A DROWNING MAN’S STRAWS.
It was none of the persons chiefly concerned, but a mere looker-on, who,
without in the least understanding the case, awoke auld Tam from his
lethargy, and gave his troubled mind a new bias.
Lady Semple, with her natural versatility, had long ago renounced her
projects for Claribel as the destined Lady Willoughby. Lady Semple had,
not without reason, made up her mind instead that Claribel Drysdale
ought to marry Mr. Mackinnon. Her father could not really disapprove of
the poor match for his elder daughter, else he would not have allowed
her to come prominently forward, as she had come, to the help of the
unfortunate old ladies. Nothing would warrant such compromising conduct
in a young lady except an attachment, of which, indeed, her ladyship had
not been without her suspicions at an earlier date, to be speedily
followed by the announcement of an engagement to the grand-nephew.
Lady Semple went on to argue the matter in all its bearings. It was a
magnificent instance of mercantile liberality and generosity in a man
whom she had always admired and esteemed, whom she was proud to call her
friend as well as her neighbour. It would be a splendid thing for Dick’s
friend--an interposition of Providence on his behalf and the making of
him. And it was quite a romance on Claribel’s part. Lady Semple herself
was not romantic, but when wealthy parents countenanced romance the
principal objection to it was removed, and the most prudent third person
might follow suit without compunction.
Lady Semple would certainly stand by Claribel when she was Mrs.
Mackinnon, both for the sake of Dick and his friend, and because of her
ladyship’s regard for the young lady. There would be no loss of prestige
for her, since the poorest officer’s wife would rank with the daughter
of the richest dyer and cotton-printer any day; and Mr. Drysdale’s money
would not come amiss, though unluckily promotion was no longer to be
bought. The thinker meant unluckily only in this instance; she was an
advanced Liberal in politics, and had been almost as anxious for the
abolition of the purchase system as for vote by ballot, though she knew
it would be a blow to a number of her nephews. Dick was an only son, and
he would soon leave the army; he had only adopted it _pour passer le
temps_, and because all men were the better of being trained to a
profession--she would say a trade, if she had her way.
The Mackinnons--Mr. Mackinnon and his wife--would probably continue in
the army; but if her father settled a regular income upon her, as a man
of his sense and kindness was sure to do, it would not signify much
although he never got beyond the rank of a captain or major. She did not
suppose he would pass higher by merit, though he was a thoroughly good
fellow, fit to be a general where a man’s tone rather than his talent
was concerned. He would make a good steady husband. She had always been
glad that Dick had chosen such a safe friend. Claribel would see the
world with her husband’s regiment, in which she would be a great force;
though it was bad form now to talk of the belle of a regiment--all that
had gone out with promotion by purchase and idle young men with their
practical jokes, pigeon-shooting, and regimental balls. It was out of
date even in fast novels. Officers had now their work to do if they
wished to get on like other men, which was much better for them. But
Claribel would not be tied down. She would have the opportunity of
learning at first hand a variety of things which she, Lady Semple, had
missed mastering. She was tempted to envy her young friend.
What would Sir Hugo do? Oh, Sir Hugo had found out that for himself, and
it was the most delightful solution possible of the difficulty. He would
woo and win young Eppie--the simplest, most artless of little girls. She
was so young, that she could be easily trained, while her transference
to polite circles would have a thousand times more novelty and charm
than Claribel’s transplantation could have had. It would be a genuine
romance--though Lady Semple was not in the least romantic, any more than
Eppie was a beggar-maid. Still, Sir Hugo was a King Cophetua in his way,
and only the knowledge of what a dear daughter the young girl, who was
devoted to her own good rustic mother, would make to darling unworldly
Lady Willoughby, with her widowed life and her devotion to her son,
could fully reconcile Lady Semple to the _mésalliance_.
Then Mr. and Mrs. Drysdale need not be left alone. That Trojan of a son
of theirs--who had resisted her ladyship’s blandishments and those of
the Vaughan girls, who had given in to his father by going into
business--had become, as she had heard, auld Tam’s right hand. He ought
to bring over that independent, original Miss Murray, the daughter of
clever, innocent Dr. Peter. She was a girl whom Lady Semple was dying to
know better. She might be of the greatest assistance to her ladyship in
getting up her Rational Dress Association. Athole would prove a fair
substitute for the loss of Claribel to her friend, as well as for the
double loss of Claribel and Eppie to their parents.
Having arrived at this triumphant conclusion, Lady Semple felt so sure
of her ground that she could not imagine herself making mischief by
putting in her oar. She first tried a series of broad hints to Mrs.
Drysdale. But Mrs. Eppie was so engrossed with the prospect of the
fulfilment of her dreams, so distracted between freshly awakened
tenderness for Clary, trembling exultation over young Eppie, vexation
with young Tam, and trouble about auld Tam, that, candid woman though
she was, it seemed impossible to draw an admission from her, as a step
towards offering her friendly congratulations.
Thus foiled, Lady Semple, in her high satisfaction, ventured to have
recourse to auld Tam.
It was one evening when the whole _dramatis personæ_ of Lady Semple’s
genteel comedy were together in the old-fashioned drawing-room at Semple
Barns. So most of them had been on a previous evening, when Tam
Drysdale’s eyes had been opened to the enormity of a penniless officer
of the Mackinnon stock having rendered himself so agreeable to Clary
that he had melted her pride and disordered her understanding, and when
her father had scowled on the couple, and angrily told his wife that he
would not have such doings.
The summer had done Sir James good, and he was able to meet company. He
had quite a knot of old friends--from London, from Edinburgh (where the
Court of Session was up, like the Parliament in London), from India,
helping Dick to dispose of the birds. Lady Semple had her neighbours and
friends to meet the greater strangers: the Drysdales--the whole of them
on this occasion; Dr. Peter and Athole Murray, whom her hostess was so
desirous of cultivating; Sir Hugo Willoughby, with Guy Horsburgh; Eneas
Mackinnon, with the son of the house.
Lady Semple was an accomplished hostess, but her skill was wasted this
evening, for her guests gave her little trouble; they arranged
themselves according to their own wishes, and hers, without an effort.
The old friends mustered round Sir James’s card-table, which he could
again enjoy, enlivening the pauses during the deals by reminiscences of
the past, extracts from their intermediate experience, anticipations of
the next day’s sport.
Round games for young people were exploded, but there had been an
attempt to try the last play of thought-reading, which had only broken
down because nobody seemed to care to have his or her thought read;
everybody seemed to be more anxious to ascertain his or her neighbour’s.
Eneas Mackinnon wanted to learn what Claribel Drysdale was thinking as
she inspected the condition of that oddest of sentimental souvenirs--a
hair album, which Lady Semple had once set up.
Sir Hugo Willoughby desired to penetrate what had been young Eppie’s
fancies as the liquid notes of her voice, which she had been pouring
forth at the piano, near which he was hovering, died away. A few moments
ago she had silenced the whole murmur of sound. The great roomful of old
and young, grave and gay, married and single, men and women of the
world, and men and women whom nothing would make worldly, had listened
breathlessly to the expression of the simple faith of a homely,
hard-working breadwinner for some poor family:
‘When Jock and Jean and Janetie,
Are up and gotten lear,
They’ll help to mak’ the boatie row,
And lighten a’ our care.
Then weel may the boatie row,
And better may it speed,
And weel may the boatie row
That wins the bairnies’ breed.’
But surely even Eppie, with the clear mirror of her innocent mind
unruffled by a cloud of passion, must have a conception of the time when
Jock and Jean and Janetie were not only up and had ‘gotten lear,’ but
entertained dreams and a life of their own apart from the visions and
the life of the most loving of parents--when the children were in train
to fulfil the Bible prophecy, that a man will leave father and mother
and cleave to his wife.
Young Tam sought to realize what Athole Murray meant when she told with
such merry eloquence to Dr. Peter, in the younger man’s hearing, her
determination to set agoing a _Haus Chronik_, such as she had read of in
a German book. It was to be a Home Chronicle of which the pages stood
for the years of her life. She would put the leading scene of the year
by means of pencil and brush on the appointed page. For instance, her
father’s being thrown by Lady Fair when the train went across Aytoun
Brig; or herself finding the old iron pot in the garden, which had
formed such a delicious study of rusty-brown ever since. Another
incident might be Jeannie’s refusing the baker’s man at the
kitchen-door; because if Jeannie had said ‘Yes, if you please,’ the
domestic economy of Barley Riggs would have sustained a severe shock.
Oh! he need not think that nobody would understand her compositions, or
be the wiser for them, because she was to write in old characters--now
her handwriting was fairly readable in modern, so it need not be wholly
illegible in old characters--the details of that annual great event, so
that he who ran could read and be instructed.
Would Jeannie and the baker’s man be the only couple who were to figure
in the Barley Riggs Home Chronicle, if it ever had a being save in
Athole’s busy brain? and must the scene always be a dismissal?
Mrs. Drysdale also was looking across at her husband, as if to ask him
the reason why he drew apart from the other elderly man present, and
stood with his hands behind his back gazing, not on the card-table, but
on vacancy.
The husband and wife did not look so much _au fait_ to each other’s
minds as they had once looked to a comical extent, or so inclined to
refer to each other. The change might easily be when there was such an
inroad of exciting elements into their family life, on which it was just
possible the couple might hold different views.
Anyhow, matrimonial confidences were not desirable in general company;
so Lady Semple adroitly got rid of the matron by sending Dick to pay
her a little attention, and herself tried to ‘tackle’ auld Tam. She went
up to him as he moved on, until he stood before a picture of Dick Semple
when a boy on his pony, which the critic had contemplated a hundred
times.
Lady Semple made the portrait the text of her remarks. ‘Do you see any
resemblance still, Mr. Drysdale? Oh, these boys and girls, how they run
away from us, and how hard it is for us fathers and mothers to be left
behind!’
‘Mr. Dick is not going to run away from you, mem.’
Tam gave the general observation an individual application with stupid
literalness.
‘Oh no! not Dick--not yet awhile, I hope,’ said his mother hastily;
‘though he no longer thinks his father’s word law, and his mother’s
praise does not send him to bed as happy as a king--and it will come to
that soon--that other going away from us, and settling in life on his
own account, which seems to sunder so many ties. Yet what would you
have, Mr. Drysdale?’ continued her ladyship, unconsciously adopting the
same line of argument which Mrs. Drysdale had formerly used; ‘we cannot
stand in our children’s way. We cannot stay with them always, so why
should we seek to keep them with us? It is better--though it is not
altogether pleasant, is it?--that they should leave us. But where
everybody is agreed, where everything is more than suitable,’ murmured
Lady Semple, ‘where the whole arrangements are simply charming, and
there is so much to rejoice at, to be truly thankful for, I can only
wish you joy, my dear sir.’
Tam looked up amazed, uncertain, when, as if they were passing before
him in a panorama, the groups around him caught his eye in quick
succession. His glance roamed from one to another, comprehensively,
conclusively. There was a twitch of his eyebrows, he compressed his lips
and thrust his chin a little forward in his eagerness to see what was
happening. His eyes were still a little dazzled, but they were no
longer incapable of receiving a vivid impression. He had shaken off the
brown study which had engrossed him; a new idea had come to him; he was
full of it and of how it might help him in his strait. But he only said
to Lady Semple:
‘Not so fast, my leddy, mem--joy is not to be wished every day; we keep
it for great occasions.’
‘But you own it is only a question of time. Oh, I must wish you much
joy, Mr. Drysdale!’ cried Lady Semple, enchanted to find herself, as she
supposed, correct in what she had conjectured, inclined to look upon the
contemplated result as accomplished, feeling as if she had made all
these marriages, and that each marriage was in its own way a feat to be
proud of. But she had the discretion not to urge Tam further, and to
leave him to digest in peace the meal she had provided for him.
It was a meal, under the circumstances. Lieutenant Mackinnon and Clary!
Auld Tam remembered what he had thought of that connection before, but
now all the reasons against it were more than annulled. If he gave Clary
to young Mackinnon, with the fortune that he might yet hope to bestow,
supposing that he were left to grapple with, overcome, and outlive the
bad times, without the horrible necessity of having to give back
Drysdale Haugh to Mackinnon, with such fines and forfeits in addition as
would have shaken the prosperity of the best-established firm in
Glasgow--would it not compensate, not for inadvertently depriving him of
his mother’s property, which might well be forgiven, but for the
iniquity of retaining it, after he--auld Tam--knew full well it was none
of his? What would ‘the offisher lad’ have more than the girl he loved,
or ought to love, from his pretensions--and Clary was a fine lass,
‘handsome and edicate,’ a lass to act for herself and him too, a boon to
any man, far more than a match for the stick of a lad she had set her
fancy on? And what would the like of young Mackinnon do with Drysdale
Haugh if he got it? Make a mess of it, as his father had done before
him; waste all that auld Tam had brought the place to; pull down
everything that he had built up, and be glad in the end to rid himself
of the inheritance, and sell it to some poor, ambitious chiel who could
put his hand to the plough like one whom auld Tam had known, as Gavin
Mackinnon had sold it.
But Mackinnon and Clary were not the only couple. There was young Tam
hanging like a bee about a flower on that ‘braw, clever, ill-faured
lass,’ Athole Murray. Well, the Murrays were mixed up with the old
transaction, which loomed so largely in Tam’s mind that it blotted out
every other. The Murrays had to do with the selling of the works to Tam
Drysdale, in spite of the marriage contract which held them for the
issue of Margaret Craig. Tam had been hammering his brains all these
weeks, in vain, to determine how much or how little the Murrays were
involved, and what he had to answer for to them. Dr. Peter’s father,
Gavin Mackinnon’s partner, had been concerned with him in the sale, not
of the farm, which had belonged to Mrs. Mackinnon, but of the buildings
and plant used in the business, and the business itself, in which he was
a partner. Could Murray’s descendants also come on Tam for their share
in the profits of the dyeing and calico-printing since the sale? On the
other hand, could not Tam require from the Murrays their proportion of
the purchase-money, which they in their turn might claim from the
Mackinnons, since the Murrays also had been misled in the disposal of
the business?
It was a complication of interests and injuries which Tam could not
unravel. The strong head, which had worked out so many calculations
without a throb, ached with the strain. But this he seemed to foresee
clearly, that if the matter were laid before Dr. Peter, that upright and
uncompromising soul would never rest till he had sifted it to the
bottom, and apportioned to every man his due, though in the process a
great business might be frittered away, and the capital which the
present crisis in trade ought to have appropriated to itself would only
be rescued from the wreck, to be parted into fractions of which nobody
would be the better except a set of lawyers. Dr. Peter would count any
loss in the name of strict integrity well lost.
But if young Tam were ‘yoked’ with Athole Murray, might not that flea be
left to stick in the wall, without any further qualms of conscience?
Athole’s promotion to be the wife of as fine a fellow as ever lived, the
future head of a great business, would far outweigh any debatable
advantage the Murrays might gain--not that Tam imagined Dr. Peter greedy
of an advantage--by joining with young Mackinnon in compelling Tam to
make restitution. And Dr. Peter was a man and a father--his lassie’s
welfare must be something, must be a great deal to him; if it would not
altogether shut his truth-speaking mouth, it must render him more
lenient, more manageable, should the real state of the case ever come to
light.
Then the marriage would make Tam’s lad happy, would atone to him for the
loss of his father; for it was one of the most bitter drops infused into
auld Tam’s full cup, in the tremendous change which had suddenly
darkened the broad sunshine of his prosperity, and rendered all his good
things worthless to him, to be forced to comprehend that, having found
his son, it was only to lose him again. There had been till recently
many business confidences between them, in which auld Tam had been proud
to think that his hands were clean, and that he had not to soil young
Tam’s by the contact. He had never dabbled in business ruses which could
not bear repetition to uncorrupted ears. But here was an affair which
could not stand being looked into, which must remain a secret, and rise
up as a barrier between the father and his son for the term of their
lives. Very likely, if the story chanced to be approached--and what
secret was not approached sooner or later?--it would demand more
sacrifices from him of deliberate, habitual deception and brazen
falsehood to maintain the central lie. How could he look young Tam in
the face if it were so, when the father had begun already in his misery
to skulk away from one of the creatures he loved best in the world? And
he had a full-hearted, despairing conviction that young Tam, hot-headed
as he had been, independent as he was, would miss his father’s
friendship, little worth as it was--would want a perfect mate in a wife,
the desire of his heart, to make up to him for the snapping of the
primitive tie which, when it is of true metal, is of the consistency of
iron.
Last of all, there was Tam Drysdale’s youngest child, his bonnie bairn
Eppie, with the splendid prospect of marrying Sir Hugo Willoughby, and
being removed far beyond the range of commercial storms, safely landed
among the aristocracy, in the august shadow of the Throne itself, as Tam
dreamed. If he could only hold out till that achievement was
accomplished, till little Eppie’s grand fortune was secured, and her
mother left to her care, for young Eppie would never see her mother
suffer, then he could be content to die--not in peace--this was not a
question of peace, but stubborn and silent. For what had auld Tam done
that he should demolish his name and fame and ruin his children to
enrich Gavin Mackinnon’s son? But he would enrich Gavin Mackinnon’s son,
and what more could be required of him?