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Title: Scotch marriages, vol. 1
Author: Sarah Tytler
Release date: February 28, 2025 [eBook #75486]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1882
Credits: The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SCOTCH MARRIAGES, VOL. 1 ***
SCOTCH MARRIAGES
I.
SCOTCH MARRIAGES
BY
SARAH TYTLER
AUTHOR OF
‘SCOTCH FIRS’ ‘CITOYENNE JACQUELINE’ &c.
IN THREE VOLUMES
VOL. I.
LONDON
SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
1882
[_All rights reserved_]
‘Choose not alone a proper mate
But proper time to marry’
COWPER
CONTENTS
OF
THE FIRST VOLUME.
_LADY PEGGY._
CHAPTER PAGE
I. BRIDEGROOM AND BRIDEGROOM’S FRIEND 3
II. PEGGY’S WEDDING 22
III. PEGGY’S WELCOME HOME 48
IV. THE LONG DAYS THAT FOLLOWED 71
V. THE REIGN OF MISRULE 92
VI. ‘LADY PEGGY’ 111
VII. ‘HUNTINGTOWER’ 133
VIII. PEGGY’S FRIENDS 158
IX. THE LESSONS THAT PRIMROSE GAVE WHILE BALCAIRNIE LOOKED ON 182
X. ‘A’ WILL BE RICHT AGAIN GIN JAMIE WERE COME BACK 209
_JEAN KINLOCH_
I. JEAN SCORNED 223
II. BOB MEFFIN’S AMENDS 247
III. JEAN’S REPRISALS 275
LADY PEGGY
CHAPTER I.
BRIDEGROOM AND BRIDEGROOM’S FRIEND.
During the last century there was little real difference between
young Drumsheugh and young Balcairnie, the young laird and the young
yeoman,[1] who was also the laird’s chief tenant and chosen friend.
Jamie Ramsay, of Drumsheugh, and Jock Home, of Balcairnie, both
rejoicing in a territorial appellation, had sat together on the same
bench in the same parish school. For that matter Jock, though not
particularly scholarly, as the cleverer of the two, had generally sat
above his companion. The boys had played together in the same games
of ball and hockey. In company they had scoured the fields together
after birds’ nests, nuts, and haws. They had in their green youth worn
and torn the same corduroys little different in quality, and satisfied
their hearty appetites on the same wholesome porridge and kail, oatmeal
cakes, and ‘bannocks o’ barley,’ for the laird’s table was not much
more daintily supplied than the farmer’s.
Even the lads’ homes were on the outside not so different as might
have been expected. Drumsheugh had an avenue of crazy fir trees, and
the dignity of a ruined tower about a bow-shot from the high, narrow,
free-stone house which represented the modern mansion. Balcairnie was
just such another house, a storey lower, without the avenue and the
tower. It was not destitute of compensation for these deficiencies in
the comfortable-looking stack-yard, which sheltered it from every
wind that blew, and in the square of the farmyard which abutted on
the house, and was alive and cheerful with domestic animals, and the
constant work going on among them. Balcairnie was the livelier dwelling
of the two. Both houses had long gardens very similar, prolific in
hardy vegetables and primitive fruit, as well as in old-fashioned
flowers. The gardens found room for umbrageous bowers and Dutch
summer-houses, and included beech and holly hedges, which enclosed
washing-greens.
Inside, the best parlour of Balcairnie might have stood for the
dining-room of Drumsheugh--furnished as they both were with Scotch
carpets and oak, and adorned alike with silver cups, won in coursing
matches, and great Chinese punch-bowls brought home by friendly sea
captains. The chief difference lay in the fact that the dining-room
at Drumsheugh was in constant use, while the _pièce de résistance_
among the apartments in Balcairnie was the ordinary parlour, given
over to drugget and blue-and-white checked linen, with ornaments of no
more costly material than cherry-wood pipes, pink-lipped shells, and
peacocks’ feathers. Again, there was no drawing-room at Balcairnie,
with spindle-legged chairs in painted satin-wood and white chintz
covers, such as was the company room at Drumsheugh. But the boys’ bare
little garret dormitories were much alike.
On the rare occasions, when the lads went from home, unattended by
their parents, they journeyed by one conveyance which served the whole
neighbourhood, except on special occasions--Tam Fleemin’s carrier’s
cart.
True, on leaving school young Drumsheugh had gone to the Edinburgh
University, as became his birth and rank, while young Balcairnie had
entered on the apprenticeship implied in holding a plough and drawing a
straight furrow under the critical eyes of his father and his father’s
foreman, according to the standard for young men in his class; but on
the return of the one lad from the college and the promotion of the
other on the death of his father to the possession of all the pairs of
horses on the farm, instead of the obligation to work one pair, the
occupations and amusements of the old allies tallied once more at many
points.
Young Drumsheugh--young only in years, for his father had died long
before Balcairnie’s father, and the laird had grown up under the rule
of a widowed mother--was a scion of the great house of Dalwolsie, the
representative of a family of respectable though not very wealthy
country gentry that had held up their heads among their equals for the
last three hundred years at least. Young Balcairnie, though his father,
grandfather and great-grandfather had been tenants of Balcairnie as
long as the oldest living man in the neighbourhood could recollect,
knew nothing further of his origin than what was to be deciphered on
a few mossy stones leaning over in Craigture kirk yard. These did not
condescend to mention whether the Homes of Balcairnie came of the great
Berwickshire Homes or not. The rude, half-effaced letters only gave
the brief, if graphic, statement that here lay ‘the cauld corp’ of
‘Dauvit,’ or Alexander, or John Home, as it might be.
But blue blood must have spoken out very unmistakably, if it had drawn
a sharp line between two lads whose rearing, casts of mind, tastes and
pursuits were so much in common. For the laird farmed the home farm,
and the yeoman was one of the first in the hunting field, though he
did not attend the hunt ball. The young men, like the boys, wore as a
rule the same every-day suits--no longer of corduroy, but of home-spun.
Good brown woollen stuff, shorn, spun, and woven in the district,
diversified by yellow buckskins, boots and tops, red waistcoats,
and three-cornered hats. The manly build of the pair rivalled each
that of the other. Both were deep-chested, broad-shouldered, long
and clean-limbed, with arms, not unused to fencing and boxing, quite
capable of keeping the owners’ heads. The corresponding legs came out
strong at coursing matches without the aid of riding horses, while
the feet beat the floor resoundingly in reels and country dances for
well-nigh a round of the clock at every merry-making, great and small,
far and near. The comely ruddy faces under the three-cornered hats
might almost have been those of brothers, except that Drumsheugh was
dark and Balcairnie fair in hair and complexion.
The men met at the kirk, they met at the market, they dined at the
same table in the George Inn of the little town of Craigie on the
market-day, they resorted to the same coffee-room to read the same
newspaper, with its chronicle of war prices, victories of His Majesty’s
forces abroad, and meal mobs at home, while the laird and the farmer
frequently rode home together, so long as their roads were one.
Balcairnie would dine several times at Drumsheugh in the course of the
winter, and if the Lady--Drumsheugh’s mother--was a thought stately,
and kept her visitors somewhat at a distance, all in a perfectly
courteous way, that was not the laird’s fault. He did his best to
make up for it by being ‘Jack-fellow-alike’ with his tenant when
Drumsheugh returned Balcairnie’s visits at the farm-house. Indeed it
was well known to the Lady herself that Drumsheugh, though he could
carry himself well enough in any society, was not guilty of offence
against any and was liked in all ranks, showed at this stage of his
development a perilous preference for humbler company than he had
been born to. He would rather accompany Balcairnie to a ‘maiden’[2]
or penny wedding, and enter with all his soul into the prevailing fun
and frolic, rendering himself the most acceptable guest in the motley
assemblage, than go where Balcairnie could not go with him, to what was
by comparison the high and dry hunt balls and subscription assemblies.
There is this to be said in excuse for Drumsheugh’s low tastes, that
the maidens and weddings--penny and otherwise--not less than the
markets of those days were freely frequented by guests--male guests
especially--many degrees higher than the mass of the company. Besides,
as is sometimes true in a thinly peopled district, it happened that
about the time Drumsheugh came of age, the county circle round him was
remarkably deficient in young people of his own age, above all in young
people endowed with such attractions as were likely to seize and retain
the laird.
Neither could the step be called a great descent, when in mind and
manners so many were nearly on one level. For instance, not only had
Drumsheugh and Balcairnie been fellow-scholars at the same parish
school, but another contemporary scholar was little Peggy Hedderwick,
the daughter of a hedger-and-ditcher, who had brought her doubled-up
scone and whang of cheese tied up in a napkin for her dinner at school,
just as she had carried her father’s dinner daily when the field of
his operations was within a girl’s walk from home. Peggy, though she
was the junior of both the lads by some three to four years, had
darted nimbly ahead, with the precociously quick wit of girls, in all
learning, save sums. She had been ‘out of the Testament’ and ‘into
Proverbs’ before either of the boys, and she had been such an expert in
repeating the shorter catechism, from ‘man’s chief end’ to the Creed,
without halt or blunder, that the master himself could not ‘fichle’
(puzzle) her. She had frequently coached her seniors and betters in
that, to them, most difficult performance. As for the Psalms and
Paraphrases, she could repeat them by heart in her shrill sing-song,
till the master, though he was a licentiate of the Kirk, grew weary
of hearing her. It was even seriously believed in the school that she
had surmounted the Ass’s Bridge of the curriculum and could say right
off, if anybody would stay to listen to her, the whole of the Hundred
and Nineteenth Psalm. She could write a fine round hand, with an
occasional clerkly flourish at the tail of a letter. It was at sums
that Peggy hung her head. The multiplication table, with its barren
chart of commercial details, unbrightened by a green spot on which
fancy and sentiment could feed, had brought her to grief, and taken the
pride of intellect out of the white-headed lassie. The lads who came
through this test triumphantly had tried to help her in turn. But it
was in vain--poor Peggy would never make even a decent arithmetician.
It must only be by counting her fingers that she could ever reckon her
earnings and her spendings.
Peggy Hedderwick, grown up into the bonniest lass for many a mile,
was now the acknowledged belle of every rustic merry-making in the
parish of Craigture. She was a great deal more and better than such a
distinction often implies. She was something else than a blue-eyed,
white-skinned, red-cheeked maiden, with a slim yet well-rounded
figure, a pretty foot and ankle, though they went bare six days out
of the seven--unless in the depth of winter, a trim waist, a slender
throat, a delicate chin, a dainty mouth, as good a nose as if she
had been born a Ramsay--or, as far as that goes, a Stewart, and a
broad enough brow to explain her early attainments in the Psalms and
Paraphrases. She was even something more than an innocent creature in
whom there was little guile, a modest child to soil whose modesty would
be a gross sin and shame in the eyes of every man worthy of the name.
She was an industrious, upright, pious soul, the stay--by means of
Peggy’s busy wheel principally, of her widowed mother. For the hedger
and ditcher, exposed to every inclemency of the weather, had early paid
the debt of nature. Peggy discharged faithfully all obligations known
to her. She was a reverent, unfailing worshipper--one of the favourite
lambs of the flock with the elderly uncouth book-worm of a dominie,
who had progressed from the parish school to the parish kirk, and was
in either place an excellent man, master, and minister.
It was to this fair, sweet, and good young Peggy Hedderwick that
Drumsheugh, wilful and masterful in his simple condescension, paid
unfailing homage. He sought her out--for she never threw herself in
his way--wherever she was to be found. He went with Balcairnie under
a hundred pretexts to wherever the laird fancied there was the most
distant chance of meeting Peggy. To bleaching-greens, quilting-parties,
Handsel-Monday games, even kirk-preachings, her sorely-smitten swain
followed Peggy desperately. He made little disguise of his infatuation,
and put small restraint on his inclinations in scenes, where, as
a welcome visitor from another sphere, he was allowed, it must be
confessed, a considerable amount of license. He would dance with no
other, he would sit by no other, he would convoy Peggy home when the
play was ended.
Soon the state of the case was no secret in the neighbourhood, with
its various circles, among them that presided over by the old Lady
of Drumsheugh. The folly and the danger, with what would come of it
all, were commented on and canvassed everywhere. The sole cover to
his actions, which Drumsheugh chose to assume, was that he went about
in these lower regions under Balcairnie’s wing, as it were. The laird
insisted on taking the yeoman with him in all his excursions and
escapades.
This was some small comfort to Mrs. Ramsay. Balcairnie was, if
anything, the wiser and more prudent of the two, and she felt he was,
in a sense, on his honour to protect his friend from the consequences
of Drumsheugh’s rashness. Perhaps the Lady also counted a little, in
the imminence of the peril--for Drumsheugh was already of age and his
own master, on a theory which was prevalent among the gossips. They
said Balcairnie had been the first captivated by the charms of young
Peggy, though he had at once drawn back from rivalry with his laird,
and that Peggy on her part had smiled on the farmer till a bigger star
appeared in her firmament.
Even Balcairnie’s marriage with Peggy would be a great _mésalliance_,
but it would not be so heinous an infringement of all social laws as
Drumsheugh’s stooping to a cotter lass, either honestly or in sin and
shame. Balcairnie’s mother as well as his father was dead, his sisters
were married, and his brothers out in the world, so that he was a lone
man--if a man can ever be called lone, able to disgrace nobody save
himself, by an unequal marriage.
The old Lady of Drumsheugh was particularly gracious to Balcairnie at
this time. She inquired after his house, if it was in good repair with
the plenishing in order? She hinted at the propriety, no less than
the probability, of his stiff old housekeeper being superseded by an
active young wife. After the next sentence or two, she went the length
of asking meaningly for bonnie Peggy Hedderwick, who was so good to
her mother and so clever with her hands. Had she not won the maiden at
the last harvest? Was not her yarn more in request in Craigie market
than that of any other girl or matron in Craigture? And the Lady had
heard that from Luckie Hedderwick’s couple of hens Peggy had reared
the finest brood of chickens that were to be seen that Candlemas.
Such qualities in a young woman were worth her weight in gold, Mrs.
Ramsay declared impressively, with her keen eyes fixed steadily on the
listener. She had the greatest respect for that girl. The Lady plainly
suggested that a farmer, whatever might be said of a laird, need seek
no richer dower with his wife than Peggy had to bestow. If the laird’s
mother were a consistent woman, no doubt she would call on Peggy and do
the Lady’s best to countenance her son’s tenant’s wife, should Peggy
receive the promotion of becoming the mistress of Balcairnie.
To this stroke of policy Balcairnie merely replied by returning the
lady’s fixed stare, with a full and grave stolid look from blue eyes
which were not unlike Peggy’s.
If Balcairnie had ever entertained a tender inclination towards Peggy,
it made no ill-blood between him and his friend the laird. It was
probably early nipped in the bud by the fact that Peggy’s favours had
been swiftly transferred, ere they were well bestowed, from Balcairnie
to Drumsheugh. Balcairnie was once heard reproaching her, more
waggishly than bitterly, ‘Ay, Peggy, when I gie you a turn in the reel,
fient a kiss you grant me now, gin the laird be by.’ For Peggy, with
all her virtues, was a woman still. She was caught while her fancy
was yet hovering in its flight, by the glamour of superior rank. Both
of her admirers were bonnie and fine lads to her, in the first blush
of their admiration, and while both were above her in station, there
was not much to choose between them. But the lairdship, and perhaps
the greater boldness of Drumsheugh, turned the scales, and after a
few months of ardent courtship Peggy was as far gone as her lover.
She would no more have permitted a comparison between the merits of
Drumsheugh and Balcairnie--though the latter was her very good friend
just as he was the laird’s--than she would have suffered the old
bed-ridden mother who had borne her and toiled for her to be matched
with any other woman in the kingdom, be she Queen Charlotte seated with
her golden sceptre in her hand by the side of King George on the throne.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] In Scotland the distinction between a yeoman farmer--one who owns
his farm--and a tenant farmer is not strictly preserved. The term
yeoman is, or was, employed indiscriminately to any farmer.
[2] A harvest-home, so called from the last sheaf of corn cut on
the farm for the season. It was allowed to fall to the share of the
best shearer or reaper, who tied it up with ribands so that it might
take the semblance of a doll. It was then hung conspicuously as
the chief adornment of the principal wall of the barn in which the
‘maiden’--called in the north of Scotland the ‘kirn,’ was held. The
decked-up sheaf was finally carried home by its proud winner, and
suspended on the wall of her cottage, where it was treasured as a token
of her prowess.
CHAPTER II.
PEGGY’S WEDDING.
There came a crisis to all those thoughtless daring doings, and it did
not proceed from the old Lady of Drumsheugh, much as she loved to lead
in life. She had ruled with a high hand her old husband, who, if all
tales were true, was not an easy person to guide; but his young son,
with his easy temper and pleasant speech to the world at large, though
he was a good son at home when he was let alone, threatened to prove
too much for her.
There was another mother in the case, as has been signified,--poor
old Luckie Hedderwick--who had never been considered more than a
sickly ‘feckless’ body in her best days, and who was now bed-ridden
and dependent on her daughter’s industry for her daily bread. Whether
Luckie had been from the first an accomplished and hardened deceiver
so that she could at last bring forward a strategy worthy of the rival
mother--the Lady of Drumsheugh; whether the approach of death began to
unseal her dim and dull eyes, and to teach the foolish, ignorant old
woman wisdom beyond all earthly sagacity; whether the former dominie
who visited his aged and sick parishioner at the cottage in Peggy’s
unavoidable absence, was secretly at the bottom of the manœuvre, Luckie
Hedderwick suddenly set an interdict on all future friendship and
love-making between Peggy and the laird. The old woman had been till
then as silly and inconsiderate as any lass in her teens in taking the
greatest pride and pleasure in Peggy’s triumphs and conquests, and in
encouraging the girl in what other people held to be Peggy’s sins of
vanity and unwarrantable ambition; but she now forbade her child, under
pain of her mother’s lamentations and reproaches--which were worse than
her wrath--so much as to have a meeting with the gentleman, if she
could possibly foresee and prevent it.
Peggy was broken-hearted and in despair, but she never dreamt of
defying, and still less of cheating, her mother.
The laird, arrested in the full force of his passion, was goaded
to the brink of madness and driven half beside himself. No more
well-understood foregatherings with Peggy; no more interceptings of
the girl on her way to the well, or the shop, or a neighbour’s house;
no more strolls among the whins and broom[3] in the twilight, careless
who saw; no more walking of his horse--or leaping from the saddle
and walking himself--beside her when he came up with her, which he
was pretty sure to do, on the return of both from Craigie market; no
more climbing of the breezy, heathery hill and descending on the other
side where the green trees shaded the road, throwing a white shower of
blossom there in the spring, being full of birds singing as they rifled
the fruit in summer, and in autumn dropping blood-shot leaves among
the mud and mire. The laird would gallantly insist on placing Peggy’s
basket before him on the saddle, or would carry it for her. Balcairnie
either trotting on with a passing nod, or falling discreetly into the
background, determined to show that he was not curious over much, or
bent on spoiling sport.
The spectacle had hardly been an improving one. The young laird had
been demeaning himself in some lights, trifling with a poor country
girl, and exposing her, as he ought not to have done, to serious
misconstruction and harm. Peggy, like a senseless girl, had been laying
herself open to scandal and slander and a hundred graver dangers.
Still the pair had been a pretty pair, however ill-matched--there is
no denying it. The laird in his riding-coat and boots and tops, gaily
flourishing his silver-mounted whip; Peggy in her blue-and-red striped
linsey-woolsey petticoat, white apron, blue-and-buff striped jacket,
and her duffle mantle if it chanced to be wintry weather; her fair
hair either bare and tied up with a riband--the relic of the old snood
or cockernonie, or else covered by a Bessie-kell-a quilted cotton or
woollen hood--under the curtains of which the bonnie face beamed with
the mingled shyness and gladness of a child’s face.
In a similar manner the larger groups, in which many minor figures had
been represented with varying effect, were effaced from the canvas.
These had shown Peggy on the harvest field where the laird, like
Boaz of old, shared the labour and the mid-day meal of his servants.
Detaching Peggy from the rest, he would act as ‘bandster’ to her
shearing, or he would sit at her feet, and decree that as an equivalent
to dipping her morsel in the vinegar, she should have her choice of the
scones in the basket and the first draught of ale from the pitcher. In
those days Peggy was the queen of the autumn fields--a gentle queen
who bore the honours thrust upon her meekly. Still she did not fail to
arouse animadversion, and the entire _tableau_ tended rather to the
entertainment than the edification of the spectators.
The sensations of the company were not of a much more generous or
amiable description when Peggy was persuaded to fling her handkerchief
to Drumsheugh in the coquettish old dance of ‘The Country Bumpkin;’ or
when, at the entreaty of her lover, she sang with her flute-like pipe
to a decorously hushed assembly, or sat as mute as a mouse while he
sang in his trumpet tones. Her song might be ‘Ye Banks and Braes,’ or
‘Aye wauken O! wauken aye and weary’--both of which ditties held tender
warnings to heedless girls, if they would but have taken the hints--or
it might be some blyther measure. But his song never varied. It was
always the bold, barefaced declaration--
Young Peggy blooms our bonniest lass,
Her breath is like the morning,
The rosy dawn, the springing grass
With early gems adorning.
with a peculiar emphasis on the verse--
Ye powers of honour, love, and truth,
From every ill defend her;
Inspire the highly-favoured youth
The destinies intend her.
The laird could not stand the abrupt, harsh interference which in the
twinkling of an eye dissolved these enchanting scenes. It would cost
him his wits. He would rather carry off Peggy, with or without her
will, where nobody should ever come between them. What did she mean by
giving him up at any third person’s word, be that person her mother
twice over? Had the two-faced lass no heart in her breast? He would be
upsides with her yet, for the pain and mortification she was causing
him. He confided all this to Balcairnie, who gave no further answer
than a shake of his head and a resolute ‘I’ll no be your man in sic an
ill job, Drumsheugh,’ so the laird went on fuming and storming if he
did not speak of ‘louping ower a linn.’
The comical side of the question was that he was his own master all the
time to do what he liked in the circumstances. He had been left the
Laird of Drumsheugh without limitation. He could marry Peggy Hedderwick
to-morrow, in spite of his mother, and it was not likely that Peggy or
her mother for her, would decline a plain offer of marriage from so
high a quarter, or that either would draw so fine a distinction as to
refuse the proposed honour, unless it were accompanied by the free and
full consent of the Lady to her son’s throwing himself away.
But, somehow, the laird stopped short of such rank insubordination
and thoroughgoing independence. There was a strain of weakness in his
wilfulness, or else the times were against him. People had not yet
shaken off the old feudal prejudices. Drumsheugh, in his simplicity
and homeliness, was still, both in his own estimation and in that of
other people, the Laird, the scion of the great house of Dalwolsie,
and Peggy was the cotter lass, come of hynds and nobodies. Balcairnie,
who was not so far before her in the last respect, might have married
her without reservation, though she was by no means his social equal;
but the most disinterested unworldly version of the affair which
the most single-hearted judges looked for from Drumsheugh was that
he should be found fond enough of Peggy, and faithful enough to her,
while he was sufficiently regardless of his own interests, to engage in
a secret ancient troth-plight equivalent to a marriage with her, and
right in the eyes of the law, though it was censurable by the Kirk.
It would be a contract which must hamper him all his days, and if he
were ever so far left to himself as to seek to evade it, might drag
him down to crime and misery. Why on such small temptation, out of two
courses--the one clear and above-board, the worst consequences of which
would be faced at once--the other a flattering more than half-cowardly
compromise done in the dark, and only coming to the light and
encountering the natural results after a long interval--a manly fellow
like the laird should inevitably, as if it were a matter of necessity,
have adopted the second and lower course, remains a testimony to the
force of habit and of one-sided reasoning.
The laird had been accustomed to set his mother at nought in what
seemed right in his own eyes. He was not dependent on her in money
matters, and did not give a thought to the risk of forfeiting the
savings of her jointure, since he was at this stage of his development
as free-handed as he was open-hearted. Still, he could not summon
up his courage to brave the high-spirited, determined old woman
altogether. In the same way he could not make up his mind to despise
the clamour and opposition of his circle of gentry, little as he had
hitherto prized the hereditary association with them.
Drumsheugh, when he was compelled to a decision, never dreamed of a
more generous and honourable step than that of running away with Peggy,
and vowing that he was her husband before two available witnesses;
nay, the idea of anything less temporising and more magnanimous did
not even cross Balcairnie’s mind. It was in serene satisfaction with
the concession that he agreed to back the laird as usual in waylaying
Peggy, in spite of her mother’s commands, and in propounding to her the
grand yet sorry expedient for getting rid of all objections in future,
by establishing the couple in the sure, if unacknowledged, relations of
man and wife.
After some spying and picking up of floating information, the two
friends learnt that Peggy, while she now kept religiously indoors
with her mother, for the most part of her time, was in the custom of
recompensing the neighbour who went most of the girl’s errands. This
reward consisted in Peggy’s ‘ca’ing,’ or driving out, the neighbour’s
cow in the cool of the morning and late evening of the June season, to
feed for an hour or two on the grass by the dyke sides and ditches, or
on the short turf of a single knowe, which rose in solitary dignity
among the flat corn-fields. The road to the knowe was for a certain
distance that to Craigie, so often trodden in happier circumstances.
The knowe itself, with its patches of rushes, had been Peggy’s seat
when as a child she had played at plaiting the ‘thrashies’ into a crown
and sceptre. She was an only child like her lover, and had known few
playmates save her school companions. She had been used to lonely hours
and single-handed games. Her most intimate friend in later times had
been her ardent admirer the laird, whom she was now forbidden to see
or speak to. He had been with her on this knowe when the dew lay on
the grass and the corn-craik was ‘chirming,’ as it was at the present
moment. He had made a posy for her of what Peggy merely called ‘bonnie
floors,’ but which were in detail the dead white grass of Parnassus
that grew among the rushes, together with the crimson and pink fumitory
and the yellow avens which he had gathered idly as they came along,
leaving hedge-row and dyke-side behind them. He had shown the greatest
kindness and patience in helping her to draw out the pith of the rushes
and plait it--no longer into a mock crown and sceptre, but into a real
wick for her mother’s cruizie.
All these soft recollections proved too much for poor Peggy, as she
ca’d Hawkie; the girl put up her apron to her eyes to dry the blinding
tears which rendered her more incapable of detecting prowlers in her
vicinity.
Then with the practical agility of the riever of old, the laird ‘cam’
skipping ower the hill’ from the little hollow on the other side, to
which he and Balcairnie had ridden, and where the latter stayed with
the horses.
In a moment Jamie Ramsay was by the sorrowful girl’s side, detaining
her when she sought to retreat.
Peggy wore her summer house dress, the pretty light cotton jacket
which has been immortalised by Wilkie and Sir William Allen. It had a
little collar or ‘neck,’ turned over where the sunburn of the throat
met the whiteness of the bosom, and was only confined at the waist by
the string of her apron. Her round arms were bare to the elbow, the
sleeves of her jacket being rolled up for convenience’ sake. The arms
were mottled and dimpled like those of a child. Her brown little feet
too were bare. Her uncovered hair was arranged in the most primitive
style--after all it is the fashion of the great Greek statues. The
locks ‘which the wind used to blaw’ were ‘shed’ behind the ears, wound
round the head, rippling in natural ripples as they were wound, until
they were fastened in a knot at the back of the shapely head. Yet no
stately ball-room belle in flowing gauze or rustling brocade, with
high-heeled shoes and a higher powdered _tête_, had ever appeared half
so sweet as Peggy to the enamoured young laird. He was not caught in
undress. He came a-courting her--as he was bound to do, though she had
been a beggar maid, and not merely an industrious cotter lass, who
supported herself and her mother by the fruits of her honest industry.
He wore his best snuff-brown coat, his last flowered waistcoat, his
dress buckles in his shoes, with his dark hair combed carefully and
neatly back and tied in a _queue_, the riband of which, in skilfully
disposed bows and ends, hung half-way down his shoulders.
‘I mauna bide. Let me gang, laird. Oh! why are you here, when I canna
lichtlie my mither’s word?’ cried the faithful and despairing Peggy,
with streaming eyes and heaving bosom, torn as she was by conflicting
obligations.
‘Na, but hear me, Peggy,’ insisted Drumsheugh, strong to carry the day
in his confidence in the honesty of his intentions, and the truth of
what he was going to say. ‘Take a message from me to your mother, and
she will not stand in our gate, or make another thrawn rule to keep
us apart. Tell her I am willing to join hands with you and exchange
written lines. Lass, I’ll take the half-merk with you the morn if you
like; neither king nor minister has power to come between us after
that. You’ll be to all intents and purposes my wife and the young Leddy
of Drumsheugh from that moment.’
Peggy was not only staggered, she was deeply touched and proudly
joyful. She had it in her power to become the ‘Leddy of Drumsheugh.’
The laird had vindicated his sincerity and honour. There was no more
question of tampering with her affections and betraying her trust. He
had come out of the test nobly, as not one man in a thousand would have
come.
Peggy had not the least doubt that her mother would feel more than
satisfied--she would be greatly uplifted by her daughter’s wonderful
good fortune. Instead of thwarting Drumsheugh again in his wildest
fancy, Mrs. Hedderwick would now defer to his least whim, and consent
to pay him the humblest, most grateful homage. Peggy was ready to go
with the laird to her mother and see if it were not so--to settle for
life her grand and happy destiny.
The laird, carried out of himself by the excitement of the moment,
delighted with the effect of his words, thinking himself nearly as true
and kind as Peggy thought him--more in love with her than ever--was
prepared to start that instant to fulfil his pledge and knock the nail
on the head.
To Luckie Hedderwick, accordingly, the infatuated couple went
straightway, without an attempt at concealment, widely removed as they
were, in the exaltation of their feelings, from any consideration of
prudence. They only waited till Drumsheugh hallooed for Balcairnie to
come up and wish Peggy and the laird joy, and then to bring on the
horses to the Cotton.
Poor old Luckie, lying powerless in her box-bed, could hardly believe
her fast-failing eyes and ears, when Peggy came in (followed by
Drumsheugh in full feather), and when he sat down on the kist in the
window, which was the only disengaged seat, her own arm-chair being
occupied by the unmannerly cat, and Peggy’s stool at the wheel taken up
by the tray of reeled pirns of yarn.
There was no vow of vengeance on the laird’s smooth brow, or of
reprisal on his smiling lips. On the contrary, there was the most
abundant security and provision for Peggy Hedderwick in his presence
there in her mother’s cottage, and his frankly undertaking to marry
the lass at once, before competent witnesses. It was not from such a
good end as this that her conscience and her minister alike had begun
to frighten the widow. Her dear little Peggy would be a lady after
all, and some day she would take her stand among the best and be freely
acknowledged by the whole of the county side. She could not expect that
just at first, but anyway she would be kept an honest and innocent
woman. Her children, if she ever had children, would be born in lawful
wedlock. She need neither fear God nor man, and poverty would no longer
hover at her door, only held at bay by her courageous, diligent young
arm.
Of course, it was not for Mrs. Hedderwick to say the laird nay. It was
for her to thank him from a lowly, thankful heart for not merely doing
justly by her daughter, but for being minded to endow her with his
favour and with her share of his portion of the world’s goods, which
many people would reckon far beyond her deserts.
A glimpse of Balcairnie and the horses as they walked up and down the
road, which the old woman saw through the bole of a window at the
head of her bed, completed the dazzling of any sense Mrs. Hedderwick
possessed. She described the scene afterwards as too splendid for this
world--like a verse of the Bible, or a line of an ‘auld ballant.’
It was as when ‘Abraham’s servant baud the lassie munt and ride wi’
him to be the wife of his maister’s son. To be sure the horses were
camels then, whatever the odds. It was as when the auld knicht crossed
the sea to bring the king o’ Norrowa’s dochter ower the faem to be
his queen, and then the nags were boats--whilk it was a mercy they
were not here, lest the cobbles had coupet wi’ her Peggy among the
prood waves, as gude Sir Patrick Spens’s ship sank down, in forty
fathoms deep. Whatever, it was a maist fine ferlie for Drumsheugh to
come wooing and speering for her dochter at a puir body like her,
and for Balcairnie--with whose mither, worthy woman, she hersel had
been a servant lass for three year afore she and Simon Hedderwick
yoked thegither--to sit or stand at her door wi’ the beasts in braid
daylicht, in the sicht of the whole Cotton, as gin she were the leddy
and Balcairnie the serving-man.’
The entire arrangements were agreed on that evening, the laird chalking
them out very much according to his vagrant fancy, Peggy and her
mother assenting with meek, swelling hearts, simply entering a humble
protest and venturing on a mild amendment when he suggested a clean
impossibility. It would be far pleasanter as well as safer, since the
marriage was not to be made public immediately, for the affair to take
place from home. Peggy had a cousin--a decent man--a cow-keeper near
Edinburgh. She could go on a visit to his wife. Such a visit would be
made worth the couple’s while; in fact, they were likely to be filled
with importance at the part they were called on to play. Drumsheugh
and Balcairnie could easily take a ride to town treading on Peggy’s
heels early one fine morning, or late one propitious evening; Peggy,
with her cousins to bear her company, and the laird, with Balcairnie
as his supporter, would join in a stroll to look at the shop windows
or admire the big houses, until they reached the particular house the
laird spoke of as the Temple of Hymen, to the mystified ears hanging
on his words. There Peggy and he would take the half-merk together in
the most popular mode. They would acknowledge themselves man and wife,
and sign the lines before some queer sort of mass-John and a notary, as
well as before Peggy’s cousins and Balcairnie; and the knot would be
so securely tied that only death could sever it. Peggy would come back
to her mother and the Cotton, and he would return to his mother and
Drumsheugh. Nobody need be any wiser till the couple chose to proclaim
what had been accomplished, when he should be at liberty to put his
wife into his mother’s seat. But he felt sure his Peggy would not
refuse to bide a wee for her honours, and would not weary while she had
his love and care. And Mrs. Hedderwick would not seek to come between
the pair when they were man and wife.
Peggy would not weary, would not refuse to wait a hundred years--always
supposing she lived a century and retained Drumsheugh’s unshaken love
and faith while the years lasted. Was she to dictate terms and exact
favours which were far beyond her original estate? She would be well
off if Drumsheugh owned her for his wife, though it were but with his
dying breath. As for Luckie Hedderwick, she would no more interfere
with the laird’s rights when he had established them, than she would
challenge the prerogative of the King.
It all came to pass as Drumsheugh had ordained it. In an irregular
and yet in a deliberate, formal manner, quite legal according to the
liberal law of Scotland, and with ancient custom to justify the act,
by no mock marriage, but by a binding rite, as both knew, Jamie Ramsay
wedded Peggy Hedderwick. No exposure followed the event, though it
did not go unattended by vague suspicions and fitful rumours. Such
marriages were not so unheard of as to prevent the signs of their
recurrence from being quickly noted and eagerly caught up.
But as the Lady of Drumsheugh did not see fit to cause an
investigation, to cross-question her son, or to go out of her way to
assail and harass Peggy; as Peggy’s mother in her box-bed did not stir
in the matter by proxy; as it was the old daffing intercourse between
the laird and the lass, which was openly resumed, and went on much as
formerly to hoodwink the public, what was everybody’s business proved
nobody’s business. Nothing was said or done to clear up the mystery as
to the precise terms on which the Laird of Drumsheugh stood with the
lass of low degree.
FOOTNOTES:
[3]
He’s low down, he’s in the broom,
That’s waiting for me.
CHAPTER III.
PEGGY’S WELCOME HOME.
Balcairnie could have spoken out and enlightened the neighbourhood, but
he did not. Affectionately attached as he was both to Drumsheugh and
Peggy, he had not as yet any strong temptation to speak out and shame
the Devil, while delivering his victims. Granted that the position
was most awkward and indefensible, it had not become so untenable as
to shock and scare a man like Balcairnie--not wholly unaccustomed to
such difficult conditions--into breaking his word and exposing the
offenders, with whom he had been ‘art and part,’ for the good of one or
both.
It was hardly possible that Drumsheugh’s passion would remain at
its first white heat. It was too probable that it might pass into
weariness, even disgust, where the poor girl he had married was
concerned. True, there had been no such fundamental disparity between
the two as may be imagined. Still, Drumsheugh was a man with a man’s
power of varying his life. He could not rid himself of his blue blood
and his lairdship. The likelihood was that the longer he lived their
claims on him would increase and intensify, till what he had slighted
in his youth might, in inverse proportion, become a heavy chain on
his mature years. He might come to clutch his hereditary advantages
and brandish them in a surly fashion in the face of poor Peggy, who
not only lacked such on her own account, but would to a considerable
extent qualify and damage her husband’s privileges. The shallowness
of the laird’s nature, in the middle of its single-heartedness and
transparency, would tend to this result.
In the meantime Peggy, arrested and isolated by her own deed, instead
of moving on and becoming transplanted, would stand still or retrograde
in her false suspended position. Half envied, half doubted, and blamed
by her former equals, wholly distrusted and shunned by those who were
still her social superiors, her heart would grow sick under the painful
ordeal, her gentle, modest nature wax bold and defiant. The very
appearance of evil--which is to be avoided in its turn--would work much
of the harm of the evil itself.
But long before this deplorable conclusion was reached, within three or
four months of the unceremonious marriage, while the laird was still
the fond bridegroom and Peggy the tender bride, an accident happened
which brought matters to an unexpected crisis.
One windy October afternoon the laird had been helping to take down
the first new stack to be thrashed or flailed out from the stack-yard
of the home-farm, when by some chance he missed his footing, fell
headlong from the stack-head among the horses’ feet below, and received
a kick in the chest from one of the startled horses. He was taken up
insensible and carried to the mansion-house. The misadventure created a
lively sensation, and the news gathered gravity and tragic horror as it
spread abroad.
It was said that Drumsheugh was dead, that he had been vomiting blood,
that he had never spoken, that he had cried loudly for Peggy Hedderwick
to bid her a last farewell. In the conflicting testimony one serious
bit of evidence was certain. Dr. Forsyth had been summoned post-haste
from Craigie. Balcairnie had been seen riding like a madman from
his biggest potatoe field, in which the gatherers had been toiling
anxiously all day, for frost was in the air, and if the potatoes were
not ‘pitted’ in time there would be havock among the earth-apples.
It was almost night-fall before the calamitous tidings got Peggy’s
length. They were thrown in at the half-open door of the cottage in
which she and her mother dwelt, by an ill-conditioned drunken brute of
a carter, who was driving by, and had caught a glimpse of the girl as
she moved about between the dim gloaming without and the fire-light
within. In the spirit of mischief and strange pleasure in inflicting
pain which belongs to very small, low, and morbidly hostile natures,
just as the man in other circumstances might have pelted her with a
snow-ball in which lay lodged a cruelly sharp stone; so he called
out to her in a bullying, inhumanly indifferent tone, ‘Hey! Peggy
Hedderwick, what are you doing there? Do you ken your fine laird’s
felled? He’s met his dead in the corn-yard of Drumsheugh an hour or
twa syne.’
Peggy gave a piteous, plaintive cry, like that of a wounded hare--the
most helpless, timid creature in its misery; but she did not sink down
or faint away, and the next moment she was beginning to make nervous
preparations to set forth for the scene of the disaster. She would
not listen to her startled mother, imploring, in the mingled terror
and weakness of age, for the explanations and reassurances there was
nobody to afford. The informant had driven off after launching his
thunderbolt, and the occupants of the neighbouring cottages were still
about in the potatoe fields. ‘I maun gang to him at aince,’ Peggy
kept muttering as she groped instinctively in the waning light for a
shawl to fling over her head--not so much as a shelter from the bitter
blast which had been scouring along the floor and causing her to
spin by the warm hearth-side, as with a lingering sense of what was
womanly and fitting, because it would not be wiselike in a lass to go
abroad at such a season without a screen from inquisitive eyes. ‘He
wouldna forbid me ony mair. He’s my man. Oh! Jamie, Jamie, if you’re
felled outricht, and there is nocht left for me to do for you, but
to streek you and dress you in your dead-claes, it is for your puir
lassie’s--your wife’s hand, to steek your een and kame your hair for
the last time. I dinna mind your leddy-mither now; I’m nearer to you
than she is, and I’ll daur her to do her worst the nicht--as if the
worst were not come already, gin my Jamie be felled dead! Wae’s me!
wae’s me! And it was but this mornin’, and no a terrible lifetime syne,
that he clasped and kissed me at parting.’
Peggy did not even notice to lift off the gridle on which cakes were
toasting. She who had been reared in the most frugal habits was
abandoning the good oaten bread which must ‘scouther’ unheeded. The
room was full of the sharp, searching smell of scorched oatmeal, at
which every mouse in the farthest recesses of its hole in the clay
biggin’ was snuffing with relish as at the potent odour of toasted
cheese.
Luckie was feebly protesting and whimpering over the waste, when Peggy
unheeding stepped across the threshold and ran right against Balcairnie
in the act of entering.
‘Balcairnie, is the tale true? Is he living or dead? For the love o’
Heaven, speak,’ gasped Peggy, clasping the friendly arm and making as
if she would fall on her knees at the yeoman’s feet, treating him like
the arbiter of fate.
‘Oh! Balcairnie, sir, will you stop her--she winna mind me--frae goin’
on a fule’s errand?’ implored Luckie from her bed, wiping her bleared
eyes with a blue checked linen handkerchief; ‘and gin you will forgie
me for the liberty, will you turn the cakes and tak’ them aff, or do
something to hinder sic a wicket throwing awa’ o’ gude victuals and me
no able to steer a finger.’
‘Canny, canny,’ remonstrated the doubly-assailed Balcairnie. ‘Yes,
Peggy, he’s livin’ and life-like in spite of this mischanter, thank
his Maker and yours and mine--no me. Oo, ay, gudewife, I’ll see to
the cakes. Mony a time I had a hand--not always a helping hand--in
your bakings--do you mind? When you were my puir mither’s douce lass
and I was a mischievious deil o’ a laddie birslin’ peas among your
bannocks.--Peggy, have I given you time to draw breath? If so, you maun
come wi’ me this minute. I’m sent to fetch you: no by Drumsheugh alone,
by his mither the Leddy: “Go and bring Peggy Hedderwick here,” were her
words, and you maun haste ye to do her bidding.’
But Peggy hung back. The reaction had come. She was relieved from her
depth of despair and extremity of fear for Drumsheugh’s life. Her old
childish dread of the Lady and reluctance to encounter her reproaches
and scorn revived in full force. ‘Oh, Balcairnie, I canna gang,’ she
protested incoherently, twisting her fingers. ‘Does he want me? What
has she sent for me to do to me?’
‘To gie you your paiks (whips),’ Balcairnie, who was somewhat of a
humourist in his way, could not resist saying dryly, taking off the
abject fright of poor Peggy. But the kind fellow relented the next
moment. ‘If so, Drumsheugh and me had need to come in for muckle
heavier skelps, as the Leddy is a just woman, who has a name for
uprightness, and has ta’en pride in the fact all her days. Na, Peggy,
dinna be a cawf,’ he admonished her with great friendliness though
little ceremony. ‘You maunna stand in your ain licht. You must tak’
the wind when it blaws in your barn door. Forbye you maun obey your
gude mither and your man, like a gude bairn. Drumsheugh cried for you
as soon as he cam’ to himself, and vowed he but to see you richted, or
it’s like his mither the Leddy micht not have minded your existence or
mentioned your name. And he does want you, lass, for his breast has
gotten a bit stave in from that ugly brute’s cloot; he’s lying groaning
and peching yonder, though the doctor promises to put him richt in a
wheen weeks or months.’
Thus urged and alarmed anew, Peggy prepared to go home to Drumsheugh
a weeping, downcast bride with a troubled home-coming--altogether
different from the happy woman making the triumphant, if late, entrance
on her honours which she and her laird had confidently pictured to
themselves.
Balcairnie would not suffer Peggy to tarry for any change of dress.
He had spoken the truth and he was fain to hope the best, but he was
by no means so sure as he tried to pretend of the laird’s ultimate
recovery, or even of his long surviving the bad injury he had received.
And when Peggy detected some gleam of this dire uncertainty in the mind
of his friend where her husband’s fate was in question, she had no more
heart to put on her best clothes and seek humbly to make as favourable
an impression as could be hoped for, on the mind of the Lady.
Indeed, Mrs. Ramsay had often enough seen Peggy before, and till lately
had been in the habit of speaking to her in a gracious condescending
way, becoming in a laird’s mother, when the girl worked in the fields,
or carried in her yarn and eggs to the market at Craigie. But that
notice and these salutations had been bestowed on Peggy Hedderwick, a
cotter lass. It was Peggy Ramsay, the Lady’s son’s wife by a lawful
though summary marriage, who in other circumstances might have been
tremblingly desirous to prepossess the dowager-lady in the younger
woman’s favour.
As it was, Peggy could but take down from their respective ‘cleeks’ her
ordinary duffle cloak and rustic straw bonnet as the articles of dress
which came readily to her hand, and tie their strings in such desperate
speed and confusion that they at once fell into ‘run knots,’ which must
be cut or torn asunder before she could be freed from their encumbrance
when she arrived at Drumsheugh.
‘God bless you, my lass, gin this be fare-you-weel,’ her mother’s
quavering voice said wistfully, and Peggy minded so far as to turn
quickly before quitting the room and bend over the prostrate figure
with a half-choked reply, ‘Mither, Merrin will be in next door or I’m
weel gane, gin you gie a chap she’ll look ben and see to you. If I
dinna come back the nicht, I’ll send ower the first thing the morn,
and I’ll never forget you, mither, only I can think o’ naething but him
the nicht.’
Peggy had no other idea than that she would trudge on foot all the way
through the cold, darkness and storm, too thankful to have Balcairnie’s
escort to Drumsheugh. But he had made a more considerate arrangement,
though his care for Peggy had not impelled him to so bold a measure as
ordering out the Drumsheugh coach to fulfil the lady’s commission and
for Peggy’s benefit. When it came to that, he had never dreamt of such
a step. Peggy and the family coach--the chief symbol of the country
gentry’s rank and state, were still far apart even in Balcairnie’s
loyal eyes. If Peggy should ever arrive at ordering out the Drumsheugh
coach, and driving in it at her pleasure, as another young Mrs. Ramsay
might have done in the sense of an unquestionable right, it could
only be after a considerable apprenticeship still to sufferance and
dependence on the part of the low-born wife.
Balcairnie had merely brought his horse, with a pillion fastened to the
saddle. There was no ‘louping-on-stane’ at the cot-house door. Nobody
except the laird had been in the habit of mounting and dismounting
there, any more than of driving up in a coach with horses taken from
the plough. But the example of Katherine Janfarie’s lover, though it
had not yet been sung in more than the rough border ballad, could very
well be followed in one respect--
He’s mounted her hie behind himsel’,
At her kinsmen speer’d nae leave.
Balcairnie was far too true, generous, and reverent, with too
well-balanced a mind in his yeoman estate, to find a further analogy
in the situation. But it was on the cards that he should have his
thoughts, as he rode on, stooping forward to see and guide his horse
in the gathering night and tempest on the rough road, with the feeble
woman’s arms clinging to him. For Peggy became forced, in order to
keep her seat, to cling tenaciously to the other rider, and let her
drooping head rest on his friendly shoulder, as she shook and quivered
with the sobs into which she broke out now and then in her distraction
and dismay, and as she was further flung here and there by the hard
trot over the stones and through the holes, in a painful, perilous mode
of locomotion to which she had been totally unaccustomed. Did he ask
himself was it thus that Peggy would have held by him and depended on
him utterly, had that vision which he was supposed to have entertained
for a fleeting moment come to pass long ago--had she been for more than
a year now the goodwife of Balcairnie, and had he been taking her home
as a common event from kirk, or market, or friendly visit in scenes
where she had already established her claim to be treated like the best
of the company? Faithful as he was to the laird no less than to Peggy,
Balcairnie knew that in such a case it would have been infinitely
better for Peggy, whatever it might have been for himself.
Other thoughts and associations thronged thickly on the young couple as
they rode on in their excitement and suspense. The first snow of the
season began to fall blindingly and blow strongly in their bent faces,
before they passed between the two battered pillars originally crowned
with stone balls, one of which had fallen down and been suffered to
lie, like a decapitated head, at the side of the entrance to the
avenue. By some means the stone ball had become split in two and could
not be replaced on its site. In this condition the two halves always
reminded Balcairnie, who was tolerably familiar with Scotch history,
though it was the only history he had ever read, of that unlucky
De Bohun, Earl of Essex, whose head good King Robert clove with his
battle-axe, just to give the blustering champion of England his due,
and as an earnest of the feats the warlike monarch was to perform that
day on the field of Bannockburn.
Balcairnie sought to cheer Peggy by claiming the snow as a good omen;
she was ‘ganging a white gate,’ which, as everybody knew, boded high
prosperity to a bride. But, in spite of themselves, another and very
different picture arose in their minds. It was that which in song
and legend has formed the burden of many a local tragedy. The scene
is familiar to all when the betrayed and ruined woman wanders in her
despair to her cruel lover’s door, while the ‘whuddering blast’ pierces
her to the marrow, and the deadly white and chill snow threatens to
prove her winding-sheet. She knocks, and implores piteously in vain
for admission and shelter. ‘Oh, ope, Lord Gregory, ope the door!’ cries
the sobbing, wailing voice, fast sinking into everlasting silence.
Balcairnie and Peggy were now riding down the avenue of firs, sombre
in the height of summer, with their black canopies blacker than ever
under their powdering of white, while the bare stems were ‘swirled’
by the wind in the wildest, dreariest manner. The ruin of the old
tower was faintly visible. Shaken as it was, with its loose stones
rattling in the hurlyburly, it seemed as if it might fall and crush
Peggy in punishment of her heinous sin against the ancient dignity of
Drumsheugh, and her audacious intrusion within its precincts.
The front of the house was lit up with lights stationary in ordinarily
obscured windows, or flitting up and down staircases, showing that
something out of the common had happened, and that the whole household
was roused and restless.
At the moment when the clatter of Balcairnie’s horse’s hoofs might
be heard, the hall-door was suddenly thrown open, showing what, by
contrast with the darkness without, looked a blaze of light within. A
group of servants was in the glare, but still more prominently in front
of them stood the Lady in her black mode gown, tippet, and mittens,
with her lace lappets fluttering in the night-wind as they framed a
high-nosed, high-browed face--the face of a born ruler.
Peggy set her teeth to keep back a scream of dismay, while Balcairnie
lept down quickly and lifted his companion, ready to fall in a heap on
the ground, from his horse.
Was the Lady come out to kill her on the spot by telling her Drumsheugh
was gone, and there was no longer a place for his poor Peggy in the
house that had ceased with his passing breath to be his dwelling? When
it came to that, Peggy thought in her despair, there was no place for
her on the face of that earth where her young lover walked no longer.
Was the Lady come out to spurn Peggy in the sight of the powdered
flunkeys and flouting waiting-maids, and still-maids for whom Peggy,
cotter lass as she was, had been wont, in her greater independence
and simpler sufficiency for her few needs, to entertain a mild,
somewhat inconsequent scorn? At the same time, in her perturbation, she
indulged in extravagant hyperbole, for there was only one miserable
flunkey--guiltless of powder, who was also coachman and gardener,
and one ancient waiting-maid, who united the offices of abigail and
housekeeper, at Drumsheugh.
As Peggy’s tottering feet touched the ground a firm foot stepped up to
her, a steady hand was laid upon her to hold her up, a voice addressed
her in clear, unfaltering accents, which, though they were imperious,
were far from unkind. ‘Come away, my dear. Come in where it is your
right to be in your man’s house and by your man’s side. If I had been
told, for certain, four months since what I’ve been told to-day, you
should not have waited and been kept so long out of your own. Fie!’
exclaimed the lady in a little heat, bending her brows, ‘it was not fit
that Drumsheugh’s wife should shaw neeps and sell yarn, whatever might
be free to his Joe. But we’ll say no more of that. I ken it was not
you who were the most to blame, my bonnie Peggy. It was all the fault
of these two foolish loons, Drumsheugh and Balcairnie. But we cannot
wyte the one, can we? when he is lying sick and sorry, and we may come
to forgive the second in time, for the service he has rendered us this
night. Cheer up, Peggy, the doctor says Jamie will pull through, and
be as braw a man as ever yet.’[4]
FOOTNOTES:
[4] The author cannot refrain from recording that the magnanimous
reception which the Lady of Drumsheugh is represented as according to
her son’s low-born, privately married wife, was, in fact, given in
similar circumstances by the widow and mother of an old Fife laird
to her son’s sorely daunted, humble bride. A very different fate
was hers from that of the Portuguese Inez and the German Agnes. The
sagacious Scotch mother, finding that the losing game was about to
be taken out of her hands, by what she did not hesitate to regard as
an interposition of Providence in the illness of the laird, made her
concession frankly and handsomely. Stout Drumsheugh and Balcairnie and
bonnie Peggy are more than mere shadows, as the reader could not fail
to see but for what is lacking in the skill of their chronicler.
CHAPTER IV.
THE LONG DAYS THAT FOLLOWED
Drumsheugh recovered gradually from the consequences of his fall; but
he had a long and dangerous illness, during which there was much to
subdue any human being to whom he was first and dearest.
Peggy proved herself a harmless, guileless, fond and faithful creature.
She was meek in her exaltation, which, to begin with, consisted mainly
of the liberty to nurse day and night a young man who had been too
much spoilt by rude health, an active life, and the getting of his own
way, though it had not necessarily been a base--not even a mean and
heartless way--to come out strong as a patient, considerate invalid.
The old lady opened her eyes more and more to the truth, and did not
repent of her wise generosity. She was won so far as to take Peggy
into a degree of favour on her own account. Still, there could not
fail to be an amount of reaction here also. Mrs. Ramsay made the best
of Peggy: she brought herself to think that the laird’s mother might
be the most suitable person to train the laird’s wife and to mould her
in the course of years into the future Lady as well as mistress of
Drumsheugh. She, the present Lady, might do it and get over the contact
with all Peggy’s innumerable rusticities and gaucheries, not merely
out of unselfish regard for her son, but because of some grains of
tenderness already springing up, whether she would or not, in her by no
means unmotherly heart, for her daughter. Poor little Peggy Hedderwick
that was, had been thrust on an undesirable eminence, which brought
her in unsuitable rivalry--not with one alone, but with every former
aggrieved Lady of Drumsheugh; yet Peggy deferred so sincerely to Mrs.
Ramsay in the smallest particular, and looked up to her from such a
lowly depth of respect that was almost awe, and of gratitude which in
its intensity was well-nigh anguish, that the worst part of the offence
became cancelled.
But when all was said and done, it galled and fretted Mrs. Ramsay’s
proud, punctilious nature to see Peggy scared and ashamed, floundering
and bungling hugely and grotesquely whenever she could not avoid
taking the place which had been vacated to her. For the old lady did
nothing by halves. The head of the dinner-table, the central seat
on the principal settee in the drawing-room, the top of the front
gallery ‘bucht’ in Craigture Kirk, the front seat of that coach which
Balcairnie had not caused to be driven to the Cotton to bring Peggy
home, the ordering of the servants, the receiving of the guests--all
belonged now to Peggy’s duties and privileges. She might discharge
them very unworthily, but she might not refuse to accept them; and no
third person who had Peggy’s interest at heart might decline them for
her or appropriate them in order to save her from suffering. This was
not to be done for young Mrs. Ramsay’s own sake, to avoid injuring her
fatally, since if any rash, short-sighted person were to interfere
and adopt this course, worse would be sure to come of it, and for the
sake of shielding her present the poor young woman’s future would be
irretrievably ruined.
No, as Peggy had brewed she must drink--as she had aspired, and by
what would universally be held a wonderful stroke of good fortune,
gained her aspirations, she must consent to rise to them, and fit
herself for a new sphere. She must learn to live up to the blue china
of a hundred years ago. She must agree to learn the lessons of her
womanhood, with whatever toil and torture; she must struggle upwards
against overwhelming obstacles and crushing defeats; she must resign in
exchange for her dearly bought success, all the peace, ease, and happy
equality of her hardest day’s work as a labouring woman.
There were others besides Peggy who had to endure mental pain when
Drumsheugh was sufficiently recovered to quit the retirement of
his rooms and appear even in the small publicity of family life.
At first, though the news had gone abroad at once, as the Lady had
intended it should, since the marriage was confessed and could never
be controverted, that Peggy Hedderwick had been acknowledged in the
presence of the household of Drumsheugh, and received by the mother of
the laird, as Jamie Ramsay’s wife, there were few witnesses of the
cotter’s girl’s lack of qualifications for her dignities. Only the
doctor and the minister and Drumsheugh’s confidant, Balcairnie, besides
Mrs. Ramsay and Peggy, and the elder servants, entered the sick room.
These spectators were bound in honour to keep their own counsel on the
subject of Peggy’s mistakes and eccentricities.
Besides, when a man lies hovering between life and that death which
ends all social distinctions, grades and rank, with their different
standards and clashing practices, dwindle into vagueness and unreality.
Love may be as strong as death, and so capable of doing battle with the
last enemy; but there is a tendency, even in the noblest antecedents,
the best breeding, and the most polished manners, to collapse before
the primitive foe with his rude directness of dealing. It hardly
signified in these circumstances whether Peggy were a laird’s or a
hind’s daughter, though it did matter still that she was Drumsheugh’s
first and last love, that it was to her his eye turned in every wrestle
with the assailant, that her voice could soothe or rouse him when
not even his mother’s tones could penetrate through the turmoil of
unaccustomed torture, fever, and weakness under which his senses were
reeling.
But everything became different when the first stage was over, and
Drumsheugh had returned in a state of convalescence to the family
sitting-room, with no further trace of having lingered on the brink
of the grave than was to be found in that peculiar unreasonable
‘fractiousness’ or crossness, which in itself caused Peggy to shed
salt tears half a dozen times a day, as if she had been the most to be
pitied instead of the most to be envied of low-born lasses. The fact
was she was incurably gentle and tender-hearted, and had neither the
wit to understand nor the spirit to withstand what was merely a passing
trouble not worth the reckoning, the natural result of the previous
disaster, for which the victim, in his inexperience, was not altogether
to blame. Not that Peggy found fault with her laird. It was simply
over her own presumption and demerits, and because she could no longer
‘please him,’ that she grew periodically hopeless.
The servants felt the seal set on their powers of observation,
criticism and ridicule--and here and there their secret spitefulness,
so far withdrawn. Other spies began to drop in: neighbours who, under
the plea of inquiring for Drumsheugh, came to take a look and a laugh
at bonnie Peggy on her promotion. When they were formally introduced to
her as young Mrs. Ramsay they would, in their own minds and in the same
breath, praise Drumsheugh’s taste for beauty, and censure his want of
sense and worldly wisdom in committing so gross a _mésalliance_. They
would seriously debate with themselves whether it would be fit for
their wives and daughters to call on Peggy, and make her acquaintance
as one of themselves, till the lass could bear herself more like a
gentlewoman and less like a field-worker. The old lady had taken care
to have Peggy dressed as became her new station; but of what use was it
when Peggy huddled away her hands in her black silk apron, just as she
had hidden them in her linen ‘brat,’ and bobbed a curtsey, ‘looting’
till she caught her foot in her train, tearing the lace from her skirt,
and threatening to come down with violence on her own drawing-room
floor.
No, the Lady could not stand the first tug of the social struggle,
above all as Drumsheugh had been ordered away from home to avoid
the cold spring winds till his chest should be stronger. He was
actually going to take a voyage either to Gibraltar or Madeira--great
expeditions in those days--promising such adventures and risks of being
chased and taken prisoner by foreign privateers, that it quite raised
the laird’s spirits to think of them.
Nobody proposed that Peggy should accompany her husband. It would have
doubled the considerable expense of the journey, while the laird was
but a poor man for his station. Besides, to tell the truth, Peggy,
with all her sweetness and humility, would have been of very little
use, rather a good deal of an incumbrance, as a travelling companion.
She had been rendered just then still more _distrait_ and lost by the
sudden death of her own mother, poor Luckie Hedderwick, which happened
not long after Peggy had been transferred to Drumsheugh. The melancholy
event overwhelmed Peggy with sorrow to an extent which the laird and
his mother were inclined to consider unreasonable. They did not mean to
be unkind, but it was difficult for them, after their first sympathy
with Peggy in her grievous shock and the solemnity of the occasion had
worn away, to regard the widow’s death otherwise than as a release to
more than herself, an opportune end to one of the most trying of the
awkward complications involved in the marriage. It was still harder
to be quite patient with Peggy for having so little judgment in her
lamentations for my ‘mither’ as not to recognise the compensations
in the trial, and to remain the next thing to inconsolable--letting
herself get more stupid and shyer than ever in her affliction, when the
sole foundation for it was the death of a ‘frail,’ bed-ridden woman
well up in years and laden with infirmities, so that she had become
betimes a burden both to herself and others. She could not have been
long spared to her friends in the nature of things. Peggy could not
have seen much more of her mother in the circumstances. If Luckie had
not happily been taken away at a stroke, her daughter could not have
been permitted to leave her husband’s house to wait upon her mother
without signal incongruity and a host of serious objections. Peggy
ought to be thankful that she had escaped these divided duties, and
to rest content with having been a good daughter to her mother when
the girl still belonged to the old woman, before Peggy had married far
above her in rank, and thus raised heavy barriers between the pair.
The poor soul herself had been reasonable. She had been tolerably
reconciled to what was inevitable, while she had cherished the utmost
pride and pleasure in her daughter’s lot. Peggy had been permitted to
gladden her mother’s heart in this respect: she ought to remember that
no woman, whether old or young, could have everything in this world.
As Peggy, with all her submission, could not see this side of the
question for the present--on the contrary, kept foolishly reproaching
herself and mourning her loss, it would be better on the whole that
she should be left to herself--under good guidance, however,--for a
time, to recover from the blow she had received and come round to a
more cheerful and becoming frame of mind. The old lady would take the
opportunity of her son’s going South to accompany him as far as London,
from which he was to sail. She, too, would be better for a complete
change of scene and interests. She would pay the second visit of her
life to the English metropolis, and renew a friendship with some old
Scotch families that had removed to England, the members of which she
had not seen since they were all school-girls together.
The Lady would have liked to supply her place efficiently. She was
really a fine woman and proved more thoughtfully careful of her son’s
wife in the absence of both mother and son than he showed himself. In
his lightness of heart and simple philosophy he never doubted that
Peggy would do quite well if she did not weary too much for him. But
he would write and tell her how strong he was growing, that he did
not forget her, and would be home to her again ‘belyve.’ She, on her
part, must exert herself, write and let him know all about the house
and garden, the cows and the cocks and hens; while Balcairnie would
look after the horses and cattle, manage the cropping, and the buying
and selling in the market for him, and would keep him informed on the
business of the farm which was beyond a woman’s comprehension. She must
go out and recover her roses which she had lost, good lass! in his
sick-room, for he meant to return as brown as sea air and a foreign sun
would tan and burn him.
Mrs. Ramsay would have fain done more for Peggy. She would have
provided her with a wonderful ally. It was not that the old lady did
not think of it or wish it strenuously that she made no motion in
this direction. It was because she was conscious that in her former
ambition for her son and engrossment with what she had reckoned his
welfare, she had wronged this ally, and so did not have it in her power
to ask a great favour from the injured person.
As the next best thing, the Lady repeatedly and earnestly recommended
Peggy to the good officies of Cunnings,[5] Mrs. Ramsay’s old maid
and housekeeper, an excellent servant, devoted to the family, honest
enough to be trusted with untold gold, and having but one failing to
be watched and weighed against so many virtues. True-hearted, kind
Cunnings, powerful in her worth, invulnerable on every other point, was
‘too fond of a drappie’--to put her weakness in the euphemistic words
in which it was for the most part respectfully and tenderly veiled.
She could not look on the wine when it was red, or more correctly, on
whisky when it was clear and colourless as the water at a well-eye, or
just tinged with the suspicion of amber which belongs to a mountain
stream flowing over a bed of peat, without danger of forgetting her
obligations and falling lamentably from her honourable reputation.
But except on rare and unhappy occasions, Mrs. Ramsay’s strong hand
had always been able to keep Cunnings from stumbling into the snare.
And the Lady argued that Peggy could take care of the keys of the
cellar and side-board if she could do nothing else, and that having
been solemnly warned of Cunnings’ weakness, she would not be so silly
and unprincipled as to expose her servant to temptation. Poor fallible
Cunnings, on her part, was incapable, in spite of the flaw in her
perfect integrity, of laying snares to induce Peggy to leave the keys
about, or abandon them altogether.
Mrs. Ramsay then provided Peggy with a maid of her own; a sort of
humble companion, to lighten the tedium when she should be left alone,
and to prevent her seeking undesirable associates elsewhere. The person
selected was a distant cousin of Peggy’s, five or six years older, who
had been in good service, and knew and could teach young Mrs. Ramsay
many things of which she was profoundly ignorant. In this way Jenny
Hedderwick would break the fallow ground of Peggy’s mind and pave the
way for the Lady’s more thorough and farther-reaching cultivation of
the soil.
It may sound strange to the modern reader that any relative of Peggy’s
should be received as a domestic at Drumsheugh. But such arrangements,
of doubtful propriety as they seem to us, were not at all uncommon
in those single-hearted, downright days, when the world accepted a
situation frankly and made the best of it all round. In the case of
_més alliances_ like the laird’s and sudden elevations in rank like
Peggy’s, far nearer and less well endowed relatives than Jenny were
often received as a matter of course into the household that they might
profit in their degree and in their turn by the promotion of one of
their kindred. A mother would come as a nurse or a cook, a brother as a
groom or a gamekeeper, to the establishment, over which another member
of the family ruled as master or mistress. The arrangement could not
have worked very smoothly one would think. There must have been rough
and tough tugs and hitches; but there were inequalities everywhere, and
the seamy side was then unhesitatingly exposed in all circumstances.
The one advantage which we have lost, was still in full force; defects
and obligations were freely acknowledged, not scrupulously concealed,
while plain speaking flourished to an extent which we can hardly
conceive in these self-conscious and artificial days. Even Cunnings,
old and attached retainer as she was, with a grave defect in her
character which ought to have taught her humility, treated Mrs. Ramsay,
senior, to her unvarnished opinion on many points in a manner that
would not be ventured on or suffered in the case of our polished,
accomplished servants--who are also far removed from us.
Indeed, another relative of Peggy’s, with immeasurably smaller
qualifications than Jenny could boast, had already been put on the
Drumsheugh staff. Peggy had a second cousin, called Johnnie Fuggie, or
Foggo, who was a jobbing gardener by trade. The old gardener, coachman,
and general serving-man at Drumsheugh had become fairly superannuated
and incapable even of the pretence of performing his duties. Whereupon
Johnnie, a foolish, conceited fellow of mature years, not hindered by
any modest doubt of his abilities, or deterred by the least delicate
consideration for the difficulties of Peggy’s position, applied for the
honourable post, and actually urged as a strong title to it the fact
of his relationship to the young Lady of Drumsheugh. ‘The laird can
never ha’e the face to refuse me the place, when he has marriet my ain
uncle’s dochter’s dochter. It would be a fell thing if young Mistress
Ramsay were not to hand out a helping hand and lend a lift to her ain
flesh and blude. Wha but her cuzin should be her gairner and fut-man
and a’? Wha will care for Drumsheugh gairden and the coach and my Leddy
hersel as he will? Sowl! man, he has his ain share in them, and pride
in them, because o’ the kinship!’
Thus boldly urged by Johnnie Fuggie and his emissaries, who had easily
procured access to her, Peggy had made her first ignorant, humble
petition to her easy-minded, good-natured husband, who answered without
thinking twice on the subject, ‘Oh, aye, Peggy, if you like. The place
is promised to no other that I know of. Let Johnnie succeed to poor
old Robbie Red-Lugs, but bid him mind the cauliflowers and codlins, and
the horses’ knees, or I’ll break his head for him the first time I’m
across the door.’
The Lady was not so content with this hasty appointment, which had been
none of her contriving, but she thought if it did not work well, it
could be summarily set aside when she and her son came back.
So Peggy was left--not in solitary state, but doubly fenced with
kindred at Drumsheugh after the deplorable day when she hung on her
husband’s neck at parting, and saw him and his mother drive away down
the fir-tree avenue, with the most miserable forebodings that she would
never see Jamie Ramsay in the flesh again.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] Scotticè for Cunningham.
CHAPTER V.
THE REIGN OF MISRULE.
Apart from Peggy’s despair at the separation from her husband,
following so close on the death of her mother, the young wife felt
as pleased as she could feel that she was to have her cousin Jenny
for her helper and counsellor. Peggy had always looked up to Jenny,
putting her under a different classification from that bestowed on
ordinary servants. Peggy knew how clever and diligent her older,
better-instructed kinswoman had proved herself. It had been entirely
by her own laudable exertions that she had attained a higher standing,
from which she had always been reasonably condescending and indulgent
to her little cousin.
The tables were turned now, but it never entered Peggy’s head to be
anything save highly gratified that she could be of use to Jenny, while
Peggy was grateful in proportion for the services which she was sure
Jenny would render her. Jenny, who had lived as an upper servant among
ladies, would show Peggy how to behave like a lady, so that she might
no longer annoy the laird and affront his mother. And Jenny would speak
to the poor, yearning, mourning girl’s hungry heart of the mother whose
name had come to be a forbidden word at Drumsheugh, long before Peggy
had left off wearing her first crape. Luckie Hedderwick’s memory must
be cherished in a measure by Jenny also, since she had known the widow
well, and had even been indebted to her in her better days.
Jenny was quite of Peggy’s opinion that she ought to profit by her
cousin’s good fortune. But there the thoughts of the kinswomen diverged
widely, and ran in two distinct and opposing channels. Jenny Hedderwick
was a calculating, unscrupulous young woman, bent on making her
own--and that as quickly as might be--out of Peggy’s advantages, and of
what Johnnie Fuggie had confidently reckoned, in more senses than one,
her relations’ share in them. Johnnie was a forward fool, as obtuse
as he was intrusive, but Jenny was worse. She had viewed what was to
her Peggy’s utterly unwarrantable exaltation with indignant amazement
and disgust, while she had at the same time endeavoured to swallow her
jealous vexation, and reap all the benefit she could gain from her
cousin’s prosperity without paying any heed to what Peggy might lose in
the process.
Jenny did not go the length of hating Peggy, or even of bearing her
decided ill-will. She was not worth it in Jenny’s estimation. She was
a silly ‘coof,’ who, if one lost sight of her fair face, had not a
single claim to rise above her old allies, and was as totally unfitted
to do so as a girl could be. All the use she was for, in Jenny’s sharp,
mocking estimate, was to serve as available prey for those who had
spirit and wit to spoil the new-made lady.
In accomplishing her object Jenny would not dream of being harsh
or cruel to young Mrs. Ramsay. She would be as good to Peggy in a
half-jeering, contemptuous manner as the girl would permit. Jenny
was too astute a schemer as well as too reasonable a mortal for the
opposite course of conduct. Indeed, hers was not a harsh or cruel
nature, though she was wholly worldly and in many respects unfeeling.
At the same time, Jenny would not take the trouble or undergo the
personal mortification of keeping up much of a disguise before
Peggy--her own cousin, who had been wont to convoy Jenny and carry
her bundle for her in the elder woman’s earlier visits to the Cotton,
when Peggy had felt amply rewarded for her trudge and toil by an old
riband of Jenny’s or a handful of the ‘sweeties’ which had been her
last ‘market fare’--a silly lass, who could not hold up her head in her
own house, fill the place she had won, give orders and exact obedience
and deference from a laird himself, as Jenny would have done with a
high hand in Peggy’s place. But Peggy must ‘pinge’ like a senseless
bairn for the poor old mother well out of the way. Who was to stand on
ceremony and put herself about to maintain a great show of appearances
before such an unmitigated goose?
Accordingly, the very day after the setting out of Drumsheugh and his
mother, Jenny--a strapping-enough figure, with a foxy head and steely
eyes--proceeded to ‘rake’ through the house, up and down, backwards
and forwards, opening cupboards and turning out the contents of
drawers; taking an inventory, as it were, of what might be useful to
her, with an eye to future raids.
Peggy came upon her cousin standing on a chair, narrowly inspecting the
articles of dress put away on the shelves of Mrs. Ramsay’s wardrobe, to
which the prowler had found access by means of a key on the bunch which
she carried with her ready for action.
‘Eh, Jenny, ye mauna meddle there, nor touch a preen in this room,’
cried Peggy, in the utmost dismay. ‘There’s naething o’ mine there,
it’s a’ Mrs. Ramsay’s; this is her room.’
‘Hoot, Peggy,’ said Jenny lightly, in no manner discomposed. ‘Div ye no
ken yet a’ the rooms here are yours, and it is only by your will and
pleasure that the auld flytin’ wife gets house-room now at Drumsheugh?’
Peggy was in greater distress than before. ‘But, Jenny, you’re sair
mista’en; Mrs. Ramsay is Drumsheugh’s leddy-mither. She has the best
title to be here, and she is nae randy. She has behaved as I could
never have looked for her to behave, as no common woman would have
acted. She neither flat nor grat, but took me in as her dochter without
a word against it, though we had deceived her--Drumsheugh and me; and
she has been gude to me, and patient wi’ me. Oh, Jenny, surely I never
said a word to the contrary.’
‘I daresay no,’ said Jenny carelessly; ‘she’s your gude-mither--you’re
bund to keep her up ahint her back, whatever you may do to her face.
But that need not hinder you from taking a look at her gear when you
have the chance. It will be a’ yours in the end, for she has no other
bairn save Jamie Ramsay, unless the body play you an ill trick, and put
it past you in her wull, which is the mair reason that ye should mak’
yoursel’ acquent wi’ what there is for her to leave ahint her.’
‘No, no, Jenny,’ protested Peggy, wringing her hands; ‘come down off
that chair. I dinna want to ken what that press hauds so long as it is
no mine but hers--Mrs. Ramsay’s, to do what she likes wi’.’
Jenny paid no heed to the prohibition. ‘Look, Peggy,’ she said, pulling
out and throwing down a long, lace scarf, so that it fell over Peggy’s
head and shoulders, ‘see how you’ll set that. I’m thinking you’ll wear
that, or something like it, when you come out o’ your shell and gang
wi’ your laird to grand parties.’
But Peggy was not to be betrayed through her vanity. She snatched off
the scarf and began to fold it up quickly with trembling fingers. She
knit her smooth brows into the semblance of a frown, and set down her
foot with a desperate stamp, as an outraged worm will turn on a wanton
aggressor. ‘Do you hear me speaking to you, Jenny? Put back Mrs.
Ramsay’s things this minute? Let them alane, or I’ll ring for her maid
Cunnings.’
Jenny leapt down instantly and cleverly took the first and worst word
of accusation: ‘What do you mean, Peggy Ramsay? Am I a thief, think
ye, that ye should ca’ in Cunnings or ony other woman to catch me
for taking a look about me when I was brocht here to look after you,
madam, and see to your belongings, and put you on the richt road to
behaving like ane o’ the gentles? I can tell you it will be a long time
before you do that, Peggy, my woman, when you begin by wyting your ain
mither’s kith and kin for a cantrip, because you have said the word
and you are my leddy now, and are not to be contered. Had I ever the
name of being licht-fingered, Peggy Ramsay, when I had whole charge of
a hantle grander braws than I’m like to see at Drumsheugh? What ill
was I doing to the leddy’s claes by just giving them a bit turn and
air and proper fauld up, which is beyond Cunnings’s power now that she
is ower stiff to mount upon a chair? Has it crossed your mind what
folk would think and say gin you ca’ed in ony o’ your servants--_your
servants_--Peggy Ramsay, to stop your cuzin from looking over Mrs.
Ramsay’s wardrobe? Do you want to brand me as a thief, mem?’
‘Oh! Jenny, Jenny, how can you say sic words!’ cried Peggy, in an
agony, willing to fling herself at her cousin’s feet, and beg her
pardon a dozen times. ‘You ken that I ken you’re as honest as mysel’. I
never dreamt of evening you to sic sin and shame. It would be insulting
mysel’ and my mither and a’, as well as you! I niver, niver meant sic a
wrang!’
‘Weel, then, Peggy, you’ll better take care what you say, and think
twice afore you speak again,’ said Jenny, not so much wrathfully as
in delivering the calm warning of a deeply-injured woman. ‘I like you,
Peggy, for auld lang syne, and I’ll do my best for you in spite o’ what
has happened. But, I’m just flesh and blude after a’, and though you
ha’e marriet a laird you maunna try to ride roch shod ower my head, and
bleck my gude name!’
‘Jenny, do you still believe I would?’ implored the weeping Peggy, but
with an accent of indignant reproach in the pleading, which told Jenny
she had gone far enough.
‘Na, I hardly think it,’ Jenny said with a return to reassuring,
patronising kindness. ‘But you’re a young lassie and you’re uplifted a
bit, nae doubt. Your best friend’s advice to you would be to take tent,
and ca’ canny, and dinna lippen to your ain first thochts, till you’re
aulder and wiser and less likely to be mista’en.’
Jenny came off the undoubted conqueror in the preliminary sparring,
though she showed some wariness in pursuing her victory. She did not
again enter old Mrs. Ramsay’s private domain and rummage among her
personal possessions before Peggy. Jenny confined herself to what was
the common ground of the laird and Peggy.
Cunnings was the next person who interfered with Jenny in her little
arrangements. ‘Ye maunna shift the ornaments in the rooms,’ the old
servant said with stolid impassiveness, which might have meant anything
or nothing to Jenny, whom she caught abstracting an agate patch-box
and a pair of silver lazy tongs from the drawing-room--and a gold
and tortoise-shell snuff-box, and a shagreen case which might have
suited a pair of Moses Primrose’s gross of green spectacles, from the
dining-room. ‘Mair by token that flowered pelerine which I heard you
borrow from young Mrs. Ramsay that you micht wear it at a friend’s
house in Craigie, was sent down by smack frae Lon’on as a gift from
the laird to his leddy. It is not my place to interfere wi’ ony favour
young Mrs. Ramsay may chuse to grant, but I will tak’ it upon me as
an auld servant, weel acquent wi’ the ways of the family, to say that
the laird may no tak’ it weel from her to bestow his gift, even in the
licht o’ a len’ on anither woman. I’ll also say as a frien’ to baith,
that whatever may have been fitting eneuch aince on a time, in the
niffer o’ bunches o’ ribands and strings o’ beads and sic worthless
troke o’ lasses when you were equals, the fine pelerine, noo shuitable
for Drumsheugh’s leddy, is hardly the wear for a young woman even in
upper service like you or me, Jenny Hedderwick.’
Jenny snuffed the air with her upturned nose, and her eyes shot out
an ominous flash, but she thanked Cunnings with the greatest apparent
friendliness and respect. She had taken the accurate measure of the
older woman in her strength and weakness, for such natures as Jenny’s
seldom fail to gauge the flaws of their neighbours. Accordingly in
the week following this incident, Jenny betrayed symptoms of falling
into an ailing state of health, languished, and stood clearly in need
of the ale-saps and bread-berry, the white wine, whey possets, and
warm drinks for which Peggy, in her anxiety and affection, furnished
abundant materials; while Cunnings prepared the food and drink for the
threatened invalid, disinterestedly to begin with.
There are various curious old legends and traditions of all countries
and ages--travesties, like the swallowing of the pomegranate seeds
by Proserpine--of the sacred record of the eating of the apple in
Paradise--which illustrate the danger of tasting forbidden fruit. If
a man or woman who hesitates is apt to be lost, the weak individual
who prees and prees as Rab and Allan preed the famous peck o’ maut
which Willie brewed, till nothing of the peck remains, is still more
likely to become the victim of a fatal appetite. Within a month poor
old Cunnings had fallen lower before her mortal enemy, and disgraced
herself more irretrievably than she had done in the whole course of
her long service. She had been so helpless in her degradation that
she could not ‘bite a finger’ in the customary phrase, though why the
wretched sinner should seek to accomplish such a useless performance
in the circumstances has not been explained. She had been seen in this
state, and had been put to bed, the guilty woman, like an innocent
baby, by one of the more compassionate of the mocking under-servants,
to whom Cunnings ought to have served as an example while she ruled
over them. She knew it all--the extent of her transgression, the shame
of it, the degree to which she had exposed herself. She was down in
the mire, and did not believe she could ever rise again and free
herself from its defilement, while her infatuated base propensity was
tempting her to lie and wallow in the dirt, so that she could gratify
the horrible craving. She shrank from poor Peggy, who, in place of
challenging and denouncing her housekeeper, was fit to break her heart
over Cunnings’s lamentable breakdown.
Cunnings was terrified to meet her old mistress. She became the
bond-slave of Jenny Hedderwick, who had led the older woman into
temptation and was now prepared to feed her vice, so that it might
serve Jenny’s evil ends.
There never was so thorough a moral ruin effected in so short a time.
The truth is that a man liable to Cunnings’s sin might have indulged
in it, succumbed so far, and still have continued true to the trust
reposed in him and to one half of his better antecedents. He might
have escaped a complete collapse, and saved his integrity and honour.
But it is a well-known melancholy instance of psychological difference
between men and women that, whereas there remains a reservation and
some power of resistance, even of retaining a few of the finer traits
of character in the drunken man, in the case of the woman, in whom
reason is weaker and passion stronger, an indulgence in an excess of
intoxicating drink is prone to open the flood-gates to all corruption,
and to produce a complete demoralisation of the individual.
There was no further hope or help for Peggy from Cunnings.
Jenny, triumphing in an unhallowed victory over all obstacles, sought
to get Peggy too in her power, as she had got Cunnings. And Peggy had
no defence from Jenny’s wily stratagems and bold, fierce assaults,
except God’s grace and her own good intentions. She was not wise,
but she had grown up pious and dutiful, faithful and tender of
conscience as of heart. It remained to be seen whether God and goodness
alone would suffice to protect Peggy from Jenny, the flesh, and the
devil--all the evil influences to which her husband’s thoughtlessness
and Mrs. Ramsay’s mistake had given her over.
Balcairnie could not interfere or come to Peggy’s rescue, though he
was in a position to be soon aware of the mischief which was going
on. Balcairnie was, to a great extent, gagged, if not tongue-tied. He
was not one of those impulsive, inconsiderate male-friends who figure
in so many stories, and by way of helping the women, for whom the men
are supposed to have some regard, rush rashly into the breach, indulge
in a great deal of foolish Platonic philandering, and precipitate the
wrong they have been solicitous to avert. The Scotch yeoman was a man
of another sort. He possessed straightforward honesty and common sense
approaching to sagacity in his slowness and solidity of intellect. He
was further endowed with some of the delicacy of feeling and action in
which those fine gentlemen of fiction are often curiously deficient.
He knew perfectly well that it was not in his honorary office of
farm-manager to go much about the young Lady of Drumsheugh and attempt
to control her in her domestic concerns. To do so would be to draw down
upon both the strongly-flavoured gossip of the country side. It would
be to take a liberty which not even his intimacy with his laird could
freely warrant, and which Drumsheugh, easy-going as he was, might very
possibly resent. In that case Balcairnie would have played beautifully
into Jenny Hedderwick’s hands.
No, he was aware from the beginning that he must stand at a distance,
and only come forward if matters went utterly amiss so as to forebode a
grand catastrophe.
CHAPTER VI.
‘LADY PEGGY.’
Jenny made use of Johnnie Fuggie and employed him in her aim. Her
motive here was twofold. Johnnie was a person interested in Peggy’s
kindred making their own out of Peggy, since she had become a powerful
woman with favours in her right hand. It was better for all concerned
that there should be a safe understanding rather than a dangerous feud
between the rival claimants for young Mrs. Ramsay’s bounties. In other
respects Johnnie himself was a despicable object to Jenny--a crouse,
clavering carle, up in years, with a silly wife and family keeping
him down. But Johnnie’s relations were not all detrimentals. He had
a spruce, pushing nephew, who had risen to be a commercial traveller
for ‘a big Edinburgh house in the drapery line.’ This nephew was
considerably younger than Jenny, therefore flattered by her notice,
while the disparity in years did not prevent her from making sheep’s
eyes at him.
The double inducement caused Jenny to be particularly attentive to
Johnnie Fuggie, who was even more taken in by her graciousness than
his nephew had yet proved himself. If the innocent man had known it,
she wished that Johnnie should be art and part in her manœuvres and
aggressions. Her clever tactics were to compromise everybody all round,
and when each person was deeply involved, to rule the roast, and play
her own winning game by means of her accomplices.
One afternoon, in the end of April, when the weather was unusually warm
for a Scotch spring, so that the gooseberry bushes were covered with
their pale green blossom, and there was a fine sprinkling of red and
lilac ‘spinks’ (polyanthuses) and white daisies already brightening the
garden borders, Jenny come coolly into the dining-room at Drumsheugh,
followed slowly by Johnnie Fuggie in his corduroys, velveteen jacket,
and woollen comforter, which he wore summer and winter.
Johnnie had the grace to pause, glance ruefully at his earth-laden
feet, and even execute half a scrape of a bow on the threshold. He was
a small, rickety-looking man, with a slight halt in his gait--more
perceptible in his fatigue. He was not wont to be troubled with
scruples, still he hung back a little.
But Jenny explained his presence there volubly. ‘It’s Johnnie,
cuzin Peggy,’ she said, with a wave of the hand to the unanswerable
proposition and unnecessary introduction. ‘He has been a’ the way to
the Knockruddery planting for pea-sticks, and has carriet them hame,
the gomerel, on his back instead of ordering a cart from the offices,
though Balcairnie could not ha’e said strae to that. Johnnie, puir
chap, is clean forfochten, as ye may see, with the long walk and
the load; sae, as he would ha’e needed to gang round by the Cotton
to slocken his drouth, I ha’e just brocht him in here to eat his
fower hours, but ceremony wi’ you and me. I ha’e telled Cunnings in
the by-going, and gin you’ll send her the keys, she’ll bring in the
Hollands and yale wi’ the dishes o’ tea, which are no for a man’s
refreshment. Sit ye doon, Johnnie, my man; dinna be blate, rest ye, and
mak yoursel’ at hame in the muckle chair in your ain cuzin’s hoose.’
He was her own cousin, once or twice removed, and Peggy would willingly
have given him of her best for his rest and refreshment; but Johnny
Fuggie in Drumsheugh’s absence in the laird’s chair at his table, was
what she could not authorise, whether or not she had strength of mind
to forbid it. She stood up, trembling from head to foot, growing very
pale, and gasping for breath.
Johnnie took pity upon her. The girl’s tremor still farther abashed
instead of emboldening him. It reached even through his coarse and
thick skin.
‘Na, Jenny, ye’re wrang, lass, this time,’ he mumbled. ‘This is no’
the place for me. I couldna be comfortable, ony mair than ither folk
could be. Gude e’en to you, young Mistress Ramsay, mem, I give you a’
your titles wi’ a’ my heart. I’ll gang my ways and you’ll forgie this
mischanter. It is a’ the wyte o’ this sorry Jenny. She means weel, but
her frien’liness runs awa’ wi’ her at times.’
‘You’ll no gang out o’ this house without tasting for the house’s ain
credit, Johnnie Fuggie; no’ sae lang as I’m to the fore and under
its roof, though I suld ha’e to set up a bottle and a kebbock wi’
a fardel o’ cakes on my ain account, as I have never needed to do
yet,’ protested Jenny clamorously. ‘Na, I’ll tell you what,’ with the
ready adaptation of her scheme to circumstances which is the gift of
first-rate conspirators, and is for that matter an attribute of genius,
‘we’ll sally but to Cunnings’s room, if the dining-room flegs you, and
I’m sure Peggy will not refuse to grace us wi’ her presence.’
Poor Peggy caught at the compromise, overlooking the sneer scarcely
hidden under Jenny’s accommodating suggestion. She would cheerfully
bear her relations company in the housekeeper’s room for half-an-hour,
if that would keep them out of Drumsheugh’s dining-room or the Lady’s
drawing-room.
Peggy little guessed that the visit was destined to be often repeated,
till it became almost a daily occurrence, brought about, as it
was, by Jenny’s determined, deliberate design, Johnnie’s sloth and
folly, Cunnings’s desperate self-indulgence, and Peggy’s humility and
incapacity.
But Peggy was only a troubled, frightened spectatress of those feasts,
which were rapidly degenerating into orgies where Johnnie and Cunnings
were concerned. Jenny herself was as sober a woman from inclination and
policy as Peggy was in her innocence and purity. Many women of grosser
nature, in Peggy’s position--raised suddenly from penury and frugality
to what is to them luxury and lavish abundance, without work to do,
destitute of any faculty for such duties as the women have to perform,
without the smallest capacity for the poorest kind of intellectual
recreation--sink piteously and repulsively into gulfs of gluttony and
excess. But Peggy was secure from such hideous pitfalls--on which
Jenny may have counted, by Providence, Peggy’s goodness, and the
refinement which belonged, to be sure, to the core, and not to the
surface of her nature.
It was the season for Johnnie Puggie’s nephew making his spring
rounds in the way of business, and Jenny was strongly bent at once on
gratifying and benefiting him, and on raising herself in his estimation
by proving the terms she was on at Drumsheugh. She persuaded Peggy
that it would only be doing her duty and being barely hospitable if
she invited young Baldie Puggie to spend a quiet evening at the house,
during which he might let them see his ‘swatches,’ or patterns, and
young Mrs. Ramsay might have the opportunity and pleasure of giving
him a handsome order, for old acquaintance and kinship’s sake, since
Drumsheugh did not stint his wife either in house-money or pocket-money.
Peggy in her simplicity was rather pleased that she had one relation
on her side of the house in so good a way as Baldie Fuggie, who wore
a cloth coat, and could handle his knife and fork, and was almost a
gentleman. He might rise to be ‘a merchant’ in his own person. He might
sit down even now at the same table with Balcairnie and the laird,
though his tone was not just like theirs, and he was not altogether
without the traces of the pit whence he had been dug. Yes; she was glad
to be able to grant Jenny’s request on Jenny’s account too.
Peggy was ready to welcome Baldie Fuggie to a supper at Drumsheugh, and
she would be proud to give him a lady-like commission. She must have a
braw new gown in glad anticipation of Drumsheugh’s home-coming safe and
sound. Her laird must see her at her best, so that all his admiration
might revive, and he might fall in love with his wife afresh.
There are some people to whom to vouch-safe an inch is to grant a
yard, in whatever request is pending--people who, if they are permitted
to insert a finger in an opening will forthwith introduce the whole
hand and break down every impediment to their will. This was true of
Jenny and the family supper to which Baldie Fuggie was to be bidden.
First, Johnnie must come also, because he was Baldie’s uncle and
nearest surviving relation. Next, Johnnie’s wife and children could
not be left out, and after them Baldie had one or two other friends
with whom he had been much more intimate, among the shopkeepers,
sewing-girls, and maid-servants of Craigie--honest lads and lasses
well-known to Jenny--and Peggy also in the days when she was not
mistress of Drumsheugh. It could do no harm to have them for once up
at the house to see that their old friend had not forgotten them and
wished them well. She could take leave of them, for that matter, in
this handsome, informal manner.
Then the gathering might be in Cunnings’s room, and it might be called
Cunnings’s and Jenny’s little party, merely permitted and countenanced
by young Mrs. Ramsay. Thus no reasonable person could find fault with
‘the bit ploy.’ Peggy was led on, half unconscious how far she was
going, with dust thrown into her eyes at every reluctant step. But
for any preparation she had received and permission she had given,
she was not the less overwhelmed and aghast at the size and style of
the entertainment when it burst fully upon her in the hour of its
celebration. It was far too late then to stop the details--supposing
the mistress of Drumsheugh had possessed the strength of mind and the
mother-wit to issue an interdict and organise on the spur of the moment
something very different.
Jenny had actually bespoken a fiddler. Before Peggy could believe her
eyes that Tam Lauder, the young gauger, had taken it upon him to
bring his fiddle in its green bag, there were reels forming on the
floor, and she could not refuse to let herself be ‘lifted’ (led to the
top of the set) to take the first turn, lest folk should say she was
proud and held herself above dancing in the same rounds with her old
friends, she who had been born and bred a cotter lass, and had footed
it blithely with the laird and Balcairnie at many a maiden! Oh! how far
removed from this those dances had been, when she had lived free from
responsibility, and her grandest title had been ‘Bonnie Peggy.’
It goes without saying that Peggy had no heart for that unsuitable,
inopportune merry-making when her laird was far away and her mother’s
grave had not grown green. Bitter self-reproach for what she had been
powerless to prevent, with aversion to the ill-timed gaiety and dismay
of what might come of it, wrung her gentle spirit. Notwithstanding,
Peggy was swept on with the current and compelled to take a part in the
fun which grew fast and furious, and was maintained far into the small
hours, while Baldie Fuggie betrayed that his small amount of polish was
but skin-deep.
Peggy escaped at last from what had become a homely edition of the
situation of the lady in the Masque of ‘Comus,’ crying, ‘Oh, mind,
I’m a marriet woman, I’m the laird’s Leddy,’ to shut herself up in
her room, sink scared and remorseful on the first seat, stare with
tightly-clasped hands at one of Drumsheugh’s three-cornered hats which
she had kept fondly hanging on the most available peg behind the
door, and finally begin to sob and cry her heart out. Cunnings had
been removed in a state of insensibility from her presidence over the
festivities, and Jenny was leading a troop of skirling women racing
over the house, pursued with loud shouts by Baldie Fuggie and his
fellows, who did not pretend to Baldie’s scraping of veneer, bent on
extorting forfeits of kisses and inflicting the penalty of rubbing
rough beards on blowsy cheeks.
The report of Peggy’s party--it was never called Jenny’s, not to say
Cunnings’s--spread far and wide, and created as lively a sensation
in select circles as if it had been the inauguration of a county
Almacks. In the days and places where hardly anybody read a line of
anything, save of the newspaper on one day a week and of the Bible
on the Sabbath, local gossip counted for a great deal. Without it
conversation would have languished, and men and women’s minds become
stagnant. Every scrap of gossip was therefore carefully collected and
made much of. Peggy’s party was reckoned very racy and droll gossip,
essentially characteristic and not without its moral. It proved a great
boon and set off half a dozen teas and three dinner-parties among the
neighbours. Fine doings at Drumsheugh, but no more than what was
to be expected. See what came of low marriages. Time the laird were
home, whether to reap the fruits of his folly, or to stave off a worse
catastrophe, if that were possible. Poor old Mrs. Ramsay, who had held
her head high, and had hardly reckoned a young lady in the country-side
a fit match for her son. But pride comes before a fall.
It was at this time that the mocking title of ‘Lady Peggy’ was first
bestowed on the interloper, the heroine of all these good stories.
For Jenny Hedderwick and Cunnings were beneath these worthy people’s
notice, and little mention was made of either delinquent in the
arraignment of their victim.
Though Jenny had to some extent achieved her purpose, and it might have
been said that nobody resisted her will, she began to bear a greater
grudge against Peggy, and to go near to treating her with a purely
vindictive malice, strangely unreasoning, in so reasonable a woman.
This was not merely because Jenny had taken advantage of Peggy in every
way, and wronged her to the utmost of Jenny’s power, though that is
generally a fertile enough source of ill-will in the wrongdoer, but
because Peggy beyond a certain point remained invulnerable. Jenny had a
secret resentful conviction that while apparently successful, she was
really foiled in her chief object of dragging down her cousin below
Jenny’s own level, and so obtaining a firm, permanent hold on the poor
girl through her errors and fears.
Jenny lost her prudence and her temper with it. She proceeded to cast
aside the semblance of kindness which she had kept up and even felt for
Peggy. Jenny now treated Peggy with positive rudeness and insolence.
She was for ever jeering at the young wife because of her unfitness
for her position, her ignorance, and her mistakes. And Jenny taunted
Peggy on the tenderest point, dwelling on Drumsheugh’s protracted
absence, broadly hinting that he, and all belonging to him, were
mortally ashamed of the low-born intruder in their ranks. Was there not
a cousin of the laird’s who had spent most of her early girlhood at
Drumsheugh, and who was now on a visit to the doctor’s wife in Craigie,
in the immediate neighbourhood? But though Miss Ramsay did not think
it beneath her to come and stay for weeks with an old schoolfellow who
had only married a country doctor, did she ever dream of walking out to
Drumsheugh nowadays, to hear tell how the laird was getting on, and to
make the acquaintance of her new cousin? Mrs. Forsyth, Miss Ramsay’s
friend and hostess, could not advise her to the condescension--not
even though Drumsheugh was a good patient of Dr. Forsyth’s, and Peggy
herself was acquainted with the doctor.
Lady Peggy was crushed and heart-broken in her helplessness and her
miserable sense of culpability, though she was hardly accountable for
her faults as a matron. She found no resource in reading, though good
books would have been a strengthening and sustaining influence; while
Peggy, as a carefully instructed Scotch child, had been fond of her
book--a little rustic scholar, and the taste would have remained with
any food for its sustenance. But when we learn in ‘Lord Campbell’s
Life’ that the library even of a well-born, classically cultivated
divine consisted of some odd volumes of the ‘Spectator,’ two volumes
of ‘Tom Jones,’ and the ‘History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless,’ some
idea may be formed of the dearth of profane literature at Drumsheugh.
The stock of books had not increased since the reign of the second
George, and was scarcely a whit better than Peggy might have found in
her mother’s cottage room. Certainly Luckie Hedderwick had not owned a
cookery-book or a work on farriery, which would have been in a measure
supererogatory, seeing that she possessed few and simple materials for
cookery, and had no horses to keep in health. But she had thumbed,
well-preserved copies of the ‘Death of Abel’ and ‘Blind Harry’ to match
‘The Cloud of Witnesses’--this branch of the Ramsays having been on the
Whig and Covenanting side in politics and religion--and ‘Allan Ramsay’s
Songs,’ in a much more tattered condition, at Drumsheugh.
Peggy’s sole earthly stays consisted in the faithful reading of the
little pocket Bible which had descended to her from her mother, and
the somewhat rigid observance of the sabbath and unfailing attendance
at the kirk in which she had been brought up, to which she clung, and
from which neither fraud nor force on Jenny’s part could detach her.
The minister was Peggy’s old friend, the Dominie, who took an interest
in her, and had always a kind word and glance for her when they met,
though in the ordinarily dreamy, absorbed life of a book-worm, he never
guessed she was again in circumstances well-nigh as perilous as those
from which he had helped to deliver her. But, however rambling and
incoherent his prayers, or dry and doctrinal his sermons, they were
always solemn, holy words delivered by God’s commissioned messenger
to Peggy. They served as balm to the wounded spirit, and bracing to
the unnerved will, they saved her from despair. Yet Peggy was fast
losing all modest satisfaction in her front seat in the ‘laft,’ all
womanly pride in her appearance and surroundings. Disengaging herself
with difficulty, and almost running away to get to the kirk, walking
there in all states of the weather rather than provoke discussion by
summoning Johnny Fuggie to drive her, Peggy would reach her destination
with disordered, shabby, black dress, ill-arranged head-gear, shoes
almost as cumbered with the soil as ever were Johnny Fuggie’s on
working days--a poor, hunted, forlorn-looking waif of a laird’s lady.
The sight would disturb Balcairnie in his worship. ‘If I had thocht she
would be left like this--what for doesna Drumsheugh come hame and look
after her?’ He would enter silent, broken, indignant protests. ‘But the
laird, puir fally, canna help himsel’;’ the loyal yeoman would correct
his assumption, ‘and puir Peggy was ay a saft, silly quean to let
hersel’ be put upon.’
The late spring was waning into early summer; the budding roses were
replacing the withering lilies alike in Drumsheugh and Balcairnie
gardens, and still the laird tarried abroad, though the news was
always of his amendment, while every day Peggy was drifting into more
heavy-hearted helplessness on her own account and a falser report in
the mouths of her neighbours.
CHAPTER VII.
‘HUNTINGTOWER.’
Primrose Ramsay bore a Christian name which was not altogether uncommon
among the Scotch-women of her era. It was also the surname of the
excellent vicar of Wakefield and of a noble Scotch family, and the
ordinary title of the sweetest and most welcome of spring flowers. She
was, as Jenny Hedderwick had reported, on a friendly visit to young
Mrs. Forsyth, the doctor’s wife in Craigie. Primrose was not like her
namesake and emblem, strictly fair to see, but she was cheery as ever
was pinched daisy in February, promising to close the gloomy winter and
herald the glad summer. She was a little, pale, somewhat meagre girl,
whom a passer-by might have stigmatised as insignificant-looking. Her
spirit, sense, and kindness, and not her face, constituted her fortune,
and it was only when mind and heart took possession of her slight,
though wiry, frame, coloured her ordinarily colourless cheeks, and
kindled up her grey eyes that they looked handsome. Primrose Ramsay was
valued even in the matter of personal appearance exactly in proportion
as she was known. Slight acquaintances thought little of her, intimate
friends agreed to admire her very defects, and the old relation who had
brought up the orphan girl, and with whom she usually resided, set such
store upon her that Mrs. Purvis grudged Primrose out of her sight, and
confidently believed her the attraction of all eyes and hearts, the
greatest beauty, and the most virtuous, charming young woman in the
world.
Withal, there was something about Primrose Ramsay--unprotected, poor,
unassuming, and kindly as she was--which prevented anyone from taking
liberties with her; something which daunted the coarse and shallow, and
rendered her, on occasions, as formidable as her aunt, the old Lady
of Drumsheugh, could prove. Primrose won respect in her youth, and
exercised influence wherever she went.
Primrose heard from Mrs. Forsyth, with a mixture of interest,
amusement, and pain, all the nonsensical stories, loud ridicule, and
blame, and increasingly rampant scandal afloat with regard to young
Mrs. Ramsay. Primrose could not help feeling diverted, in spite of her
goodness; for she was a girl in whom the sense of humour abounded in
exceptional strength, keeping pace with that ‘weeping-blood in woman’s
breast,’ which made her sorry too; because it went to her heart not
to be able to go over to Drumsheugh where she had spent some of her
happiest youthful holidays, or to hold out her hand to Jamie Ramsay’s
wife, when Jamie was Primrose’s nearest male relative, and he and she
had been fast boy and girl friends. And she was sure Jamie was not half
a bad fellow, though he had made a low marriage.
Primrose entertained a shrewd suspicion that the day had been when her
aunt, Mrs. Ramsay, had experienced a dread lest Jamie should throw his
handkerchief at her (Primrose); and so, just when the girl was growing
up, had managed to put a stop to her annual visits to Drumsheugh. But
in place of bearing malice or enjoying her revenge, Primrose proved,
among other things, how perfectly disengaged her own juvenile feelings
had been, by only laughing and shaking her head, ever so little, over
the _mal à propos_ recollection, and perhaps cherishing a livelier
grain of curiosity respecting that bonnie Peggy who had figured as
Primrose’s unconscious rival.
Primrose’s sole chance of catching a glimpse of her cousin’s wife,
whom she did not remember having seen as the cotter lass, Peggy
Hedderwick, was at Craigture Kirk, to which the Forsyths went
one afternoon on purpose to furnish their guest with the desired
opportunity. Primrose felt puzzled and disappointed by the glimpse
she got. Yes, young Mrs. Ramsay was very bonnie so far as features,
skin, and what colour remained to her, went. But could this shabby,
dowdy, almost slatternly ‘disjasket’ (out of joint from some depressing
cause)--young woman be the lass who had caught bauld Jamie Ramsay’s
fancy? Primrose, notwithstanding her fine eye for beauty, had some
difficulty in believing it. Poor, low-born lass! bonnie Peggy’s
exaltation seemed likely to end in her destruction. Poor Jamie! whose
single-heartedness and recklessness had brought Drumsheugh to such
a pass. But there was nothing to be done: Peggy Ramsay, according
to all accounts, was developing into a woman with whom no lady, no
respectable person, would care to hold intercourse.
Primrose Ramsay improved her visit in other ways. She and Mrs. Forsyth
occupied and amused themselves after the most approved standards of
their class and generation. Mrs. Forsyth had put herself slightly out
of the upper circles by marrying a country-town doctor. Still the
simple, stay-at-home gentry were not over-particular, else they must
have narrowed their set to a nearly stifling extent; and there was a
nice enough lower stratum of professional men, bankers, clergy and
half-pay officers with their families in Craigie, to which the Forsyths
could justly consider themselves as belonging, that at many points
touched upon and merged into the lairds and their ladies’ sphere.
Young Mrs. Forsyth had committed no heinous solecism in marrying her
doctor, and she was not punished for the small offence. She did not
feel ashamed to invite Primrose Ramsay to become the Forsyths’ first
guest in fulfilment of an old school-girl promise. Primrose could
accept the invitation and be happy in the visit, without any further
_arrière-pensée_ than belonged to her stifled regret that she was
thenceforth banished from Drumsheugh, which had become a prohibited
place to her.
Mrs. Forsyth had acted differently from Jamie Ramsay, and the result
was much more satisfactory. The single light in which the two affairs
might be said to act and react on each other was that though the laird
was Dr. Forsyth’s patient, as Jenny Hedderwick had remarked, none
looked on the unfortunate match with more disfavour, or inveighed
against Peggy’s delinquencies with greater contempt, than did Mrs.
Forsyth. It was as if she felt bound to exonerate herself from the most
distant suspicion of such gross imprudence by exaggerating the public
sentiment where Drumsheugh and ‘Lady Peggy’ were concerned.
Mrs. Forsyth was a tall, blooming, consequential bride, to whom, at the
first glance, her friend served as a foil. Dr. Forsyth was a brisk,
busy, aspiring young man, well pleased with the attainment of some of
his aspirations. The couple did the honours of their new home, where
everything was fresh, bright, and hopeful, pleasantly to the young
lady visitor Primrose. She entered with heart and soul into all their
sanguine plans and projects, and so relished them in turn with her
wholesome young appetite. She had her share of the marriage-parties,
the teas and suppers, which were not yet over for the pair. She drove,
bodkin-fashion, between the two, in the doctor’s gig, without any
loss to their gentility, far and near to these blithe, yet decorous,
merry-makings. She could not execute half so well as the bride could a
lesson in classic music on any spinnet which presented itself handily,
but Primrose beat her friend hollow in playing without a music-book
tunes to which feet could keep time in carpet dances. She had her own
song, which she was always asked to give after supper, and which never
failed to elicit well-merited applause, for she had a sweet, tolerably
trained voice, and sang with feeling and taste. Strange to say, her
song was the old ballad ‘Huntingtower,’ and its echoes used to wake in
the singer dim, contradictory associations with Jamie Ramsay and his
miserable _mésalliance_.
Did the other ‘Jamie’ of the song go away lightly after all, and
leave the peasant bride to whom, in the first brush of the affair,
he gave Blair-in-Athole, Little Dunkel’, St. Johnstown’s Bower, and
Huntingtower, and all that was his so freely, to bear the brunt of
their foolish wedlock? Did the ‘Jeannie’ who refused so decisively the
braw new gown ‘wi’ Valenciennes trimmed roun’, lassie,’ that subtle
allurement to a woman’s heart, and claimed only the heart which was
hers already, who with unwavering voice, though her heart-strings were
cracking, bade her cruelly jesting, unfairly suspicious lover, ‘gae
hame’ to the wife and the bairnies three he invented to torture and
try her, pass in the sequel and in the natural order of things into
such a wasteful, reckless, low-lifed woman as Peggy Ramsay was turning
out? Had true love no real foundation? Was there a canker at its core,
sure to come to light in the end, even when it seemed most genuine and
generous?
Primrose and Mrs. Forsyth worked and read, walked and talked together,
so as to have little time to weary, even when the doctor was too much
engaged to attend to them, or was sent for to some distant patient.
The ladies drew, and embroidered ruffles, caps, and aprons for
themselves--the favourite fancy-work of the day after work of necessity
in steady, solid gown and shirt making was disposed of.
Primrose had been so far reared in intellectual circles that she
possessed something like a large portable library of her own, which
she generally carried about with her at the foot of her father’s great
hair trunk; for, apart from the Bible in which she read as regularly as
Peggy read in hers, it was to these other books Primrose had recourse
to draw fresh springs of wisdom and happiness. She had not only ‘Hannah
More’s Essays’ and ‘Dr. Gregory’s Advice to his Daughter,’ she had sets
of ‘Sir Charles Grandison’ and ‘Evelina.’ The two novels represented
all fiction to the girl, and she read in them with as inexhaustible
sympathy and delight as her grandmother had found for the interminable
adventures of the grand Cyrus.
During Primrose’s stay in Craigie she found less need for her books
than she was wont to do on a rainy day, not only because Mrs.
Forsyth was no reader, but because Dr. Forsyth, being something of a
naturalist, had indulged himself in buying copies of ‘Bewick’s British
Birds’ and ‘White’s Natural History of Selborne.’ These offered new
treasures to Primrose Ramsay’s quickness of observation and fondness
for nature.
‘Bewick’s Birds’ bore a practical result to both Mrs. Forsyth and
Primrose, and had a strange collateral bearing--presumably not
intended by the author--on certain future events in more than one
human history. The ladies were stimulated by the inspection of the
life-like engravings to a fresh enterprise for their ingenious brains
and fingers--not that the device was altogether original. Feather
tippets had become almost as much the fashion as muslin ruffles. But
Mrs. Forsyth and Primrose would make themselves such tippets as had
seldom been seen even in the wardrobes of the Duchess of Portland and
Mrs. Delany. The whole country-side was to be ransacked for a variety
of feathers. The doctor’s gig was to be put in requisition to carry
the collectors to different poultry yards, from which they were to beg,
borrow, and, it is to be feared, when temptation waxed too strong,
steal, their spoil. Mrs. Forsyth and Primrose’s minds became as stuffed
with feathers as if the minds had been so many beds and pillows for
mortal aches and bruises. The girls, even the doctor, who did not often
consent to lose sight of the superior enlightenment and dignity of
his college, medical school, and learned profession, with the burden
of responsibility involved in a promising practice, grew zealously
engrossed and affected, as only young, eager, care-free natures could
be usurped and excited by such a trifle.
‘There is Balcairnie,’ said Mrs. Forsyth one day, when the two women
were earnestly speculating on the places they ought to visit in their
search. ‘We have not been to Balcairnie yet. I am told that Balcairnie,
in addition to his peacock and a most splendid bubbly-jock, has got
a pair of guinea-fowls. We have not a single guinea-fowl’s feather,
and we ought to have a whole row of them. What a good thing for us,
Primrose, that Balcairnie has set up a pair of guinea-fowls. We must go
a-begging to Balcairnie.’
‘He is my cousin’s great friend,’ said Primrose meditatively. ‘I
remember him as a long-legged laddie running about with Jamie; but I
had not much to do with him.’
‘Of course not,’ said Mrs. Forsyth emphatically, ‘your aunt would take
care of that. Your poor cousin had too much to do with his tenant--not
that Balcairnie was so far beneath Drumsheugh. Balcairnie is a good
farm, and they say its tenant has grown rich in these war times,
though he is well liked, and has not a lowe raised among his stacks
for keeping up famine prices, like some other farmers. But it was he
who took about Drumsheugh to maidens and country ploys, where he fell
in with “Lady Peggy.” Had it not been for her there would have been no
great harm done, since young men will have their heads out and know
for themselves what a splore means. Why, even Davie, though he was
coming out for a doctor, which is the next thing to being a minister
so far as douceness is wanted, went his round of first-footings, and
feet-washings, and dergies, before he had me to take care of him,’ the
young wife ended, with a fine show of power and sedateness. ‘But as
they tell,’ she began again, ‘Balcairnie had gone too far himself in
daundering and sitting among the stooks, and dancing with the barn-door
beauty, who was as cunning as Sawtan himself in her schemes. He might
have given her his promise--who knows?--in their trysts and convoys and
caperings, for a wily fool never loses sight of her own interest. At
last, he pushed the laird into the breach, and escaped by causing the
officer to cover the soldier, instead of the soldier the officer.’
‘What a shame!’ cried Primrose; and then her natural candour and
sagacity came to her aid in disentangling the perversion of the story.
‘If Jamie did not put Balcairnie out,’ she suggested; ‘that was more
likely than that Drumsheugh should serve as a cat’s paw to another lad.’
‘Any way, Balcairnie acted as blackfoot to the laird and played him an
ill turn,’ maintained Mrs. Forsyth, who in the midst of her youth and
happiness was not disposed to take a charitable view of human nature.
Kirsty Forsyth showed herself a trifle hardened at that stage of her
history.
But so blinding is covetousness--granted the object coveted is no
heavier than a feather--that Balcairnie’s evil deeds did not hinder
Mrs. Forsyth from instigating her husband to invite the yeoman to
dinner on the market-day.
This invitation was with the sole purpose of the two fair traffickers
in feathers getting round the simple farmer and inducing him to have
every ‘pen’ which fell from the guinea-fowls carefully picked up and
stored on the ladies’ behalf--if the greed did not prompt them to
lead or drive their victim to the barbarous extremity of slaying the
birds that they might then be plucked for the benefit of the tippet
manufacturers. The still greater wantonness of torture by which birds
have been plucked alive to serve the vanity of women had not so much as
entered the heads of a more primitive generation.
Mrs. Forsyth’s single scruple was on the score of comparative
gentility. ‘Jock Home is only the farmer of Balcairnie,’ she said
anxiously to her husband; and ‘though Drumsheugh has thought fit to run
and ride the country with him, they were two young men after their own
pursuits. I do not know, Davie, if it is right for us to have him at
our table otherwise than as your patient, to bid him to meet Primrose
Ramsay as though he were young Pittentullo’, or Captain Don, or any
other gentleman of our set.’
‘Hout, Kirsty,’ said the more liberal doctor, ‘you have not stuck so
fast to your set. Balcairnie is a fine enough fellow who would pass
muster anywhere. He is well to do; I should not wonder though he were
to buy his farm, if Drumsheugh let it get into the market, and come out
as a laird among the best of them some day.’
So Mrs. Forsyth swallowed her misgivings and Balcairnie furnished a
stalwart figure to the two o’clock dinner-table in the flat above the
apothecary’s shop, which also belonged to Dr. Forsyth, and was a source
of considerable profit to him. Such a house was thought then quite
good enough for the best doctor in Craigie, even though he had mated
with a sprig of the gentry. Their olfactory nerves were not supposed
sufficiently sensitive to feel mortally offended by the occasionally
pungent smell of those drugs which helped to butter the couple’s bread.
Balcairnie and Primrose regarded each other in side glances, under
their eyelashes, with some interest. He had heard in the inveterate
distortion of facts which is a prominent feature in gossip, that the
Lady had intended her niece for her son. Primrose had just been told
that Balcairnie had contrived to shift his folly and its consequences
to Drumsheugh’s broad shoulders, though her mother-wit had cancelled
the error, and laid hold of the greater probability of the yeoman’s
having been jilted for the laird.
The estimate which the two formed of each other at first sight differed
comically and unfairly.
‘A shilpet sparroy of a lass like that!’ Balcairnie reflected
disdainfully, ‘was she to stand in Bonnie Peggy’s licht? Drumsheugh
would not have had an ee in his head or a mind of his ain, if he had
preferred this leddy to yon kimmer.’
‘Jamie’s a well-favoured, manly chield, with a good heart, though he
may have a thick head,’ considered Primrose, not without reluctance;
‘but I doubt his Peggy stood in her own light for all that. If I am not
mistaken, the yeoman is worth double the laird.’ Her penetration saw at
once, against her will, that Balcairnie was the bigger, better man of
the two.
But by the time the party had repaired to the drawing-room, and the
ladies were exerting themselves with their interested object in helping
to entertain Balcairnie, a remarkable reversal of his opinion took
place, while her verdict remained unchanged.
As the conversation was craftily turned to ornithology generally, he
became deeply impressed by Primrose’s lively intelligence in expounding
these plates in the bird-book, which so delighted him, and by her
wonderful acquaintance with the looks and habits of those fowls of the
air with which he himself was most familiar.
‘The leddy-lass kens as muckle about craws and doos and laverocks as
I do, though I have followed the ploo, and set girns for them, when I
should have thocht she would have been sitting with her feet on the
fender, or at a window fanning herself, ganting over a nouvelle and
holding a yapping lap-dog on her knee.’
Mrs. Forsyth made a dead set at him with the feather tippets. He looked
at them, laughed with surprised pleasure, and ventured to touch them
shyly with his great brown hand in a sort of marvelling, fearful,
wholly large-hearted admiration. He glanced round at the tambour
frames, the open spinnet, the books which might be nouvelles, but which
must be so much better reading than he had imagined when they did not
incapacitate the readers for all this ability and industry, and for
a practical appreciation of the bird-book. It is to be doubted that
Balcairnie applied to Primrose and Mrs. Forsyth a homely, if emphatic,
classification and commendation, which at the same time meant a great
deal from his mouth and that of Robbie Burns--‘clever hizzies!’ he
said to himself. Balcairnie remembered Peggy with a rueful sense of
contrast. Poor lass! she could not be half so useful now at Drumsheugh.
She could not divert herself in all these charming fashions. Poor
Drumsheugh had, indeed, thrown himself away. How could he have been so
blind and besotted? It made au odds when a man kenned little better.
Of course, Balcairnie would be right glad to be allowed to be of any
use to the ladies. The guinea-fowls were at their service, living or
dead, and he thought he could put them in the way of some moor-hens and
wild ducks. If Mrs. Forsyth and her friend would not object to honour
his bachelor-house by their presence, if they could put up with the
poor accommodation of a farm-house, perhaps the doctor would bring them
out to see what they could find at Balcairnie, where the cherries were
nearly ripe and curds and cream were always to be had for the taking.
The ladies were correspondingly gratified, not only with the success
of their design, but in addition with Balcairnie’s somewhat quaint and
naïve but altogether becoming deference and gallantry. An engagement to
visit him was entered into on the spot.
All this agreeable social intercourse had nothing whatever to do with
old friendship and its obligations--on the contrary. Balcairnie, as
he looked and listened, more and more enchanted by the bright face
and womanly eloquence of Primrose Ramsay, in the revulsion of his
feelings, was conscious of an increasing temptation to undervalue and
decry Peggy’s charms and Drumsheugh’s taste, which the fickle man had
been applauding to the skies hardly three hours before. Balcairnie no
longer called Primrose ‘a shilpet sparroy.’ Where had his eyes or his
ears been when he made that invidious comparison? She was like the lady
wren in her dainty proportions as she flitted here and there with such
light grace, and such deftness of hand in everything she did, whether
she helped Mrs. Forsyth to dispense the dishes of tea, or showed Dr.
Forsyth the impressions of seals the ladies had taken in his absence,
or arranged the counters on the card-table. She was like his mother’s
favourite white hen, which always looked so dainty and spotless beside
the other hens, that discriminating people grew disgusted with their
flaunting yellow or red necks relieved against their brown or black
backs. She was like the white calf, which his father had held to be
so lucky. No pet lamb could have been so canty as this orphan lassie
showed herself. She was an orphan lassie, though she was also a lady
who had danced at the hunt balls into which Balcairnie might not
intrude.
But when Primrose was farther called upon to lend her aid to the
hilarity of the evening by singing for Balcairnie’s benefit, and when
she sang her romantic ditty of ‘Huntingtower,’ Balcairnie, struck
by the unintentional coincidence, swayed by more than one powerful
influence, and penetrated to his melted heart, took a swift and bold
resolution which was neither time-serving nor personal.
CHAPTER VIII.
PEGGY’S FRIENDS.
The woman who sang ‘Huntingtower’ as Primrose Ramsay sang it could
neither be hard-hearted nor narrow-minded, Balcairnie said to himself,
and he acted on the speech.
The visit to Balcairnie was paid. The ladies behaved as graciously as
the host was intent on rendering the visit a pleasure to his guests.
Everything was propitious, even to a recent fortuitous moulting of
the guinea-fowls. There was quite a heap of the clear grey and black
and white spotted feathers, which Primrose called ‘second mourning
feathers,’ at their fanciers’ disposal. The cherries were at their
best, the curds and cream as rich and sweet as could be desired. Yellow
ragwart, small pink and white convolvuluses, great purple mallows grew
among last autumn’s russet stacks, which sheltered the farm-house
more effectually than the fir-tree avenue sheltered the mansion of
Drumsheugh. The garden was fragrant with red and white gilliflower,
pink cabbage-roses and lilac lavender, and gay with orange marigolds.
The kye were coming home from the pasture, the sheep were in the
fauld, the pigeons were flying back to the pigeon-house as the evening
drew on. The whole place looked so ‘couthie’ and sweet and bright, so
home-like and cheery, that the women felt it hard it should be wasted
on a single man and his servants. The hardship to her sex surprised
Mrs. Forsyth into something like an aggrieved wonder that Balcairnie
did not take a wife.
The remark in its turn startled a deeper colour into Balcairnie’s ruddy
cheeks, and provoked a laugh from Dr. Forsyth and Primrose Ramsay.
At last Balcairnie found an opportunity when the party were still
strolling about the garden, and Dr. Forsyth had called away his wife
to examine one of the Dutch summer-houses which were then in great
favour, and of which he proposed erecting a specimen in their garden at
Craigie. Balcairnie and Primrose Ramsay were left sauntering along a
broad box-edged walk, listening to a blackbird in a neighbouring lilac
bush. Balcairnie interrupted the bird, and went to the gist of the
matter and of his purpose at once. He had no notion of courtly fencing.
Artful preambles were not in his way. ‘Miss Ramsay, I want to speak to
you about your cousin’s lady up at Drumsheugh.’
Primrose met his request, which was more like a demand, with a look
of surprise and some annoyance. She was not easily offended, but she
felt vexed that this man--her cousin’s friend, whom she had begun to
respect as well as to like--should introduce an unpalatable subject,
one on which they could not be expected to agree, at his own place too.
He was less of a gentleman--one of nature’s gentlemen--than she had
been thinking him. Then she said, with a shade of distance and dryness
in her manner and tone, ‘I beg your pardon, Mr. Home, but I am not
acquainted with young Mrs. Ramsay, though she is my cousin’s wife.’
‘That is the very reason I want to speak to you about her,’ he said,
looking her straight in the face. ‘What for are you not acquainted with
Drumsheugh’s wife?’ he asked bluntly. ‘You should be. Not only has she
become your relation by marriage, you could be of the first service to
her; you could do her all the gude in the world. And I have conceived
such an opinion of you, madam, that I believe you would be pleased to
confer a favour even on a stranger, and do gude to one you might never
see again.’
She stood still, perplexed and a little softened.
He was forced to go on; he must speak out now or be silent for ever.
‘Young Mrs. Ramsay is lonesome in the laird’s absence. For mair reasons
than one she has great need of a friend. If I mistake not, you could be
the best friend she has ever had in this world.’
‘How could I?’ stammered Primrose. ‘She is your acquaintance, not mine.
Why cannot you help her if she requires help?’
He waived aside the proposal with an impatient swing of his arm. ‘A
man body is worse than nothing to a woman in some straits. A woman
friend--a gude woman to give gude advice from her own experience,
is everything. If I were even to mint the trouble in a letter to
Drumsheugh, I might only breed more mischief. I tell you what, Miss
Ramsay, you may rue it to the day of your death, if you do not give a
thocht to what I’m asking from you.’
‘Be reasonable, Mr. Home,’ remonstrated Primrose, whom his earnestness
infected and stirred with agitation. ‘How can I interfere? I have no
commission from my cousin Jamie or my aunt, even supposing I could move
in this matter. From what I have heard--forgive me, if she is a friend
of yours--I could do no good. Young Mrs. Ramsay is taking her own
course--a foolish, downward course, I fear--with which it would not be
fitting that I should intermeddle.’
‘Then what is the gude of your being a young leddy, so muckle cleverer
and wiser and better-bred, with no chance of your making a mistake
or the world’s finding faut with you?’ Balcairnie put the question
sharply, almost sternly, and the next moment grew abashed and shocked
at his own rudeness. ‘I beg your pardon, humbly, Miss Ramsay, I’ve no
manners, as I need not tell you, but it makes me mad’--with a quick
groan--‘to think of another woman, a leddy gude and kind, as I can see,
leaving a poor sister lass to be sorned on, trodden down and driven
desperate--never by her own wickedness and hardness of heart, but just
because she’s as tender and gentle as any leddy in the land.’
Primrose was struck by his passionate advocacy. How he must have loved
this girl, who had forsaken him for a grander suitor, to be so deceived
in his view of her character--if he were deceived. She had already had
a conception of him as a larger-minded man than Jamie Ramsay, and his
present appeal proved his largeness of heart.
‘I daresay she is to be pitied, poor thing, with her man so long away,
though he is recovering,’ she granted slowly and doubtfully, for even
Primrose Ramsay’s prejudices were strong. ‘But has she not been very
thoughtless, to say the least, in bringing so many of her own folk
about her and letting them run riot--disturbing Drumsheugh and the
neighbourhood by their pranks?’ Primrose ended more severely.
‘How could she help having her own folk when they were ordained, and
placed about her by Drumsheugh and the auld lady? When no other body
would look near her to see whether she could say her head or her feet
were her ain, or speak or go but as her so-called servants would let
her!’ maintained Peggy’s champion stoutly. ‘I grant you Peggy ocht to
have been firm,’ he admitted, forgetting in the half-bitterness of the
admission the scrupulous ceremony with which he had been previously
naming his laird’s lady. ‘She should have stood like a rock and defied
all inroads on her dignity and authority as the new-made Leddy and
mistress of Drumsheugh--as you, madam, with your birth and breeding,
would have done, no doubt. But when, you find a poor bit leveret
behaving like the dog that chases him, or a lintie like the hawk that’s
striking her down, then you may reasonably--you spak’ of reason, Miss
Ramsay--count on sic behaviour from a meek, young creature like Peggy.’
‘Has she no spirit of her own?’ Primrose was goaded on to inquire.
‘I do not know what you mean by spirit,’ said Balcairnie, doggedly.
‘She had enough spirit to do her mither’s bidding, and save the laird
from being betrayed into becoming a scoundrel who might have ruined her
and flung her to the dogs. But as for the spirit to hold her ain and
keep off all that would rob and murder her, where her gudes and credit
are concerned, I trow Peggy has not muckle of that spirit to boast of.
There is some word about the wind being tempered to the shorn lamb. I
wuss it may blaw lown ower Peggy’s grave, for, so far as I can see, the
best thing she could do would be to dee soon, poor lass. Then when her
head’s lying among the mools, the fact that it was ever raised to be
one of the heads of the house of Drumsheugh may be forgiven her, and
the scum of her folk cannot prey on her any longer.’
‘Oh! do not say that,’ cried Primrose in real distress. ‘It cannot be
so bad as that. Think of Drumsheugh who has cared so much for her--what
would he do?’
‘I’ve thocht of Drumsheugh long enough, ower long; I’m going to think
of Peggy now and what she’s to do. It was I who brocht her hame to
Drumsheugh, and I swear to you, Miss Ramsay, if I had kenned what
the innocent, loving soul was coming to, I would suner the beast had
fallen and broken his neck--baith of our necks. For it is true I
was Drumsheugh’s aider and abettor--his blackfoot in courting Peggy
Hedderwick. He was my friend and Peggy’s choice; it was not for me to
conter them.’
Primrose looked in the manly, honest face, and believed every word he
said, to the last syllable. Her dauntless spirit rose and her generous
heart swelled. ‘There is a better resource,’ she said, with hearty
sympathy and goodwill, relinquishing her opposition all at once, and,
womanlike, passing in a bound to warm partisanship. ‘She shall not be
set upon like that! How base of her kindred! But we will circumvent
them, sir. You and I will beat them before the game is played out.
I’m not afraid that my cousin Jamie will be seriously angered by my
interference. I’ll venture to take him in my own hand. As for my aunt,
she’s an upright woman, Mr. Home. She would never countenance such
wrong-doing. She is ignorant of it. When she welcomed Bonnie Peggy
home she meant to receive her as a daughter and behave to her as a
mother should--I am sure of it.’
It was a difficult enough task which Balcairnie had set Primrose
Ramsay, and he could render her no assistance in the beginning. It must
not even appear that she was acting on his prompting.
Mrs. Forsyth was exceedingly aggrieved by Primrose’s proposing to pay
a visit to Peggy, and opposed the step violently. Doctor Forsyth, who
should have known better, shook his head at his wife’s instigation.
Primrose’s happy first visit to the couple was in danger of having
its harmony entirely spoilt, and the girl suspected that her friends’
opinion was a tolerably sure sign of the light in which the world
generally would regard her conduct. It was mean, time-serving, and
unworthy of her to go near ‘Lady Peggy,’ and seek to get the foolish
mistress of Drumsheugh out of the mess into which she had floundered.
But Primrose was as strong and staunch in facing and overcoming
difficulties in what she recognised to be a good cause as Peggy was
weak and yielding. There was the courage of a lion in the small, pale,
pleasant-mannered, merry-tongued girl.
Primrose walked out alone to Drumsheugh, claimed the right of entrance
to the drawing-room, which could not well be denied to her, and begged
young Mrs. Ramsay to be told that her cousin, Miss Ramsay, had come to
wait upon her.
Peggy did not pause, like ‘Mistress Jean’ in the ‘Laird o’ Cockpen,’
to ask petulantly what brought her visitor there ‘at sic a like time,’
for it was early in the day. She was overwhelmed with consternation
and shame while Jenny coolly informed her cousin that here was one of
the laird’s family come to call his wife to account, to require a
statement of her stewardship, and to pounce on all her shortcomings.
‘Oh! what sall I do, Jenny? Mercy on me! what sall I do?’ besought the
poor changeling in the foreign nest.
‘Say you’re no weel--I’m sure that’s true eneuch,’ suggested the
temptress. ‘Say you never trysted her here, and you maun bid her
excuse you for you’re no fit to receive a visitor, you’ve gotten the
heartburn, or the headache, or ony other convenient ailment.’
Accordingly a message was brought to Primrose: ‘Young Mrs. Ramsay was
very sorry, she was not able to see a stranger.’
But Primrose was more than a match for Jenny. The young lady had quite
as much ready wit at her command as the woman owned. It would be
strange if the powers of light did not sometimes overcome the powers
of darkness. Primrose presented her compliments, and she too was very
sorry to hear that her cousin’s lady was ailing. But it did not matter
so much--Mrs. Ramsay need not put herself about, or exert herself when
she was not fit for the exertion. She--Miss Ramsay--had walked out from
Craigie with the intention of staying for a few days at her cousin’s
house of Drumsheugh. If its mistress was not well enough to come down
to her visitor to-day, no doubt Mrs. Ramsay would be better to-morrow
or the next day. In the meantime Miss Ramsay could entertain herself,
and her old friend Cunnings would see that she had everything she
wanted.
‘Hech, sirs! hech, sirs! sirs the day!’ moaned Peggy, shrinking away in
the fastness of her chamber from the most distant sight or sound of her
deliverer.
‘Send the bauld cutty about her business. Bid her leave the hoose this
minute,’ stormed Jenny.
‘Oh, I canna do that, Jenny,’ insisted the cowering Peggy.
‘Drumsheugh’s leddy cousin--she maun bide here as long as she likes,
till he come back, if she takes it into her head, though I wonder what
pleasure it can be to her to force herself in and sit in judgment on a
puir lass like me. Oh, Jamie, Jamie! will you never come back and stand
by me?’
‘It’s no your chirming will bring him back. If he had wanted to come
he might have been here long syne,’ said Jenny scornfully. ‘Peggy, tak
your choice--either that insolent hempie maun gang, or me.’
‘Jenny, Jenny, will you leave me, when the auld leddy engaged you
to stay with me till she came back?’ implored the girl, to whose
transparent mind infidelity to a pledge was simply incomprehensible.
‘How can I put Drumsheugh’s cousin to the door? It would come ill aff
my hand; I could look neither him nor his mither in the face again if
I were guilty of sic sauciness.’
‘Then you’ve ta’en your choice, Peggy, my woman, and you maun abide by
it,’ said Jenny, beginning instantly to gather together her ‘pickings’
and belongings. ‘It’s muckle gratitude I’ve gotten for a’ the trouble
I’ve wared upon you. But you’ll maybe think on me, madam, when you’re
in the hands of your gaoler. For Drumsheugh and his mither have sent
you a rale gaoler at last, and it’s little pity she’ll ha’e on your
fule tricks, you heartless gipsy.’ Jenny had the wisdom to anticipate
defeat, and beat a masterly retreat, while the wretched Peggy was
weeping and quailing, and abjectly beseeching her tyrant to reconsider
her resolution.
However, Jenny was not sufficiently prudent to avoid altogether an
encounter with her adversary, in which Peggy’s ’cuzin’ came off second
best.
‘Gude day to you, mem.’ Jenny flounced past Primrose who had gone
out to stroll in the avenue. ‘I wuss you joy o’ the charge you’ve
underta’en. I suld ken something o’t, and I tell you for your comfort
you may as weel be a daft woman’s keeper. Peggy Ramsay is bund to gang
daft as sure as ever lass gaed. I may tell you a bit o’ my mind since
you’ve not stucken at treating me like a common thief.’
Primrose turned round upon Jenny with a flame of outraged righteousness
in the girl’s aspect like the flaming sword which the angel held to bar
the way to Paradise. ‘These words are very ready on your lips, Jenny
Hedderwick. I believe they are too ready. If young Mrs. Ramsay were to
lose her wits, it would be you who had scared them away. Woman, you are
worse than a common thief! You have seethed a kid in its mother’s milk.’
At that terribly mysterious accusation even Jenny looked cowed for the
moment and slunk away, muttering a denial. The first news she heard
when she entered Craigie was that the firm to which Baldie Fuggie was
attached had broken--become bankrupt. ‘Sae that door is steekit for the
present,’ Jenny said to herself without equivocation. But she had her
pickings--a profitable four months’ work, in addition to her wages to
console her, and for such as Jenny open doors are plentiful.
Cunnings was also stumbling and fumbling about, in trembling
preparations to be gone without delay from what had been her home for
forty years; but Primrose anticipated her. She came softly into the
housekeeper’s room and looked shyly and sadly at the sinner. Primrose
said no more than ‘Oh, Cunnings, Cunnings, I’m sorry, sorry,’ and the
grey-haired delinquent groaned out her abasement: ‘Ye may weel be
sorry, Miss Ramsay, for I’m a lost woman, and yet I’m no worth the
sorrow o’ the like o’ you. I’m just a miserable, auld drucken drab.’
‘Oh! whisht! whisht! Cunnings,’ cried the girl, hiding her face, and
thinking how the trusted servant had been proud to teach her many a
secret of housekeeping, and had made much of her and petted her in
the old happy days, when Primrose came between a child and a girl to
Drumsheugh.
‘Let me gang!’ cried Cunnings desperately, ‘afore the auld mistress
claps her een on me again. She’ll walk in neist and speer what I’ve
dune wi’ the hoose and the keys when they fell into my keeping. I’ve
betrayed them baith, Miss Ramsay, and what’s waur I’ve sided wi’ that
limb o’ Sawtan Jenny in betrayin’ the puir simple bairn up the stair.
Mind ye she was betrayed. She would never o’ hersel’ had ony troke
wi’ sic doings as we were fain to carry on to cloak our ill deeds.
I’ve selled my sowl for drink, and I’ve betrayed the young mistress
(Maister Jamie’s wife). Let me gang, Miss Ramsay, if you’ve a thocht o’
sorrow for a wicket wretch like me.’
‘No, Cunnings, you shall not go,’ said Primrose brave and steadfast,
like a pitying guardian angel this time. ‘You’ll stay and help me
to undo all the wrong, and then your own fall may be forgiven and
forgotten. You’ll trust to me and I’ll protect you from your fell
weakness. I’ll speak to my aunt and cousin when they come back. I’ll
tell them that you wanted to go. I’ll bear the blame of keeping you
here. You were a faithful servant once; you’ll be faithful again,
please God. It is never too late to repent and win back respect and
confidence. Cunnings, you do not need a girl like me to tell you that.’
Cunnings hung her head more and more, and wept the few scalding tears
of age; but she stopped her packing and submitted to Primrose Ramsay’s
guidance when at the words of sympathy and encouragement, remorse was
converted into repentance.
Primrose had frequently and anxiously conned over the part she should
play in her first meeting with Peggy. Miss Ramsay would approach the
young mistress of Drumsheugh with studied deference and all the formal
homage which was now Peggy’s due.
But when Peggy, compelled to stand at bay for the second time in her
life, after a hasty, ineffectual effort to arrange her dress properly
and remove the traces of tears from her face, crept like a guilty
culprit or a forlorn ghost into the room, Primrose forgot all her
preconceived theories and studies and thought only of the fair young
creature thus blighted in what should have been her pride of bloom.
Instead of advancing in a stately fashion, curtseying and waiting for
Peggy to offer her hand, Primrose went swiftly to the wife, clasped
her in the girl’s kind arms and kissed the cold cheek, which began to
blush warmly with amazement, doubting relief and trembling pleasure.
‘My cousin Peggy,’ said Primrose, in her clear, sweet voice, ‘I’m glad
to know you. Will you forgive my intrusion? I’ve often heard of you and
so must you have heard of me; and now we must make the hearing knowing,
and become good friends as well as kinswomen, if you will let me stay
as long as you can spare room for me at Drumsheugh.’
‘Stay as long as you like,’ stammered Peggy. ‘There’s no want of room.
Ony o’ Drumsheugh’s frien’s maun aye be welcome here. Oh! surely you
ken that, though I canna say what I should,’ beginning to twist her
fingers.
‘I ken,’ said Primrose gently, ‘and you say all you should. You’re very
good to me, cousin Peggy--you’ll let me call you that in stead of Mrs.
Ramsay, which I’ve been accustomed to say to my aunt, and you’ll call
me cousin Primrose. You are very good to permit me to stay here when
I’ve taken you by surprise.’
‘_Me_ good! Permit _you_, Miss Ramsay! Oh! you’re laughing at me in
your condescension,’ cried Peggy, aghast.
‘No, I’m not laughing, and there is no condescension. I’ll never laugh
at you,’ answered Primrose a little gravely; and then she went on
cheerfully, ‘When we come to know each other better, I’m sure we’ll
be good friends, and you’ll not suspect me of laughing at you in that
sense again.’
Peggy stood rebuked without being chidden, and somehow her crushed
spirit rose a little under the rebuke. She began to look Primrose in
the face with timid satisfaction, and to proceed to ask her to sit
down and try to make her comfortable, as Peggy had been wont, in the
few happy moments after her marriage, to busy herself modestly with
Drumsheugh and Mrs. Ramsay.
CHAPTER IX.
THE LESSONS THAT PRIMROSE GAVE WHILE BALCAIRNIE LOOKED ON.
Even Primrose, who was of a hopeful disposition, with some well-placed
confidence in her social powers, had wondered what she could get to
say to Peggy in the intercourse which must follow, and Peggy had been
in mortal terror at the appalling necessity of making conversation
for Miss Ramsay. But after the first ten minutes the talk became
wonderfully easy between these two honest, single-hearted, gentle
souls, though they were on different levels of intelligence and
education. Peggy was entranced by what Primrose could tell of her
early visits to Drumsheugh--including innumerable anecdotes of
the young laird. Why, Primrose was the first intimate friend and
equal--like a sister of Drumsheugh’s--whom Peggy had ever known, who
could and would give the loving girl--pining for talk of Drumsheugh in
his absence--welcome, though not very recent information concerning
him. Primrose, in her turn, enjoyed drawing forth Peggy’s tales of
her school days, when she had been the little class-fellow of both
Drumsheugh and Balcairnie.
Gradually and almost inadvertently Peggy passed in her talk from
her school to her home and her mother. When she would have stopped,
abashed, recollecting with tingling cheeks and a pang at her heart that
her husband and his mother had not cared for her recalling these tender
associations, she found, to her deep, ineffaceable gratitude, that it
was otherwise with Primrose Ramsay. ‘Tell me about your mother, Peggy;
I like to hear about mothers--I think all the more because I have not
been so favoured as you. I never knew my mother; she died when I was
a child in arms. But your talk helps me to judge what my mother would
have been like--is like. For our mothers are both alive, and we’ll see
them yet in Heaven,’
Primrose introduced a new _régime_ at Drumsheugh--a reign of order and
diligence, peace and prosperity. And in place of its being opposed by
Peggy or proving distasteful to her, it was hailed and clung to by her
with breathless, well-nigh pathetic eagerness. She was so desirous,
when the least prospect of attainment was held out to her, of being a
good wife, a mistress of Drumsheugh of whom its old owners need not be
altogether ashamed.
One of Primrose’s first questions had been whether or not Johnny Fuggie
should be sent away after Jenny. If necessary, Primrose would assume
the responsibility of the dismissal, and save Peggy from every grain
of the pain of it. But after consultation with Balcairnie, and on
examination for herself, when the righteous young reformer found that
the man had only been a tool in Jenny’s hands, like poor Cunnings, that
he had got a wholesome warning, and was capable of being induced to
behave with fitting respect and keep at a discreet distance from his
mistress--especially when it was taken into account that he had a wife
and family whom it would go to Peggy’s heart to punish through their
bread-winner--Primrose agreed that Johnnie should remain on trial, so
to speak. The trial, as in the case of Cunnings, ended well. Johnnie,
in spite of his temporary aberration, his long tongue, and his foolish
conceit, behaved thenceforth very tolerably under difficulties. If
Peggy and he occasionally lapsed into too rash, free-and-easy gossip
when she happened to be alone with him in the garden, it was probably
as much her fault as his, and it might serve for a safety-valve in the
tension of their relations. Though poor Peggy would flutter off like
a lapwing when surprised in the indulgence, no serious harm followed,
and Drumsheugh was the last man in the world to come down heavily on so
natural and venial an offence.
Peggy, as a rule, showed herself very docile and a very quick pupil.
She only displayed a little restiveness now and then, when the lessons
trenched too closely on much-prized associations.
Primrose said one day, ‘You have very bonnie hair, Peggy, but I think
I could let you see how to dress it better, so that your friends might
more easily guess how long, and fine, and glossy it is.’
‘This was the way Drumsheugh liked my hair busket lang syne,’ answered
Peggy, a little jealously; ‘and if I were to alter it, then it would
be to put on a mutch. My mother put on a mutch when she was married;
she held that all married women should wear mutches,’ Peggy explained,
evidently a little troubled that she had not complied with her mother’s
standard.
‘But maybe Drumsheugh will like your hair busket in another fashion
now,’ said Primrose persuasively. ‘His fancy may be as taken with the
new as with the old way. His fondness does not rest with the past,
it is to last all your lives, and it will always be finding out new
beauties in his wife and her fashions. The glory of wedded love is
its growth in fidelity and its fidelity in growth. It is, or should
be, like God’s love--new every morning, and so it never gets stawed
(satiated), or tires, or shifts. As for the mutch, you can always wear
it of a morning in our rank, and you may come on to something like it
of an evening, if my cousin Jamie bring you, as I should not wonder
though he will, a fine lace ‘head’ of Mechlin or Valenciennes.’
After that conversation, under the blissful prognostication of her
laird’s finding new beauties in her every day, Peggy consented to
learn to put up her hair like Primrose’s, in a modified version of
some becoming mode of the time, and thus came considerably nearer in
appearance to the conventional lady of her generation. So with her
clothes: Primrose taught Peggy how to choose them, and how to wear them.
Strange as it may sound, it was not otherwise with her mind; for Peggy
had received the good, solid, parish education of a Scotch child a
hundred years ago. Her constant study of the Bible had trained her
intellect, so far as it went, as well as her heart. Her familiarity
with the Hebrew prophets and poets, with old Scotch ballads, and
with the exquisite songs which Burns was then causing to flood the
whole country, from castle to cottage, had cultivated her imagination
and taste. Peggy entered with positive zest into the new world of
literature, didactic and fanciful, to which Primrose introduced her. To
the teacher’s joyful surprise, and a little to her bewilderment, Peggy
was far more impressed and enthralled by a book than Kirsty Forsyth had
ever been. Peggy listened with the most respectful attention to the
advice of Hannah More and Dr. Gregory. She hung on Richardson’s and
Fanny Burney’s stories. She was wrapped up in the fortunes of Harriet
Byron, Clementina and Evelina, though their spheres were so different,
and the ‘_ma foi_’ of Evelina’s aunt, with the cockney follies of her
cousins might have been Greek or Latin, or the practices of Timbuctoo
to Peggy. Still she had perfect, comprehensive sympathy for each
heroine. Primrose’s entire heart was won by Peggy’s unexpected openness
to Primrose’s beloved books.
Another gift of Peggy’s was susceptible of training. Under Primrose’s
judicious direction Peggy’s singing became greatly improved, and
brought on a par with that of the chief young lady vocalists round
Craigie. Peggy’s broad Doric did not interfere in the least with this
accomplishment, for she sang Scotch songs, and her mother tongue only
enabled her to give them with truer effect.
Dancing was an additional available attainment of the age--so highly
coveted that the acquirement was often prosecuted under what might
have appeared insurmountable obstacles. The poor notable wives of
impecunious lairds dispensed with expensive dancing-masters, and
taught their children to dance the intricate country-dances of the day
by means of chairs set up in rows.[6] Lord Campbell, after he was
a distinguished, hard-working lawyer, went under an assumed name to
an evening dancing-school. Dr. Norman Macleod’s aunts were supposed
to have acquired dancing from an enterprising little governess,
heavily weighted with a wooden leg. Primrose was bent on refining and
perfecting Peggy’s dancing. She would make feints of practising her own
steps and of longing for a country-dance till she coaxed Peggy to stand
up with her at the head of a double row of chairs.
Balcairnie, who could go oftener to Drumsheugh now that Miss Ramsay
was there, caught the two girls in the middle of such a performance.
Primrose with long-winded assiduity was singing the tune of ‘The
White Cockade,’ in addition to taking her part in the dance. Peggy
was slightly holding out her gown as she was bidden, and sliding
bashfully, yet not without a certain natural grace, down the room at
the backs of the chairs. No gazer could have been more imbued with
keen pleasure and humble admiration, but, like Actæon, he had to
pay a penalty for his rash gazing. He was compelled by the autocrat
Primrose to join in dancing a ‘three-some reel,’ performed to his
whistling instead of her singing, while the last rays of the setting
sun were yet gilding the pear-tree round the western window of the
Drumsheugh drawing-room. When he was brought to the point he did his
duty gallantly, not withholding a single spring, shuffle or ‘hough!’
which was Primrose’s due, but capering his best, with the serious face
which most English and Scotchmen put on to qualify their gambols. It
might be some consolation for the effort of the exhibition to hear a
judge and mistress of the art like Primrose say graciously after the
deed was done, ‘Well danced, sir. I have often heard that there were
no reels to be seen far or near like those danced by you and Drumsheugh
and my cousin Peggy here, and now, though I am a poor substitute for
the laird, I know what the folk said was true.’
Peggy’s hands were far more unmanageable than her head or her heels.
She had been brought up too entirely in the country, and Luckie
Hedderwick had been too poor for the child to have derived any
advantage from such a ‘sewing school’ as Craigie possessed, under
the patronage of some of the Ladies Bountiful in the neighbourhood.
It need hardly be said in addition that Peggy had not the smallest
acquaintance with the mysteries of high cooking, preserve and pastry
making, and the brewing of home-made wine. Peggy could spin and knit
well, and do a little coarse sewing and darning rather indifferently.
She could scour a floor or a table, make porridge and kail, boil
potatoes and bake cakes, but she could do little else in the light of
domestic attainments. Unfortunately, with the exception of the spinning
and knitting, even Peggy’s few acquirements were out of count. The
field for them was gone. Primrose set herself with affectionate zeal
to supply the blank, but long before Peggy had toiled half through her
first sampler, Miss Ramsay was forced to own to herself that here was
labour thrown away, as much as if she had sought to train Peggy to play
on the spinnet late in the day. There are some respects in which lost
opportunities--however innocently and inevitably lost--can never be
recalled. Peggy’s fingers had grown stiff, and her eyes dull to nice
distinctions of pattern and colour. She must be left to her spinning
which, fortunately, was not yet banished from drawing-rooms; and she
must be permitted to hem towels and dusters in the same dignified
quarter. For the child-wife Dora could not have felt prouder to be
of use than was the rustic ‘Lady Peggy.’ Indeed, Peggy went further
than Dora, since the little English girl could feel content to be
played with--whether by David Copperfield or Gyp, while it made the
deeper-souled Scotch girl, who had once actually been the bread-winner
of a household, feel humbled and miserable to realise herself of no
real moment, an idle ornament--if she could be called an ornament--and
not one of the stays of her house.
At last Peggy’s wifely ambition was fired to gigantic struggles by
two grand and glorious achievements which were dangled before her
eyes. If she would give her whole attention and try and try again, she
might--who knows?--so improve in white seam and cookery as to be fit
before she died, or her sight and memory failed, to make a frilled
shirt for Drumsheugh, and bake a pie which he could eat.
How hard Peggy strove at her tasks, with such splendid rewards before
her, during the long summer days! So immeasurable was her enthusiasm
that against tremendous odds she attained her object, even before
Drumsheugh’s return. She made the shirt, every bit with her own slow
hands:
Seam, gusset, and band;
Band, gusset, and seam;
sewing on the buttons in an intensely happy dream. She baked a
preparatory pie, pondering as anxiously over its ingredients as the
eastern princess debated over her crucial cream tart with the pepper
seasoning, and more impartial authorities than Primrose and Cunnings
would have pronounced the feats highly creditable to their author.
With innocent pride and exultation Peggy displayed the trophies of her
prowess to Balcairnie. She showed the sark of Hollands fine, solemnly
assuring him that she had put in every ‘steek’ herself, and gleefully
boasting that she had a web of the same cloth bleaching on the green,
and by the next summer she would have made a dozen of shirts to keep
the laird well provided. She conducted her friend the yeoman into the
larder, and invited him to break off a lump of the pie-crust and ‘pree’
it for himself.
Having examined these two credentials of capable womanhood, which
used to be demanded from every young girl before she passed into a
young lady, that were often crowned by gratified parents with such
substantial gifts as silk gowns or gold watches, he said with profound
conviction, and the utmost approval: ‘Ay, Mrs. Ramsay, you’re a
finished leddy now, and you may thank Miss Ramsay for it.’ He made a
little obeisance to Primrose in his turn, and looked as if he felt
certain that Peggy’s prosperous future was thenceforth secured.
Primrose had grown very proud as well as fond of her pupil, after the
visitor had by earnest representations induced the old relative with
whom she usually dwelt, to grant her further leave of absence and
suffer her stay at Drumsheugh to extend to many weeks.
It happened to be Primrose’s first long visit from home after she was
quite grown up. Therefore it formed an era in the girl’s life which
might never be repeated. This was not foreboding an early death for
Primrose, but she was no longer a school girl, and before travelling
had been made easy, when it was still both hazardous to the person and
a drain on the purse, friendly visits were not frequent though they
might be long. Primrose and Peggy had laughed together over that famous
marriage visit paid by the ‘heartsome lass,’ Miss Suff Johnstone, to
the young matron the Countess of Balcarres, which lasted over a period
of thirteen years. ‘I should like to give her safe out of my own
hands, improved as she is, the dear lamb, into the hands of my cousin
Jamie and my aunt,’ Primrose proposed to herself. ‘I wonder what they
will think of her; if they will thank me. But I have done little; I had
such good ground to work upon.’
The Ramsays, mother and son, had heard of Primrose’s presence at
Drumsheugh, and were thoroughly acquiescent and complacent, though not
in equal degrees. The laird was simply well pleased that Peggy should
have good company, be acknowledged by his kin, and become acquainted
with one of the best of them. It was left for his mother to cry out:
‘Primrose Ramsay at Drumsheugh! That beats all! Now all will go well
with my son’s wife.’
To do the old lady justice, she had been accustoming herself more and
more to think and speak of Peggy as ‘my son’s wife’; while she did
so, she took the girl nearer to her heart, and made Peggy’s joys and
sorrows more her own. ‘I would have given ten years of my dowager’s
jointure to have said before to Primrose, “Come and help us,” but I had
not the face. Primrose Ramsay is a fine as well as a clever creature.’
Mrs. Ramsay reflected further: ‘Who but she would have looked over all
former shortcomings and been the first to hold out her hand to Peggy? I
see now what a wife Primrose would have made to Jamie, but it was not
to be.’
No doubt the fatalistic sentence had been to a considerable extent
worked out by the speaker. For it had been on the cards that Jamie
Ramsay might have been won from Peggy in the earlier stages of their
acquaintance, and his allegiance transferred to Primrose, if that most
winning young woman--at once strong and sweet--had continued thrown in
his way as a visitor at Drumsheugh.
Still, Mrs. Ramsay, though rather an exceptionally truthful woman,
consoled herself by repeating, with a shake of the head, ‘It was not to
be,’ slurring over all the details in the failure of such a marriage,
and adding briskly, ‘But the next best thing is for Primrose to have
taken Mrs. Jamie in hand.’
So long as Drumsheugh and his mother used the privilege of rare
travellers in pro-longing their travels, Miss Ramsay had to content
herself with showing off Peggy in the first blush of her rapid
improvement to Balcairnie. Generous man though he was, he sometimes
sighed in the middle of his unaffected satisfaction--not so much for
Peggy as for that charmed region into which she was fast passing, and
which he might never enter. No fairy princess or gifted woman, however
good, would quit her rank to train his clumsy hands and feet and
tongue, to refine his plain manners and rude tastes.
But other company besides Balcairnie now came freely to Drumsheugh.
Primrose’s presence there made the greatest difference in this
respect to Peggy. If the laird’s cousin--a sensible, well-conducted,
well-educated, young lady like Miss Ramsay, went and stayed with his
wife, the scandals against her must have been grossly exaggerated. She
must have been more sinned against than sinning: Miss Ramsay had taken
care to remedy all that was wrong, and if she supported ‘Lady Peggy’
thus cordially, Drumsheugh’s neighbours could do no less than back her
a little, for the sake of the laird and his mother.
When people did notice young Mrs. Ramsay, everybody was struck by the
change in her, and the immense advance she had made. She was becoming
quite presentable, and like the rest of the world. Poor young thing!
after all she had always been modest and harmless, though she had been
a cotter’s daughter and a field worker not two years ago. Her elevation
had been the fault of Drumsheugh and Balcairnie, as Drumsheugh’s own
mother had said.
Mrs. Forsyth herself made her appearance at Drumsheugh, acknowledging
by her presence there some glimmering suspicion that a fresh mild
sun might be about to rise on the social horizon. ‘You have worked
wonders,’ she said to her old friend. ‘I believe I could bid young Mrs.
Ramsay to my house to tea now, without fear of how she might behave and
what folk would say. Still, it was a great risk, and I cannot acquit
you of much imprudence in exposing yourself to it.’
‘I am not so foolish as to ask your acquittal, Kirsty,’ said Primrose,
‘and we are not out of the wood yet. Take care that you do not run into
danger yourself. My cousin Peggy might help herself and drain your
tea-pot.’ Primrose was provoked into a hit at the private parsimony
which was already the weak point of Kirsty Forsyth’s housekeeping ‘Do
you know what Mrs. Jamie said to me when we were speaking the other
night of the dancing-school ball at Craigie, and I was remarking that
if Drumsheugh had been at home we might all have graced it? “I might
have tried a reel or even a country dance,” she ventured to promise,
“but a high dance I would not have attempted.” Yet, if it had not been
going out of fashion, so that she might have danced it at the wrong
time and place, seeing that she does not know all the outs and ins of
society, poor dearie, I would have engaged to instruct her to walk
through a _minuet de la cour_ ravishingly.’
‘Primrose, you are out of your mind or fey,’ said Mrs. Forsyth angrily,
for to dance a _minuet de la cour_ ravishingly had been till quite
lately the height of polite accomplishments.
Primrose was not always in a merry mood. Like most fine characters,
hers had a pensive side, which it remained for Peggy to find out. ‘Why
do you take so much trouble with me, cousin Primrose?’ inquired the
young wife in one of her paroxysms of gratitude.
‘Because I like you so well, my lassie,’ answered Primrose promptly.
‘I’m real fond of you--as fond as though you had been the sister I
never possessed, and that is saying something. I would have liked a
brother--a big, blustering, fleeching chield of a brother--to order me
about and make a stir in the house. But oh! Peggy, I would fain have
had a sister. I would have had a great work either with an elder or a
younger sister.’
‘But when you first kenned me?’ urged Peggy.
‘Well, you see, I could not let you be wronged, as Balcairnie told me
you were wronged, and my cousin Jamie is the nearest man-body I have.
Some day he or his son, if you bring him an heir, will walk at the
head of my coffin as chief mourner at my funeral.’
‘Na, na,’ interposed Peggy; ‘you’ll marry yoursel’--you’re bound to;
and a man and bairns of your ain will lament you sair. But death and
auld age are far awa’.’
‘I dinna ken,’ said Primrose softly; ‘we do not all live to grow old,
Peggy; my mother and father both died young. As for marrying,’ speaking
a little more lightly, ‘we do not all marry either. I’m not bonnie,
like you, and I’ve no tocher.’
‘What a tocher you would be to any lucky lad who had the gude fortune
to win you!’ cried Peggy ecstatically.
‘But he cannot ken that ere he set his heart on me,’ said Primrose
naïvely. Then she went on to tell Peggy that the income of the elderly
relative with whom Primrose stayed died with the annuitant. Primrose
might be a very poor gentlewoman indeed, in a generation when there
were few channels by which a gentlewoman could earn independence.
She was often forced to think how anxiously she would have to pinch
and scrape to secure a living in her old age, when she was ‘a single
leddy,’ without even the small privilege of ‘a lass with a lantern,’
for her evening escort to the houses of better provided friends.
While Peggy vowed in her heart that Primrose should never know such
straits, since the best seat, the best room, and the most precious
thing which Drumsheugh held must be at her command, young Mrs. Ramsay
was made to understand that the sense of her loneliness, her lack
of family ties, and her uncertain future often pressed heavily on
Primrose. Yet this was the girl Peggy had always envied, because
Primrose was so clever and helpful and blithe that she never entered
a household without becoming quickly like sunshine there. It taught
Peggy another, and that one of the most valuable, lessons she learned
from her friend--the mingled warp and woof of which the web of human
life is composed, the hard knots beneath the smooth surface.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] As an example of the rigid self-restraint, no less than the
indefatigable self-devotion of one of these ladies, it is recorded that
when a son was about to sail for India--a terrible exile then--and came
in to say farewell, when he found her playing on her piano, she merely
looked over her shoulder, nodded a ‘good-bye, my dear,’ and immediately
turning resumed her tune, and played on till his last footstep had
sounded in the avenue.
CHAPTER X.
‘A’ WILL BE RICHT AGAIN WHEN JAMIE HE’S COME BACK.’
At last, when the late harvest of those days was nearly over, when
Balcairnie was ‘grieving,’ or ‘leading,’ or ‘forking’ in the fields and
in the stack-yards both of Balcairnie and Drumsheugh, before the first
hoar frost had melted in the early rays of the morning sun, till it was
lying again thick and white all around, like the manna of the children
of Israel, in the moon-light; when the mellow russet and yellow apples
had long replaced the delicate pink-and-white apple blossom, and there
were no lingering flowers in the gardens save sun-flowers, marigolds,
and daisies, Drumsheugh and his mother were to come home--not ‘late,
late in the gloamin,’ like Kilmeny, but at a more rational hour of
the afternoon. It would permit a four o’clock tea, or ‘fower hours,’
something perfectly distinct from a modern kettledrum. At the ‘fower
hours’ Peggy’s famous pie was to serve as the _pièce de résistance_,
well balanced by ale and glenlivat. Her maiden efforts in preserves,
elderflower and elderberry, currant, and ginger wines were to keep
company with the butter-bannocks and cakes and honey, the loaf-bread,
the short-bread and the diet-loaf which suited the old lady’s green
tea. The provision was not too ample for the large execution sanguinely
expected from the ravenous appetites of the travellers. Balcairnie,
too, had donned his best coat in honour of the occasion, hurrying
from the harvest-field at the first word of warning that a yellow
post-chaise was seen on the road to Drumsheugh.
It had not been altogether the laird’s careless procrastination, or any
reluctance to return home from a growing fear of what he was to find
there, which had delayed the mother and son so long. There had been
chases by privateers, contrary winds, an illness of Mrs. Ramsay’s, an
accident to the London coach, uncontrollable impediments turning up in
succession and baffling the travellers.
But at last Peggy wore, under happy auspices, one of the new gowns
which had been ordered from Baldie Fuggie. It had been carefully cut
out, made up, and toned down under Primrose’s superintendence; next it
had been brightened up by dexterous touches here and there, of lawn
neckerchief and apron, and bonnie breast-knot. It was a very fair and
gentle-looking young lady, whose trim feet in their rosetted shoes,
under the dainty skirt well tucked through the pocket-hole, tripped
so lightly--though the speed was tremulous, from her post by the
decapitated stone pillars at the head of the fir avenue, into the
middle of the rough road--along which she had jogged with Balcairnie on
the wintry night of her dismal home-coming--to take that first place at
the chaise door to which she was entitled.
Old Mrs. Ramsay’s head, well protected with wraps, though it still
wanted a month to Martinmas, was poked out of the window on her side in
anticipation of her arrival. ‘Eh! can that be you, Peggy, my love?’ she
cried with glad surprise. ‘You’re looking so well I would hardly have
known you.’
But when Drumsheugh leapt from the chaise and took his wife in his
arms, he said the very reverse, though he had not even heard his
mother’s comment, and had no thought of contradicting her. ‘I’m glad to
find my Peggy the same,’ he said fervently, ‘the very same as when I
left her. I’m far gladder of that than to be at hame again, though that
is good, too. I have not seen any leddy like you, Peggy, my doo, since
I quitted Drumsheugh.’
Peggy looked uplifted to the sky as at the very words she would have
liked best to hear.
‘The ungrateful man!’ said Primrose Ramsay to Balcairnie, when the two
were comparing notes together in the recess of one of the drawing-room
windows before he left. ‘The ungrateful woman!’ after all I have done
to make her liker him and her place henceforth.’
He was not sure whether she was most in jest or earnest, and there
was a strain of wistfulness in his reply. ‘But did you not see how
his speech pleased her, Miss Ramsay? She would rather have been told
she was the same to him than that she had grown like the queen on
the throne; yet she would not have been the same to him if she had
not changed with the weeks and months, thanks to you. Do you hear
me, madam, or do you suppose I’m contradicting myself? He has been
learning, almost without his knowledge, to see her with other een all
the time he has been away, and if she had come upon him, just as she
used to be, he would have been startled and flegged. It is these other
een which the improvement in her fits so well, that he was as proud and
happy as a king to see at a glance she was as bonnie and dear to him as
ever. Except for you, Miss Ramsay, this gude end would never have come
to pass.’
‘I’m afraid you’re a flatterer, Balcairnie,’ said Primrose demurely.
‘Na, na,’ he said hastily, with some trouble and agitation laying hold
of him, in consequence of her accusation, ‘I have no saft words. I’m
but a yeoman-farmer. Nobody’s likely to ettle to rub me down--or up,’
he finished, a little sorely.
‘Don’t let them, if there is anybody so conceited and impertinent as
to try,’ she said quickly, with a curious tone of half-smothered
indignation against him rather than against herself, mingling with her
half fun; ‘there is no call for it. You are best as you are; you could
not be better. But why do you let me speak like that? Why do you need
to be told such a plain truth?’
A rush of colour flew into his face, a glow into his eyes; still he
paused doubtfully, as at news too good to be believed. ‘Forgive me for
being a gowk,’ he said humbly, ‘but do you really mean I could not be
better to you, Miss Ramsay?’
She bit her lips, frowned, laughed, and nodded, while she grew as red
as fire herself. ‘Why do you make me say and do such things?’ she
repeated, with an impatient tap of her foot.
‘Well,’ he said eagerly, ‘I’ve gear enough, and if I were to buy a
place like this, and be a laird like Drumsheugh, you and me would never
be equal in anything worth counting--never. Nobody kens that better
than myself; but there would be less outward odds, less descent in the
sight of the world for you.’
‘Please yourself. I daresay it is very natural for a man to wish to
have land of his own,’ she said, with the indulgent sympathy which was
one of her chief charms. ‘Most natural for a man like you who would
know and love every inch of his land, and spend his life in causing it
to wave with corn. But if you please, I have my pride too, and I think
I would rather stoop a little in outward show, if the world likes to
call it stooping, than that you should be in a hurry to rax up (stretch
violently) an idle fancy, to me. I would like fine to try what it is
to be the gudewife of Balcairnie. I’ve a notion it would be a pleasant
place to fill, to stand in your mither’s shoes, and be to you what she
was to her gude man.’
In after years, when Primrose had long been the much-loved,
much-honoured wife of Jock Home, and their love had room and to spare
for merry jesting, he was wont to assure their daughters that he would
never have presumed to approach their mother as a suitor if she had not
given him the first word of encouragement.
On the whole, Balcairnie and Primrose’s _mésalliance_--small by
comparison, though, to be sure, it was a direct result of the first
flagrant transgression of social laws, met with large tolerance. There
were even persons, only slightly acquainted with the future bride,
certainly, who maintained she had done very well for herself--‘a
penniless lass with a long pedigree,’ white-faced, and small to boot,
who had won so braw a bridegroom and so comfortable a down-sitting as
Balcairnie. She had cut her own cloth when she was pretending to be
looking after the interests of others. Even the old Lady of Drumsheugh
grieved over the marriage principally because she was conscious that
here too she had been to blame for the misadventure. And Primrose was
so fine and generous a creature she deserved the very best match in the
country, which, when it came to that, Primrose argued with spirit she
had got.
As for Primrose’s proper guardian, she would not have thought the
Prince of Wales or the Duke of York good enough for her darling, so
that it did not matter so much that Mrs. Purvis should resent the
child’s infatuation, and experience a large amount of chagrin, which
had to be tenderly borne with and persuaded away before the wedding
could take place.
Mrs. Forsyth, though she had set the example, did not clearly perceive
the parallel, and was by no means without several strong private
objections. Balcairnie might have plenty of money and old wheat stacks,
but he was not in a learned profession like Dr. Forsyth, and it would
be a terrible upheaval of the very foundations of gentility if unequal
marriages were to become common, the rule instead of the exception.
But there was great and unmixed joy in the hearts of Drumsheugh and
Peggy over the delightful fortuitousness of the attachment. Drumsheugh
almost shook the bridegroom elect’s hand off, and loudly claimed the
right to be ‘blackfoot’ in turn to his friend. Peggy hugged Primrose as
if they had been very sisters, and cried that now she was not to lose
her, she, Peggy, had little more to desire; she was near the summit
of human bliss. In the end even the few hostile voices were silenced,
for Balcairnie, in the course of a year or two, fulfilled his purpose
of buying a fair estate, was welcomed among the lairds, and held up
his head modestly among them. Then the old Lady of Drumsheugh and Mrs.
Forsyth took him fully to their hearts.
JEAN KINLOCH.
CHAPTER I.
JEAN SCORNED.
‘Ower the muir among the heather,’ Jean Kinloch walked straight and
fast on a sunny sabbath morning in autumn. She was only nineteen years
of age but already she was tall and broad-shouldered, with the perfect
proportions and perfect development of health and strength. She was
nearer to a beautiful woman than to a bonnie lassie. She had the
dark-haired, black-browed, grey-eyed face, with the clear-cut features
and clear complexion which one is accustomed to associate with the
highest type of Norman beauty. But Jean’s white square teeth, and round
somewhat massive chin, were departures from the type as it is usually
to be met with. And if she had the dignity and earnestness which on
occasions break into sunshine--incomparably sweeter, more pathetic,
even more radiant, relieved against the almost sombre background, than
an all-pervading, soulless light-heartedness can be--it was not Norman
dignity and earnestness. It was the self-respect and sedateness of the
Scotch peasant woman, on whom a Hebrew stamp has been deeply impressed,
who is enamoured of duty as other women are enamoured of pleasure, to
whom the sternest doctrines of Calvinism are invested with an awful
beauty. These are the Lord’s decrees, and though He should slay her,
yet will she trust in Him.
Jean’s dress had lost the picturesqueness which would have
distinguished her grand-mother’s, but it was good of its kind--if
somewhat severe in the tone and cut, and only remarkable as worn by
Jean Kinloch. But Jean carried a bible which was no modern, cheaply
printed, cheaply bound Bible Society’s volume: it was a valuable
hereditary possession in a couple of small volumes bound in fine and
lasting russian leather with flaps fastened by burnished silver clasps,
while there was dim gold on the edges of the yellow leaves with their
clear delicate print. A bible not unlike it is to be seen among the
relics of Burns. It was given by the peasant farmer’s son to his
Highland Mary--the girl whom he was to immortalise by two out of the
most exquisite love-laments in any language--in that autumn when she
came down and ‘shore’ the harvest with him among the
‘banks and braes and streams around
The Castle o’ Montgomery.’
But Jean Kinloch’s bible was not a love-gift, on which, as it was held
in the man’s left hand over a running stream, the woman and her lover
clasped hands, and swore in the sight of their God to be faithful to
death. Such bibles with the broken sixpences of a more worldly form of
troth-plight were already gone out of fashion. This book possessed a
different distinction, having been Jean’s mother’s kirking bible.
Jean was bound on a long and fatiguing walk even for her youth and
vigour, so that she had got up by daybreak, before even the minister,
the earliest riser in the manse, had replaced the Greek and Hebrew
studies of ordinary days, by the preparatory devotions peculiar
to the sabbath day, while the rest of the household lay in silent
unconsciousness. She had set out ere the raw mist had cleared away, in
order to reach Logan Kirk in time for the forenoon ‘diet of worship.’
The only sufficient warrant in Jean’s eyes for such a distant
expedition on that ‘sawbath day’ which she had been taught to reverence
so intensely, would have been an exceptional privilege of sitting down
at one of the sacred ‘tables,’ after they had been jealously ‘fenced.’
Then she would have heard it ‘served’ by some grand minister, a very
patriarch and prophet in one, a man famed in Jean’s circle for lofty
austere piety, impassioned zeal, and immense experience with learning
to match, though the latter quality was held in small account compared
to the recommendations which went before it. Such a minister was a fit
successor to ‘Holy Renwick’ and ‘gude Cargill’ and the other heroes and
martyrs who endured to the end--till they were shot down in peat bogs,
or mounted steadfastly and triumphantly the long ladder to the high
gallows in the Grass Market of Edinburgh.
But young Jean was not journeying on so unexceptionable and profitable
an errand. It was her own private affairs which sent her forth to cross
the broad moor on the sabbath morning, and any competent judge might
easily guess that Jean’s affairs were in dire confusion when she took
such a step.
Jean’s story was not unprecedented in her rank of life, though it is to
be hoped that hers was an extreme case. She had been courted for years,
young as she was, and at last trothplighted to a young ploughman.
Their marriage had been fixed to take place in the following spring at
Whitsunday, one of the two great feeing, flitting, and marrying terms
among Scotch agricultural labourers. Jean had been making manifold
happy preparations in her quiet womanly way by little purchases from
pedlars, by seams sewed diligently in the half hours which were
honestly hers, by plans made over and over again with fond deliberation
and reiteration for the laying out of her little savings and her next
half year’s wages. She had been undecided whether she herself should
invest in a chest of drawers, or help Bob to buy an eight-day clock,
either of which would be an ‘honesty,’ that is a standing mark of
respectability in their ‘cot house’ and might descend as an heirloom
to their children.
In the meantime the bridegroom elect had left Dalroy, which was his
native parish as well as Jean’s, and gone ‘to better himself’ on a
farm in the parish of Logan. But it did not seem to her to matter
much--except where their feelings were concerned, that he should have
little communication with her, either personally or by letter in the
interval. He might or he might not, after the pitting of the potatoes,
the last pressing job of the rural year,
tak his stick into his hand
on his sabbath-day out, and cross ten miles of moor, as Jean was doing
now, to visit her for a few hours. He might or he might not send her a
formal letter or two, or a message occasionally by the carrier. What
was his performance or failure in such trifles to Jean’s great trust in
her lad? Yet of all classes of men, perhaps with the single exception
of soldiers, not one is so notoriously fickle in love-making as Scotch
ploughmen, not one is more exposed to special sources of temptation,
and not one, alas! as Jean knew, though her pure mind recoiled from the
grievous knowledge and refused absolutely to connect it with her lover,
is more apt to fall into a particular form of vice.
But it is to be hoped that the class’s frequent fickleness and folly do
not often attain the climax they reached here; for Jean had not only
been courted, a solemn promise of marriage had been exchanged between
her and her lover, and such promises are not broken--either by lord or
lout, lady or lass, without causing such a scandal in their respective
worlds, as proves the comparative rarity of the offence.
Jean had dwelt in her dream of perfect faith and security until two
days before the sabbath in question. Then the sister of the lover, who
was also Jean’s bosom friend, came to the back door of the manse and
called out Jean in the middle of the day at the height of her household
work, to break to her a catastrophe.
‘Oh Jean!’ said Eppie, taking the first word--before Jean could cry
out was there anything wrong with Bob--and speaking with tears and
groans and honest blushes--‘Oh! that ever I should see the day I would
be black ashamed of my ain kith an’ kin--that ever I should have to
say it to you--a lass that mither an’ me were proud to count as are of
the family. There is word by Willie Broon the carrier--and I doubt it
is ower true, for Willie, though he may take a drap, was never given
to leein’--our Bob has played you fause, he has ta’en up with another
lass--ane Leezbeth Red (Reid), a fellow-servant at Blawart Brae. Nae
doubt she has set her cap at him ilka day and hour, ilka kye milking
and horse suppering, and Bob was aye a simple chield--even mair sae
when a fair flattering tongue than when red and white cheeks came in
his way. The upshot is--and I could have seen him, my ain brither,
in the mools afore I had to carry the tidings to you--and I’ll never
speak to the other lass who has stealt him from you--never, be she ten
times my gude sister--but it is richt you should ken at aince; they say
Bob has done her a sair wrang, and there is nothing left for him but
to marry her; so the twa are to be cried together this very incoming
sabbath in Logan Kirk. They may be cried and marriet too,’ protested
the informant in her righteous indignation for Jean, ‘but it’s no his
friends that will ever own them after sic heartless deceit, and sic
disgrace as they have brocht upon us a’.’
‘Dinna speak in that wild way, Eppie,’ said Jean with a little of her
natural stateliness and reserve after the first deadly spasm of sick
incredulity and terrible pain, when Jean had held her breath for a
moment. ‘If it be sae that Bob has changed his mind without telling
me, even if he has fallen into greater sin, still it is not for you
to refuse to own his wife; though I ken you mean weel, what gude would
that do to me? And now I maun go in, Eppie, for I am in the middle of
ironing the minister’s best sark, and if I tarry longer the irons will
get cauld.’ And the irons must not get cold though Jean’s heart should
break. She must go on ironing in a dazed sort of way, but yet to the
best of her ability, that special sark of the minister’s which he was
to wear when he presided over the Synod next Tuesday.
Then Jean resolved to ascertain for herself, beyond the possibility of
doubt, whether Bob Meffin were a traitor or a true man. It was not a
subject to ask questions about, nor was she the woman to lay bare her
heart to the public gaze. But this coming sabbath was Jean’s sabbath
out, and she could, without saying a word to anybody else, get her
unsuspecting mistress to grant her leave to spend the day in walking
across the moor and attending public worship at Logan Kirk instead of
waiting on the ministrations of her master at Dalroy.
Jean shed no tear nor did she sob and sigh audibly as she walked along
to meet her destiny. But she was utterly unobservant of the nature she
loved in the scene around her, either in its broad outlines or in its
minute details. She had no attention to spare to-day for the spreading
heathery moor, as fresh and free almost as the blue sky above it, on
a sunny morning like this, when what had been the summer’s glistening
dew-drops were just beginning to fall heavily and hoarily in the first
suspicion of frost.
Jean had no notice to give to the sweet pungent smell of the heather,
to the varying hues of the purple milkwort, the yellow rock rose, the
nodding white-flowered grass of Parnassus which diversified the red
ling. She did not listen to the hum of the big bee--a splendid fellow
in black and gold, who was continually crossing her path and sounding
his drone in her ear, or to the twitter of the brown and grey linnet
which brushed her very skirts as he rose from the broom, or to the crow
of the moor cock and to the cry of the plover. Yet all these noises
were made doubly distinct by the sabbath stillness which rendered
itself felt even on the moor when no sportsmen were shooting there, no
quarry men or bands of late shearers taking near cuts to their quarries
and fields.
Now and then Jean roused herself from her painful abstraction,
and tried to control her racked heart and brain, by what she had
always known as the potent spell of duty. It was the sabbath day,
and therefore she was not her own mistress; though it was her ‘day
out,’ she ought not, as a Christian woman, to be engrossed with her
own worldly concerns, however imperative. She should try at least
to engage in some mental exercise befitting the day--since, as Jean
held, its divine obligation was not affected by her human distress.
She made a great effort and prepared to repeat aloud, as she walked,
one of the psalms with which her memory was stored, using it as the
early Christians raised the symbol of the cross for a charm against
distracting worldly thoughts.
She began mechanically to say the first psalm, the earliest learnt by
Scotch children, one of the most familiar throughout life. But
All people that on earth do dwell,
Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice,
in its call to universal praise--associated closely as it is with
the noblest, simplest, most moving melody which ever rang rudely yet
thrillingly through barn kirk or along bleak hill-side, faltered and
died away on Jean’s quivering lips.
The staunch-hearted woman began again with the psalm which holds the
second place in the regard of her nation--
The Lord’s my shepherd,
I’ll not want;
and when she had reached the fourth verse, she found that her choice
was more appropriate:
Yea, though I walk in death’s dark vale,
Yet will I fear none ill,
said Jean steadfastly--and truly, it was like voluntarily descending
into ‘death’s dark vale’ to go on with the end in view for which Jean
journeyed this day. And if she had got her choice, the girl in her
magnificent bloom of young womanhood, with all her warm interest in
life--which her religion sanctified but did not stifle, would far
rather have lain her down and died, than found Bob Meffin a leear, a
still more cruel sinner against another woman than against Jean herself.
Jean was not well known to the congregation of Logan Kirk; she had not
been there more than once or twice in her life before, and the one
person in the neighbourhood with whom she was well acquainted she did
not expect to see in the kirk this morning.
She reached the little kirk close to the adjoining hamlet, both of
the ‘drystane dyke’ order of architecture, just as the most primitive
of bells commenced to make discord instead of harmony, clattering and
tinkling instead of clashing and booming its summons.
Nobody recognised Jean as she passed through the groups in the
roughly kept kirkyard, and though she did not absolutely shrink from
observation, being too brave and upright to take, as if by natural
instinct, to hiding her head, she certainly did not desire notice.
She was glad to get into a back seat without attracting any further
remark--than what was casually bestowed on a strange face, from the
fellow-worshippers who were equally strange to her.
The country people--most of them farmers and farm-servants with the
village hand-loom weavers--tramped and tumbled in, with the want
of ceremony which used to distinguish a Scotch rural congregation.
The minister and precentor took their places, and Jean fixed mute
imploring eyes on the latter as if the decision of her fate rested
with him. He was a homely, elderly man, distinguished among his
compeers by the _sobriquet_, derived from his office in the kirk, of
‘Singing Johnny,’ a souter by trade, but a less thirsty and a more
theological souter than his great namesake. As he rose for the secular
rite which in Scotland precedes the religious services, even the most
austerely devout listened attentively with human interest. And if
the congregation had only known, so as to watch a young woman in the
obscurity of the back seats, they might have been aroused by the fading
of the rich colour in her face, the rigid set of her mouth, and the
desperate light as of a creature at bay, in what ought to have been
her reasonable grey eyes, to comprehend that her hands were clasped
tight--even clenched--under the shelter of the book-board in an agony.
Johnny dallied with the matter in hand, perfectly unaware of the
torture he was inflicting. He laboured under no press of business as
at Martinmas or Whitsunday; this was a sabbath between terms when
little was doing in Johnny’s line. He was able to rise in a deliberate
manner, to sleek down his stubbly hair as he was wont to do, before
raising the psalm tune, to look around him with even more philosophical
indifference; indeed, the only customary act which he refrained from
doing as if to distinguish his secular from his religious duties,
was that of putting up his hands before his mouth and giving a
preliminary cough behind the screen. At last he proclaimed sonorously:
‘There is a purpose of marriage between Tammas Proodfit and Ailison
Clinkscales--for the second time,’ not that the purpose had been
entertained, dropped and resumed, but that the announcement had been
made before and would ring out once again in the ears of the listening
kirk.
One woman was listening intently with bent head as if she would fain
catch even the sound of a pin’s fall, through the thick tumultuous
beating of her heart. At the words spoken there was the faintest rustle
of relaxation in her attitude. The couple whose intention had been thus
sounded abroad were entire strangers to her. What had she to do with
a Tammas Proodfit and an Ailison Clinkscales, or what had they to do
with her? It was not to hear them ‘cried’ that she had walked ten miles
across the moor.
After the proclamation there was a distinct pause, which had the air
of being instituted for sensational effect, unless Johnny had no
more ‘purposes of marriages’ in the background to fire off at the
congregation.
One fainting heart leapt up with half wild relief and joy. After all
it was a base report without a word of truth in it. Bob was to be
proved innocent as the babe unborn.
Woe’s me! Johnny was even then fumbling with another set of lines in
his horny fingers; he lifted up his voice afresh and called all present
to witness that there was also a purpose of marriage ‘between Robert
Meffin and Leezbeth Red for the first time.’ Having discharged his lay
functions, he stopped abruptly to look up, in expectation of the folded
paper which the minister rose and bent over the pulpit to hand to him,
taking Singing Johnny into his confidence as it were, with regard to
the psalms and paraphrases appropriate to the sermon, which were to
be sung during the service, for which the precentor was to find the
fitting tunes on the spur of the moment.
Even after the commencement of the second proclamation, the formal
employment of the full christian name struck so unfamiliarly on Jean’s
ears, as to stay the flood of anguish for an instant longer, till the
enunciation of the surname in company with the name she had heard given
to her rival, rendered doubt no longer possible. It was all over, as
Jean had heard said after her father and mother had drawn their last
breath. It was too true: this was her Bob Meffin and no other whom she
had heard cried with another woman in order to repair as far as might
be a shameful wrong.
Jean felt like the rest of us when the catastrophe we have most dreaded
has come upon us, that she had not known how much she had hoped against
hope--how hard a battle hope had fought for bare life, till it lay
slain stark and cold at her feet.
For she had not come there with any intention of protesting against the
marriage which would be celebrated within the next few weeks. Such a
step is even rarer in Scotland than in England; neither could there be
any appeal under the circumstances. It was only that Bob Meffin had
lied to her and before the Lord, had fallen from what Jean had judged
to be the glory of his manhood and dragged down another with him in his
fall. Thenceforth the two who had been all in all could be less than
nothing to each other.
Jean had listened to the sentence which blighted her youthful hopes,
crushed her tenderest affections, and left her in the flower of her
beauty, in all her sense and goodness, for no fault of her own, a lass
‘lichtlied’--scorned before the world--that sorest humiliation to a
woman. And it was all for the wiles of another lass with regard to whom
Jean knew full well, without any vanity or arrogance on her part, that
Leezbeth Red and such as she were not worthy to be named in the same
breath with her--Jean, since they could not save either themselves or
the men whom they had never loved with a noble unselfish love, from
gross sin and degradation.
But unless in the involuntary shiver which ran through her--while long
rays of sunshine were finding their way into the kirk windows and into
the open door, lighting up and warming even the remotest corner--and in
the breath drawn in and let out again with a dry inaudible sob, Jean
gave no sign. She neither screamed nor fainted, she made no ‘dust’ or
disturbance in the kirk of all places, she would have thought that
neither maidenly--‘wiselike’ she would have called it--nor reverent.
Bob Meffin was a fallen sinner, that was all, though it was enough
for her to carry branded on her heart to her dying day. And she would
never see or speak with him again, though she had loved him with all
her heart. And what power of passion and depth of tenderness existed
in that heart may be fairly conceived in the light of a biblical
compliment which her master the minister once paid her. He had been
watching Jean with his younger children when he exclaimed suddenly,
‘Jean, your mistress is right, you’re a fine young woman; you remind me
of that riddle of Samson’s, “Out of the strong came forth sweetness.”’
CHAPTER II.
BOB MEFFIN’S AMENDS.
Fourteen years passed--not without their changes. It was a fine frosty
winter afternoon when two knots of homely men and women--forming two
distinct coteries--were gathered at one end of Dalroy village, where,
on the right side of the little street stood the Dalroy ‘smiddy,’ and
on the left was ‘the smiddy well’--a dipping-in-well famous throughout
the village for the excellence of its ‘tea-water.’ Horses were waiting
to be shod round the smiddy door, while their temporary owners--dark
figures in the ruddy glow of the furnace, prepared to hold their rustic
parliament. At the centre of attraction over the way maids and matrons
took their turn in filling their cans and pitchers.
Very nearly at the same moment Jean Kinloch came in sight--emerging
from the blue haze made up of the frost and the gloaming, while there
was heard, with the peculiar distinctness of such a sound in such
weather, the rumbling of a cart, with cart, horse, and driver still
unseen, sounding louder and louder as it drew near in the opposite
direction.
Jean had a plaid pinned over her cap, and carried a bright pitcher
dangling lightly from one wrist; she was sniffing with satisfaction
‘the caller air,’ which sent her rich blood coursing through her veins,
and yet not refusing to welcome the hot blast which met her as she
crossed in front of the smiddy door.
Of course, Jean’s arrival was hailed before she was within ear-shot by
a double chorus of half-approving, half-ironical comments--the purport
of which she could very well guess--beginning with ‘Here comes the Miss
Fraser’s Jean.’
Jean had remained in the service of the Manse family all these years,
though both the minister and his wife were dead, and the Manse was no
longer the home of the remnant of the household. Impoverished as such
remnants usually are, and consisting only of Jean’s young ladies, they
could hardly have continued to live on, in genteel poverty, if Jean,
who was so closely allied to them as to be styled theirs by inalienable
possession, had not worked their double work on diminished wages.
‘Jean’s true to a minute,’ said another speaker, a man in the smiddy.
‘She’s nae daidler either at meat or wark.’
‘Ay, lasses, ye may stand about,’ a woman at the well took up the
theme, without hearing the man’s contribution to the subject. ‘Jean
Kinloch’s no sma’ graith--least of a’ in her ain opinion.’ It was like
a version of that climax of commendation pronounced on the virtuous
woman in Proverbs, ‘Let her own works praise her in the gates,’ with
the grudging qualification that must have mingled with the praise.
Jean did not mind much either the concentrated scrutiny or the sifting
analysis of her merits and demerits, to which, with her knowledge of
the world, she knew she was exposed. Like a pillar of strength in her
self-reliance and composure, her fine presence was unimpaired by her
servant’s costume, and her goodly prime untouched by any token of
decay. Though she had not risen in worldly rank and prosperity, this
was a very different Jean from the miserable lass, high-souled and
innocent as she was, who had sat in a back seat in Logan Kirk to hear
Bob Meffin cried with another woman.
Before Jean could say ‘Gude day’ to anybody, while she was still coming
forward in the mingled lights of a cold primrose in the western
sky behind her, and a warm saffron from the glare of the smiddy at
her right hand, the cart--the rumble of which had been constantly
increasing--rattled up, bringing cart, horse, and driver into the
illumination. And even before the din of its progress had ceased or the
half-dazzled eyes could distinguish the face of the new comer, a voice,
which seemed to issue from the past, suddenly called in eager excited
tones, ‘Jean Kinloch!’
Jean turned startled, and with a shock even to her well-strung nerves,
at the imperative summons. In spite of changes in the speaker, to which
those in herself were infinitesimal, she recognised, without a moment’s
hesitation, her old lover. She had not seen him since six months before
that day in Logan Kirk, on the last occasion when the two had parted
a fond loving lad and lass--a plighted bridegroom and bride. She had
heard little of him in the interval, for his sister Eppie had married
a soldier and ‘followed the drum,’ while with her departure Jean had
lost all chance of news of her recreant lover.
Taken by surprise as she was, Jean cried out with shaken accents, in
turn, ‘Bob Meffin!’ Then she recalled, as any true woman would have
recalled, instantaneously, the whole circumstances, the scene, the
spectators. Some of them had known the two in their green youth, and
were doubtless speculating already, with keen interest and a sense of
the ridiculous, how Jean Kinloch would meet Bob Meffin now that the
pair had reached the years of discretion--after what had once been
between them, after the falseness of Bob which had separated them.
Jean was equal to the occasion; she stepped up to the cart, to which
Bob sat nailed, with the intention of speaking to him, and doing her
part in the interchange of such light questions and answers, as might
be expected between old acquaintances who had known each other well
in youth, and who happened to encounter each other in later years. As
to any nearer relation which had ever existed between them, Jean’s
attitude showed that she, at least, meant to behave as if she had
forgotten it as utterly as the most trifling incident of her girlish
days.
But unfalteringly as Jean carried out this line of conduct, in the few
paces that intervened between her and Bob Meffin, which she crossed
steadily with every eye upon her, and with her own eyes not fixed on
the ground, but raised to catch his, she took in at a glance the whole
man--including every indication of the transformation he had undergone
since the last time she had seen him.
That Bob Meffin had been a gallant-looking young fellow in his degree,
stalwart, lithe, fit to heave up the biggest sheaves on the stack which
was in the process of building--as Jean had shorn foremost on her
harvest rig--and to dance longest and with lightest foot at harvest
home or bridal.
This Bob Meffin was a broken-down, fast-ageing man, while Jean was
still in her prime. His back was bent, while hers was straight; his
hair had grown thin, and hung in uncared-for grey locks under his faded
cap, while hers, in its undiminished profusion and without one dead
white thread, was carefully disposed beneath her spotless white cap.
His cheeks and forehead were weather-worn, dragged, and wrinkled, while
hers remained fresh, round, and smooth. His working clothes had lost
all the smartness with which the Bob Meffin of old had worn his most
patched jacket and most clay-clogged shoon. Before that lightning-flash
of womanly observation, they gave evidence of such untidiness and
neglect in absent buttons, ragged cuffs, and the frayed, dangling ends
of his neckerchief, as not only cast the utmost discredit on the wife
who had supplanted Jean, but told in graphic language that Bob had
lost all personal pride and even proper sense of what was due in the
dress of a respectable ploughman, who had risen to be foreman over the
younger men on the farm.
Here were the wrong doer and the wrong sufferer. A fine moral could
have been pointed from the difference between them, even though a
hair-splitting casuist might have urged that it was not a case of
retribution alone, since the constant exposure and the coarse fare
of a ploughman, even when he carries the clearest of consciences
within his bosom, is apt to tell upon him betimes, and make him look
elderly before he is forty. As for Jean, though she had undergone
‘a disappointment,’ having continued in domestic service, she had
of necessity missed such parallel drudgery and lack of sufficiently
nourishing food, as she had once looked forward to willingly and
cheerfully. But such causes make the ploughman’s wife keep pace with
her husband in ageing prematurely.
Still Bob Meffin had altered with a vengeance; and Jean could hardly
believe the testimony of her eyes and was impressed by the change. For
surely nobody will say that because Adam delved and Eve span, because
Jean had been a servant lass and Bob a ploughman all their respective
lives, they had not the feelings of their kind, so that Jean should
fail to have a sensitive perception that her former hero had lost, in
the rough battle of life, all the glamour with which he had once been
surrounded?
Was Jean pleased that it should be so? That she had lived to see how
Bob Meffin had been punished for his desertion of her and degradation
of another? She could not tell, there was such a tumult of pride and
pain in her heart.
But she went up to him where he sat and said with the easiest manner
imaginable, ‘Is this you, Bob? How are you, and how are your wife and
bairns?’
‘My wife!’ cried Bob aghast. ‘Do you no ken, Jean, she’s dead and gane
a year and a half syne?’
Jean received another shock in which there were appalling elements.
The dead woman had been one against whom Jean--Christian woman as
she was--had borne a sore grudge for many a day. Nay, only a moment
ago, Jean had been sharply summing up, with rising disdain and not
without a sense of bitter satisfaction, what she had reckoned as so
many unanswerable proofs of Leezbeth Red’s wifely incompetency, while
all the time Jean’s successful rival had passed away long months ago
without Jean’s knowledge, to give in her--Leezbeth’s--account to the
Great Judge.
‘Poor woman!’ said Jean more softly; ‘she had gotten her ca’ early.’
‘She was never a strong woman,’ said Bob, speaking without the
awkwardness which must have accompanied the discussion of his living
wife’s qualities with Jean. He spoke also with that little hush of
reverence, which is found in every man or woman with a spark of
generosity and awe in the soul, when he or she refers to the dead--once
so near, but who has gone far beyond all kindly communion and familiar
every-day life.
In addition Bob showed that grave composure of regret which might be
expected from a reasonable man and a widower whose grief was a year
and a half old. ‘Leezbeth was silly from the time of our marriage,’
continued Bob, not uttering a supercilious reflection on the limited
mental capacity of his wife, simply expressing himself in the
vernacular for delicate health. ‘She had mostly to keep her bed, for
the last year or twa of her life.’
That sentence explained much. The misfortune of having married a
sickly wife doomed to die prematurely, may only serve to call forth
the deeper tenderness of the rich man whose personal independence and
the necessaries--nay, the soothing solaces of whose life, remain
altogether untouched by the calamity. But it is a crushing blow to
the poor man, however faithfully and gallantly he may bear it. Bob’s
slouching gait, haggard face, grey hair and uncared-for clothes were
all easily accounted for now, without farther severe reflection either
on himself or on his dead wife. They spoke of hard work doubled when
rest should have come; of the son of the soil returning from his day’s
darg,
Wat, wat, wat and weary,
with neither a blazing ingle nor a clean hearth-stone, not a single
creature-comfort to sustain him; of ill or uncooked food such as a
dainty townbred beggar would have turned from in supreme disgust; of a
father who had to be father and mother in one to his helpless children;
of long nights of waking and watching for the labouring man whose sleep
ought to have been sweet.
Jean, who understood the circumstances so well, was not the woman
to be unmoved by them. ‘But your bairns, Bob?’ she suggested kindly,
turning instinctively to what seemed to her the single prospect of
better days for the speaker. ‘They will be getting on, and rising up to
be a blessing to you?’
‘They are that already, woman,’ said Bob heartily, while his careworn
face brightened inexpressibly, ‘though the auldest of the two lasses,
Lizzie and Peggy, is but growing thirteen, and they have to take turn
and turn about at their schulin’ and at keepin’ the house. They are
as gude and clever, though I should na say sae, as lasses can be. My
word! Jean, they can kindle a fire and put out a bannock that would not
disgrace yoursel’.’
Here was a trace of the old Bob with his impetuosity and sanguineness.
Jean smiled faintly in listening to him, even while she asked herself
sternly, how she could be such a weak and wicked sinner as to feel a
pang of jealous resentment shoot through her. It was because she heard
this poor man who had suffered so much, refer in terms which proved
his high esteem for the only thing of value that remained to him--his
bairns and Leezbeth Red’s--not Jean’s--to her, who must go a lone woman
to her grave through his treachery.
‘For the bit laddie,’ continued Bob with a slight fall and wistful
yearning in his voice, ‘he’s but a wee chappie of three years. We
lost twa weans between him and the lasses. He’s no stout--I’m whiles
frightened that he has his mither’s constitution. But his sisters and
a gude auld body of a wife in our cotton do the best they can for
him, and wha kens but that we’ll be permitted to pu’ him through--and
live to see him a braw man some day?’ Bob lifted his bent head with
glistening eyes at the remote but inspiring prospect.
Jean thought of a manse child that had died in its infancy, on
which she had doted as women like her are apt to lavish passionate
affection on little children. ‘I hope sae too, Bob, my man,’ she said
in the kindly phraseology of her class, and addressing him all the
more gently, because she sought, in her own mind, to atone for the
unreasonable, unrighteous anger she had felt stirring in her heart
against him, for his very fatherliness, only a moment before. ‘I’ll be
right glad to hear that your laddie has thriven.’
Bob’s face brightened more and more, as he leapt down from the
cart-head, and stood by Jean’s side. But in spite of the decided action
a certain hesitation and agitation began to appear in his manner.
The movement served to remind Jean of what she had been losing
consciousness of, that she and Bob Meffin were central figures in an
attentive circle scrutinising their proceedings, and probably catching
scraps of their conversation.
‘Jean,’ said her old lover, lost to, or careless of, their public
position, a broken red rising in his face while his eyes fell before
hers, ‘I’m pleased to have seen you here, lass; and I own I had a
notion we might forgather, after I had been with the cart for draff
at the brewery, and made up my mind to come this way, because I had a
doubt about a nail in ane of Bruce the horse’s shoon--the back fit on
the hinder side--which Jamie Caird could put richt. Jean, I leed to
you when we were young, I’ll never deny it; but oh! woman, ye dinna
ken what it is for a man to own to a lee, whether to man or woman.
And ye dinna ken how I was tempted--a thochtless lad as I was, in the
same place with a bonnie fulish young lass who took a liking to him,
and would let him see her heart richt or wrang. Jean, I’ll no say ill
of the dead to whom I did wrang, who was the mither of my bairns. She
did her best, puir feckless thing, when she had gotten me--no sic a
bargain after all, since I was neither so clever nor so handy as to
make up for her lack of pith and experience--and she was a tried woman,
racked wi’ pain and faint with heart sickness, longing to be gane to
her rest, her worst enemy might have pitied her, puir Leezbeth! long
before she gaed aff the face of the earth. I would be a muckle brute
to blame her at this time of the day, and to throw a’ the wyte of my
faut on her. Still, Jean, the truth must be spoken, and gin ye had
kenned, even at the time, there was some puir excuse for a moment’s
madness of passion and its miserable consequences--you were aye so
strong yoursel’ that you micht hae had some mercy on the weak--and
we were weak as water, baith Leezbeth and me. But it’s a’ ower now,
Jean, and you are to the fore and a “wanter” yet. Woman, gin you would
suffer me to make some amends--a’ that’s in my power. I’ve keepet my
place and risen to be foreman at Blawart Brae in spite of a’. I’ve
gude thirty pounds a year o’ wages, and I’ve paid up my debt this last
twalmonth. If I had onybody to manage for me I micht do weel yet. It’s
not to certain puirtith I’m bidding you, Jean. And there’s my little
cummers,’ continued the infatuated man, with a flash of exultant hope,
well-nigh conviction, at the mention of his young daughters; ‘they will
be proud to do your will, and wait on you like a queen; you could rear
them into fine women like yoursel’. The wee chappie would be a fash to
you, no doubt, but you are never the woman to heed sic fash, and oh!
lass, you dinna ken what a takin’ way he has wi’ him, how he is the pet
of ilka body that comes near him, though he’s ill-grown and weakly. He
tholes his trouble like a bit man, and when he’s no clean knocked on
the head wi’t, and wallied like the young grass in simmer-time when
there has not been a shower to slocken its drouth for sax weeks, he’s
the plaisantest o’ God’s creatures you ever saw. Jean, you would like
Jockie as gin he were your ain, and you micht be the saving of my
laddie,’ pleaded Bob passionately, as he had never pled before, not
even for Jean’s young love.
Jean was so confounded at the turn matters had taken, and the advantage
Bob Meffin was seeking to wrest from her pity, and the softening of
her heart towards him and his, that she hardly gave their full meaning
to the first words of this second suit, and it was not for a moment
that the extent of their presumption struck her. ‘The deil’s in the
man!’ Jean said under her breath, in spite of her principles, her
decorum, and the recollection that she had served in a minister’s
family for a large part of her life. Was there no end to the conceit
of men, in themselves and their bairns? And so he thought he could
make her amends! Doubtless he imagined she was still hankering after
his fickle love, and pining for his sake, while she being an honest
woman had banished him from her thoughts, as a married man, fourteen
years before. By his careless use of the slighting term ‘wanter,’ which
complaisant contemptuous married couples applied to single men but
particularly to single women, he betrayed that he shared in the coarse
popular scorn of old maids, and the mean opinion that they would be
only too glad to snatch at any--the most wretched, chance of changing
their condition and escaping from its reproach. He, the middle-aged,
battered, and broken-down ploughman with his two forward hempies of
lasses, and his heavy handful of a sick bairn, concluding impudently
that any husband was better than none, judged himself a fit match for
an independent well-esteemed woman like Jean Kinloch! And he had been
the very man, the leear, as he had rightly called himself, to the one
woman, the worst enemy to the other, of the two who had trusted him.
He had wrung Jean’s heart when it was young and tender, and lichtlied
her for a lass like Leezbeth Red, leaving Jean to be the mark for the
jests and scoffs of mocking tongues.
Jean was burning with indignation, and looking at it in her light,
greater provocation could not have been given her. ‘Are you daft, Bob
Meffin?’ She turned upon him with a pale face set like iron, and words
which cut like swords. ‘Do you think I would have a gift of you, after
what has come and gane? If I had been brodent on a man, I might have
had my wale of a hantle better than you ever were, without waiting so
long. Man, I’m weel content to be an auld maid, it’s no sic a forlorn
lot as you marriet folk in your crouseness fancy. But I would be keen
to get marriet gin I could consent to stand in a dead woman’s shoon, a
lass who was like to have had “a misfortune”’--Jean used the apologetic
phrase with strong contempt--‘who had so little truth and honesty in
her that she could steal the fickle man’s heart and word which were
not worth the taking, though they had been flung at her feet, kennin’
a’ the time they belonged to another woman--would I be plaguet wi’ her
brats o’ bairns, think ye?’
Bob heard the terms of her answer with as much amazement as she had
experienced at his proposal, with consternation added to the amazement,
and with the pain of a great disappointment in the crestfallen and
wounded expression of his face.
But at the last scornful words the man’s spirit kindled within him. He
faced Jean, and replied to her with volleys of wrath: ‘Jean Kinloch,
you may cast laith at me, you’ve ower gude richt, though I thocht--I
was wrang--a’ the same I had a fulish notion it would be grander to
forgi’e and forget, and that the lass I had lo’ed sae weel, when there
was naebody to come atween us, micht be fit to play the grander
part. But to cast laith at the silent dead for the wrong-doing of her
youth, after she has paid the heavy cost--to cast laith, to my face,
at my innocent bairns, my twa gude lasses and my stricken laddie, Jean
Kinloch, you were na blate.’
‘Na, Bob, I didna mean--’ began Jean hesitatingly, but he would not
hear her.
‘You’ve done what I’ll stand frae no man or woman born, no frae the
woman I aince lo’ed as I lo’ed my life, and whom even when I gaed her
up, because I couldna say “na” either to mysel’ or to anither, I would
hae focht ony mither’s son in braid Scotland who would have dared to
say that she was not amaist worthy to be worshipped. I thocht you were
ower gude for me, and it was a comfort in repenting o’ my folly, that
you were weel rid o’ me. But I tell you where you stand glowering
there, you’re not the woman I thocht you; you’re not gude enough for
the gift o’ my bairns that you have spoken tantingly o’--Jean Kinloch,
you’re a hard, cauld woman this day.’
This was turning the tables in truth, and an astounding effect followed.
Bob Meffin’s words could hardly be called reasonable, and yet the
utterance of them seemed to lift him above his fall and to lend a
homely dignity to the sinner, as he walked away from the old love to
whom he had not been true.
Jean felt it with a curious force. She had the strongest conception
that Bob Meffin, who had jilted her in the past and was insulting her
in the present--as she had thought only a moment before, who defended
his dead wife and loved his children so fondly, was having the best of
it in their contest. He had been foolish and false in word and deed, he
might be what she had called him--the most conceited and audacious of
men. He might share in the low views current as to ‘wanters’ and old
maids, yet could it be that Bob Meffin had grown a better man than Jean
was a woman, while he had been the sinner and she the sinned against?
Had the simple, manly patience with which he had paid the penalty
reversed the result in character, in the subtle workings by which good
may triumph over evil? Had Bob become less and she more worldly-minded
since they parted? Had his nature been softened, mellowed, purified in
his ceaseless toil for his sick wife and helpless children, while she
in her comparative ease, her leisure for her bible and her kirk, had
lost sight of magnanimity and mercy and learnt only vindictiveness and
malice? And if so, had she not been doubly defrauded? Was Bob to cheat
her not only of earthly, but of heavenly happiness?
Jean’s sense of justice rebelled against the merest bewildered
suspicion of such a sentence. But she was sorry for the words she
had spoken; she had been mean enough to cherish the recollection of
Bob’s offence after all these years, and, with a full knowledge of the
apples of Sodom it had borne, to cast it up to the offender. And he had
been perfectly right in his accusation--she had ‘cast laith’ at the
dead wife whose soul had gone before the great tribunal--at Leezbeth
Red’s and Bob Meffin’s innocent bairns, thus outraging the most sacred
feelings of humanity. As Jean was a good woman she must take back her
words in part, she must say she was sorry for having uttered them.
‘Forgi’e me, Bob,’ she said in a low tone, her handsome face working
with suppressed emotion. ‘It was sma’ of me and unworthy of a Christian
woman to let on about byganes--no to say it was cruel to say an
unbecoming word o’ your dead wife and your living bairns.’
Alas! the original mercurial temperament of the man which no suffering
had altogether subdued, leapt up on the slightest encouragement from
the depth of alienation and despondency to the height of fresh love
and hope. He was not merely propitiated, he was elevated by a single
word of regret so as to be ready to repeat the affront he had given.
‘Will you no think better of it, Jean, lass, and make me a prood and
happy man at last?’ he called out loudly and recklessly. Jean’s recent
remorse for her harshness was nipped in the bud, and she was furious at
the renewed outrage. ‘No me, niver, niver,’ she proclaimed to him and
to all who might choose to listen.
CHAPTER III.
JEAN’S REPRISALS.
Eppie Meffin had returned with her soldier, a full-blown sergeant
in possession of a comfortable pension, to settle in her native
village. And Jean went to congratulate her old friend, but found that
condolences instead of congratulations were in requisition.
Eppie stood bathed in tears with her good bonnet and shawl thrown on
anyhow, in her haste to set out for the Dalroy railway-station, which
was now within three miles of the village, while the train stopped for
five minutes at another station a mile from Logan, on its way to a
place of greater note.
‘Come a bittie with me, Jean, it’s lang since we’ve seen ane anither,
lass. I take your early visit very kind, and am fain to hear your
cracks, ‘but I canna stop to speak to you,’ said Eppie, without waiting
to be questioned on the cause of her distress.
Jean complied with the petition, excited almost out of her staid
maidenly composure. And her companion was not slow to pour forth her
lamentations over the misfortune that had befallen her, through all
that was left of her kindred.
‘Oo, aye, it’s that unlucky Bob: you may be satisfied now, Jean, you
ha’e lived to see vengeance execut’ on him--as they say, it’s aye
ta’en--even in this world, on the deceivers and deserters o’ women.’
‘Me satisfied!’ cried Jean in unfeigned horror; ‘what do you tak me
for, Eppie Meffin? Do you think I wish, or ha’e ever wished, an ill
wish on your brither? You’re speakin’ like an unregenerate heathen.
Is’t his ae bit laddie?’ inquired Jean almost tenderly.
‘It’s a hantle waur than the bairn,’ groaned Eppie. ‘I canna help
liking the wee thing who is no accountable for a’ the fash he gies; but
’deed he would be weel awa’, at rest from a’ his pains.’
‘Oh! Eppie, Eppie,’ said Jean reproachfully, ‘when Bob’s heart is set
on this bairn, and ane can never tell what the silliest callant may
come through, and live, and grow to; you a mither yoursel’ to speak sic
words!’
‘You speak o’ me bein’ a mither,’ said Eppie with a half-choked voice,
‘woman, you dinna ken what the outcome o’ a mither’s love may lead to,
though you’re gude--you were aye a gude lass, Jean Kinloch. There’s
my ain brisk mannie Peter. Do you think if I had the choice, and if I
kenned I was to be ta’en away frae him, and his father was to forfeit
his pension and become superannuate’, I wouldna rather choose to have
a’ the briskness ta’en out of my laddie, and see him lying still--never
to stir mair--only fit for the mools, than look forward to a chance of
his comin’ to want, and fa’n on the parish, and being knocked about and
scorned, and treated to a dog’s life?’
‘Then it’s Bob himsel’,’ said Jean briefly.
‘Wha else should it be?’ demanded Eppie, made peevish by her grief.
‘Ye dinna say he’s dead?’ said Jean, with white lips.
‘No dead outricht,’ said Eppie, not so grateful as she ought to have
been for the great respite, never having contemplated the extremity,
‘but he is no muckle better, so far as being a bread-winner is
concerned. He was trying to break in a maisterfu’ horse, when it turned
and flung at him, and struck him atween the elbow and the shouther.
His arm--and it’s his richt ane--is that melled the doctor is feared
the banes will never gang thegither again, and he may have to cut it
aff bodily. If poor Bob survive the operation, and be left an ae-armed
man, he’ll no even be fit for a hag man’ (the used-up man who is the
cattle-feeder on a farm). His maister may do something for him, so long
as he lives, since the hurt was got in his service, but Bob cannot be
allowed mair than will provide for his ain bite and sup, and what is
to become of his bairns even in his lifetime Gude can tell. Me and my
man micht take ane o’ the halflin lassies, but we could do nae mair;
and little as the like o’ her is gude for, she’s like to be ill spared
with her faither as weel as her little brither thrown on her and her
sister’s care. Pity me! for the care, wi’ the auldest of the twa hardly
in her teens. Now, Jean, when you’ve heard a’ will you flee out on me
again for wishing the weary wean were safe in a better place?’
Jean was silent in the magnitude of the calamity.
At this moment Eppie had only one complaint to make of the victim,
and she did not dream of including Jean in it, for Eppie was a loyal
friend as well as an attached sister. She had heard already how Bob
as a widower had ventured to make up to Jean Kinloch again, and so
far from approving of the venture, Eppie, in fairness to her sex, and
still more in fairness to Jean, had said stoutly, unswayed by family
interest and partiality, that Bob was rightly served in the repulse he
had received. He had no reason to count on any other answer. He was
both bold and simple to speer Jean Kinloch’s price a second time. There
had always been a simplicity about him, poor chap, though he was no
fool either. Doubtless that had been the cause of his falling an easy
victim to the wiles of that light-headed cutty Leezbeth Red--that Eppie
should miscall the dead. But Eppie’s auld mother, who had a great work
with Jean, could never abide Leezbeth. Thus Eppie took refuge from any
self-reproach for the disparaging criticism on her late sister-in-law,
by regarding it as a mark of filial respect.
‘You ken, Jean, it’s a mercy, “there was never a silly Jocky but
there was aye as silly a Jenny,” and some canny woman, a wee bit up
in years, wi no muckle to lippen to, micht have drawn up wi’ Bob and
his foreman’s house and wages. And what though, she had been a thocht
ill-faured?’ speculated Eppie boldly, ‘she would not ha’e made a waur
wife and step-mither because of the shape of her nose or the colour of
her skin. Of course I dinna mean a weel-to-do, weel-looking woman like
you, Jean,’ broke off Eppie in perfect sincerity; ‘a match like that
was no longer to be thought of for him. If you were inclined to change
your state, you micht aspire as high as a butler or a schulemaister.
But about the woman that might ha’e done for our Bob afore this
mischanter--if she had not been a fule o’ a lassie--caring only for
idleset and a reive at whatever pleasure came in her way--she would not
ha’e been that ill aff. Puir Bob has learnt to serve hissel’ and to be
easy served, and his patience wi’ these bairns o’ his, and his pleasure
in them, is jist extraordinar’.’
‘Yes,’ Jean said half abstractedly, ‘he seemed to think a deal o’ his
bairns.’
‘Nae doubt, ilka craw thinks its ain bird whitest, and Bob’s birds
were aye birds o’ Paradise. No that I would deny they’re fine lasses
as lasses gang, but will that prevent them being frichtet out o’ their
wits if Bob has to get his arm chapped aff? and if he come round, how
long will they be, think ye, of forgetting the trouble and getting out
their heads? And how can I, wi’ a man and bairns and a house o’ my ain
to look after, and a railway journey atween me and Bob’s family, keep
the lasses out of a’ but good company, and set them down and haud them
on their seats, at their seams and their knittin’, and teach them to be
orderly and punctual and weel-mannered,’ said the sergeant’s wife with
emphasis. ‘No that it matters muckle since it has come to the warst,’
she added the next moment, sinking back into dejection. ‘I see nae way
now for them but they maun gang on the parish--that ever ony o’ my folk
should come to this!’ Eppie ended with fresh tears of mingled personal
mortification and grief for ‘our Bob.’
Jean tarried a couple of weeks, hearing various reports of Bob’s
keeping up or giving way--of the youngest of his doctors maintaining
that he would both save the arm and restore it to usefulness, only
months of suffering and helplessness must intervene--of the eldest
of his doctors swearing that Bob’s arm, if it were not amputated at
once, would cost him his life at no distant day. Jean could bear it no
longer. Her punishment, not Bob’s, was more than she could bear. She
would ‘take her foot in her hand,’ go across the moor, and ask how Bob
Meffin fared. She was an old enough woman to decide for herself on the
desirability of such a step. She was old enough in her rank of life to
be her own chaperon, and dispense with the presence of Eppie on her
visit.
Jean was not accustomed to railways as her travelled friend was, so it
did not occur to her to lessen the fatigue of the expedition by having
recourse to the station, nearly three miles off, and being carried by
the iron horse and deposited a mile from her destination. To Jean, by
far the simpler and less troublesome course was to ‘take her foot in
her hand’ and walk the ten miles to Logan.
It was already the month of February, and the days were lengthening,
though spring was making little show in the woods and fields, and least
of all on the moor.
Jean accomplished this journey as she had accomplished that other,
with the frost-bitten instead of the blooming heather under her feet,
and the former summer sky still grey with wintry clouds over her head.
It was not the sabbath day, so Jean was not called upon to redeem the
holy time by speaking to herself in psalms and hymns and spiritual
songs, as she trod the long and hard road; but she caught herself
muttering involuntarily half aloud more than once, ‘God be gude to
Bob Meffin and his mitherless bairns.’ And she was conscious, through
her anxiety, that peace with God and man, instead of restless misery,
filled her breast.
Jean passed the kirk where she had sat and heard Bob ‘cried’ with
another woman, as it seemed to her an age ago--passed the kirkyard
where Leezbeth Red lay sleeping. She knew the road to Blawart Brae
perfectly well. Had she not learnt its every turning by heart in the
days when she had thought of the farm in the light of her home as a
young wife? Bob’s present house was not, indeed, the house which
that young wife would have dwelt in, the last was tenanted by one of
the junior ploughmen and his wife--no older than Jean would have been
if she had come to Blawart Brae a married woman by the time she was
twenty. Jean caught a glimpse of a young lass whose brown hand was
already invested with the dignity of a wedding-ring, as she looked up
and paused in the act of pulling up a curly green kail-stock from her
‘yaird.’ Jean stared wistfully at the fresh contented face as at a
picture of what her own face might have been like, if Bob Meffin had
not broken his vows more than a dozen of years before.
Bob’s cottage was that of the foreman on the farm, but the little
advantages which the promotion secured had all been lost in the
grinding poverty to which he had been subjected.
Bob himself opened the door to Jean’s knock, for he was able to walk
about the house, though his arm was still in an early precarious stage
of recovery.
‘Eh! Jean, is this you? Come in by; it’s kind of you to look in and
speer for me in the by-going, since you maun ha’e some other errand at
Logan.’ He cried with such glad surprise, that Jean had no more cause
to fear the nature of her welcome.
He insisted upon her occupying the one arm-chair, and he would break
up with his left hand the little fire gathered on the hearth, while
he kept repeating, as in a wonderfully pleasant dream, ‘Is’t possible
you’ve come aince errand to see me? Woman, the sicht of you is gude for
a sick man;’ and Jean knew that he admired her fine carriage and fine
face as of old--that to him, as to the rest of the world, she was still
the well-endowed, the well- not the ill-favoured woman whom Eppie had
proposed as a fit wife for her brother.
As for him, he looked fifty times more haggard and worn than when Jean
had seen him sitting, still able-bodied and active, on the head of
his cart between the smiddy and the well, in the winter gloaming. His
cheeks were more sunken, his hair had received an additional white
powdering, his very voice piped a little with weakness, his fustian
clothes naturally were worse--not better, attended to, while his
right arm, that sign and seal of a working man’s independence, hung
pathetically incapable of service in its sling.
But he was eager, even cheerful, in his greetings to Jean. At the
same time it was clear that though he had no regrets to spare for his
personal appearance, he was full of apologies for his house which might
throw discredit on the management of his young house-keepers. Both
of them were absent for the moment, since Lizzie had carried out her
little brother, and Peggy, who had returned to the parish school, was
not come back for the day.
To tell the truth, Jean saw Bob’s house when it was about its best,
while he remained constantly at home to give directions to his lasses,
and when his sister Eppie came over, once a fortnight, expending her
surplus energy and emotion in scouring not only the family wardrobe,
but the windows and the grate.
But it was a house bare and barren in its small space, as the great
ward of a poor-house, while it was liable to the squalor the absence of
which is the redeeming feature of the poor-house. Here there was not
one of the articles which are the pride of a well-to-do ploughman’s
heart, and which make all the difference between ‘couthiness’ (plenty
and comfort combined) and dreariness in his homely dwelling. In Bob’s
house there was no chest of drawers rubbed by proud patient hands--such
as Jean had been once laying by ten shillings of her wages at a
time to buy; no grandiose eight-day clock with perhaps a wreath of
brilliant pink roses and gorgeous blue convolvuluses painted round its
broad face, to which Bob in the heyday of his fortunes had aspired;
no coarse but gay earthenware, for show as well as for use, in the
cupboard with its glass door; no resplendent coloured engravings of
worse than doubtful merit as works of art, but bright suggestive spots
relieving the staring or dingy blankness of the white-washed walls; no
exquisitely patched quilt--a marvel of womanly ingenuity and industry,
such as Jean had once stitched together and sung over, and laid aside
to fade in her kist--adorning the box-bed. There was not even a cat
purring about the ‘clean hearth-stane,’ or a bird chirping in its
cage, or a growing plant on the ledge of the small window. Yet Bob as
a young man had been fond of animals and plants. Only there had been
hard times in his history. Then a cat, if it did not cast aside its
domestic habits and run wild about the stack-yard and barn, killing
rats and mice which Bob might have been tempted to grudge it, for its
own consumption, would have grown as lean in flesh and as unthrifty in
coat as Bob himself. The pence to be paid for an ounce of bird-seed
might have formed a far larger sum than he, with any conscience, would
have dared to abstract from the family capital. The burdened man could
not have given the moment’s thought and time necessary to supply the
‘flooer’ with the common sunshine, air, and water--all that it craved.
Jean, who had been thinking much of late of her old comfortable
manse-kitchen glittering with pewter, tin and brass, the very roof
groaning with the weight of mutton hams, pigs’ cheeks, dried fish,
bags of onions, bunches of herbs, contrasted it with this region of
desolation, but did not shrink from the contrast.
Jean and Bob chatted together one on each side of the flickering
fire--the blinking of which was more kindly than the pale February
sunbeams, which shone steadily on the dispiriting house-place.
But Bob was not down-hearted: he was wonderfully hopeful, as, by the
Providence which makes the back fit for the burden, it was his nature
to be. He was ready to praise to the skies the cleverness and kindness
of his young doctor--Bob having affectionately appropriated his medical
man, with a certain proud admiration and tenderness for his gifts and
his youth, much as Jean had appropriated her young mistresses, dwelling
with fond delight on their graces. Bob proclaimed with unstinted
gratitude the generosity of his master, who was paying in full a
term’s wages which the servant had not earned, and only putting an
orra (extra man) man into Bob’s place, till it could be ascertained
whether he should recover from the effects of his accident, as Bob was
well assured he would in time, if it were the Lord’s will--he used the
expression without the slightest affectation. Eppie was a good sister
to him, while all his neighbours were richt kind. He could better thole
the pain of his arm now, that he had the comfort of trusting it was not
to be sawn off. Bob said the words without shrinking and with manly
fortitude. He had been in worse straits and seen far greater ‘trouble,’
and he had much to be thankful for. There was no more pretence in the
acknowledgment of thankfulness than in the reference to his Maker’s
will. Bob was one of those wayfaring men who, though a fool, was
prevented, in part by his very simplicity, from erring in his judgment
of the way he had to go through life and death.
Then he quietly dropped his own affairs and turned with kindly
interest to discuss Jean’s concerns, and also to hear the news of old
acquaintances which could only reach him and Jean orally, and could
never come to them through any humble substitute for ‘Fashionable
News’ in West-end newspapers. Bob could and did read stray newspapers,
but they rarely brought him intelligence of the doings of friends old
or new, and news were especially acceptable to Bob in these weeks of
enforced idleness and pain, from which, though he bore the infliction
bravely, he was fain to have his mind diverted for an hour. He took the
friendliest interest in the changes going on in Jean’s ‘family,’ which
happened at that moment to be looking up in the world, while now and
then that very interest betrayed him into precarious allusions. ‘So
Miss Mary is to be buckled with young Logan o’ Logan! I mind her weel
as a bairn. She was the little leddy wi’ the lint white locks I ha’e
carried on my shouther many a time--you mind, Jean? when there was a
lock o’ us among the minister’s hay. And Miss Catrine’s to go back to
the manse--how bools rin round! and she wants you to go back wi’ her.
You’ll do’t, Jean,’ said Bob with cordial confidence. ‘You’ll like the
auld place far better than Logan House after young Logan has come to
his kingdom. The manse o’ Dalroy was a bonnie pairt and a happy hame
even for a servant lass in the auld days. I’ve no doubt it will be as
nearly as possible the same, under Miss Catrine who comes o’ a gude
stock and the young minister who I am told has the making o’ a powerful
preacher in him, while he is a kind man to the puir. I’m as pleased as
you can think, Jean, to hear o’ your down-sitten in the end--for you’ll
never leave them, they’ll never let you go. Woman, you’ll be an honour
to their house among their young maids; you’ll be like Rebeecy’s nurse
whom all Israel murned for, that the auld Doctor aince preached about,
and you could turn up chapter and verse, and read what was said o’ her
in the “Word.”’
‘Thanks to you, Bob,’ said Jean in a low tone, conscious of his
self-forgetfulness.
But all through the conversation Bob was alert for any sign of the
return of his bairns. He was extremely desirous that they should come
home in time for Jean to see them before she left. ‘I wouldna like to
keep you ower long, Jean, when you have siccan a tramp between toons,
and it was mair than kind of you to come. But if you could just aince
cast een on the bairns, if you could see Jockie and tell me what you
think o’ him, I would like it aboon a’ things. If I were at their
heels,’ cried Bob, waxing hot in his great longing to bring about the
introduction, ‘I would try if a gude paik wouldna put smeddum in them.
But you ken bairns will be bairns,’ he turned the next moment and
craved indulgence for his culprits. ‘They will find things to play wi’,
were it but a wheen burrs to stick on ane anither’s backs, and keep
them ahint on the road.’
At last the members of Bob’s family arrived simultaneously, the lasses
with their bleached hair and round rosy faces, and the puny little
lad. Lizzie was lugging along her brother in her motherly young arms,
Peggy had her bag with her books hung round her neck. There was no
particular sign of that seeking to get their heads out of the yoke
which Eppie had foreboded, though they might not have been guiltless of
the light-heartedness of sticking burrs on each other’s backs for the
last quarter of an hour. But the two, and even the small child, having
a spindly arm hanging loosely across the breast of his sister’s blue
pinafore, with his eyes looking large and hollow like his father’s, in
his wasted mite of a face, stared open-mouthed at Jean. In vain their
father strove to do the honours with the best effect. ‘Gie me the
bairn, Lizzie. This is Lizzie and thon’s Peggy, Jean; and here’s an
auld friend of mine, lasses.’
In his deep anxiety that the children might make a favourable
impression on his old friend, Bob suddenly fell foul of the objects of
his devotion with a sharpness of fault-finding which not only took them
completely by surprise, but drove them into a frame of mind still more
stupid and provoking.
‘Ha’e you no a tongue in your head, Lizzie?’ Bob reproached his
eldest-born cuttingly. ‘And as for you, Peggy,’ he turned furiously
on the second girl, ‘lowse that bag from your neck this minute, and
put aff that bannet that you have a’ but torn the croon frae since
you left hame this morning. What garred you be sae royd--and noo you
are as blate, when I would have had you look wiselike and behave your
best no to disgrace yoursel’s and me.’ Bob ended with a groan of
disappointment--well-nigh despair.
Jean had to interfere with her womanly forbearance and consideration.
‘Let them alane, Bob. There’s naithing wrang. What would you ha’e o’
the bairns--fine bairns, who I am sure will do a’ they can to please
you?’
But Bob’s heart melted utterly to his youngest-born, his son and heir,
and he failed to attack him with scathing sarcasm. ‘Here’s Jockie,’
he said, smiling on the child that nestled in his left arm. ‘Tak him
frae me, Jean, he’ll no greet--he’s the best manners o’ us a’--he’s
sic a licht wecht, though he’s a hantle heavier than he was six months
syne, you’ll no feel it, even though you’re tired,’ said Bob, putting
his darling awkwardly with his one free hand into Jean’s arms. He
gave a sigh half of speechless satisfaction, half of unfathomable
sorrow--looking in her face at the same time, seeking to hear her utter
her tribute to the child’s attractions, and hanging breathlessly on
what was likely to be her outspoken verdict of whether it was to be
life or death for the lad.
Jean took the bairn reverently and gently. He did not greet; in his
weakness he appreciated fully Jean’s light firm grasp, while he
cuddled to her breast and looked up in her face with his child’s eyes.
‘Puir wee lamb,’ said Jean, sitting down again, for she had risen, as
if his feather’s weight had overpowered her strength; and she stroked
the wan cheeks till Jockie smiled with the ineffable sweetness of a
sick child’s smile.
‘He looks far frae strong,’ said truthful Jean slowly, while Bob
listened to her words as if they had been those of an oracle. ‘But I
dinna think he has just the look that little Jack at the manse had--I
ha’e a hope he’ll get ower his sickness. Do you mind, Bob, your mither
used to say you were a silly bairn yoursel’ till you were sax years
auld? and your Jockie has a look o’ you.’
‘Do you think sae, Jean?’ said Bob, almost shame-faced at the
extent of the compliment, while ready to bless her for the faintest
encouragement to trust that Jockie might live to become a toil-worn,
care-laden man like his father. But, no; Jockie, if he were spared,
would have brighter fortunes; no true father or mother has ever ceased
to dream that his or her child will be more successful in the best
sense--happier in every way, in the path trodden and cleared before him.
‘I canna keep you longer, Jean,’ said Bob reluctantly but with manly
tender forethought for her. ‘And I canna expeck that sic a favour will
be repeated. I canna even find words to express to you how much I’m
obleeged for this ca’. But if we should never meet again in this world,
you’ll mind, Jean, I said as my last words to you, that, like the
Maister you ha’e served all your life, you’ve returned gude for evil,
you have done what you could to cheer the heart of a sick and lanely
man.’
It was the single word of complaint he had allowed to fall from him,
and he only let it pass his lips to enhance the value of her good deeds.
The two had left the children in the room behind them, and were
standing in the doorway about to part.
‘Bob,’ said Jean hurriedly, ‘I’m ready and willing to come again and
stop, if you’re in the same mind that you were on the afternoon you
spoke with me, at the smiddy well. The Miss Frasers have no more need
o’ me. Eppie will gie in the lines and cite the minister to come here,
and I’ll walk across the moor as soon as a’ is ready--if you are in the
same mind, Bob.’
Jean spoke the words tremulously, but merely as a matter of course, in
her recantation of her refusal. It was the thought farthest from her
generous heart to choose this moment of all others in which to reproach
him with his former faithlessness.
But as a wrong once done is indelible, the reproach of which Jean
never dreamt, smote Bob’s conscience keenly, even while he protested
vehemently, ‘I’m in the same mind. Could I be in any other to my auld
true love Jean?’ And he cried again, ‘Oh, Jean! your tender mercies
are baith kind and cruel,’ while he bowed himself in such an agony
of shame as he had never yet felt for the past. He had even, for an
instant, a notion that it must be the bitterest part of his punishment
to have to put away from him, with his own hand, this ecstasy of hope
and happiness for the future--not of himself alone but of his children.
‘I canna let your mercies be, Jean, I daurna let them be,’ he muttered
hoarsely.
‘Then I winna ask your leave, Bob,’ said Jean in her triumph of love,
before the might of which Bob’s anguish and resistance went down.
‘It’s no me, it’s the bairns, who have won you, as I aye kenned they
would,’ said Bob, taking heart again at the thought of his treasure;
‘and they will thank you as I couldna do--no, though I were to live to
ninety-nine and never cease speaking your praises.’
END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
LONDON: PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
AND PARLIAMENT STREET
Transcriber’s Notes
Obvious punctuation errors and omissions have been silently corrected.
Page 41: “freely acknowleged” changed to “freely acknowledged”
Page 55: “scorched outmeal” changed to “scorched oatmeal”
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