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.