‘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.