FRIENDS MEET AT BARLEY RIGGS.
Barley Riggs was an old-fashioned country-house, left stranded among the
bleach-fields of Drysdale Haugh. Instead of surroundings of woodland
pasture or corn-land, it was encircled by acres of white webs,
Turkey-red webs, or webs of divers colours, the aspect being something
like that of a rainbow brought down from the skies and spread out on the
dull earth.
For convenience the house had been appropriated, at different times, by
the different partners in the works. The original Drysdale had never
dwelt in it; but the Mackinnons on their marriage had preferred it to
the old farmhouse. Soon Gavin Mackinnon had ceased to take any active
interest, or rather to do any active mischief, in the business; then
Barley Riggs had been made over to his partner, Mr. Murray, a fussy,
fault-finding man, whose continual meddling and rating had been little
more to the purpose than Mackinnon’s helplessness. After Tam Drysdale’s
purchase of the place, he had come there while Drysdale Hall was
building round the nucleus of the farmhouse. Finally, Barley Riggs was
again occupied by a Murray, though no longer as proprietor or tenant of
the works, which had grown and spread till the buildings, vats,
cylinders, and blocks were nearly doubled, like the men, women, and
children who earned their bread by them, compared to what they had been
five-and-twenty years before.
Dr. Peter Murray had been born at Barley Riggs when it overlooked a far
smaller colony of working-rooms, machinery, and working people’s
cottages, when the ground-rainbow was but a handbreadth to the size it
had reached now. He had come back to his first nest, as some men will,
while others avoid their early homes with dogged dislike or nervous
repugnance. He bore no grudge against the prosperity in which he had no
share. He maintained that he had been so soon inured to the smell of
chemicals that he rather liked it, though it was stronger now than in
his young days.
Dr. Peter had been bred a doctor, and had earned his little independence
as a medical man at a foreign station. But he said that he could
practise nowhere so well nor feel so much at ease with his patients as
among the hands at the old works, of which he was now the doctor by the
appointment of Tam Drysdale. Many of the people had stayed long enough
for them to have been known to Dr. Peter in his and their calf-days. He
could tell yet whom he had first bled, whose tooth he had tried his
‘prentice hand at pulling, what baby had led the troop of his babies,
so that it had been christened ‘Peter’ in compliment to him; and he had
still the pleasure of bailing ‘Peter Murphy’ out of a Glasgow or local
police court at least three times a year.
Dr. Peter Murray was a philosopher whose character was a puzzle to Tam
Drysdale, just as some of Tam’s idiosyncrasies bewildered Dr. Peter,
though he understood his man much the better of the two. Yet the two men
had not only a high esteem for each other--they had many points in
common, such as their scientific bent, particularly with regard to
chemicals, in which they had both dabbled more or less since their
boyhood, and their humane feeling for their fellow-creatures,
represented by the workpeople at Drysdale Haugh. But how Tam Drysdale
could build a great showplace and pretend to be comfortable in it, and
how Dr. Peter could be satisfied to dose away the end of his days in a
shabby house without a single modern improvement, were samples of
riddles which neither man could read to his satisfaction.
Dr. Peter was not alone at Barley Riggs, though his wife was long dead
and his family out in the world, married, and scattered far and wide,
with one exception. This was his youngest child--the daughter
Athole--who kept her father company, took care of his house, and was as
pleased with her position as he could be with his.
At Barley Riggs, Dr. Peter and his daughter practised what people are
told in these days has all but gone out of the world--‘plain living and
high thinking.’ They had to be frugal, for the income of the head of the
house was not large, and he had determined to leave a sufficient
provision for his unmarried daughter, though she had besought him with
tears in her merry eyes not to stint himself on her account, in the
modest indulgences he craved. She could work for herself at any time. He
had taught her both how to be independent and how to be easily
satisfied.
But even if necessity had not been laid upon the Murrays to be frugal,
their inclination pointed that way. They were disposed to be simple, not
luxurious in their habits. They had so many higher enjoyments that the
couple could hardly wait or stoop to occupy themselves much with the
gratification of the senses. So long as books were left--they allowed
themselves great scope in books, which are the finest and cheapest
luxury--they did not object to faring simply. It did not trouble them
that the furniture at Barley Riggs, which Dr. Peter had carried across
the globe and back again, was almost as out of date and lawfully worn as
that of the Miss Mackinnons in St. Mungo’s Square. Rivalling books, in
the estimation of father and daughter, was life in every aspect--human
life, animal life, plant life. It afforded them treasures beyond price.
It was a divine problem they were never weary of seeking reverently to
work out for themselves.
The old-fashioned parlour at Barley Riggs was somewhat hard in angular
forms and cold in neutral tints, such as were in fashion a good many
years ago. The chairs and tables were of mahogany, black with age; the
carpets and hangings, in colour, held chiefly by drabs and browns. There
were here and there foreign touches which told of Dr. Peter’s long
residence abroad--a cabinet of strange shells which he had gathered on a
distant seashore; specimens of primitive pottery in dull red and thick
yellow; a curious weapon or two hanging on the walls; but the place was
marvellously homelike. It was a sitting-room lived in, where most things
were for service and in constant use. It was scrupulously clean and
bright, for cleanness and brightness not only cost little--they were
conscientious duties and joys to Athole Murray, which she felt bound to
discharge and cherish, and to hand on to her single handmaiden Jeannie,
culled from the Drysdale Haugh working-girls. To have failed in these
respects would have been to risk something by the admission of dust and
gloom in spoiling a candidate for life’s blessings and immortal gains.
Bookshelves, carved by Dr. Peter’s skilful hands, and full to running
over, occupied every inch of vantage-ground, and relieved the homely
style of the rest of the furniture. For though the volumes were not
chosen on account of their binding, and were mostly well-worn, buff
calf, and red and blue cloth, they did brighten up with soft and gay
tints the Quaker-like groundwork. Summer and winter the room was never
without green leaves and very often flowers, which Dr. Peter and Athole
managed to rear in perfection, to the piqueing of the pride of the
gardeners at Drysdale Hall, and even to the smothered mortification of
Tam Drysdale. Tam was generous, but he desired as his right to have the
best that money could produce; and was not money the engine of engines,
even in the delicate domain of lilies and roses?
Above all, the Barley Riggs parlour had a wealth of pets, remarkable,
considering its narrow bounds and constant occupation by the family--a
dog, a cat, and a kitten lived on the best of terms with a variety of
birds. But these were only the indoor stock. Outside, pigeons fluttered
on the roof of the house and on the window-sills; swallows built in the
eaves; tame pheasants sat on the branches of the nearest trees; a couple
of hedgehogs scuttled away across the walks. In the paddock a goat and
its kid were tethered; and Dr. Peter’s pony, and an old Shetland pony,
which Athole had ridden as a child, roamed at their own sweet will,
sharing the pasture with an Alderney cow and her calf. A large family of
poultry looked out from behind the wire-net fencing their poultry-yard,
like nuns from the other side of a grating. The whole little territory
was teeming with life, and the occupants took the keenest interest in
it all--down to the butterflies and beetles among the wallflowers and
irises, the caterpillars on the cabbage-leaves, the bees on the thyme.
If it be true that
‘He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small,’
then surely Dr. Peter and his daughter Athole prayed well.
He was a long, lean man, very brown and very grey, whose coats had a
trick of looking shabby, yet who had something positively noble in his
air, he was so entirely beyond being touched by circumstances, so
sufficient for himself and those he belonged to, so born to confer
benefits of their kind on all with whom he came in contact.
Athole was very like him in being thin and brown and dark-haired, as he
had been before he became grey. Her features were refined, but so
irregular as to be positively bizarre. Her chief beauty lay in her grey
eyes. For reasons of her own, Athole Murray was fond of dressing in grey
of all shades, from slate to silver, in linen or silk occasionally, and
frequently in woollen stuffs with the texture shifting to suit the
different seasons, and with names significant of demureness and
retirement from the world--Carmelite nun’s cloth; and yet nobody could
be less demure or nun-like than Athole Murray. She was a busy, cheerful
girl, a little over twenty. She had an amount of humour and fun, liable
to mislead her neighbours with regard to her earnestness, which made
men’s hearts glad, and cost her some pains to keep within reasonable
bounds.
On the evening of an April day, Athole was sitting in the parlour at
Barley Riggs, at a little table which was peculiarly hers, diligently
drawing designs for the calico-printers. She had lithe, capable hands
which could not be idle. They had been early trained to a variety of
occupations. Athole could not only sew all manner of needle-work, cook
daintily, clean deftly: she could carve in wood better than her father
could. She could etch like a second-rate etcher; she could paint on
china, not merely for exhibitions of amateur performances, but so
cleverly that a china manufacturer of some reputation had offered her
regular work and good wages. She had compounded with her father for his
persistence in making a provision for her future, by taking upon her a
share of the present household expenses, and supplying the necessary
funds from a neat little income which she gained by being the most
original designer employed at the Drysdale Haugh Works.
Athole was in grey as usual, but she had a blue knot where her little
white collar met the neck of her gown, and companion blue knots where
her sleeves terminated above her slim round wrists. She had told her
father in confidence--these two were great friends--that were it not for
the hindrance they would offer to her going out to look after the beast
tribe, and the temptation the fashion might present to Jeannie, their
handmaiden, she (Athole) would sport another pair of blue bows in her
shoes. She was entitled to compensation for always appearing as ‘a grey
lady’ when all the colours of all the Drysdale Haugh dye-vats were
perpetually before her eyes.
What made her do so? It was so oblivious and so like a man to ask. Of
course familiarity bred contempt. Of course she chose to be out of the
common in plainness, since she could not witch the world with splendour
like Clary Drysdale; and it would not suit her complexion to be always
in pink like Eppie. Did he not know green was the complement of red, and
if she figured in any tinge of rose-colour she would come out as the
Green Woman. She would be solicited by half a dozen caravans to give
them the benefit of her unique charms for Glasgow Fair. How would he
like that?
No, grey was her safeguard. Besides, grey had nothing to lose, and did
not fade, and many cheap materials were considerately dyed that colour.
It was her duty as a sensible woman, especially in relation to their
handmaid Jeannie, to set before her an example of economic and rational
clothing, not unbecoming under the difficult circumstances. It was
little she could do; but, like the man who would not wear a miller’s hat
though it cost him his life, she was prepared to make a stand--to go to
the scaffold if she were sent there in a righteous cause, in a protest
against the extravagance--whether in art-colours or in aniline dyes, in
straight lines or in puffs and folds--of her sex, in the matter of dress
in this generation.
As Athole drew in her particular window, her father entertained a
visitor. The stranger’s presence did not disturb the young lady in her
occupation, not even though that stranger was young Tam Drysdale, the
son of the master of the calico printing-works. She did not stop her
work. She made no pretence of concealing the pattern on which she was
engaged. She did not even go on stiffly and awkwardly, as if she ignored
a spectator.
She asked him once to look at what she was doing. ‘Are you acquainted
with this geometrical flower, Mr. Tom? I am afraid it “never grew,” like
the tree in the city arms.’
When he answered, a little put out by her appeal, that he had no doubt
her design was an excellent one for the purpose, she knew better than he
did, she acquiesced quietly with a laugh that had some pleasure and no
annoyance in it. ‘I dare say I do. I have worked for eighteen months in
this way, and if I have not failed in my reckoning, I have done this
pattern with variations twenty-two times. No, don’t pity me, I beg,’
she interrupted young Tam as he prepared to address her with a
portentously grave face. ‘I am not an object of pity. I am not a
struggling artist nipped in the bud, or a martyr to the wants of a
numerous family. I think that I am neat-handed, have some notion of
colour, and some idea of what a calico-pattern ought to be, if you will
allow me to say so; but that is the extent of my capacity. And it is not
a hardship in other respects to work like this for two or three hours a
day from choice for liberal pay, considering the nature of the work. It
rather soothes than wearies me. My father has trained me to do something
of the kind to keep me in order, lest I should get so audacious that I
should not be fit to live with.’
She told him this easily and composedly, but for the twinkle in her grey
eyes. It did not enter into her head that there was anything unworthy in
itself or disparaging to her in working for pay--working for his
father. She was more than his equal by birth, for the Murrays were of
gentle descent as far back as they could count, and his equal by
education, though she did not dress in purple and fine linen, or fare
sumptuously every day. She was his mother’s and sisters’ friend, though
Clary, with her own engagements, did not come half so often to Barley
Riggs as Eppie came. It did not seem to Athole Murray that any drawing
of patterns, though it had been ever so repugnant to her, while, as it
chanced, she liked it, could alter these facts.
Young Tam took one part of her speech seriously, and answered her,
standing, looking a protesting giant by her side:
‘I beg your pardon, Miss Murray; I was not going to pity you. I agree
with Goethe that life is earnest, and work, so that it is real, is about
the best thing we have. I only pity the workers who have no advantage
from their work, or, if they have, advantage of the grossest kind or in
the scantiest degree. I pity still more the men and women who think
they are profiting by toil that is done by proxy, while they are simply
pampering what is lowest in their own natures and reducing themselves to
the _rôle_, if not of brutes, of fools and dolls.’
Young Tam spoke with bitterness, but with freedom, as he could not do at
home. He was in another atmosphere--more congenial, nay, with a
fascination for him, widely as his hearers differed from him.
Dr. Peter took the trouble to contradict his visitor most decidedly, to
remonstrate with him strongly. The elder man’s life-long friendship with
Tam senior, in spite of their divergences, warranted the step. Besides,
Dr. Peter had known young Tam more or less for years, entertained a
considerable regard for him, and would not let him go far wrong if he
(Dr. Peter) could help it.
‘Come, come, young Tam Drysdale, you are going a great deal too far.
Communism--not to say Nihilism--has been proved rank folly over and
over again. If you think so little of wealth, ease, and luxury, why need
you grudge them to the favoured few, and cry out like a bairn or a
fanatic against the want of them in the many?’
‘Well, sir,’ said Tam, with a grim smile, ‘you are about the last person
I should have expected to find upholding riches, with the power they are
supposed to confer and the sacrifices they entail.’
Dr. Peter shrugged his narrow, stooping, student’s shoulders. ‘I suppose
that is a hit at me because I have not made a fortune with my lancet and
stethoscope. To tell the truth, I do not greatly miss it. Athie and I
can get along famously with what we have; we’ll not say how much or how
little, lest I should make you open your eyes, Maister Tam. But I don’t
want to compel all the world to have our tastes; the uniformity would be
inconvenient, to say the least, and a trifle tiresome.’
‘You don’t mean to say that you approve of keeping some noses at the
grindstone in order that the same feature in other people may be cocked
in the air,’ said Tam satirically--‘that you, who are a medical man and
expound the laws of health, give your consent to cellars and garrets on
the one hand, to match palatial mansions on the other? You are something
of a reformer, and you are a church-going man. Are you satisfied as a
patriot and a Christian with the physical, moral, and intellectual
condition of the two great classes in a commercial centre like Glasgow?’
‘How so? In what light?’ asked Dr. Peter cautiously.
‘Take the well-to-do,’ young Tam explained. ‘They are never weary
boasting what they can get for their money. They lay themselves out to
spend at the greatest rate. They glory in the reversal of their early
practice--not merely where a little cheap refinement and higher
education are concerned. They turn their backs on the past, and load
themselves with burdens too heavy to be borne, of altered habits, late
hours, unpalatable arrangements, uncongenial associates. They make asses
of themselves in dress, at table, with their hunters and hounds, their
plate, their pictures and books--all for the sake of showing what fine
gentlemen they have grown, when the truth is they were a deal nearer
being gentlemen, if gentlemen were true men, in the rough guise in which
they started.’
‘You are going a great deal too far, Tam,’ repeated Dr. Peter severely;
‘but what of the other class?’ very much in the tone in which the
prisoner at the bar interrupted the summing-up of the judge with ‘It’s a
lie, my lord; but go on.’
‘Do I need to tell the poor men’s doctor, who attends them more for love
than for money, what their case is like?’ asked young Tam, with his
voice softening a little. ‘While they are toiling in the sweat of their
brows, without hope of rising to greater ease and leisure, their hearts
are eaten through and through with envy at the distant sight and sound
of good things which the audience is too ignorant to understand are no
better than fairy gifts--glittering pinchbeck and spun glass. They are
worse--heavy clogs to weigh down men and women unaccustomed to lives of
parade and sensuous indulgence, cankers to destroy the bravest manliness
and the sweetest womanliness. The working class, with their desperate
strikes, their fits of starvation and their fits of excess, their gross
materialism, their worn-out bodies and trampled-down souls, their
conceited atheism--you know better what they are than I do, Dr. Peter
Murray.’
‘I should think so, lad--I should hope so; and the rich too, for I am
happy to say I have some of them for my patients and friends also,
though it may lower me in your estimation to hear it. Young Tam, you
are flying in the face of Providence, you are counting the spots in the
sun, and challenging its lustre. There are such things as faults that
lean to virtue’s side, and vanities which are but the dust of the earth
that gathers on some of the noblest works of God and man. No man, be he
rich or poor, is bound to be a slave either to his gains or his
deprivations. Tam Drysdale, you have no more respect for the poor than
for the rich. You do not honour all men. What do you take the poor for,
that you should speak of them as if they were debased helots, instead of
honest men and women who call no man master, in one sense? Every sturdy
dyer and patient bleacher, every hammerer and weaver and mill girl among
them, has his or her destiny in his or her hands, in all essentials as
much as you or I have. A poor man or woman can be as decent and
intelligent as you or I, with the intelligence of mother-wit, which is
infinitely higher than the thin veneer of education that, to tell the
truth, sometimes covers up and wastes what finer grace and natural
polish the wood ever had.’
Tam looked taken aback, and remained silent, while Dr. Peter waxed more
and more indignant.
‘The times are hard, indeed, and things have come to a pretty pass, if a
respectable working man or woman--it is all one--who is not a fool and
can practise self-denial, like a man or like a woman, cannot earn
independence. Such independence means comfort and the power of showing
you a bien [comfortable] house and a canty [cheery] fireside, whose
owner has no cause to grow green with envy at the masters, no call to
ruin himself or herself in a wild attempt to pull them down and reign in
their stead. No doubt, trials are rained on some poor sinners; it
happens so occasionally, and shuts our mouths. But we cannot see the
end from the beginning, and even then the back is made for the burden.
No, spare your pity, sir, or pity yourself,’ ended Dr. Peter, flinging
himself back in his chair.
‘Never mind him, Mr. Tom.’ Athole looked up from her drawing to come to
the rescue. ‘You have rubbed him the wrong way, as I often do. Nobody is
to pity, rich or poor, except yourself, father--is that not it?’
‘Bairn, I see a great deal to pity, and I have no objection to my
neighbours sharing that luxury, if they find it such. But I will not
have wholesale condemnation, or stock of abuse in the guise of pity.
Maister Tam, you who are fresh from the schools should know a trick
worth two of that. Surely the philosophy of all the centuries has found
out something better than to keep on pitting the classes against each
other, and setting them by the ears when their strength is in the
union--not of the men alone, but of the men and the masters, in making
the best and not the worst of each other.’
‘Then you judge trades’ unions to be a mistake in social economy? You
condemn them in the face of all they have got for the people, which was
only their just right?’ said young Tam, eager to catch at the inference
and nail down his adversary.
‘I neither judge nor condemn. The question is beyond me, and may be
beyond you too, if you will allow me to say so,’ Dr. Peter excused
himself, with a comical twinkle replacing the gleam of indignation in
his eyes. ‘There are great difficulties here, as there are in every
human problem. However, I can see that many, both rich and poor, are
doing their best, and I for one won’t quarrel with them, though they do
not find the solution at once, or blunder in the search as their fathers
have done before them. I have seen great changes and improvements in my
day.’
‘Of what kind?’ inquired young Tam dubiously.
‘For instance, here at Drysdale Haugh, I remember when there were few
cylinders in comparison with the blocks. The work was ten times harder
than it is now, and took ten times as long to do. There was no thought
then of machines to relieve the men who had to keep and turn the yarn on
the rods, hanging for hours over the cisterns of boiling dye liquor. As
for the houses or hovels for the hands, you might have had occasion for
your attacks in those days, Maister Tam. I tell you that your father has
been nothing less than a benefactor to his folk, and I’m proud to say
you’ll not find better quartered, more fairly and liberally treated
workpeople on this side of Glasgow. I only hope you may do as much for
your neighbours when your time comes.’
‘I don’t wish to smother my father’s honour,’ said young Tam, with a
faint smile and a slight increase of colour. ‘There is one thing, he
knew by experience what the people lacked. What I regret is that he was
not content to remain one of them, to share the joys and sorrows he was
so well acquainted with--to raise them if you will, but not to break off
from them and put himself into a position which is not natural to him.
Well, it sits ill upon him, and makes him lose his proper dignity. It
brings out what is least admirable in him--there can be no disrespect in
saying that,’ observed young Tam with some ingenuousness; ‘and it
exposes him to the ridicule of people who are immeasurably his
inferiors.’
‘If they are his inferiors, why need anybody heed? Fools will laugh
whether you give them cause or not--not that I see anything to laugh at
in your father, or any laughter going. He is one in a thousand, who has
not only done well by himself, but by all around him. He is held in very
high and general respect, as he deserves to be, I would have you to
understand, Maister Tam. As for not rising above his original footing,
or not taking the benefit of the labour of his hands, supposing he holds
it to be a benefit, and not occupying the post he is fitted for and
called to fill, you are speaking arrant nonsense. You would have castes,
in hard and fast lines, in Christian England as in heathen India. Fine
sources of progress they have proved in the East! You would remove one
of the greatest inducements for ordinary men to struggle and endure, and
bring the work of their lives to perfection.’
‘And if every man acted as he spoke,’ retorted Tam, ‘you should be a
court physician at least.’
‘I square no man’s life by my rule. If I have found that my tastes are
all of a homely kind, it is my own look-out. In point of fact,
artificial and complicated forms interfere with what I like and can do.
Athole and I flourish best on a moderate income, in a plain old house,
with a single servant-lass.’
‘Speak for yourself, father,’ asserted Athole from her coign of vantage.
‘How do you know that I would not prefer to be a Turkish sultana, or an
Arcadian shepherdess, or the principal of a Ladies’ College? But there,
speak of angels--I see Mr. Drysdale and Eppie--her visit is to the
Newfoundland puppy--at the gate.’
There was a little commotion of welcome as old Mr. Drysdale and Eppie
entered Barley Riggs house, in which young Tam Drysdale fell into the
background. His father’s eyes followed him, and then glanced with a
quick suspicion from his son to Athole. Was there any loadstone here
which drew Tam from his useless studies and might serve to make or mar
him, independent of his other vagaries? No; it could not be a brown,
shilpet, plainly-dressed lassie, working as a designer, though she was a
lady born and bred--auld Tam did not deny that. Tam never addressed
Athole, even in giving her his views on printed calico patterns, without
calling her ‘Miss Murray, mem,’ paying the respect due to her in double
measure, as it were. Still, though she had not forfeited her young
ladyhood in his eyes, he was alive to the light in which many people
would regard her; he fully recognised her disqualifications as a
possible match for his son. She would have no more than a penny or two,
if Dr. Peter could scrape together that for her, and young Tam might
have a fine girl like Clary, with as good a tocher. If ‘Sir Jeemes’ had
owned a daughter, Tam might even have pretended to her. No, he could not
be so blind and besotted. Dr. Peter’s daughter was a good lassie and a
clever lassie, and auld Tam rather liked her on his own account; but she
was not for young Tam. His eccentricity could not go the length of
fancying her.
Eppie was come after the Newfoundland dog, and without the smallest
disguise she announced her errand, drew Dr. Peter out to the stable, and
was presently seen in the distance hugging a black fluffy ball in her
arms; while her companion, nothing loth, for both of the Eppies were
pets of his, marshalled her round the paddock, introducing her in
succession to every member of his numerous family.
Auld Tam remained where he was. In spite of his boast the night before
of being able to walk to Glasgow and back, he was tired enough to be
glad to rest in one of the heavy, roomy Barley Riggs parlour chairs.
Athole was under the necessity of bearing him and young Tam company.
She had no objection; she had as great a liking for the elder Tam as her
father had for Mrs. Drysdale and Eppie. She seemed to know exactly what
suited him, as if she belonged to him. She brought him with her own
hands, in spite of his protest, such a glass of draught ale and such a
water biscuit as he had been wont to refresh himself with twenty years
before, and still liked from old association. While he drank the ale and
munched the biscuit, to his evident solace, she chatted with him about
the weather, about her flowers and his, admitting herself fairly beaten
in polyanthuses before she claimed the superiority in white primroses.
She gave him her lively report of the pattern-room, and the good effect
with which the last designs were likely to come out. It was she who,
before the others returned, introduced the subject which lay very near
Tam Drysdale’s heart. This was certain experiments he was making in
mordants and pastes. He grew radiant in describing the improvements he
hoped to bring about in dyeing and printing, until young Tam was stirred
up to ask a question or two, and to offer a sensible suggestion. As a
boy he had gone considerably beyond the ordinary boyish stage of
dabbling in chemicals, and threatened to blow himself and his family to
atoms in gratifying his taste. There had been a time when young Tam, to
his proud father’s delight, had shown decided promise in what might have
been called the paternal field. The son had mortified the father deeply
by abandoning the laboratory for the library; but to-night, with Athole
Murray for a link between the two men, young Tam testified some of his
old interest in the subject.
Eppie came in crying, ‘Father, I have seen such a heap of beasts;’ but
auld Tam did not heed her. The fascination of the theme entrapped Dr.
Peter also. The three men engaged in a conversation in which the words
‘retort,’ ‘deposit,’ ‘affinity,’ ‘discharge,’ ‘hold fast,’ were for ever
coming to the surface.
Athole fell out of the talk, apparently without being missed. She set
herself to entertain Eppie, who was too much entranced with her baby
Newfoundland to stand in need of amusement.
The discussion was not ended when the party of Drysdales left together.
For the moment the division between the father and the son had been so
bridged across by the sympathetic warmth of the interest evoked, that
auld Tam as he walked away plucked young Tam by the sleeve in a way he
had not done for months. The action was for the better emphasizing of an
additional reason for the course the experimenter was taking in order to
get an unsurpassable tint of orange, which by a junction with an
unapproachable blue was to lead to an unassailable green; but the motive
did not signify, the result was everything.
Athole Murray smiled as her eyes followed the departing figures. Then
she came and stood by her father’s side on the hearthrug and assailed
him for an opinion.
‘Don’t you think, father, that some day young Tam Drysdale will go heart
and soul into his father’s business; that he will pull down Drysdale
Hall and build it up bigger and grander, or have another place in finer
taste, which will cost a great deal more, and take twice the pains to
create its delicate harmonies? and don’t you imagine that, earnest as
Goethe found life, young Tam will take heart before all is done, and
dance the night out and the morning in, as many times as there are hairs
in his head, without regard to the excusable occasions of Clary’s and
Eppie’s weddings.’
‘I don’t know about the dancing and the building, Athie; but the young
fellow will ripen, and lose his sour flavour, and be wholesome social
food in the course of nature, if he does not contrive to make a mess of
himself and his life in the meantime, before they have righted
themselves. He is in a transition state and a morbid frame, disgusted
with himself and the world. He has come into auld Tam’s gains without
going through the process of earning them, and he cannot digest them.’
‘Are they so ill to digest?’ inquired Athole incredulously.
‘So it seems. Young Tam has approached the question of employers and
employed without practical knowledge, and he is all at sea. Yet it is to
the honour of the lad that he will not leave the question alone. But he
sees every discrepancy magnified and distorted. He has an honest regard
for his father and mother--that thrawn chiel [cross fellow]--you heard
what he said of auld Tam; but that is just why it galls him past bearing
to see them make themselves ridiculous. Between you and me they do it
oftener than I like to think when poor Tam brags and blaws [boasts and
puffs] of his fields and gardens, his sheep and cattle, his table and
his cellar, his man-servants and his maid-servants, and brings forward
their prices; and when she mince-minces her words, and tries some
“lang-nebbet” [long-nosed] name that trips her up. I do not wonder at
young Tam. I could shake the kindly auld fules myself.’
‘But young Tam need not see it,’ maintained Athole, with her head held
high and her eyes alight, ‘I should like him a thousand times better if
he were deaf and blind, if his honour for his father and mother were a
shield to screen them from his own over-critical eyes, as well as his
neighbours’ carping tongues.’
‘That is a woman’s way of thinking,’ said Dr. Peter, at the same time
giving his daughter’s hair a not disapproving stroke. ‘All feeling and
no reasoning--all heart and no head. Some people would call it “high
fantastic,” but I never object to a good woman’s flights--least of all
am I likely to do it here, where I profit by them, being a father
myself, my dear.’
‘But, father,’ interrupted Athole quickly and indignantly, ‘you are not
like that.’
‘I can only say I have not been tempted,’ he answered, with a laugh.
‘But remember it is not easy for young Tam when, as he hints, there are
people mean enough to “sorn” [trespass] on the hospitality of Drysdale
Hall, and jeer and laugh at its master and mistress. I take it that men
are different from women here--I’ll not say that it is to their gain,
with sharper eyes, harder to blind, rougher tongues that go straighter
to the mark, and a greater tendency to use the scalpel though they cut
into their own flesh.’
‘He knows how good and kind they are, and that should be enough for
him,’ said Athole stoutly. ‘I admit they are laughable sometimes; they
force me to laugh to their faces, and then I am “black ashamed” of my
heartlessness, and could bite my tongue out if I have said anything.’
‘But he does not laugh, lassie; he leaves that to Miss Clary, if any of
them is guilty of such light laughter. Ay, if you must do either in the
circumstances, it is a mighty deal better to greet [weep] if you are a
woman, and gloom [frown] if you are a man, than to mock with
the mockers, as it is safer--taking a certain parable into
consideration--though I grant you less pleasant, to be disgusted than to
be charmed with yourself.’
‘Young Tam will never be half so nice as his father,’ said Athole, still
betraying tokens of discontent, while she arrived at her conclusion
meditatively. ‘I’m fond of auld Tam.’
‘So am I, Athole. But young Tam, with all the expense bestowed on his
education, has not had the same chance; and he’s a chip of the old block
in many respects. He may be led, but he will not be driven; yet that
auld fule Tam, who knows himself, and ought to know his son, seeks to
drive him.’
‘He’s so horribly self-conscious; he has mounted such a very tall
hobby-horse, and he rides it so pragmatically and unmercifully. He
rejoices so in his superiority and consequent martyrdom; he is so
ridiculously young in his grievances.’
‘That is a fault which will mend every day,’ her father told her
hopefully. ‘I think of many of the young men of his class, of their
entire engrossing satisfaction with their pretty selves, their bit toy
yachts and hunters, club dinners, and dances such as you propose for
young Tam Drysdale’s heavy head and exercised heart. I reckon up these
gentlemen’s small ambitions of being noticed by the country gentry, of
pushing themselves up to marry into the higher ranks, and have wives as
silly as themselves, that despise their commercial partners. And the
conclusion I come to is that such fellows are but a parcel of spoilt
boys compared to a lad, ill-conditioned you may say as yet, but who has
the making of a man in him. More than that, you must remember, Athole,
all that I have mentioned is innocent enough, but there are other
ways--not to be spoken of to ears like yours, while it is right that
you should know of their existence. There are means of selfishly
indulging in prosperity, and wildly rioting in the days of a man’s
youth, that end--as surely as the rivers run to the sea--in the foul
wallowing of swine in the mire, or in the wickedness of devils. Contrast
young Tam and his troubles with such rich men’s sons and their brutal
experiences, and his father and mother may thank God for the day that he
was born to them.’
The conversation had grown too serious to be prolonged, and it had taken
a turn which rendered it impossible for Athole to contradict her father
further.