tied up roll of paper from the pocket of his
shooting-jacket, and began to unfasten it with awkward shyness.

‘I called in at Lang’s on my way,’ he said, ‘not for lunch, of course; I
knew it would be awaiting me here. I wanted something which I sometimes
have to breakfast. I don’t know if you are familiar with it, Auntie
Janet, but I thought you might like it for a change.’

‘Is’t a coocumber?’ cried Miss Janet.

‘It’s mair like row-chow tobaccy,’ said Miss Bethia.

‘It is a Bologna sausage,’ said Eneas, with a blush. ‘It wants no
cooking; if you will make the servant bring a knife and fork and plate,
I shall cut you some slices, and you will see how good it is.’

‘I have not tasted it for mony a day,’ exclaimed Miss Mackinnon in her
harsh voice, with a hungry gleam in her sharp eyes. ‘The very smell goes
about my heart.’

‘It makes my mouth water,’ chimed in Miss Bethia, forgetting herself.

Miss Janet interposed quickly:

‘Betheye, you fetch the plate and knife and fork. Lunch is not a meal of
ceremony, and the lass is out of the way. She’s never to be found when
she’s wanted,’ she went on, with a touch of the finesse of Caleb
Balderstone. ‘There’s sic a cry out now for half-holidays and evenings
to the lasses’ sel’s, that maisters and mistresses are ill served.’

Miss Bethia returned with the necessary implements, and with her mind
set at rest by the reinforcement to the eatables. She could enjoy the
contribution with a clear conscience and a large appetite.

‘It’s most deleeci-ous,’ she prolonged the word while she spoke with her
mouth full, and looked with eager invitation at her sisters. ‘Tak’
another slice, Meye. Help yourself, Janet. It was most kind and mindful
of you, Eneas, to think of bringing the sausage.’

‘Good heavens!’ thought the Lieutenant, taken aback by the
_empressement_ with which his attention to his own comfort had been
received, ‘can the poor creatures have become so miserly that they are
in danger of starving themselves to make a hoard?’ But he was not quick
to take up an idea, and this one--partly fallacious--dropped out of his
mind, as he submitted to a process of proud and affectionate ‘heckling’
or cross-questioning as to the prosperous and brilliant course of life
he was supposed to lead.

‘And what fine doings have you had of late, Lieutenant?’ began Miss
Janet. ‘Here’s the slate and the slate-pencil,’ disengaging them from
the wall and putting them into his reluctant hands. ‘Write your news
down for Meye, while you tell them to me and your Aunt Betheye.’

‘But unfortunately there is very little to tell,’ said Eneas,
endeavouring to rouse himself to call to mind and retail a little
information that would be agreeable to his hearers. ‘I was at Semple
Barns for three days last week. There were private theatricals at the
Hepburns’ on Tuesday, and a dinner and dance later in the evening at the
Gilhaizes’ on Thursday.’

‘You’re coming on. If three ploys in a week are not enough to serve you,
you’re ill to serve,’ said Miss Bethia gaily.

‘But they were not great ploys,’ Eneas felt driven to defend himself.
‘The acting at the Hepburns’ was wretched, and the dinner at the
Gilhaizes’ the most stupid affair I have taken part in for an age.
Semple Barns was well enough. Lady Semple is good-natured, and Sir James
not past tolerating; besides, young Semple’s my greatest chum in the
regiment. No, no claret, thanks, Aunt Bethia; I never indulge in it to
luncheon; I prefer a glass of ale. Don’t mind it to-day; I see you do
not have it at hand--another time,’ he murmured. ‘Shall I pour you out
some claret? No? Have you joined the Blue Ribbon Army? for I don’t
suppose that you swill beer like a drayman or a sub.’

‘My dear, that’s a fell-like comparison, as well as a low-lifed
expression.’

Miss Janet did not hesitate to rebuke her favourite, but she spoke less
sharply than usual.

‘No; we’re no Gude Templars,’ remarked Miss Bethia, ‘but we find we’re
as well without wine--it’s heating for the blude. We jist keep the
claret-joog as a finish to the table.’

‘I hope you explain the nature of the case to your visitors,’ said Eneas
seriously. ‘You know there is a prejudice against decanted wine which
has stood about. Suppose some unlucky fellow who holds the prejudice
were to help himself, not knowing the state of matters!’

‘Hoots! we dinna want ony of your mess-table fikes here.’ Miss Janet
dismissed the scruple lightly. ‘For my part, I think wine is all the
better after it has ta’en with the decanter; though it had little
chance to do that when it gaed like ditch-water in the hoose. The
tappet-hen was not supposed to stand still, ony mair than the shelty,’
referring to the merry titles for the old jugs which travelled
unceasingly round hospitable Scotch tables, with wine, spirits, or
punch.

‘Wha were a’ at Semple Barns?’ asked Miss Mackinnon, who had been
conning her slate.

‘Only the family, with the addition of Miss Drysdale of Drysdale Hall.’

‘And what’s she like?’

‘Upon my word, auntie, that is a posing question,’ he answered with a
laugh. ‘It is not always easy to describe a young lady; and when one has
to write the description on a slate, which all who run may read, the
task is still more ticklish. But here goes,’ and he wrote in one of the
scrawling hands of the nineteenth century, which he was sufficiently
good-natured to struggle to render legible:

‘Miss Drysdale is a very handsome girl, with quite good manners, only a
little brusque or haughty--I am not sure which. They say she will have a
large fortune.’

Miss Janet and Miss Bethia, even Miss Mackinnon, screwed up their faces
and looked at each other. One fortune had come already from Drysdale
Haugh to the Mackinnons. Why not a second? True, the first had not
brought great luck, but that might be because it was not big enough, or
because poor Maggie Craig had not all the advantages ascribed to Miss
Drysdale.

For a wonder, the Lieutenant chanced to notice and interpret the
exchange of glances, and made an effort to put his foot on the folly at
once. He was so annoyed at the necessity that he grew red while he said,
with assumed carelessness: ‘She is a great deal at Semple Barns. The
Semples may have an eye on her for Semple, but I don’t think it will
ever come to a match. He’s not a bad fellow, but it is a poor
baronetcy; and what with her looks and her tin, I should say she would
look higher.’

‘Set her up!’ Miss Janet employed her favourite adjuration. ‘Tam
Drysdale’s dochter, and her mother are o’ the Mercers that had a pauchel
[small farm] and a meal-mill some gate near Partick. But it makes me
sick, laddie, to hear tell of Drysdale Haugh and Drysdale Ha’, as I’ve
been telt Tam Drysdale has nick-named the auld farmhoose. I kenned the
place well enough before you were born; and it seems aye as if it should
all be yours in richt of your mither, whatever power she gave your
father to dispose of her property.’

‘I wish it were,’ he said, smothering a yawn; ‘but, as you are aware, if
wishes were horses beggars would ride; and since the place was sold
before I was born, I am afraid I have not the shadow of a title to
complain.’

‘It is very queer and hard though to us, who can look back and mind
your father and mother’s marriage in this very hoose,’ said Miss Bethia,
echoing her sister’s sentiments, ‘after all the speak that was made
about her land and the works that Tam Drysdale’s coining money out of.’

‘And every care was taken,’ said Miss Janet, condescending to offer
solemn assurance of her share in the precautions. ‘I mind, as if it were
yesterday, giving Kate Carstairs her congy in the drawing-room, in order
to see to the signing of the contract in this room’--looking round, as
if the few sticks of furniture which were left would find a voice, and
testify to the watchfulness employed in vain.

There was no rapping diablerie heard from the old mahogany, neither did
any subtle instinct tell Miss Janet that, in the language of children
when they approach a hidden secret, she was ‘as hot as fire’ at that
moment.

‘Did your father never speak of his marriage contract?’ she inquired in
perfect unconsciousness, getting, if possible, hotter still.

‘No,’ answered Eneas, a little impatiently; ‘how should he? You forget
he died when I was little more than an infant.’

‘I wonder what became o’t,’ reflected Miss Janet. ‘Dauvit Milne wound up
the auld Milnes’ business, so that there was little gudewill o’t to
sell; and the lad Dalgleish gaed aff to the ends of the earth after that
silly thing, Tina Carstairs, had drawn up with him. It’s all very well
for her Auntie Kate to call him a judge, and say they’re riding in their
carriage out yonder. There’s naebody to contradict her. But I’m
thinking, Eneas, your father got the contract into his ain hands.’

‘I dare say he did,’ said Eneas indifferently. ‘The man of business
would see it was all right; and if it had been of the least consequence,
we should have heard more of it.’

‘I’ll hae a look among the family papers,’ said Miss Janet. She had
hardly a moral doubt after all, that, though she might have forgotten
the circumstance, the document must have been committed to her keeping.

‘Do you know, auntie, I never was at Drysdale Haugh.’ The Lieutenant
made a little change in the subject. ‘I have only seen it--the house, I
mean, which looks a jolly place from a distance.’

‘To think it was your mother’s property!’ exclaimed Miss Bethia, with
another groan, letting the hands, with the knitting she had already
taken up, drop in her lap.

‘But it is only fair to remember,’ said Eneas, with that exasperating
manly element of justice which so often acts like a cold douche on
women’s emotions, ‘that, as I have heard you say, my mother, or rather
my grandmother, was no blood relation to the old owner of the farm; it
was by favour he left it to her, and she must have been considered an
interloper by the man’s relations. It will only seem to them righteous
retribution that lands and works are lost to her descendants, and
restored to his.’

‘Nonsense, Eneas!’ said Miss Janet tartly. ‘Auld Drysdale brocht your
grandmother up, and came bound to leave her his gear; forbye, he had no
near relation. This Tam Drysdale is only the son of a cousin, a
ragamuffin that the auld man would never have seen in his road.’

‘Well, it is clear that I should never have made a dyer and
calico-printer like this Drysdale,’ persisted Eneas. ‘Sir James Semple
says he is a remarkable man, and has not his superior among the Glasgow
magistrates. The son is good form, and a bit of a scholar, and, strange
to say, of a Radical. I have told you what the eldest daughter is like.
Will you be horrified to hear me say that I am going with Dick Semple
to call on the Drysdales one of these days? I have a little curiosity to
see what might have been mine.’

‘The curiosity is very natural,’ said Miss Janet, speaking most
tolerantly, ‘but I’m not sure whether proper pride might not have
slipped in and forbidden you to set a foot within that door, if you had
not been an offisher, upsides with the best in the land, fit to ca’ the
king your brither. Horrified! No, Lieutenant, by no manner of means,’
declared Miss Janet, smoothing down her ruffled plumes, and yielding to
mercenary motives. ‘Gang the very first opportunity--you have our full
consent--and bring us word of all the new-fangled doings.’

‘We do not ken a single body that can tell us,’ put in Miss Bethia,
‘except Athole Murray, Dr. Peter’s dochter, and she beats about the buss
as gin we would be hurt by the purse-proud grandeur,’ forgetting that
she had no objection to avail herself once more of the source of that
grandeur on her kinsman’s behoof.

Eneas was smiling his languid smile behind his reddish-brown beard. He
had not meant to ask his aunts’ consent to pay a morning call. Neither
had he the smallest intention of becoming a reporter of the magnificence
of the fortunate dyer and calico-printer, thus nourishing idiotic
fancies, or calling forth fresh jeremiads on his loss of what had never
been his, and perhaps ought not to have been his mother’s.

Still the young man did his best to render himself agreeable to the
women who had brought him up, each of whom held him as the apple of her
eye. He was too well intentioned not to feel a certain remorse because
he was not able to do more for them--were it only to entertain a warmer
feeling where they were concerned. He meant to please Miss Bethia when
he told her that he had been speaking to Lady Semple, who was fond of
Scotch music, of the reels that seemed to be his aunt’s private
property. He wished her to play one, of which he whistled a bar, to see
if he were right in the idea he had given Lady Semple of the tune.

But Miss Bethia did not offer to move, and looked put out, until Miss
Janet came to her aid, and informed him that the piano was in need of
tuning.

‘Why, it was out of tune the last time I was here--you should not let it
stand in that state, or has it got too bad to be put in order?’

‘That’s just it,’ said Miss Bethia, with a peculiar tone in her voice.
‘That’s the way o’t. The instrument is growing auld--like its mistress.
It is the worse of the wear, and so is my music. I’m feared I’ve had no
time for practising of late, and the noise fashes Meye--no that she
hears it--that’s just the vexation,’ she hastened to add, to hide the
stumble she had made; ‘she cannot bide to see my hands moving, and no a
sound to catch her ear. Na, Lieutenant, you maun tak’ to new pianies and
new players.’

He had never heard Miss Bethia hint at growing old before, or fail to
receive any compliment to her playing as if it were not less than its
due. Her manner gave him a small shock. ‘I wonder what it all means?’ he
puzzled himself to make out, as he descended the stair and passed out
into the square.




CHAPTER XI.

THE PEOPLE’S HOLIDAY.


Since a charter was granted by William the Lyon to enable the
inhabitants of Glasgow to hold an annual fair within its bounds, Glasgow
Fair has been the great gala of the year to the hordes of craftsmen,
factory hands, small traders, wharf and quay men, hewers of wood and
drawers of water of every description, with their entire families--from
the baby in arms to the big unruly hobbledehoy. Riotous merrymaking is
the realization, to a multitude of toilers, of temporary relief from
work, and meetings with present cronies and old friends.

Two or three days’ unshackled pursuit of pleasure--more or less
hilarious--derives a further spice of excitement from the fact that the
fun, as it becomes fast and furious, is in imminent danger of
degenerating into folly or worse, that many an aching head and sore
heart, some broken bones, incarceration in a city gaol, and an
opportunity of returning to the world a sadder and a wiser man, are not
infrequent results of the saturnalia.

It matters little to the mass of the revellers that the conditions of
the city fair have undergone a great change since its institution; that
the staple articles of trade in which the fair originated--the ‘horn,
corn, wool, and yarn,’ long the standing toast at every feast in the
district--have merged into a great horse and cattle market, in which
servants are still ‘arled,’ with the site removed to a different quarter
of the city. The Green is given up for the occasion to shooting and
drinking booths, sweetie-stands, gorgeously painted shows and caravans,
swings and merry-go-rounds, to the proprietors of which enjoyment is
combined with profit. Strangers, country people from the Highlands and
the Lowlands, roam about, still more entranced than the natives. The
children are in Paradise. Bagpipes squeal, fiddles scrape, drums beat
‘Barum, barum, baree.’ The hum of the sing-song speech, the gleeful roar
when a crowd laughs, the shouting of the more than half-fou
merry-makers, rise above the music, and are borne many a mile away,
refined by distance, till they echo with almost a plaintive sound among
the rigging of outward-bound ships ‘down Clyde.’

Perhaps the two chief marks of altered fashions which separate the
modern from the ancient Glasgow Fairs are to be found in the following
signs of the times. There is an almost entire withdrawal of the upper
classes from taking any share in the gala, except when evening has
fallen and thrown a veil over the scene. Then, under the slight
obscurity of a summer night, some of the young choice or unchoice
spirits among the Glasgow princes condescend to form parties, and stroll
in bands over the ground for the gratification of elbowing their way
among their inferiors, cracking jokes right and left, interviewing the
giants and the fat girls, or imagining themselves the heroes of not very
heroic adventures. Not a conventional gentleman, not a single woman who
makes any pretension to being a lady, appears where their grandfathers
and grandmothers mixed freely with the multitude, relished the whole
spectacle heartily, and claimed their due in the people’s holiday.

Another conspicuous innovation is that, though the numbers of the
sight-seers and pleasure-seekers are kept up on the Green, they are
always drawn from lower sources, and an Irish flavour like that of
Donnybrook is increasing among the elements of the composition.
Expeditions and excursions have become the order of the day with the
better-class working-people as well as with their employers. The
wandering spirit that possesses the men and women of the nineteenth
century has reached the Glasgow mechanics. They judge wisely enough that
if the weather is favourable, at the height of the season, two things
are preferable even to the delights of the Green.

The one is a cheap sail, lasting for several hours, which will carry the
passengers in the steamboats far beyond the hazy smoke-tainted
atmosphere, where the air blows caller off the salt water, up among the
numerous lochs, shadowed by the mountains, that fringe the Western
coast. The other is a run by railway to the Campsie or the Farnese
Hills, or down into Robbie Burns’s country--green Ayrshire--with wild
roses to be pulled from the hedges and horse-gowans by the wayside, and
the first hare-bells are to be seen nodding on Castle Downans where
fairies dance, and the earliest poppies bursting open in the fields by
Kirk Allowa’. The women and children agree with the husbands, fathers,
and sweethearts. So the summer navy of steamboats starting from the
Broomielaw is doubled and quadrupled. At the railway stations stout
guards, bareheaded, without their coats, struggle manfully, no longer
red but white in the face, to hold back the invading host, check their
tickets, and send them without accident to their destination.

‘Whaur are ye for?’ cries the herculean protector of the public,
clutching by the breast an old man far upwards of seventy, as he
stumbles on alone to the platform. ‘For the tr-rain,’ answers the piping
voice, while the lacklustre eyes gaze wildly in the face of the sturdy,
kind inquisitor, as their owner makes the self-evident declaration.

The giant thus delayed in his office, with the thronging thousands
pressing upon him, shows marvellous patience.

‘Whatna train, Gruffer?’ he cross-questions the innocent offender, while
the speaker seizes the chance to pass his black hand over his steaming
brows.

‘Jist the tr-rain for my gude-dochter’s [daughter-in-law’s],’ reiterates
the aged traveller a little peevishly at being thus interrupted and kept
in the van of the swaying force that have borne him forward on their
advancing wave.

‘Weel, ye maun stand aside by me till ye mind whaur your gude-dochter
lives. Whaur are you for, mem? Hae you a ticket, laddie?’ and so on,
with the ceaseless interrogations to the troops marching without orders,
and not knowing whither they are to turn--north, south, east, or west.

In one of the steamers that paddled swiftly down the broad stream, with
its decks so covered with passengers that they seemed to occupy every
seat that could furnish a resting-place, and to gather in clusters and
knots like so many bees, one man looked all alone, and as if he rather
drew back out of sight, standing with his hands in his pockets in the
shadow of the funnel. His attitude and air were unlike the jovial
bearing of the rest of the voyagers, which might well be, since the
intruder in the ranks was young Tam Drysdale, with a sneaking
inclination to see for himself what the people’s holiday was like. There
was indignant bitterness in his heart that they were left to take it all
alone, and a regretful remembrance of holidays he had seen abroad--for
young Glasgow with a full purse is generally tolerably familiar with the
continent and America, though Asia and Africa may hardly yet have
entered into his calculations. Tam could recall many a village and even
great town, beyond the German Ocean, where princes--not merchant
princes merely, but men of royal blood, fit to mate with kings and
queens, with their princesses, noblemen and noblewomen not a few--had
not scorned to grace the proceedings, as if they were still those of the
Middle Ages. The whole company had joined fearlessly in the games, as if
the princes belonged to the people and the people to the princes, and
had yet one heart between them to be gay or sorry in unison. In this
light it did not seem to matter so much as people supposed that these
foreign peasants were further back in the knowledge of many things, had
a smaller number of comforts, were forced to be more frugal in their
ways, while they had infinitely fewer chances of rising in the world.

At the same time, young Tam lingered on the least popular side of the
funnel, and could not tell for his life how he was to fraternize with
any of the groups around him. His father could have done it far sooner.
Auld Tam still held the ‘open sesame,’ though he did not choose to use
it. He understood these men and women, by old fellow-feeling and genuine
sympathy, a world better than the son with his dreams fathomed their
wants and wishes. Even young Tam’s mother and his sister Eppie could
have made friends much more readily than he could. Those two would have
done it in right of their abounding, sweet, guileless womanhood, in
which he had no part.

Still, the incapacity he felt galled the young man as with the sense of
an injustice done to him, an artificial barrier foisted upon him, and
erected between him and those whom he sought to call his friends. He
could not tell exactly what separated him from the humanity around him.
It was not lack of goodwill on his part. It was not dress--that
frequently potent agent in rearing or levelling dead walls between a
man and his neighbour. Tam had thought of that beforehand. He had made
an elaborate study of the fact that the better-paid, better-conducted
operatives and small shopkeepers--the very people who took their wives
and children for excursions on the Fair-days--resigned their moleskins
for the occasion, and disported themselves in more or less ill-fitting
broadcloth, with a lavish display of white shirt, silver chains across
their vests, and tall hats. Tam had accommodated himself to the
prevailing standard. He had exchanged his shooting-jacket for the only
black frock-coat he possessed, and replaced his wideawake by a
chimney-pot hat.

But the general similarity in dress did little or nothing. He was eyed
askance, good-looking fellow though he was, not merely by the men he
came across, but by all the nicer, more discriminating women, in freshly
washed and got up calicoes, or in sober woollen gowns, or in wonderful
silks, and hats in which white feathers were the prevailing fashion, or
bonnets lavishly crowned with flowers. The wearers of these garments
dandled babies, strove to keep small children pinned to their sides, or
flirted modestly or violently, according to taste, each with the ‘young
chap’ who happened at that time to be in the ascendant in her circle of
admirers. But all agreed in giving the cold shoulder, to begin with at
least, to the young man who had the air of a gentleman, the wolf in
sheep’s clothing whom father might not like, whom Alick or Angus or Jack
would almost certainly disapprove of. Even the undisciplined children
running all over the deck, getting into everybody’s way, and never out
of scrapes, fought shy of Tam. Unlike his father, again, he had no
manner for children. Was it his education, or his self-consciousness, or
his very anxiety to bridge the social gulf between them, that kept him
aloof from his kind?

In the meantime the steamer--another _Iona_, fluttering with flags from
stem to stern--was pushing down the river on the sunny yet showery
summer day, preceded and followed by many similar vessels, through the
labyrinth of shipping from every part of the world--past wharfs and
warehouses deserted by toilers--past the yards, well known to the
shipbuilders, with skeleton ships on the stocks, where the sheds were
forsaken and the din mute. Down and down the living freight went, till
green pastures and ripening cornfields began to smile under the very
frown of the hills rising in the distance.

Here was the heart-shaped rock of Dumbarton, with the castle where
Wallace had lain a prisoner. There were the crowded roofs of Greenock,
clustered under its own storm-cloud, hanging over the city churchyard,
where Highland Mary was laid to rest. Yonder ran the Tail of the Bank,
by which fleets have ridden at anchor, where Colin’s solitary ship was
seen through the morning mists by the sharp eyes of the loving gudewife,
so fain to tell that her man was ‘come to town.’ This was the entrance
to the loch by whose shore the race of Macallum More slept soundly.
Across the river the warning white finger of the Cloch Lighthouse bade
belated crafts beware. Roseneath was fair as when Jeannie Deans landed
under the guardianship of the Duke’s man. At Toward Point the tenderest
of Highland tragedies lingered with the memory of the old clan Lamont.
At last the twin islands of Bute and Arran came full in sight, and
Goatfell rose, brown and grey and russet--not purple as yet--unrivalled
from the sea, and held up a rugged face to the fleecy clouds.

The steamer was bound for Rothesay Bay to discharge its load of
humanity, in time to rush back again and bring down a fresh cargo before
night fell. The company had enjoyed in their own way their dearly-loved
‘water,’ with which, from youth to age, as a rule, their holiday moments
were associated. As children they had dabbled in the shallows, as boys
and girls they had rowed and fished for ‘podlies’ and ‘golden haddocks;’
at all ages the passengers had sailed, first with their fathers and
mothers, next with their mates and sweethearts, and at last with their
children, in turn.

But the voyagers bestowed only a general attention on the objects of the
shore. The eyes which looked were well acquainted with each landmark,
and, as a rule, they were not such eyes as to take in every tint and
tone, every glint of light and bar of shadow, by which Nature, in her
sameness, is ever new and ever fresh. The gazers liked to hail each
peculiar feature. Yes, this was Helensburgh; and that was Gourock; and
yonder was Dunoon with its Convalescent Home, from which some of them
had profited; and farther down was Innellan, and the steamer was passing
the mouth of Loch Striven. But everything was greeted in an easy,
off-hand manner, that did not disturb the ‘turns’ up and down, where
there was room to turn; the cracks and smokes of cronies, leaning over
the side of the vessel, and idly watching its track in the water; the
resounding jokes, that seemed to take in hundreds of grinning
participants in the effects of the jokers’ wit. The superannuated
fiddler near the gangway never wanted large audiences, who turned their
shoulders on the scenery, and gave themselves up to the inexhaustible
fascination of ‘Jessie the Flower o’ Dumblane’ and ‘The Carse o’
Gowrie.’ It was too early to make the musician’s powers available for
regular dancing, even if there had been space for the exercise, so that
there were only fitful attempts at solitary exhibitions of the ‘Highland
Fling,’ or such individual capers as could be performed on the minimum
of boards.

Additional refreshments and stimulants to those of the air and the water
soon began to be in request. Not only were baskets and bags opened
before the time, and bottles of various dimensions extracted and handed
round, while unpropitious women were hospitably pressed ‘to taste,’ and
children’s mouths stuffed with cookies and gingerbread, but visits were
paid with ever-increasing regularity to the lower regions of the vessel,
and returns accomplished each time after longer tarrying and with
greater reluctance. The faces of the visitors waxed always a finer,
deeper crimson, or a more sodden yellow or white. Eyes became fishier
and more inclined to roll. Wagging tongues moved with more difficulty in
the mouths which could not hold them. The enemy that is equally alluring
to impressionable and to stoical natures, which lends zest to the
moments, and ends by stealing away the brains, was on board and at
work, though it was not yet noon, answering to the third hour of the day
in Eastern countries. These clean, well-to-do workpeople, who had not
spirit enough to enjoy themselves without having recourse to other
spirits, which leapt at a bound from servants to masters, would soon be
neither agreeable nor altogether safe company.

Tam looked around discontentedly, and felt that he had no right to
interfere, any more than with gentlemen in their cups, though some of
his father’s dyers hung their heads a little, or glared defiance at him,
as at a spy, when he nodded a greeting to them in their slinking past
him to descend the cabin stairs. The very women looked less respectable
than at starting. Many were flushed with anxiety or tortured with
apprehension, or they had grown hardened and callous. The last began to
gossip loudly and indifferently, to complain, to scold, to importune.
They resorted to washing their dirty linen in public, to counting over
audibly the cares and crosses in their drudging, slaving lots. Some of
them took to asking whether, if there were oblivion and exhilaration
going, they should not have their share as well as the men, who were
their own masters and the stronger vessels; one or two women descended
into the shadier recesses of the steamer, and came back smacking their
lips, laughing uproariously, snatching up their babies, cuffing their
elder children, bandying coarse taunts and coarser jests with whoever
were like-minded, causing young Tam to turn away in dread of attracting
their attention, sick with disgust and shame. The bloom of the holidays
was brushed off ere they had well begun to a section of the
holiday-makers.

Tam had to tell himself over and over again that it was the scum of all
mixtures which rose to the top; the mass of the pleasure-party were
sober as yet, and he hoped that a considerable portion of them would
continue sober to the end. But not one of them wanted him, or owned any
sympathy with him. He was as solitary as among the rich and luxuriously
living traders, to whose ranks his father had risen, whom the son had
been tempted to despise. If anybody spoke to him or showed signs of
accepting his overtures to conversation, it was sure to be a forward,
senseless, objectionable person, whom he had to cut short. The more
reasonable and superior a man or woman was, the more he or she seemed to
be endowed with a proud shyness, a modest reserve, a jealous _esprit de
corps_ as to the interference of a stranger in joys and sorrows with
which he could have nothing to do.

The interloper heard fragments of talk of long and short hours, high and
low wages, volunteer corps and volunteer balls, night-classes,
Sunday-schools, friendly societies, half-holidays when the brambles
were ripe, feats of curling and skating in the dead of winter. But
nobody that he cared to listen to desired to listen to him or to
exchange experiences with him. He would have liked to tell some dyers
who were grouped together speaking of their craft--his father’s trade,
for anything that he knew yet his own in the future--all that Dr. Peter
had recounted to him of what he had heard when he was young of Papillon,
‘the butterfly Frenchman,’ who had brought the art of dyeing everything
save tartan to the banks of the Clyde, and of Mackintosh, the stout
Scot, who, among other services to his native town, after he had started
the trade in ‘cudbear,’ had the wit to see how much further ‘Turkey-red’
went, and worked under the direction of the stranger till he made the
production of Turkey-red one of the arts of Glasgow, as purple was of
Tyre.

But though young Tam had come primed with such curious tales, he could
not intrude these where there was no sign that either they or their
teller would be welcome. His tongue was tied.

In the outer cold in which he stood, young Tam’s heart warmed when he
came suddenly on a broad, smiling, familiar face, the owner of which
saluted him at once frankly and respectfully. He was an alien in every
respect--in his attire, in his speech, in his occupation. He was big,
good-natured, blustering Sandy Macnab, the head dog-man at Semple Barns,
in kilt, plaid, sporran, and brogues, who, to please himself, was taking
an airing and a sail with the ‘Glasgy bodies’ in the general holiday of
the Fair. Young Tam did not affect Semple Barns so much as the rest of
the family affected their next neighbours. Still, he was there
occasionally, and Sandy knew him quite well as the son of Mr. Drysdale,
Sir James’s ally. Was Tam to hobnob with Sandy, a gentleman’s
servant--one of those hangers-on from feudal times in virtue of
artificial needs, to whom Tam, with his radical notions, had objected
most strongly? A comical sense of the absurdity of the situation struck
Tam. Still, he could not resist exchanging a word with the dog-man, who
was full of Celtic vivacity, did not dream of being anything save
accessible, while he was too well accustomed to the society of his
superiors in rank to take advantage of the circumstances. At present
Sandy was perfectly sober.

‘How are Sir James and Lady Semple?’ inquired Tam, as an introduction to
the conversation.

‘Sir James and my leddy are well, sir. They went south a week syne, to
be out of the way of the Fair. For, as you know, a’ Glasgy gangs pourin’
out of the city in every direction, and neither the road, nor the rail,
nor the river is for the gentry at sic times. Sir Jeames is getting less
active than he used to be in pushing his way through, and my leddy does
not like to be tied down to bide at hame for twa or three days, so they
have taken flicht beforehand.’

Tam smiled a faint smile.

‘And is this excursion in your line?’

‘Weel, a sail on the water and a snuff of the hill air are aye in my
line,’ said Sandy cordially, ‘though I confess I would rather it had
been a “rowin’ boat,” and the hills had been nearer; but a man maun be
thankful for sma’ mercies. However, my main errand here was to see what
a day’s change would do for a countryman I have on my hands. He was not
a’ there, to begin with; and, ‘deed, I think there must have been a want
about mysel’ to tak’ sic a handful upon me, with no call save that we
were baith acquaint with the peat-reek and the scent of the gale [bog
myrtle]. It was a’ that fleechin’ [flattering] sorry Bawby Sed’s doing,’
continued Sandy, in regretful deprecation of his own weakness. ‘She
buttered me up about what I had come to, and the service I could render
to the man. I wish I had tried the Gaelic Society first.’

‘Who is he, and what is wrong with him?’ asked Tam, not deeply
interested, but glad to be on sociable terms with one of his companions.

‘Will your honour come and see?’ suggested Sandy, using one of the
old-world phrases that still lingered in his part of the country, not
dreaming that it could be anything save acceptable to his companion,
who, according to his theories, ought to have preferred to be addressed
as ‘Young Tam.’ ‘The infection is all gone, for, if you’ll believe me,
the cratur brocht the fivver tramping south with him. He had no sooner
been lodged with the dugs than he was laid on his back gowlin’ and
rampagin’, clean out of his wits--of which he had never a great stock,
in the hicht of the disease, far waur than any yappin’ and scrapin’ o’
the bit beasts. In place of being a help to me he was an awfu’ plague.
If I had not first fallen on my feet wi’ a gude maister and mistress, I
micht have gotten into grief wi’ them for bringing sickness about the
place. But Sir Jeames and my leddy were very considerate and kind. They
had in Dr. Murray, and he fetched a nurse from the infirmary, since the
sick man was ower bad to be removed, and we a’ feasted on denties from
the big hoose. The sinner who had caused the trouble pu’d through, and
noo he’s convalescent. But he’s as wake as water, and he hasna gotten
his mind--what there was o’t--richt back. I thocht it micht divert him,
and the doctor said there was nae harm, to tak’ him for a sail. It was
the least thing Bawby Sed could do to look after him. Moreover, she’s
aye ready for the road; so if you please, sir, they’re sitting on the
sheltered side of the vessel, and if you’ve ony skill in complaints,
you’ll maybe step ower and gie’s your opinion.’

Tam had no skill, but he had also no shrinking from the sight of
disease, while his refusal might sound, to Sandy, like a cowardly
shunning of danger, which the man himself had apparently faced with
intrepidity.

The young man began to thread his way with the burly Highlander across
the crowded deck. In the middle of the process Tam was surprised by the
statement from Sandy: ‘I did not think of it when you spoke to me first,
Maister Drysdale, but I’ve just called to mind that Rory--that’s the
object’s name--has some notion in his licht head, with which the
gentleman your faither has to do.’

‘I do not think my father has ever had much to do with Highlanders out
of Glasgow,’ said Tam incredulously. ‘He has been in the Highlands, of
course, but he has led too busy a life in Glasgow and at Drysdale Haugh
to have had time to make many acquaintances elsewhere.’

‘Very like, sir; only the first time I saw the felly he was speerin’ at
Bawby Sed about Drysdale Haugh. He coupled it with the Mackinnons that
were there before your time, but he allowed there was a Drysdale in the
matter. One of his reasons for takin’ the place of dug-laddie at Semple
Barns, and coming out with me, was that we were cheek by jowl wi’
Drysdale Haugh. All through his illness he yammered [murmured] about
Drysdales and Mackinnons and the gentleman that cam’ to the island for
the shooting, and the charge he left with ane Morag of the Bothie. If
Rory has not been aff his head from first to last, it was maist
unfortunate that he did not get word of Captain Mackinnon, the young
maister’s frien’, while he was staying out at our place for a couple of
weeks. A meeting micht have let the cat oot of the poke [bag]--always
supposing there is a cat in the poke, and it is not a craze
altogether--with which it would be a thoosand pities to fash ony
gentleman. But then, Rory was at the hicht of the fivver, not fit to be
spoken wi’. ‘Deed he’s not fit yet, when it comes to that--but yonder he
is, tied to Bawby Sed’s apron-string.’

Poor Rory of the Shelties had never been much to look at, but now, with
the ghastliness of his late illness still blanching his freckled skin,
and pinching his long chin, with his short tartan coat hanging loose on
his shoulder-blades as if they were two pegs, so that he had double need
of the plaid in which he was wrapped, he looked a miserable wreck. Mind
as well as body seemed gone, as he sat sunk in his corner, and kept
feebly tapping the lid of a snuff-mull which somebody had put into his
hand.

Mrs. Seth sprang up the moment she caught a glimpse of Sandy’s waving
tartan. ‘Tak’ a turn wi’ him yersel’, Sandy Macnab,’ she enjoined her
friend, ‘while I rax [stretch] my banes and see if there’s onybody I ken
on board. He’s dreich [dull] company, I’m not sure the braw sail is
worth it. For you, Sandy, you’re like a recruiting sergeant in the auld
Forty Twa.’ With this propitiatory compliment Mrs. Seth hastily
withdrew, lest her purpose should be anticipated.

‘Hoo are ye noo, Rory?’ his patron Sandy addressed the sick man, in the
condescending coaxing accents with which he might have spoken to a
child. ‘Dinna ye find the wind and the water refreshing?’

‘They mak’ me dizzy,’ said Rory peevishly.

‘Oo! that will wear off,’ said Sandy confidently, ‘and you’ll be as
strong as a powny in no time. Wha do you think I’ve brocht to see you?
Young Maister Drysdale, of Drysdale Hall and Drysdale Haugh,’ speaking
with elaborate distinctness. ‘Div ye hear, Rory?’

‘I’m no deaf, I have the hearing,’ said the invalid, still as ‘fractious
as a child,’ but raising himself slightly while he spoke, and fumbling
with his claw-like hand on the seat near him, a gleam of cunning purpose
coming into his lacklustre eyes. ‘It is Mackinnon of Drysdale Haugh,’ he
muttered.

‘There he is at his havers [nonsense] again,’ protested Sandy
unceremoniously.

‘I’m afraid my father is all there is to stand for the owner of Drysdale
Haugh,’ said young Tam. ‘Have you any claim on the place? Had you
anything to do with the Mackinnons? When you are better, if you will
come to my father he will see to it.’

But Rory was not listening to the assurance; he was occupied with
another source of excitement. His hands were groping convulsively around
him. ‘What have you done with my boxie, Sandy Macnab?’ he asked,
quivering with passion and distress. ‘It is my kistie I want, and if
you’ve stealt it, I’ll have you up before the first justice I can find.’

‘The impidence and ingratitude of the wretch!’ exclaimed Sandy, not
discomposing himself, though the scene began to attract attention, to
Tam’s annoyance. ‘To think that I would touch his dirty papers!’
betraying by the very terms of the protest that his curiosity had got
the better of him.

Then as Rory’s rage subsided into a weak wail, while the lamentable
figure rocked backwards and forwards as if it had been that of a woman,
compassion replaced wrath in the easy, genial nature of the dog-man.
‘Losh, man, your bit boxie’s safe in the press in your room! Would you
gang lugging an auld soldier’s kit with you when you’re taking a
pleasure-sail for your health in the company of friends? You’re to have
everything you want at my expense--that is, at Sir Jeames’s. Here,
drink a drappie from my flask to put heart into you, and set your mind
at rest about your boxie.’

Rory made no objection to swallowing the whisky, nor stopped to
ascertain whether it was administered by a traitor or a true man, an
arrant thief or the most honest of his kind. The draught was potent in
his present state; in a few moments he was fast asleep, and likely to
remain so for some time, while his outraged keeper called anew for the
services of the truant ‘Bawby Sed,’ to ‘hap [wrap] up’ her patient, and
keep him in her eye, lest he should ‘loup ower the side of the steamer
and become fude for fishes’ in the storm he was making about his boxie,
though it was as like as not that he would forget all about it when he
awoke. ‘It is his bodily wakeness that mak’s him doubly wake in his
mind,’ Sandy explained to all interested. ‘The doctor says when he gets
strong again he may be all the man he ever was, which is not saying
muckle. I wuss I had never meddled wi’ the wull-cat.’

‘Hout! twa Jock Hielantmen should match are anither,’ jeered a listener.

‘I would like to ken wha you’re calling Jock Hielantmen? You’ll better
mind your manners,’ Sandy suddenly fired up, and spluttered haughtily.

Young Tam strolled away, not much exhilarated by the incident, and not
troubling to puzzle out the wandering fancy--to which he attached no
importance--of a half-witted Highland beggar, as Rory appeared to him.

The steamboat reached the pier in Rothesay Bay, and its company streamed
out pell-mell, without spending more than a glance on the semicircle of
mountains that closed in a lovely scene. Somehow the disregard of it
jarred upon Tam, accompanied as it was by the unvarnished utterance of
the popular impression with regard to a little island containing a
single house, firmly believed to exist somewhere in the neighbourhood.
‘Ay, it is a funny place, if ye kenned a’, and could get a glimpse o’t,’
a man who was looking earnestly about for the object in question told a
neighbour. ‘It’s the Drucken Island, where the rich leddies that forget
theirsel’s are shipped aff by their men. But they say the leddies have
stealed the key o’ the boathouse, and rowed to the shore, and gotten
what they wanted, in spite of the doctor and their keepers, afore now.’

‘Eh! what a drouth [thirst] they maun hae had to risk their lives to
slocken [quench] it!’ exclaimed a woman in the vicinity.

‘Lass,’ said a grave companion, ‘they risked and lost mair than their
lives afore they ever came there, God help them!’

The sail was over, and it was who should get first on shore and make the
most of the land entertainment. A few of the passengers started for
Ascog, with its fuschia hedges, the vitrified fort, or the walk to
Kingarth, that would take the pedestrians past the fine pleasure-grounds
of Mount Stuart. A considerable number had friends in the island, and
desired to look them up and claim their hospitality. But the great
proportion of the holiday-makers went no farther than the seaside and
the green braes, congregating there like ants, occupying every seat and
public walk which the inhabitants of the place had for the time
forsaken. There were bathing and wading under difficulties, a great deal
of tolerably reckless boating, homely picknicking to an enormous extent,
and much simple lounging and ‘lazing,’ as well as abundant horse-play.
‘’Arriet and ’Arry,’ represented by Murdoch and Maggie, not only flirted
‘through wind and wet,’ they exhibited their love by showering salt
water on each other, and pelting each other with sea sand. There were
frequent resorts to the nearest ale-houses, which became in the end
choke-full.

Young Tam, through all the baffling, disappointed consciousness of a
wasted day, continued doggedly determined to see the holiday to the end.
He would not allow himself the respite of a visit to a good hotel and a
quiet dinner eaten in welcome retirement. He strode into one of the
humbler inns, sharing in the hubbub, took his chance of the knives and
forks, and partook of the pies and ale which were the most solid
refreshment of the fellow holiday-makers who refused to own him as a
fellow. He loitered wistfully among them to the last moment, running
with the multitude at the false alarm of a drowned man who was fished
out of the water and resuscitated before it was too late, and a lost
child that was found sitting chattering on a policeman’s knee. He saw
the last of his umbrella in bestowing it on a young couple bent on
walking out of earshot of their companions, and being drenched to the
skin in one of the sudden down-pours of the latitude--the pair never
stopping to thank him for the sacrifice.

Tam re-embarked manfully with his steamboat load, cleared out just in
time before the arrival of another consignment of the same kind,
flooding Rothesay at sundown with a fresh crowd of riotous strangers,
for whom there was neither sleeping accommodation nor return to Glasgow
that night. If the weather were fine, they would lie about, like
unpicturesque northern lazzaroni, on door-steps, under sheds, against
hay-stacks, on the bare hillsides. If the night set in soaking
wet--instances had been known of an Icelandic experience--the churches
would be thrown open to the dripping, shivering troops of men, women,
and children by humane people in authority, who did not find it
inconsistent with their religion to discover that churches were made
for men, and not men for churches.

In young Tam’s steamer the scum came more and more to the surface.
Silenus and his crew prevailed over decent working men and women, who
took refuge in effacing themselves and cautiously withdrawing into
obscurity. The crowded decks presented an orgie, kept up to a maddening
refrain, given forth by hundreds of singing, shouting, and swearing men,
bawling women, and crying children. It seemed next to a miracle that the
sailors could preserve the faintest remnant of discipline, escape the
demoralizing influences around, and continue to manage the ship so as to
prevent any hideous accident.

The night wind blew cold, even on a summer evening, the humid climate,
which forms an excuse for the frequent resort to the hot wine--the
barley-bree of the country--relieved itself by the frequent discharge of
pelting showers. The wistfully smiling side of the weather was gone,
and only the sulks and tears were left. The shores of the river grew
dark and disconsolate. The very river--blue, like the Rhone in some of
its more favourable aspects--was now a muddy grey, suggestive of much
dirt, which the dredging machines were insufficient to clear away.

Every voyager, except those past feeling, grew chilly and weary. The
women drew the skirts of their gowns over the wearers’ shoulders and
heads to afford them shelter and to protect finery, of which the
feathers were draggled, and the artificial roses drooping. The men
buttoned up their coats, turned up the collars, and smoked heavily. The
children experienced the consequences of a slight swell on the water and
a day’s surfeit.

There was a desperate determination to dance impossible dances, and as
much promiscuous embracing as if men were living in the days of the
great French Revolution, and vowing eternal liberty, equality, and
fraternity.

At last more than one free fight arose, in which Tam, with his broad
shoulders, clear head, and indignant heart, felt bound to interfere.
Like the grand, inspired legislator--the friend of his people in their
slavery--Tam, too, would have said, ‘Wherefore smitest thou thy fellow?’
and would have received the refusal, with reason here, to acknowledge
him as a ruler and judge. ‘The redder’s lick’ was ready for him, as for
his neighbours. Several men who had broken all bounds in their drunk
frenzy turned upon him--‘What are you doing here, young Drysdale, spying
ferlies [wonders]? We want nane o’ your countenance. Auld Tam is worth a
dizzen o’ you; but we dinna want him nayther, nooadays. Mind your ain
bizness; it’s for nae gude ye’re skulking here in oor boat. Is’t oor
lasses you’re seekin’?--gentlemen like you can try these tricks--or a
handle to haud over our heads if we get into a scrape, or a sham of
teaching us to behave like gentlemen? But you’re no a generation out o’
the dirt yoursel’--for a’ your faither’s braw hoose and your mither’s
fine carriage. Tak’ you care, young Tam Drysdale, or we’ll gie you a
dook [dip] in the water for your pains.’

Tam was surrounded and borne away by some of the sober men in his
vicinity. One of them knew him sufficiently, and had enough interest in
him, to remonstrate:

‘What made you come with us the day, sir? It was a fule’s errand. It
would have been all very weel if it had been a maister’s treat, in which
the maister still keeps the upper hand. But the Fair-days are like the
daft-days at the New Year, they are an exception to a’ ithers. They
belong mair to the riff-raff than to ony ither portion o’ the community.
I’ve half made up my mind to stay at hame and shut mysel’ in the hoose
with the gudewife and the weans another year; leastways, though Granny
at Rothesay be disappointed, I’ll not jine ony o’ the shoals on the
water. I question whether Norman himsel’ could have quieted them at sic
a time.’

Then Tam remembered there was one ostensible working-day in the year
when even his father did not venture to the works or the office. For on
the 1st of January (old style) these brethren of labour--descendants of
an old severely religious people--the Whigs of the West, having begun
the year with their first-footing and their exchange of bottles on every
side, were ‘roaring fou,’ almost to a man, for the space of twelve
hours--the quietest individual in ordinary circumstances being often the
most madly hilarious or brutally violent on these privileged occasions.
‘Ca’ canny till they settle down again,’ had been auld Tam’s wary
advice. ‘Puir chiels, they have not sae mony break-oots, and there will
be sair heads and shamed faces among them the morn.’




CHAPTER XII

THE PLEASURES OF THE RICH.


Auld Tam and Mrs. Drysdale went a good deal into company like
themselves--rich millowners with whom Tam had large connection in
business, and the heads of some of the most flourishing trades in
Glasgow, who had become, in one way or another, acquainted with the
wealthy dyer and calico-printer, and who had often the common ground
with him that they too had risen from the ranks. There is a spell in
money, as in many potent things, which draws the possessors into an
alliance--offensive and defensive.

It would be hard to sum up the thousands represented by Tam Drysdale’s
acquaintances. Though he had not forgotten his poorer friends, and did
them many a good turn, he had a genuine respect for money, or rather for
the qualities concerned in its acquisition. He made excuses for the rich
man no less than for the poor. ‘He’s made a grand job o’ that mill, or
that pit,’ he would say. ‘They cry he’s near-handed, or he’s fond o’ the
bottle, or he’s grown an imperious dug in his age. But what would you
have? Think of what he’s been and dune! Money has its temptations. Them
that have spared in their youth may be led into stinting still in their
riper years, or they may be beguiled into menselessness, as it were, to
make up for the past. If men commence to scrape and boo at your biddin’,
it’s no aye easy to refrain from walking over their necks. More by
token, a man that has made and keepit riches has as frequently as not
shown his superiority--that he has the brains, the smeddum [spirit],
the self-restraint, and the energy that render men fit to rule.’ Tam put
a prosperous man’s high value on prosperity, while with his feeling for
adversity there mingled, in spite of his kindness of heart, a shade of
impatient scorn.

Mrs. Drysdale had also her estimate of her friends--those richly clad,
frequently overgrown as well as overweighted women, who for the most
part formed her circle, affected by the texture of their satins and
velvets, and the contents of their jewel-boxes. She did not apply the
same test to Lady Semple, for even Eppie’s simple judgment was quick
enough to discern that her ladyship, who had a habit of wearing shabby
silk gowns without ornament, belonged to a different class and must be
measured by another rule.

The visiting consisted largely of dinners conducted with the greatest
formality. The great points at those dinners were the costliness of the
table equipage and the expense and unseasonableness, rather than
seasonableness, of the viands. So much silver glittered on those
mercantile tables that it began to be a drug and little thought of, as
the metal was at Jerusalem in the days of King Solomon. There was a talk
of silver-gilt, even of a sprinkling of gold vessels, to create a
sensation. The givers of the feast were still dead to the merits of
rock-crystal, else there would have been an opening for it. Salmon, the
first day the Act of Parliament permitted the rivers to be drawn; lamb
when the frost-bitten grass was still sprinkled with snow, peas and
strawberries, not half-withered importations from the shores of the
Mediterranean, and yet not brought to maturity before the month of May
by an unaided Scotch sun; the earliest oysters, grouse and venison.

Tam and Mrs. Drysdale viewed those feasts--not necessarily of
reason--with the greatest respect, and dressed in the man and woman’s
best to do the entertainments honour. The husband and wife took their
station as host and hostess in the Drysdale Hall drawing-room, or drove
off as guests in the Drysdale Hall carriage, with something like
solemnity, as for an imposing rite. Notwithstanding their laudable
endeavours to grace the scene, neither looked half so well as in his or
her ordinary attire. There was a specially clownish air about Tam in his
fine broadcloth and fine linen. Mrs. Drysdale suffered more than ever
from the disadvantage of being ‘braw’ in her richest velvet and most
delicate lace. It was to little purpose that he wore on one of his
little fingers a sapphire fit to be an heirloom, or that her bracelet,
brooch, and ear-rings far outshone that broken diamond necklace, found
after a fire among the ruins of Shawfield House, of which there is still
an old Glasgow tradition.

But the excellent couple were not singular. Their fellow guests were,
to use a Scotch phrase, ‘as fine as they could hing,’ rejoicing in the
costliest materials and the most expensive of tailors and _modistes_ to
furnish the toilette. Dockens were wagging with a vengeance. The result
was not cheering when the personal comeliness which distinguished the
Drysdales was wanting. It was positively depressing. Nobody seemed quite
at home in his or her clothes. They were not as if they had grown upon
the wearers’ backs--which is the perfection of dressing, and the women
had the expression of thinking of nothing else but their wardrobes and
those of their neighbours displayed for the general benefit.

Young Tam and Claribel were only occasionally present at these dinners.
St. Mungo’s city drew a hard and fast line between the old and the young
in these matters. The visiting of the latter included the staying for
two or three days at a time at a friend’s house where there were young
people like themselves (the seniors rarely paid a visit which lasted
over a night), balls, public and private, junior clubs, the theatre, the
hunting-field, and all picnics that were not purely family affairs. But
the solid dinners lay in the province of the elders, and formed their
dissipation.

If an exception was made it was in young Tam’s favour, for his benefit
or loss. His sex and the probability of his entering into his father’s
business entitled him to greater consideration than any girl, however
handsome or well-dressed or otherwise mistress of the situation. He was
fitter company for the elderly men, since Young Glasgow can generally
talk business with as much zest as his father can talk it--nay,
sometimes with a glitter of the eye under the smooth forehead and hair
the hue of the raven or the squirrel, which hints at an increase of the
gambling spirit in the population.

As for Claribel, though she knew what she was about, and could suit Lady
Semple, who found her a most useful and obliging young friend, Clary had
very little to say on the stock themes of servants and tradespeople to
matrons of her mother’s type. It was to this level that Mrs. Drysdale’s
conversation fell in society; though when she was alone with her
daughter Eppie, she could tell charming tales, idyls of old country and
town life, embellished by queer figures and quaint customs--Egg Jean,
Bell Geordie and Creepy Kate; Milky May-day, and Hallowe’en with its
nuts and apples.

But from the time that Tam and Mrs. Drysdale started, sitting side by
side like a pair of wedded doves, he with a glove in one hand and she
with her laced pocket-handkerchief in her lap, talking with bated breath
of the richest and greatest persons they expected to meet, they were
‘upon their manners,’ she naturally more subdued than he, but both
considerably impressed. Solemnly Tam stepped from the carriage at their
destination and handed Mrs. Drysdale out under the awning put up to
shelter them from the elements. Arm in arm, in spite of modern usage,
the two were passed from one officiating domestic to another, in the
line of servants stationed in the hall, on the staircase, in the
corridor, a tolerably numerous band, when, according to the way in St.
Mungo’s city, Tam tipped each servant, crossing every palm with silver
as he passed its bowing owner.

At last came the stentorian announcement, ‘Mr. and Mrs. Drysdale;’ and
the door was flung open to reveal another pair, generally portlier and
as well clad, standing in the centre of another gorgeous drawing-room,
with a stream of black coats, gold chains, white ties, velvet and moire,
flashing stones and choice bouquets, circling or subsiding into a
stationary ring round the central couple.

The dinner itself was a very serious, not to say ponderous, business, in
which each eater not only dwelt on the merits of soup and entrées, but
appraised the madeira which had travelled round the world, and the
home-raised pines. The circumstances did not admit of much talking,
unless in a word or two to next neighbours. It was only when the
pheasant made its exit, and the port and the cheese took its place, that
the sense of responsibility was lessened, and a strain of
good-fellowship, always increasing in joviality, began to prevail.

The tongues of the men commenced to wag on politics, local interests,
and when two of a trade met, ‘shop’ was not absent. There was no lack of
shrewdness, broad common-sense, and fair intelligence, for these
men--reckoning them from those who had made the humblest beginnings--had
all received a fair parish-school education, and their acquirements had
been enlarged and rubbed into the best condition by intercourse with
the world, and the calculations and speculations of trade. There were
college-bred men among them, and members of the old Glasgow houses--not
stranded like that of Mackinnon, but borne on to this day on the full
tide of prosperity. It was among the last that the best attributes of
the born and bred diner-out showed themselves in a fund of appropriate
anecdote--not coarse or worse--and in a peculiar humour not so much
caustic as dry in its ripeness, like the champagne, sometimes with a
dimly perceptible current of sadness in its mirth, as the best Scotch
wit, unlike English wit or French wit or American wit, seems always to
play on the wan face of

    ‘The mighty waters sounding evermore.’

The guests who thus contributed to the entertainment of the company were
not entitled to complain that they were not in request, or were not the
men whom their hosts and fellow-guests delighted to honour. Such men
need never have sat at their own tables, and though they were often by
no means the richest men present, their shadows never grew less, and
they kept their own even in a money-making, money-respecting community.

Young Tam could not for the life of him imagine what his father,
especially, could see to like in such feasts. The young man was at war
to the knife with all the luxury and parade. He hated to find his father
and mother making part of them. They did and said more things to vex him
then than at any other time, though they were not worse or nearly so bad
as other people present. Tam and Mrs. Drysdale’s knowledge might be at
fault, but their native modesty and kindly instincts--which forbade them
to render themselves conspicuous or to offend anybody’s prejudices when
the husband and wife were aware of them--were almost always to be
trusted. If young Tam had been wiser he might have let his parents
alone, and thought no more of them, with an easy mind.

Mr. and Mrs. Drysdale were not like the Nimmos, who had begun life with
a small eating-house, and were now wholesale exporters of provisions to
a vast extent; but though her apparel matched that of the best
gentlewoman in the room, and she had a set of rubies without its equal
in St. Mungo’s, she could never be allowed to have any other partner at
table than one of her sons who was familiar with her little habits, and
took the liberty of engrossing her conversation on the petawties and the
piz, and that donnert deevil of a servant; and what for should she not
pyke her teeth when a curran’ had got into ane of them? and she minded
when a whole glass-fu’ of toothpicks was provided for the customers at
the shop in the close. Her husband was not so objectionable, but he was
the better of his daughter-in-law at his elbow. She was a sharp,
determined little woman of better standing, and warned off the servants
with the sherry and the liqueurs, under his very nose.

No; young Tam was a prig and an ass if he imagined he had any real
reason to blush for the authors of his being. He was bound rather to be
thankful to them for more than the goodly heritage they had provided for
him, at which he ‘cast laith,’ even for their manly and womanly
courteous self-mastery. Still he would have been relieved if his father
had not brought forward his Burgundy, and promised his host the next
time he came to Drysdale Hall the taste of such a brand as was not to be
found in Hamilton Palace, and his mother had not called macaroni
‘mikeronis,’ and Charlotte à la Russe ‘Chaurlotte-ally-Rice.’ He did not
care half so much when she cried out, ‘Keep me, the day!’ at the most
exciting of Mr. Rowland’s stories, and his father was surprised into a
guffaw that seemed to shake the table.

Small faults to rankle in a mind that was not little. It was only sore
in a transition phase, and raw in its youthfulness.

Young Tam had not time and attention to spare for good stories. He felt
angry with himself when he was forced to laugh. A set of old tomfools,
he was tempted to style his companions. Life was earnest: he could not
afford to waste it in such child’s play. He thought of the gross revelry
of the Fair-days, he recalled the misery of times of strike and failures
in cotton, and he wondered that men and women with souls to be saved
could thus trifle with the signs of the times. He would not have exposed
himself to the purgatory of these dinners, at which he sat in his goodly
young manhood like a killjoy, had he not known that to refuse all such
invitations would incense his father as much as anything he had yet
done.

It was not only by his father and mother’s satisfaction with these
pompous gaieties that young Tam felt aggrieved; he was still more
exasperated with Athole Murray’s barefaced enjoyment of the ridiculous
proceedings. There was an exception made for Athole sometimes, as for
young Tam, in putting her name on the dinner-lists. Her father was
frequently one of the guests, for two reasons. First, he was an old and
respected native of the locality; in the second place, when he was in
the mood, he was one of the most accomplished story-tellers of the
circle, one of the most learned in the curious records of the great city
of which all her citizens are proud. His comparative poverty was thus
condoned, and he was welcomed to rich men’s tables, at which he did not
refuse to sit because he was not himself rich.

Dr. Peter had boasted that he had friends among the wealthy as well as
the poor. He did not grudge the former a farthing of their hundreds of
thousands. He could make as much allowance for their temptations as one
of the men themselves--Tam Drysdale--could do. It pleased Dr. Peter to
exercise his faculty on their behalf. They were worthy fellows, many of
them, he maintained, and few knew, as he was in circumstances to know,
the good they did, not only by their public works, but by their private
charities. If he could contribute to their entertainment--they were not
always easy to entertain, as they were not particularly entertaining in
a mixed company--that was their weak point; if he could help them to a
right good laugh, he should always think it a privilege and a compliment
to himself to play his part.

It was awkward to invite Dr. Murray to a party which included ladies,
and exclude Athole, his solitary specimen of womankind. As the mistress
of her father’s household, she had something of the brevet rank of a
matron; therefore she appeared occasionally, like young Tam, at the
elderly people’s dinners. She had no individual taste for heavy,
prolonged meals, and there was sometimes not another young person
present to keep her in company except the young Turk from Drysdale Hall.
Athole was at ease and contented in her home-life, but she did not
despise a change. She thought it good for her father. She liked to see
him among his contemporaries, and she had a cordial esteem for some of
them, not altogether derived from him.

The girl was an exceedingly simple figure among the magnificent dames.
It would have been absurd in her to try to cope with them, or even with
the daughters--when there were daughters--of the houses where the
entertainments took place. For the husbands’ or fathers’ incomes far
more than outnumbered in thousands what her father could claim in
hundreds. Athole’s silk gown was not as thick as leather, according to a
definition which she had heard some of the favoured matrons apply to
their silks. It was generally supplemented by some gauzy material with
which she rang changes. She hoped her single state and her twenty and
odd years carried off her failure in the virtues of the Worth School, on
which not only newspaper paragraphs, magazines of fashion, and novels by
benighted female hands, but novels concocted under male auspices,
insist, with a sort of man-milliner gusto distressing to realize. If her
supposed probation did not justify what fine ladies might call her
shabbiness--what then? It did not signify. Athole laughed at the idea,
and her thin, dark face and brilliant eyes looked more bizarre and
expressive than ever. A ‘shilpet, blecket, poorly got-up lassie,’ many
of the ladies called her, with disdainful pity. Yet their husbands were
fond of talking to the Cinderella who had not yet met her fairy
godmother.

And, after all, this Cinderella’s rags were no rags, and by no means
without womanly and artistic taste in their disposal; only they were not
rich and rare like the approved garments of the day. Athole knew very
well, under her philosophy, what became her, and used to say that though
she were as rich as Crœsus, she did not think she would adopt costly
array. In addition to the consideration she professed for her maid
Jeannie, to whom Athole was a law in dress--who, like many hand-maidens,
copied her mistress at a humble distance--Athole was satisfied satin and
velvet and the cunning devices of the most ingenious and extravagant of
dress-makers did not suit her style as they suited Claribel Drysdale’s
outward woman. Athole was plain, and simplicity did best with plainness.
She did not wish to look like a fantastic Frenchwoman.

Besides being set apart for each other when they were the only young
people at these dinners, there were mingled attraction and repulsion
between Athole Murray and young Tam Drysdale. She knew that he was
affronted by her levity in relishing these feasts, and it tickled her
that he should be so affronted. He knew that she did not believe in his
modified Communism, and looked upon it as a particular kind of juvenile
disease--not so common as the measles, but occasionally to be seen even
in the sons of rich men. He was aware that she laughed at him, and he
was piqued by her laughter--piqued to bring her to a juster frame of
mind by proving his sincerity. When he meditated anything
desperate--resigning his birthright, going to Australia, turning out to
work for his own hand at any work for which he was qualified--he always
took into account how Athole Murray would look and what she would say;
if she would believe in him then, and if she would be sorry for having
mistaken him.

‘I hope you are enjoying yourself, Miss Murray,’ said young Tam
frigidly, on one of these occasions. His tone sounded as if his hope
partook more of the nature of a fear. He was standing before her, after
the gentlemen had joined the ladies in the drawing-room. Athole was
sitting on a couch, near a knot of gentlemen who occupied the hearthrug
with cups of tea in their hands, and a _raconteur_ improving the moment
till the whist-tables should be set out. A chorus of laughter testified
to the capabilities of success on the part of the narrator.

‘Thanks, exceedingly,’ answered Athole, suddenly brightening her whole
appearance by the expansion of a curious little scarlet fan which she
held in her hand. ‘But don’t let me miss Mr. Rowland’s next story--he is
in great force to-night.’

‘I wonder you can be entertained by stale Joe Millers.’

‘But as I am entertained, and as he is just going to tell a story which
always makes me laugh, though I have heard it a hundred times, please
don’t talk just now. Perhaps it is not so familiar to you; if so, you
cannot guess what a treat it will be.’

She stopped, and set herself to listen, and he was compelled to follow
her example. Mr. Rowland was retailing the strait of a Highland
dancing-master, whose steps were unassailable, but whose music was
confined to his voice, with which he sang, to improvised appropriate
words, the tunes of the strathspeys and reels through which he was
assiduously marshalling his pupils. Mr. Rowland gave examples, humming
the doggerel in alternately slow and fast time, with his comical cracked
voice, in keeping with the comical jiggy airs:

    ‘Now, Jock, for sure and certain,
     Come tiddle and come tartan,
     You’ll dance with Betty Martin,
       She’s a pridefu’ little queen.’

    ‘And you there, White Breeks, White Breeks,
     Set you to Red Cheeks, Red Cheeks,
       Or you’re no worth a preen.’

‘Mr. Tam,’ said Athole behind her fan, ‘have you forsworn laughter? Have
you taken the pledge in that direction? Oh, I should not like to be
Clary and Eppie! Now hear my story. There was once a very great lady
listening to the reading of a very small book. The hapless author--a
misled young woman--mutual friends supposed, mistakenly of course, might
profit by the great lady’s patronage. “Oh!” she said, with a shudder at
a certain point in the tale, “whatever she’s going to do, I hope she’s
not going to be funny.”’

Young Tam was driven to smile, and at the unusual sight auld Tam, whose
eyes were resting on the couple, experienced a second twinge of doubt
regarding them. Young Tam could not be so depraved in taste as to be
making up to that insignificant, nearly ugly, lassie of Dr. Peter’s,
with all the beauties and all the fortunes in Glasgow awaiting his
choice. The next moment Dr. Peter Murray walked up to his daughter and
young Tam. Auld Tam took heart of grace, and made a fourth in the group.

‘By-the-bye, do you know anything of a Highland tramp who has been down
with fever in the servants’ offices at Semple Barns?’ young Tam was
asking the doctor. ‘I met him with Macnab, Sir James’s dog-man, in the
Rothesay boat, on one of the Fair-days. The Highlander had come to
Glasgow, as I understood his countryman to say, full of some talk about
Drysdale Haugh, and the Mackinnons and Drysdales, as if he had business
with one or the other. But his wits, if he ever had any, were far to
seek when I saw him. The poor, miserable fellow seemed at the last gasp;
indeed, I should not wonder if he were not alive.’

‘I never heard of such a person,’ interposed auld Tam in surprise.
‘I’ve had little troke [traffic] with the Highlands, and the queer thing
is how this mon should ken of Drysdale Haugh--that is, if he is not a
Glasgy Highlander, born and bred within a hunder yards of the
Gallowgate. I am not so full of conceit as to fancy the fame of my works
has crossed the lochs, and floated as far awa’ as Skye, or John o’
Groat’s.’

‘I attended the man,’ said Dr. Peter, ‘and I can bear witness that he
had heard of you or somebody of the same name, and of your works, and
that they had belonged to a Mackinnon. I was curious to know if his
acquaintance extended to the Murrays, but I could never find that he
paid us that compliment in his delirium. He’s not dead, but he’s as bad.
His mind became affected to such a degree, and he grew so unmanageable,
that I had to apply to have him lodged as a pauper in the asylum. He may
recover his judgment, or he may not. I thought, to begin with, it was
simply bodily and mental weakness, following on the fever in a bad
subject, and that when the first was better the second would mend in a
measure. But I can no longer pronounce on the case.’

‘I hope the poor sinner was not an impostor trying to get up a begging
story, and turn a penny on some scrap of information he had picked up,’
suggested auld Tam. ‘You mind Mackinnon went to the Hielands for sport
every season; but, preserve us, he’s been dead for mair than twenty
years!’

‘And this man--a shauchled [ill knit] half-natural at best, broken down
by hardship and poor living--is not above thirty or thirty-five, judging
of him professionally. He was never likely to trump up a story to much
purpose, and now he is _hors de combat_ either in the business of
imposition or in any other. That word “business” is sometimes oddly
applied. Have you heard what Inglis, our oldest elder, said to that
new-fangled chap Cairns, who has come into the session, and is fain to
put the other elders through their facings in the discharge of their
duties? “Muster Cairns, I have been an elder for thirty years, and I
know my buzness!”’


END OF VOL. I.


                 BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD




                 THREE-VOLUME NOVELS AT ALL LIBRARIES.

          =PRINCESS NAPRAXINE.= By OUIDA.

          =DOROTHY FORSTER.= By WALTER BESANT.

          =SAINT MUNGO’S CITY.= By SARAH TYTLER.

          =A DRAWN GAME.= By BASIL.

          =HEART SALVAGE BY SEA AND LAND.= By MRS. COOPER (KATHERINE SAUNDERS).

          =THE NEW ABELARD.= By ROBERT BUCHANAN.

          =A REAL QUEEN.= By R. E. FRANCILLON.

          =FANCY-FREE.= By CHARLES GIBBON.

          =THE WAY OF THE WORLD.= By DAVID CHRISTIE MURRAY.

                  LONDON: CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79371 ***