TIME’S CHANGES.
Seven-and-twenty years had passed with all their changes since the
winter night on which Gavin Mackinnon and Margaret Craig’s marriage
contract was signed. Six-and-twenty years had intervened since Mr. David
Milne--the solitary representative of an old firm of Glasgow
‘writers’--had wound up their century-long business, disposed of what
was left, and retired with the accumulated gains to buy an estate in
Kirkcudbright, and begin a new life as the founder of a family of
Galloway lairds. Four-and-twenty years had elapsed since Mr. Dalgleish,
the husband of Miss Carstairs’ niece Tina, finding the field too well
occupied already, or that law was not so profitable in the West of
Scotland as it had been, accepted a colonial appointment, and sailed
with his family for New Zealand, to sit on endless boundary questions
and judge the rights and wrongs of Maoris and settlers.
Seven-and-twenty years, with all their vicissitudes--vigorous, full
lives vanished like shadows, leaving no traces behind; new lives which
had dawned and risen above the horizon, advancing to the hot glow of
their noon; old stranded lives lingering on, apparently without use or
purpose.
The superannuated house in the old square was little changed, except
that the narrow means of its occupants had grown narrower, until they
pinched with the sharp pinch of poverty. Each one of the Miss Mackinnons
was in her place, though it was becoming always harder and more
comfortless. There had been a business speculation--soon coming to
grief--into which the ladies had rashly let themselves be drawn, with
the urgent desire of getting higher interest for their small capital.
The end had been that the disaster which followed had swallowed up the
larger part of the Miss Mackinnons’ pittance.
The poor ladies had eked out what was left by the secret sale, bit after
bit, extending over a period of years, of what they had been accustomed
to cling to fondly as the proofs of their old gentility--quaint silver
plate, a few jewels, a considerable quantity of fine lace--until the
disposal of the family’s effects had come down to table and bed linen,
and articles of furniture in daily use, which would fetch little money,
while their absence would be severely felt. And always as the
surreptitious sale approached its conclusion, starvation or the
workhouse stared the unfortunate gentlewomen more fully in the face.
Still they lived on, though the middle age of twenty-seven years ago was
the old age of to-day--old age without its privileges and indulgences;
while Miss Mackinnon was stone-deaf, and could only be communicated with
by means of the slate and slate-pencil which hung behind her chair, or
through a set of signs which the patient ingenuity of faithful affection
had invented and maintained for her use.
Miss Bethia, after a futile attempt to teach her antiquated system of
music, had relinquished her piano and laid aside her embroidery, which
proved unsaleable, to work at plain sewing, secretly disposed of at the
very shop where the Mackinnons’ custom had still been an esteemed
compliment in the days of Miss Bethia’s youth. Miss Janet did a
servant’s work behind backs, in addition to taking her place before the
world among the ladies of the house.
Withal something heroic had crept in with the suffering into these
narrow lives--something of Spartan endurance of hardship, of generous
self-denial, of steadfast submission to the Providence that knew best
what was fit for all. The Miss Mackinnons were frequently absurd enough,
and in the increasing isolation of their experience they were getting
homelier and more rugged and uncouth, falling back more and more on
their old Scotch and their primitive manners, which they had always
declined to lay aside, as something which had been good enough for
former Mackinnons, so was good enough for their descendants and for the
world till the end of time. But the women had never been so like ladies
as in their silent, desperate fight with overpowering odds.
A grain of hope remained at the bottom of this Pandora’s box. The
Fentons of Strathdivie had not been so tenacious of existence as the
Mackinnons in St. Mungo Square. One after another had dropped into his
or her grave without direct heirs, till at last there was but one ailing
man between the ladies and their share of Strathdivie.
It had better be said at once that Strathdivie in its entirety was
nothing more than a moorland farm in one of the wards of Lanarkshire,
which, in the present state of agriculture, was anything save a
flourishing possession; and it had not the supplement of dye-works or
bleachworks, or coal or iron seams, to multiply its worth. Divided into
portions, the allotment that might come to the Miss Mackinnons was so
trifling that no man need have led a grudged life because of it. Yet
that pittance meant such comparative ease and security to these
hardly-bested souls that they could not help contemplating it afar off
with longing eyes. It was the hidden burden on the consciences of all
the three that they were wishing ill to poor Archie Fenton, not caring
to hear that he had any chance of getting hale and hearty again,
privately calculating on the probable length of days of a man who was
younger than two of the sisters.
To intensify the cruel uncertainty, it was suspected that on the few
occasions on which Mr. Fenton and the Miss Mackinnons had met, for the
connection between the families had belonged not to the present but to
former generations, the two elder sisters--Miss Janet especially--had
been so unfortunate as to give offence to the disposer of Strathdivie.
She had interfered, as usual, where it was a particular want of tact and
taste to interfere; and she had perhaps betrayed only too unmistakably
what were her expectations with regard to the farm in the Middle Ward;
while, it was believed, Archie Fenton was not without some power to
‘will away’ from his distant cousins their share of his property.
But surely he could not be so unnatural and unjust, the Miss Mackinnons
argued with whitening lips. Blood was thicker than water, and a dying
man would not dare to face his Maker after he had robbed his kindred,
however remote, of their lawful patrimony.
Where were Gavin Mackinnon and his wife that they did not come to the
help of their aged kinswomen? One might as well ask where were last
year’s leaves that they did not continue to clothe with fresh green the
gaunt grey boughs of some venerable tree. The years which had spared the
Miss Mackinnons had been as fatal to their nephew and niece as to the
Fentons of Strathdivie. Both had gone to their long home many a day
before. Ere their deaths the dyeing and calico-printing had thriven so
badly in his incapable hands that first he had tried a partner in the
concern, and that device not succeeding, he had, in the course of three
or four more years, got from his wife the power of selling the property
to the same purchaser to whom he had, in conjunction with his partner,
already disposed of the business. The buyer of both was the son of a
cousin of old Drysdale’s, the original laird of Drysdale Haugh. The
younger Drysdale was a man whose father had sunk to a very inferior
position. The son, on the contrary, had risen through every grade, till
he was not only the sole proprietor of works and farm, but had improved
and extended them, had made them a great concern, and had ended by
building a fine mansion-house as an addition to the old farmhouse.
Neither Gavin Mackinnon nor his wife had lived to hear what another
man’s sagacity and energy had made of what they had let slip through
their fingers. She had not seen the fifth anniversary of their marriage,
and he had not survived her as many more years. There were people who
said the couple had been done to ruin and death by the Miss Mackinnons’
powers of talking and interference in their nephew’s private affairs.
But everybody who knew anything about it was aware that Gavin Mackinnon
could never have made anything of a trade to which he was not bred; and
what was she fit for save to spend or spare as much of her own money as
came into her hands? Then she died, as her mother had done before
her--in giving birth to an only child, about whose arrival in this world
his grand-aunts had certainly made as much fuss as if he were the heir
to an earldom. Still, all things considered, these were circumstances
over which the Miss Mackinnons could not have had much control. Neither
ought they to have been held accountable for their nephew’s premature
demise, seeing that no amount of enlarging even on disagreeable topics,
and putting fingers into other people’s pies, could cause a wet autumn,
telling considerably on a man who had never been alert about anything in
his life save sport. In this particular instance he pursued it in
soaking rain, till he caught a violent cold, which settled on his lungs
and carried him off in ten days.
During the lives of the husband and wife the sale of Drysdale Haugh had
furnished them with a considerable sum in ready money, which they had
not had time to spend, though he especially had done his best to get rid
of what was so unfamiliar to him. What was left fell to their son, who
had been reared, so far, under the care of his grand-aunts. But while he
was a minor he could do nothing for them, and by the time he was of age
so much of his patrimony had been spent on his education--worthy the
last of the St. Mungo Square Mackinnons--and so much more in gratifying
his kinswomen’s shortsighted pride and his own boyish fancy by the
purchase of a commission for him in an infantry regiment, that there was
little left to spare from his small income.
Lieutenant Eneas Mackinnon was the pride and delight of his old
relatives, the one cause of congratulation in the middle of their
reverses, the single gleam of light in their far-spent, darkening days!
For his credit and advantage they would sacrifice the little that
remained to them, while he had only a dim idea of the straits to which
the old ladies were reduced. He had wished to do something for them out
of his chronic impecuniosity, and it was in a great measure their fault
that they would accept next to nothing at his hands, lest the dear lad
should be stinted and not able to make a fair show among his brother
officers.