ATHOLE MURRAY COMES TO THE RESCUE.
Dr. Peter, in the middle of his work, responded readily to the call. It
proved that he had not only known the Mackinnons in his youth; he had
always kept up some intercourse with them, and Athole had been in the
habit of calling in St. Mungo’s Square occasionally. He looked grave and
resolute when he saw Tarn Drysdale by appointment afterwards. Yes, the
poor old ladies were at the wall, sure enough; and even viewing the
matter in a professional light alone, something must be done
immediately, or there would be more than one death to answer for. But he
had his proposal ready. Athole must take up her abode in St. Mungo’s
Square for a week or two, till Miss Bethia was able to be removed for
change of air to Barley Riggs. Only a woman could cope with the
circumstances where women were concerned, and he had paved the way for
his daughter’s arrival. He had told Miss Janet that he wanted a little
change for Athole, asked if she--Miss Janet--would take in the girl for
a while, and hinted at a board. The old lady, with her instincts of
hospitality, her necessities, and her pride, had been too bewildered to
make any decided opposition. Now he would not stand on further ceremony;
he would act as if he took Miss Janet’s and her sister’s consent for
granted, despatch Athole the next morning, and when she was once in the
house, it would be hard for the Miss Mackinnons to turn her out. Athole
would bring the sinews of war, and would propose to undertake the
housekeeping on the plea of relieving the sister-nurses, who were too
weak and worn out to make any effectual resistance.
Auld Tam as he listened, stared fixedly at Dr. Peter.
‘But, man, she’s your dochter, your last-hame lassie, the very apple of
your eye,’ he remonstrated, with wonder and rising vehemence. ‘I ken
what Tam and little Eppie and Clary are to me, and I have their
mither--that I sometimes say is worth them all--while you have only this
lassie left at hame; and you are sending her where the fever has just
been, and where a great burden of responsibility, work, and fatigue will
fall upon her young shoulders.’
‘I know,’ said Dr. Peter, bowing his head as if sealing a bargain. ‘But
did you never think, Tam, that the way to keep a thing you prized was to
give it freely in the name of God and your neighbour? I never would shut
Athole out of the way of the fever, when she could be of use. She had no
fear, and I believed I could take care that she ran little more risk
than if she had stayed locked up in the parlour at Barley Riggs. I was
right, and you’ll see I’ll be right again. You may trust me to take care
of Athie,’ he ended, with a smile.
‘But what if you should be mistaken, Peter?’ Tam felt bound to press the
point. ‘If an accident were to happen, if you were to lose your lassie
by her foolhardy exposure?’
‘There is no foolhardiness, and there is very little exposure,’
maintained Dr. Peter unflinchingly; ‘not more than happens to every
doctor and nurse--indeed less, for I shall be always in the background,
ready to step in at the first note of warning. And if it were to come to
the worst, Tam,’ he said slowly, with a peculiar light coming into his
eyes, ‘what then? It would be the will of God. It is given to every man
and woman once to die; nothing--not all the love and care in the
world--can prevent the execution of that sentence. And can death come
better to any man or woman than in the way of duty? I know what is in
your mind--it is not of the one to be taken, but of the one left behind,
you are thinking. Well, what is to come of somebody’s journey might be
shorter, as the road would be darker--that is all--not so very much when
the day is far spent and its work three-fourths done.’
‘Peter Murray, I honour you with all my heart,’ said auld Tam warmly;
‘but I could not do it, man--I could--not--do it. It is with no will of
mine that young Tam is in the thick of this fray; but he’s man-grown,
with a mind of his own. I’ll not say that it has been all loss that I’ve
seen a bit of the lad’s mind lately, and we’ve focht together against
the fivver--young Tam and me; only the price might have been ower heavy,
God help me! and I could not have sent him into the battle, or even
given my consent to his entering the ranks, if he had condescended to
ask it. Na, not though it is the first time since I was a wean that
I’ve had a glimmering that the auld Bible story of Aubraham’s offering
up his son, his only son Isaac, is more than an allegory or a prophecy,
and holds a lesson for men and faithers,’
Auld Tam continued sorely exercised in his mind about the Miss
Mackinnons, with Dr. Peter’s lassie Athole in the midst of them. To him
she was a slip of a young lady whom he knew best as a clever
pattern-designer, a bit gentlewoman, with her inalienable rights as
such, though neither bonnie nor braw, only as bright as a mavis thrush,
as quick as a needle, the charm of whose womanly blitheness and lively
wit Tam himself had felt, while he was well aware she was the light of
Barley Riggs, the delight of her father’s heart. In spite of what Dr.
Peter had said, was this a creature to put in the breach, to send to
share the privations she was seeking to lighten, and to brave the hardly
overcome fever?
Tam was so troubled in his mind that he forgot to watch the effect of
the news on his son. He neither saw how young Tam set his teeth, nor how
he reared his head, and his loss of colour was succeeded by a warm glow.
Sure enough, if any harm happened to Athole Murray, it might be laid at
the door of the two Tam Drysdales. Who was it that had summoned her
father on the scene, and offered a temptation to Dr. Peter’s Quixotic
philanthropy?
Both auld and young Tam took it upon them to go as far as Eneas
Mackinnon had gone--indeed, to go farther, to enter the hall of the
house in St. Mungo’s Square, and solicit speech with Miss Murray, to
hear how her father’s scheme was prospering.
The first time that Athole came down to the two men, who were together,
as she spoke to them the tears ran down her cheeks without her knowing
it, and she was half laughing, half crying, though she was not
naturally hysterical.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I could not have imagined anything like it. If I had
guessed a hundredth part of it, I must have got the better of Miss
Janet’s scruples long ago, though I had let meat and drink down the
chimney, as the barber and his wife disposed of the body of the Caliph’s
favourite in the “Arabian Nights;” I would have come after it was dark,
rung the bell, pushed in the basket, and run away. Maybe Miss Janet
would have thought the angels or Elijah’s ravens had come to her aid. If
the Miss Mackinnons had advertised for the owner of that basket they
would have been clever if they had found her. Now, we are all right,
thank you--at least, we are fast getting right. I open the door, for of
course I am the youngest, and the stairs try me least, and I take in all
the parcels. If there is anything very suspicious, even for my extensive
requirements, I carry it to my room, and Miss Janet is too much of a
lady to meddle with what I do there. My father fills the pockets of his
overcoat, and has always to speak to me, in private. I can’t tell if
Miss Janet suspects--I think she must--but her endurance had been
stretched to the last thread, and now she submits and ignores my
manœuvres. She is so tired that when she has once given in she can’t
rally her forces for some time. Indeed, my father feared she would
either have a bad illness or sink from sheer exhaustion for the first
ten days after I came. Oh yes, she’s a great deal better, and Miss
Mackinnon is pretty well--I am sure Miss Janet must have managed to give
her the larger share of the little that was going--and Miss Bethia is
progressing favourably. She is by far the most manageable. She and I
have quite little feasts in her room.’
‘I am most happy to hear it,’ said auld Tam, with enthusiasm.
‘But, oh! the gaunt emptiness, the gnawing want, the fainting
hopelessness that must have been in this house!’ cried Athole
passionately. ‘The mice had deserted it months before, Miss Bethia told
me. But Miss Janet and I never speak of it. We winked at it even when I
was labouring, like a well-disposed brownie, to fill the cupboards as if
they had never been bare, without anybody witnessing the performance,
and to make a great display of my accomplishments in cooking--the fruits
of my last lessons at the cooking school. But I never saw anything at
all like what I beheld first, in the most miserable cottage at Drysdale
Haugh.’
‘I sincerely trust you have not suffered yourself, Miss Murray, mem,
from your great pity and kindness,’ said auld Tam, standing with his hat
in his hand before her.
‘I!’ she cried incredulously; ‘how should I suffer? It was a bit of an
adventure for me, and I had “a piece in my pocket” all the time. You
know, Mr. Drysdale, the task was to get older people, more in need of
it, to halve my piece with me.’
Athole had recovered her composure by the time the next visit of inquiry
was made, and her accounts grew always cheerier and cheerier, till she
began to laugh quite naturally at young Tam coming alone to ask for the
three Miss Mackinnons, and to affront him by making game of his odd
contributions to the larder in St. Mungo’s Square, on the whole rather
more unsuitable than the Lieutenant’s gifts to his aunts. ‘It is not the
same as a picnic, Mr. Tom,’ she was at the trouble of explaining to him.
At last she nearly quarrelled with him by flatly refusing to take it
upon her to have anything to do with scalloped oysters and preserved
ginger. The Miss Mackinnons were pretty sure to disapprove of both them
and their donor, and she must also decline wasting another fraction of
her valuable time in telling him that Miss Bethia’s convalescence was
an established fact, and that there was nothing the matter with any
other person in the house, while it was too absurd that he should
constitute himself a purveyor for their wants. He had better go and shop
with his sisters. Oh! _she_ did not despise shopping--she was quite fond
of it, when she had plenty of time and money, and nothing better to do.
If he did not attend the Nasmyths’ ball--the first ball of the
season--the more fool he; the loss would be his, for she could not
flatter him that one gentleman would be missed, and balls were excellent
things to those who were not above dancing and making themselves
agreeable and useful.
‘That is all she thinks me fit for,’ he told himself in a rage; ‘she
regards me as a perfect humbug. When she is so grossly unfair I wonder I
trouble myself what she thinks: though there is nobody like her that I
know, nobody so good to everybody except me, so brave and bright--but I
will let her alone in future.’
Miss Bethia was not hard to persuade to try a change of air at Barley
Riggs, and her sisters were induced to accompany her. During their
absence as much of the old furniture of the house in St. Mungo’s Square
as could be hunted up was restored to it, without a word said on either
side, until its absence appeared to have been part of an uncomfortable
dream.
The next step was to make Miss Janet let her name, and the names of her
sisters, be put, in strictest privacy, on the list of impoverished
better-class families helped by a certain fund. She was led to do so by
being shown the signature of her grandfather among those of the early
subscribers to the fund, and by the facts being impressed upon her that
she was only taking back what he had given. Miss Bethia was, as Athole
Murray had found, by far the most pliable of the sisters, and she lent
herself half willingly, half with fear and trembling for what Miss Janet
would say if she ever found out the unbecoming traffic, to sundry wiles
and devices of Athole’s, as the instrument appointed by her father and
Tam Drysdale for lending the Miss Mackinnons substantial assistance. At
the same time Miss Bethia had never received so many or such well-paid
orders for work; altogether, there was hope of the Miss Mackinnons
keeping soul and body together till a share of Strathdivie fell to their
lot.