SAINT MUNGO’S CITY
A Novel
BY SARAH TYTLER
AUTHOR OF ‘THE BRIDE’S PASS,’ ‘WHAT SHE CAME THROUGH,’
‘BEAUTY AND THE BEAST,’ ETC.
[Illustration: colophon]
IN THREE VOLUMES
VOL. I.
London
CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1884
[_All rights reserved_]
SAINT MUNGO’S CITY.
CHAPTER I.
YOUNG MACKINNON’S MARRIAGE CONTRACT.
Nearly thirty years ago, three highly-respectable ‘single ladies,’
sisters, of the name of Mackinnon, the youngest of them already turned
forty, the eldest over fifty, and showing decided tokens of what had
been from the beginning a sort of ready-made old-maidishness, dwelt in
what was still a commodious house in one of the old squares of Glasgow.
It was a region which had fallen down in the world, since the days when
its substantial houses--their line broken here and there by low-browed,
covered-in ‘pends’--were occupied by more than one of the ‘Tobacco
Lords’--the ancient autocrats of the West, sprouts from the great
Highland houses who had pocketed their pride and stooped to prosecute
trade in St. Mungo’s city instead of levying blackmail on the Lowland
borders. These adventurous spirits had amassed great fortunes, and had
strutted on the ‘plainstanes’ in their huge wigs and scarlet cloaks, as
haughtily as in the days of their youth they had climbed their native
braes in bonnets and kilts. Such magnates had long passed away. The tide
of trade and fashion had altered more than once in the interval since
sugar had got the better of tobacco, and cotton had rivalled sugar, and
iron distanced cotton.
As for the cotton and iron lords, they were no longer content with
gloomy houses near the old College and the Cathedral, from which the
dweller could patronize learning and hold intercourse with the
professors and clergy--ignoring their comparative poverty because they,
too, were of gentle birth, while book-knowledge has always had its value
in Scotland. Far less were the modern traders satisfied with country
houses by the Kelvin or down near the Broomielaw. Glasgow was spreading
out north and south, and east and west. The old houses, which had become
centres of a great population, instead of standing on the outskirts of a
town, were constantly passing into lower hands or changing their
character. The buildings were occupied by shopkeepers and warehousemen,
or let out in lodgings, or, after sustaining a gutting-out process,
flourishing anew as shops, where in former days no shops, however
select, had broken in upon the genteel retirement of ‘family mansions.’
Like houses, like people; many of the proud, prosperous old families had
fallen from their high estate, and stood on an inferior footing, forced
to yield in wealth and influence to new men coming to the front in new
branches of industry--men frequently not drawn from the gentler ranks,
either of the Highlands or Lowlands, who had been ‘hands’ before they
were ‘heads,’ and, along with the sterling qualities which had raised
their owners, were apt to retain much of the original clay with which
they had been clogged.
The class which was superseded had only the pride of their superior
antiquity and gentility to console them, and naturally clung tenaciously
and not very amiably to these antecedents. The Miss Mackinnons were come
of the outstripped, borne-down rulers of the past. Their father had been
a man in a better position than the one they filled. Their grandfather
had been far before their father. As for their great-grandfather, ‘a’
Glasgy,’ as Miss Janet was wont to say, ‘trim’led at the wag o’ his
finger.’ Unfortunately, his descendants had little more than his memory
to plume themselves upon.
But it seemed as if the fortunes of the Mackinnons were about to
revive--not in the persons of the ladies, whose prospects of
advantageous matrimonial alliances, never great, were slipping slowly
but surely from the reluctant women’s grasp--but in the case of their
eldest nephew, the head of their branch of the family. Gavin Mackinnon
was about to marry an heiress in her own right--not such an heiress as a
Glasgow Mackinnon might once have aspired to--but a lass whose family
was not without drawbacks and little mortifying objections, which the
ladies, if not their nephew, swallowed with a manifest effort of
complacence.
Still, here was an undoubted heiress who had succeeded through her
mother to a small landed property, the worth of which was increased
tenfold by calico-printing and dye-works built on the land, also the
property of Miss Craig, when such works had come into repute as sources
of trade and wealth that would hold their own against the cotton
industries thus supplemented.
No Mackinnon had married a bride with so promising a patrimony for the
last two generations. Certainly the trumpeters of the family recoiled a
little from the obligation of their nephew to take up calico-printing
and dying as a calling, which was something widely different from
possessing estates in Virginia, that furnished broad Scotland, and
England to boot, with wholesale supplies of the crop of the country.
In addition, the elder ladies could have wished that Miss Craig had been
able to claim more commercially aristocratic kindred; nevertheless, she
and her dowry were by no means to be despised. ‘There would be plenty of
the cotton and iron dirt’--Miss Janet was guilty of indicating the
_nouveaux riches_ in these terms--‘who, for all their bragging that they
were rolling in wealth, would jump fast enough at Maggie Craig, with her
cash and Drysdale--her grand-uncle-by-marriage’s auld farm-house,
print-factory, and dye-vats.’
It was more of a recommendation than the reverse to the Mackinnons, that
Miss Craig, who had been sent home from India for her education, had few
relations in this country, and was so far dependent on the good offices
of the Glasgow kinswoman of her future husband. It was a matter of
resignation, to say the least, to these fairly humane and
well-intentioned persons, that Miss Craig’s mother, from whom she
inherited her property, had died when she was an infant, and that her
father had married again since she left India. It would have been a
thousand pities for her to return there to her strange step-mother,
especially when the tenant to whom the calico-printing works were let,
who had made a good thing out of them, was retiring at the end of his
lease on a competence, leaving the business with the works to a
successor, who might or might not be the husband of the owner.
The Craigs were nobodies; and the Drysdales who were before them at
Drysdale Haugh were little better, ‘farming bodies’ of a homely kind,
though the land had been their own; while calico-printing and dyeing had
not yet reached such a magnitude as to elevate calico-printers and dyers
to the rank that the tobacco-traders had held--they were hardly on a
level with cotton and iron manufacturers.
But when Gavin Mackinnon turned up, crossed Miss Craig’s path, proposed
for her, and on her acceptance of his hand boldly undertook to become a
printer and dyer on his own account, his aunts were not so destitute of
the shrewdness of a trading population as to fail to hail the windfall
which had come to the family, and the staff which had been put into
Gavin’s not too capable hand.
It was a pleasure to the gradually aging women that the marriage should
take place in their house. In addition to the lively interest which
women in general find in all that belongs to a wedding, intensified to
the highest pitch of excitement when the actors by proxy are past their
grand climacteric and have lost the sanguine expectation of becoming
brides themselves, the Miss Mackinnons had a natural liking, seldom
gratified, for dispensing counsel, and ordering and presiding in matters
of consequence.
They were all three tall, stout women, rather imposing-looking in their
very plainness. It was an advantage to the two elder sisters that they
assumed the matronly style in dress which ought to have been theirs, had
fortune been kinder, and men more solicitous of their favour. They wore,
if not caps, at least a sufficient quantity of lace disposed about
their heads to shade what was gaunt or heavy. Pelerines and huge falling
collars had gone out for young women, but older people still indulged in
them, and they were not without a certain dignity which suited large
proportions. The third sister, Miss Bethia (pronounced with the accent
on the ‘i’) did herself less justice. She put on gowns of gayer colours
and flimsier materials, and arranged her unsheltered hair in a much more
youthful fashion of elaborate plaits and braids.
Miss Mackinnon was developing deafness which she declined absolutely to
acknowledge, and the greater part of her time was spent in clearing up
the misconceptions--the inevitable growth of habitually hearing and
speaking at cross purposes. She had grown both tart and stupid under the
process, otherwise she would not have been less intelligent and
agreeable than her sisters, which, perhaps, was not saying much, for
the Miss Mackinnons had been brought up under desperately narrowing
influences and with overwhelming prejudices. Miss Janet had come to the
front as the result of Miss Mackinnon’s deafness; she was left to lay
down the law, while her long tongue and restless energy kept her from
granting her victim a moment’s respite.
Miss Bethia represented the accomplishments of the ladies. She was
fondly believed to be one of the best piano-players in Glasgow, which
meant that she thundered through half-forgotten pieces with stunning din
and astounding celerity, and played reels with more spirit than
delicacy. In spite of the family’s income, she worked indefatigably for
pleasure, and at considerable cost, in wools and silks, heaping up
trophies only too gorgeous in the shape of cushions and stools and
screens, in the otherwise faded and antiquated drawing-room. She had a
simper hovering about her large mouth which was absent from her
sisters’ faces, and seemed to say that in spite of Miss Bethia’s
ponderous nose, light blinking eyes, with barely visible eye-lashes, and
tow-like hair, much on the pattern of the other members of the family,
she laboured under the delusion that she was the beauty no less than the
genius of her race. It is hardly necessary to say that Miss Bethia was
the most foolish of the sisterhood.
There was a redeeming feature in the Miss Mackinnons’ characters which
did something to make up for their intolerable conceit and tendency to
constitute themselves and their opinions the centre of the universe,
before which all mankind was to bow. They were strongly attached to each
other. None deferred more loyally to Miss Mackinnon than did Miss Janet
and Miss Bethia; a fond mother could hardly have been prouder of a
cherished daughter’s performances than were the elder sisters of the
younger’s prowess on the ‘piany’ and in fancy-work.
One of the peculiarities of the female Mackinnon mind was that it
scorned any attempt in Scotch people to speak ‘high English.’ As the
ladies’ voices were naturally loud, and they had accustomed themselves
to speak still more loudly to suit Miss Mackinnon’s infirmities, the
effect of their homely Scotch shouted to each other or to any visitor
was decidedly startling to a new-comer. Another thing the sisters could
not abide was a silly pretence at polished instead of plain manners.
Such weak copying of their neighbours, or yielding to changes which were
no improvements, were for ‘the cotton and iron dirt.’ Such trifles were
far beneath the attention of the Mackinnons. These favoured mortals
needed no artificial props. The family’s claims to precedence were so
unanswerable that a Mackinnon might do exactly as he or she liked,
within the bounds of the moral law, for the maiden representatives of
the house were respectable Christians and staunch Presbyterians, assured
that the name would grace any speech or action, and confer, not derive,
lustre from it.
Only a small moiety of the world took the Miss Mackinnons at their own
estimation, and the moiety was ever decreasing. Strange to say, Maggie
Craig, a simple yet aspiring girl, was among the worshippers at the
nearly deserted shrine. These absurd elderly women contrived to throw
dust in her young eyes. Her chief inducement to marry Gavin Mackinnon
was that he was the first man who had made her an offer, and that he was
big--big in various ways--in speech as well as in bodily inches, and so
filled a certain space in her world. But her next reason was that in
marrying him she would enter into one of the oldest and best Glasgow
families, which to Maggie signified as much as if she had referred to
one of the patriarchal houses of ancient Rome, and that she might
thenceforth hold up her head in the light of being closely allied to the
unapproachable cream of the inhabitants of her father’s native city.
Therefore the bride-elect was highly gratified instead of being
intensely bored by the invitation from her future husband’s aunts to
make their house her home, and be married from it, rather than from the
house of a business correspondent of her father’s or of a
school-companion of her own, nearly all the choice she could command.
Mr. Craig had sent home a formal consent to the marriage. It was little
more than a form, since Maggie was of age and could please herself. He
dimly remembered the Mackinnons as something beyond the common and above
his mark when he left Scotland. He had not known anything of them in
later days so as to modify his opinion. At the same time, his parental
interest in Maggie, and his impression that she was doing well for
herself, did not go the length of tempting him to return before his
time. He had younger children, who, as they had never been separated
from him, had eclipsed the first-born in his affections, and he was at
once easy-going and slow to be moved from the plans of his whole life.
He left Maggie to her own discretion, and trusted her to her new
friends. He would come home, if he lived, at the date he had originally
fixed.
It was the night before the wedding--a frosty winter night, which caused
a slight shudder in the minds of stay-at-home people at the thought of
the railway journey to London--the sum-total of the bridal tour. A jaunt
to London in winter, and to the Highlands or Ireland in summer, were the
stereotyped wedding-trips which had always floated dimly before the Miss
Mackinnons’ imaginations; and it is needless to say the sisters had
imposed their standard on the younger generation by sheer strength of
will and loudness of tongue. Gavin Mackinnon was something of sounding
brass himself, but he was quiet and yielding compared to the redoubtable
aunts. Maggie was a cipher in their hands in the meantime.
In spite of what might have been supposed to be the Miss Mackinnons’
skill and experience as tacticians in a general way, they had as a
matter of course not been familiar with marriages. The grey house in the
weather-beaten, smoke-darkened square was in the greatest disorder.
There was not a room clear of bride’s-cake, or white gloves--‘livery,’
the elder ladies called them--or new gowns, or travelling trunks. There
was hardly a place in which to receive the two lawyers who came for the
important purpose of reading and getting the signatures to the marriage
contract. The Miss Mackinnons had talked so much for the last ten days
that they were not fit for anything else. The bridegroom, finding it
less trouble to agree than to contradict, had acquiesced accordingly--in
spite of his pompousness. Maggie was only occupied in considering how
soon she would be a Mackinnon, with all the privileges of the race.
The marriage settlement, which was as necessary for the dignity of the
family as for the safety of Miss Craig, was left to take care of itself
or to be concocted by the aunts. Luckily they were perfectly honest, and
had no thought of taking advantage of their new relative. Luckily, too,
for the sense and reason of the document, Miss Craig’s lawyer was on the
spot, and had been invited to join another member of the profession--the
Mackinnon family lawyer--in drawing up the deed. Miss Janet was
persuaded that none of the preparations would prosper unless she were,
as she said, ‘at the heels of them.’ But she was now entertaining a
visitor who had come on a call of congratulation and inspection.
Miss Carstairs was a little woman, a contemporary and old friend of the
Miss Mackinnons--one who had come within the charmed circle of old
Glasgow. She now sat coolly and contentedly in the middle of the
confusion, where old silver dishes and ‘dead-fine’ table linen, hunted
out of ‘presses’ to do honour to the occasion, lay about among
railway-rugs, leather straps and time-tables on the little ebony tables
and bamboo chintz-covered chairs and couches of the drawing-room. The
dining-room, with its heavy mahogany and horse-hair furniture, and fine
old punch-bowl below the sideboard, pointing back to the days when
Glasgow punch had been famous, was given up, as a place of superior
gravity and masculine simplicity, to the lawyers with their pen and ink,
and the young couple who were to profit by these appliances.
‘Our marriage settlements,’ said Miss Janet in her powerful voice to her
crony, as if she and her sisters had been married two or three times
over, ‘were aye made siccar, though in the making they covered ever so
many pages of parchment. My great-grandfather’s was, like his will, as
big as a sma’ book. He married a Fenton--Jean Fenton--and it is through
her me and my sisters have an interest in Strathdivie--that is, if ever
the Fentons of Strathdivie fail, we’ll come in for our share as heirs
female through my great-grandmother, Jean Fenton. Oo aye, this
settlement between my nephew Gauvin and Miss Craig is but a flea-bite
compared to our former settlements. But that is no reason it should not
be made richt and ticht, with a lawyer on our side, Dauvit Milne--we’ve
always employed that firm--and a lawyer on hers, new graith [growth],
but a decent enough man, I believe, a Mr. Dalgleish. Do you ken him,
Miss Carstairs?’
‘I should think so,’ said Miss Carstairs, a little drily; ‘you’ve
forgotten, Miss Janet, he married my niece Tina. They’ve a place in the
Highlands, where I stayed three weeks with them last summer.’
Miss Janet did not trouble herself to apologize for what might have been
a slip of the tongue; on the contrary, she rushed upon a fresh offence.
‘A place in the Hielants, and he a writer body that lives by pen and
ink, and cannot date back two generations!’ she exclaimed, in a high,
protesting key. ‘After that Dauvit Milne may have his London mansion,
and his shooting-box in the Sooth.’ The irony was more plain than
gracious; but graciousness was not a quality in which Miss Janet
Mackinnon excelled. ‘Weel,’ she added with emphasis, after a pause, as
if the world’s verdict hung on her sentence, ‘I’ve nothing particular to
say against it--save that “dockens will aye be waggin’,”’ she ended with
admirable candour.
Miss Carstairs gave an indignant sniff, but she knew Miss Janet too
well to resent her unconscionable rudeness. Besides, it was the
Dalgleishes who were stigmatized as ‘dockens.’ Miss Carstairs was as
well descended as any Mackinnon of them, and could afford to overlook
the sneer.
‘It was touch-and-go with that will,’ remarked the eldest Miss
Mackinnon, with her usual irrelevancy, for she had caught only stray
fragments of the conversation. ‘If she had died an hour or twa suner,
our Miss Craig would have lost every penny. It would have been maist
unnatural that she should not have profited by her mother’s succession,
but auld Drysdale never mentioned heirs. He was a hot-headed stubborn
man, and though he had a great work with Beenie Pryde, he never liked
Jock Craig. It was not with the uncle’s will that the niece made the
marriage. But, as I said, it was a mercy she died when she did, though
I’ve heard tell that if she had so much as given a pech or sech [groan
or sigh] after his breath was out, the property would have been hers,
and would have come in the course of nature, as it has done, to her
dochter, her heiress.’
‘She’s speaking of how Miss Craig’s mother came into her inheritance,’
Miss Janet hastened to explain, carefully lowering her voice; ‘she’s
thinking of wills and deaths, instead of settlements and marriages, no
that they’re so far apart. Yes, it was just so, auld Drysdale left his
money to his niece by marriage. He had no near relations, and though he
had the word of being hard, he had aye a soft heart for the memory of
his young wife who pined and died long before she saw her prime. He took
her sister’s dochter, Beenie Pryde, and brocht her up to keep his house,
and was as fond of her as if she had been his ain bairn. But there was
an odds for all that; he could never altogether forgive her for marrying
Jock Craig, and though he left her his means, as he had come bound to
do, when he took her to rear, he did not trouble to mention her wean,
that had not a drop of his blude in its veins.’
‘Well, I mind something of the story, but I never heard all the ins and
outs of it before. The Drysdales were not in our set, Miss Janet,’ said
mild Miss Carstairs, not without what these old-fashioned ladies would
have called a ‘fling’ at her hostess, in return for Miss Janet’s
treatment of Miss Carstairs’ niece Tina and her ‘writer body’ of a
husband.
‘Who said the Drysdales were in our set, Kate Carstairs?’ demanded Miss
Janet defiantly.’ They were not such fules as to set themselves up so
far beyond their standing. They kenned their place and keepit it, which
was more to their credit. But that did not prevent auld Drysdale’s being
a man of some substance,’ composing herself to resume her story. ‘When
the news of his death and his inheritance was sent out to where the
Craigs had gone, it was found that she had died after giving birth to a
lass bairn--our Miss Craig--the very same day that the auld man her
uncle’s breath went out at Drysdale Haugh. I tell you, Miss Carstairs,
it was nothing short of a dispensation of Providence that he was gone
before her by the space of three hours, or Maggie Craig could not have
touched plack or penny of his,’ ended Miss Janet, excited by the crisis
of her narrative.
‘She would have had to hurry if she would overtake him in his journey,’
remarked Miss Mackinnon, with a smile that was a little ghastly, as a
commentary on the conversation.
‘What’s she after now?’ inquired Miss Janet, fairly mystified. ‘Oh, I
mind,’ her face clearing up; ‘she’s so keen to lose nothing we say.
Meye’s very sharp, but she’s apt to jump from subject to subject, by all
the world like a bird from branch to branch. She’s off, as she thinks we
are, to a joke we had among oursel’s this morning, of the bride’s
remaining behind to look after the gear, and the presents that had not
made their appearance in time, while the bridegroom went the first stage
in solitary state. But I must awa’ to keep Gauvin and Miss Craig in
countenance while they hear the settlement read--a trial to young folks
in their position--and to append my signature as witness. I’ll leave
nothing undone that I put my hand to. You’ll forgive me for leaving you,
Miss Carstairs. You know, it’s not an ordinary occasion. If you like to
stop till I come back, Meye here can be showing you Gauvin’s “traps,” as
he calls them, his dressing-case and the studs and things in it, for I
think you’ve looked over the bride’s paraphernely, or Betheye--I hear
her coming in, she has been awa’ about the cards--will give you a tune.’
‘No, thank you very much, Miss Janet,’ said Miss Carstairs, rising and
expressing all the more gratitude because of the positiveness of her
refusal. ‘I must run away myself--you will forgive me for having
detained you so long, at such an important time, with so much on your
mind as I see you have. The bride can have nothing to think of in
comparison.
‘I dare say no,’ Miss Janet accepted the implied compliment
unhesitatingly, and without limitation. ‘What has a young thing like her
to take up her mind about but to look bonnie and please Gauvin? It is me
and my sisters that have to care for them baith and see that nothing’s
forgotten, and to keep the cook and confectioner, the session-clerk and
the minister, up to the mark.’
‘I can feel for you, Miss Janet. When my niece Tina was married, though
it was out of her father’s house, not mine, and it was not quite the
same thing’--Miss Carstairs corrected herself hastily, catching a
warning flicker of Miss Janet’s light blue eyes; ‘for Tina did
condescend a wee bit, though Mr. Dalgleish’s a steady lad, and getting
into a fine business, and there’s something to be allowed for a lassie’s
choice--my very heels were sore, and I could not sleep for a week.’
‘What are you saying about quadreels, or was it reels, Miss Carstairs?’
asked Miss Mackinnon. ‘No, we’re to have no dance, only a degoonay in
the French fashion.’
‘I’ll not forget a bit of the cake with your cards,’ Miss Bethia assured
the departing guest. ‘I’m to have charge of the cakes and cards, and you
must promise to dream upon the cake.’
‘Hoots! Miss Betheye, I’m done with dreams, which does not mean that you
should be, you that can give us “Wooed, an’ married, an’ a’” so that our
feet can hardly keep still, while I’m “timber-tuned.” You have so many
more pretty pieces of work than those you’ve so handsomely presented to
Miss Craig that she may get them made up for her drawing-room, it would
be a real pity they should be wasted.’
‘Awa’ with you, Kate Carstairs!’ cried Miss Janet, while Miss Bethia’s
simper passed into a giggle; ‘would you rather have Bethia wasted than
the ottomans and cushions, however elegant or creditable to her taste
and industry? You would not have Betheye stoop to a man not in every way
worthy of her and her family; and where is such a man to be found at
this time of the day, I should like to hear?’