THE PLEASURES OF THE RICH.
Auld Tam and Mrs. Drysdale went a good deal into company like
themselves--rich millowners with whom Tam had large connection in
business, and the heads of some of the most flourishing trades in
Glasgow, who had become, in one way or another, acquainted with the
wealthy dyer and calico-printer, and who had often the common ground
with him that they too had risen from the ranks. There is a spell in
money, as in many potent things, which draws the possessors into an
alliance--offensive and defensive.
It would be hard to sum up the thousands represented by Tam Drysdale’s
acquaintances. Though he had not forgotten his poorer friends, and did
them many a good turn, he had a genuine respect for money, or rather for
the qualities concerned in its acquisition. He made excuses for the rich
man no less than for the poor. ‘He’s made a grand job o’ that mill, or
that pit,’ he would say. ‘They cry he’s near-handed, or he’s fond o’ the
bottle, or he’s grown an imperious dug in his age. But what would you
have? Think of what he’s been and dune! Money has its temptations. Them
that have spared in their youth may be led into stinting still in their
riper years, or they may be beguiled into menselessness, as it were, to
make up for the past. If men commence to scrape and boo at your biddin’,
it’s no aye easy to refrain from walking over their necks. More by
token, a man that has made and keepit riches has as frequently as not
shown his superiority--that he has the brains, the smeddum [spirit],
the self-restraint, and the energy that render men fit to rule.’ Tam put
a prosperous man’s high value on prosperity, while with his feeling for
adversity there mingled, in spite of his kindness of heart, a shade of
impatient scorn.
Mrs. Drysdale had also her estimate of her friends--those richly clad,
frequently overgrown as well as overweighted women, who for the most
part formed her circle, affected by the texture of their satins and
velvets, and the contents of their jewel-boxes. She did not apply the
same test to Lady Semple, for even Eppie’s simple judgment was quick
enough to discern that her ladyship, who had a habit of wearing shabby
silk gowns without ornament, belonged to a different class and must be
measured by another rule.
The visiting consisted largely of dinners conducted with the greatest
formality. The great points at those dinners were the costliness of the
table equipage and the expense and unseasonableness, rather than
seasonableness, of the viands. So much silver glittered on those
mercantile tables that it began to be a drug and little thought of, as
the metal was at Jerusalem in the days of King Solomon. There was a talk
of silver-gilt, even of a sprinkling of gold vessels, to create a
sensation. The givers of the feast were still dead to the merits of
rock-crystal, else there would have been an opening for it. Salmon, the
first day the Act of Parliament permitted the rivers to be drawn; lamb
when the frost-bitten grass was still sprinkled with snow, peas and
strawberries, not half-withered importations from the shores of the
Mediterranean, and yet not brought to maturity before the month of May
by an unaided Scotch sun; the earliest oysters, grouse and venison.
Tam and Mrs. Drysdale viewed those feasts--not necessarily of
reason--with the greatest respect, and dressed in the man and woman’s
best to do the entertainments honour. The husband and wife took their
station as host and hostess in the Drysdale Hall drawing-room, or drove
off as guests in the Drysdale Hall carriage, with something like
solemnity, as for an imposing rite. Notwithstanding their laudable
endeavours to grace the scene, neither looked half so well as in his or
her ordinary attire. There was a specially clownish air about Tam in his
fine broadcloth and fine linen. Mrs. Drysdale suffered more than ever
from the disadvantage of being ‘braw’ in her richest velvet and most
delicate lace. It was to little purpose that he wore on one of his
little fingers a sapphire fit to be an heirloom, or that her bracelet,
brooch, and ear-rings far outshone that broken diamond necklace, found
after a fire among the ruins of Shawfield House, of which there is still
an old Glasgow tradition.
But the excellent couple were not singular. Their fellow guests were,
to use a Scotch phrase, ‘as fine as they could hing,’ rejoicing in the
costliest materials and the most expensive of tailors and _modistes_ to
furnish the toilette. Dockens were wagging with a vengeance. The result
was not cheering when the personal comeliness which distinguished the
Drysdales was wanting. It was positively depressing. Nobody seemed quite
at home in his or her clothes. They were not as if they had grown upon
the wearers’ backs--which is the perfection of dressing, and the women
had the expression of thinking of nothing else but their wardrobes and
those of their neighbours displayed for the general benefit.
Young Tam and Claribel were only occasionally present at these dinners.
St. Mungo’s city drew a hard and fast line between the old and the young
in these matters. The visiting of the latter included the staying for
two or three days at a time at a friend’s house where there were young
people like themselves (the seniors rarely paid a visit which lasted
over a night), balls, public and private, junior clubs, the theatre, the
hunting-field, and all picnics that were not purely family affairs. But
the solid dinners lay in the province of the elders, and formed their
dissipation.
If an exception was made it was in young Tam’s favour, for his benefit
or loss. His sex and the probability of his entering into his father’s
business entitled him to greater consideration than any girl, however
handsome or well-dressed or otherwise mistress of the situation. He was
fitter company for the elderly men, since Young Glasgow can generally
talk business with as much zest as his father can talk it--nay,
sometimes with a glitter of the eye under the smooth forehead and hair
the hue of the raven or the squirrel, which hints at an increase of the
gambling spirit in the population.
As for Claribel, though she knew what she was about, and could suit Lady
Semple, who found her a most useful and obliging young friend, Clary had
very little to say on the stock themes of servants and tradespeople to
matrons of her mother’s type. It was to this level that Mrs. Drysdale’s
conversation fell in society; though when she was alone with her
daughter Eppie, she could tell charming tales, idyls of old country and
town life, embellished by queer figures and quaint customs--Egg Jean,
Bell Geordie and Creepy Kate; Milky May-day, and Hallowe’en with its
nuts and apples.
But from the time that Tam and Mrs. Drysdale started, sitting side by
side like a pair of wedded doves, he with a glove in one hand and she
with her laced pocket-handkerchief in her lap, talking with bated breath
of the richest and greatest persons they expected to meet, they were
‘upon their manners,’ she naturally more subdued than he, but both
considerably impressed. Solemnly Tam stepped from the carriage at their
destination and handed Mrs. Drysdale out under the awning put up to
shelter them from the elements. Arm in arm, in spite of modern usage,
the two were passed from one officiating domestic to another, in the
line of servants stationed in the hall, on the staircase, in the
corridor, a tolerably numerous band, when, according to the way in St.
Mungo’s city, Tam tipped each servant, crossing every palm with silver
as he passed its bowing owner.
At last came the stentorian announcement, ‘Mr. and Mrs. Drysdale;’ and
the door was flung open to reveal another pair, generally portlier and
as well clad, standing in the centre of another gorgeous drawing-room,
with a stream of black coats, gold chains, white ties, velvet and moire,
flashing stones and choice bouquets, circling or subsiding into a
stationary ring round the central couple.
The dinner itself was a very serious, not to say ponderous, business, in
which each eater not only dwelt on the merits of soup and entrées, but
appraised the madeira which had travelled round the world, and the
home-raised pines. The circumstances did not admit of much talking,
unless in a word or two to next neighbours. It was only when the
pheasant made its exit, and the port and the cheese took its place, that
the sense of responsibility was lessened, and a strain of
good-fellowship, always increasing in joviality, began to prevail.
The tongues of the men commenced to wag on politics, local interests,
and when two of a trade met, ‘shop’ was not absent. There was no lack of
shrewdness, broad common-sense, and fair intelligence, for these
men--reckoning them from those who had made the humblest beginnings--had
all received a fair parish-school education, and their acquirements had
been enlarged and rubbed into the best condition by intercourse with
the world, and the calculations and speculations of trade. There were
college-bred men among them, and members of the old Glasgow houses--not
stranded like that of Mackinnon, but borne on to this day on the full
tide of prosperity. It was among the last that the best attributes of
the born and bred diner-out showed themselves in a fund of appropriate
anecdote--not coarse or worse--and in a peculiar humour not so much
caustic as dry in its ripeness, like the champagne, sometimes with a
dimly perceptible current of sadness in its mirth, as the best Scotch
wit, unlike English wit or French wit or American wit, seems always to
play on the wan face of
‘The mighty waters sounding evermore.’
The guests who thus contributed to the entertainment of the company were
not entitled to complain that they were not in request, or were not the
men whom their hosts and fellow-guests delighted to honour. Such men
need never have sat at their own tables, and though they were often by
no means the richest men present, their shadows never grew less, and
they kept their own even in a money-making, money-respecting community.
Young Tam could not for the life of him imagine what his father,
especially, could see to like in such feasts. The young man was at war
to the knife with all the luxury and parade. He hated to find his father
and mother making part of them. They did and said more things to vex him
then than at any other time, though they were not worse or nearly so bad
as other people present. Tam and Mrs. Drysdale’s knowledge might be at
fault, but their native modesty and kindly instincts--which forbade them
to render themselves conspicuous or to offend anybody’s prejudices when
the husband and wife were aware of them--were almost always to be
trusted. If young Tam had been wiser he might have let his parents
alone, and thought no more of them, with an easy mind.
Mr. and Mrs. Drysdale were not like the Nimmos, who had begun life with
a small eating-house, and were now wholesale exporters of provisions to
a vast extent; but though her apparel matched that of the best
gentlewoman in the room, and she had a set of rubies without its equal
in St. Mungo’s, she could never be allowed to have any other partner at
table than one of her sons who was familiar with her little habits, and
took the liberty of engrossing her conversation on the petawties and the
piz, and that donnert deevil of a servant; and what for should she not
pyke her teeth when a curran’ had got into ane of them? and she minded
when a whole glass-fu’ of toothpicks was provided for the customers at
the shop in the close. Her husband was not so objectionable, but he was
the better of his daughter-in-law at his elbow. She was a sharp,
determined little woman of better standing, and warned off the servants
with the sherry and the liqueurs, under his very nose.
No; young Tam was a prig and an ass if he imagined he had any real
reason to blush for the authors of his being. He was bound rather to be
thankful to them for more than the goodly heritage they had provided for
him, at which he ‘cast laith,’ even for their manly and womanly
courteous self-mastery. Still he would have been relieved if his father
had not brought forward his Burgundy, and promised his host the next
time he came to Drysdale Hall the taste of such a brand as was not to be
found in Hamilton Palace, and his mother had not called macaroni
‘mikeronis,’ and Charlotte à la Russe ‘Chaurlotte-ally-Rice.’ He did not
care half so much when she cried out, ‘Keep me, the day!’ at the most
exciting of Mr. Rowland’s stories, and his father was surprised into a
guffaw that seemed to shake the table.
Small faults to rankle in a mind that was not little. It was only sore
in a transition phase, and raw in its youthfulness.
Young Tam had not time and attention to spare for good stories. He felt
angry with himself when he was forced to laugh. A set of old tomfools,
he was tempted to style his companions. Life was earnest: he could not
afford to waste it in such child’s play. He thought of the gross revelry
of the Fair-days, he recalled the misery of times of strike and failures
in cotton, and he wondered that men and women with souls to be saved
could thus trifle with the signs of the times. He would not have exposed
himself to the purgatory of these dinners, at which he sat in his goodly
young manhood like a killjoy, had he not known that to refuse all such
invitations would incense his father as much as anything he had yet
done.
It was not only by his father and mother’s satisfaction with these
pompous gaieties that young Tam felt aggrieved; he was still more
exasperated with Athole Murray’s barefaced enjoyment of the ridiculous
proceedings. There was an exception made for Athole sometimes, as for
young Tam, in putting her name on the dinner-lists. Her father was
frequently one of the guests, for two reasons. First, he was an old and
respected native of the locality; in the second place, when he was in
the mood, he was one of the most accomplished story-tellers of the
circle, one of the most learned in the curious records of the great city
of which all her citizens are proud. His comparative poverty was thus
condoned, and he was welcomed to rich men’s tables, at which he did not
refuse to sit because he was not himself rich.
Dr. Peter had boasted that he had friends among the wealthy as well as
the poor. He did not grudge the former a farthing of their hundreds of
thousands. He could make as much allowance for their temptations as one
of the men themselves--Tam Drysdale--could do. It pleased Dr. Peter to
exercise his faculty on their behalf. They were worthy fellows, many of
them, he maintained, and few knew, as he was in circumstances to know,
the good they did, not only by their public works, but by their private
charities. If he could contribute to their entertainment--they were not
always easy to entertain, as they were not particularly entertaining in
a mixed company--that was their weak point; if he could help them to a
right good laugh, he should always think it a privilege and a compliment
to himself to play his part.
It was awkward to invite Dr. Murray to a party which included ladies,
and exclude Athole, his solitary specimen of womankind. As the mistress
of her father’s household, she had something of the brevet rank of a
matron; therefore she appeared occasionally, like young Tam, at the
elderly people’s dinners. She had no individual taste for heavy,
prolonged meals, and there was sometimes not another young person
present to keep her in company except the young Turk from Drysdale Hall.
Athole was at ease and contented in her home-life, but she did not
despise a change. She thought it good for her father. She liked to see
him among his contemporaries, and she had a cordial esteem for some of
them, not altogether derived from him.
The girl was an exceedingly simple figure among the magnificent dames.
It would have been absurd in her to try to cope with them, or even with
the daughters--when there were daughters--of the houses where the
entertainments took place. For the husbands’ or fathers’ incomes far
more than outnumbered in thousands what her father could claim in
hundreds. Athole’s silk gown was not as thick as leather, according to a
definition which she had heard some of the favoured matrons apply to
their silks. It was generally supplemented by some gauzy material with
which she rang changes. She hoped her single state and her twenty and
odd years carried off her failure in the virtues of the Worth School, on
which not only newspaper paragraphs, magazines of fashion, and novels by
benighted female hands, but novels concocted under male auspices,
insist, with a sort of man-milliner gusto distressing to realize. If her
supposed probation did not justify what fine ladies might call her
shabbiness--what then? It did not signify. Athole laughed at the idea,
and her thin, dark face and brilliant eyes looked more bizarre and
expressive than ever. A ‘shilpet, blecket, poorly got-up lassie,’ many
of the ladies called her, with disdainful pity. Yet their husbands were
fond of talking to the Cinderella who had not yet met her fairy
godmother.
And, after all, this Cinderella’s rags were no rags, and by no means
without womanly and artistic taste in their disposal; only they were not
rich and rare like the approved garments of the day. Athole knew very
well, under her philosophy, what became her, and used to say that though
she were as rich as Crœsus, she did not think she would adopt costly
array. In addition to the consideration she professed for her maid
Jeannie, to whom Athole was a law in dress--who, like many hand-maidens,
copied her mistress at a humble distance--Athole was satisfied satin and
velvet and the cunning devices of the most ingenious and extravagant of
dress-makers did not suit her style as they suited Claribel Drysdale’s
outward woman. Athole was plain, and simplicity did best with plainness.
She did not wish to look like a fantastic Frenchwoman.
Besides being set apart for each other when they were the only young
people at these dinners, there were mingled attraction and repulsion
between Athole Murray and young Tam Drysdale. She knew that he was
affronted by her levity in relishing these feasts, and it tickled her
that he should be so affronted. He knew that she did not believe in his
modified Communism, and looked upon it as a particular kind of juvenile
disease--not so common as the measles, but occasionally to be seen even
in the sons of rich men. He was aware that she laughed at him, and he
was piqued by her laughter--piqued to bring her to a juster frame of
mind by proving his sincerity. When he meditated anything
desperate--resigning his birthright, going to Australia, turning out to
work for his own hand at any work for which he was qualified--he always
took into account how Athole Murray would look and what she would say;
if she would believe in him then, and if she would be sorry for having
mistaken him.
‘I hope you are enjoying yourself, Miss Murray,’ said young Tam
frigidly, on one of these occasions. His tone sounded as if his hope
partook more of the nature of a fear. He was standing before her, after
the gentlemen had joined the ladies in the drawing-room. Athole was
sitting on a couch, near a knot of gentlemen who occupied the hearthrug
with cups of tea in their hands, and a _raconteur_ improving the moment
till the whist-tables should be set out. A chorus of laughter testified
to the capabilities of success on the part of the narrator.
‘Thanks, exceedingly,’ answered Athole, suddenly brightening her whole
appearance by the expansion of a curious little scarlet fan which she
held in her hand. ‘But don’t let me miss Mr. Rowland’s next story--he is
in great force to-night.’
‘I wonder you can be entertained by stale Joe Millers.’
‘But as I am entertained, and as he is just going to tell a story which
always makes me laugh, though I have heard it a hundred times, please
don’t talk just now. Perhaps it is not so familiar to you; if so, you
cannot guess what a treat it will be.’
She stopped, and set herself to listen, and he was compelled to follow
her example. Mr. Rowland was retailing the strait of a Highland
dancing-master, whose steps were unassailable, but whose music was
confined to his voice, with which he sang, to improvised appropriate
words, the tunes of the strathspeys and reels through which he was
assiduously marshalling his pupils. Mr. Rowland gave examples, humming
the doggerel in alternately slow and fast time, with his comical cracked
voice, in keeping with the comical jiggy airs:
‘Now, Jock, for sure and certain,
Come tiddle and come tartan,
You’ll dance with Betty Martin,
She’s a pridefu’ little queen.’
‘And you there, White Breeks, White Breeks,
Set you to Red Cheeks, Red Cheeks,
Or you’re no worth a preen.’
‘Mr. Tam,’ said Athole behind her fan, ‘have you forsworn laughter? Have
you taken the pledge in that direction? Oh, I should not like to be
Clary and Eppie! Now hear my story. There was once a very great lady
listening to the reading of a very small book. The hapless author--a
misled young woman--mutual friends supposed, mistakenly of course, might
profit by the great lady’s patronage. “Oh!” she said, with a shudder at
a certain point in the tale, “whatever she’s going to do, I hope she’s
not going to be funny.”’
Young Tam was driven to smile, and at the unusual sight auld Tam, whose
eyes were resting on the couple, experienced a second twinge of doubt
regarding them. Young Tam could not be so depraved in taste as to be
making up to that insignificant, nearly ugly, lassie of Dr. Peter’s,
with all the beauties and all the fortunes in Glasgow awaiting his
choice. The next moment Dr. Peter Murray walked up to his daughter and
young Tam. Auld Tam took heart of grace, and made a fourth in the group.
‘By-the-bye, do you know anything of a Highland tramp who has been down
with fever in the servants’ offices at Semple Barns?’ young Tam was
asking the doctor. ‘I met him with Macnab, Sir James’s dog-man, in the
Rothesay boat, on one of the Fair-days. The Highlander had come to
Glasgow, as I understood his countryman to say, full of some talk about
Drysdale Haugh, and the Mackinnons and Drysdales, as if he had business
with one or the other. But his wits, if he ever had any, were far to
seek when I saw him. The poor, miserable fellow seemed at the last gasp;
indeed, I should not wonder if he were not alive.’
‘I never heard of such a person,’ interposed auld Tam in surprise.
‘I’ve had little troke [traffic] with the Highlands, and the queer thing
is how this mon should ken of Drysdale Haugh--that is, if he is not a
Glasgy Highlander, born and bred within a hunder yards of the
Gallowgate. I am not so full of conceit as to fancy the fame of my works
has crossed the lochs, and floated as far awa’ as Skye, or John o’
Groat’s.’
‘I attended the man,’ said Dr. Peter, ‘and I can bear witness that he
had heard of you or somebody of the same name, and of your works, and
that they had belonged to a Mackinnon. I was curious to know if his
acquaintance extended to the Murrays, but I could never find that he
paid us that compliment in his delirium. He’s not dead, but he’s as bad.
His mind became affected to such a degree, and he grew so unmanageable,
that I had to apply to have him lodged as a pauper in the asylum. He may
recover his judgment, or he may not. I thought, to begin with, it was
simply bodily and mental weakness, following on the fever in a bad
subject, and that when the first was better the second would mend in a
measure. But I can no longer pronounce on the case.’
‘I hope the poor sinner was not an impostor trying to get up a begging
story, and turn a penny on some scrap of information he had picked up,’
suggested auld Tam. ‘You mind Mackinnon went to the Hielands for sport
every season; but, preserve us, he’s been dead for mair than twenty
years!’
‘And this man--a shauchled [ill knit] half-natural at best, broken down
by hardship and poor living--is not above thirty or thirty-five, judging
of him professionally. He was never likely to trump up a story to much
purpose, and now he is _hors de combat_ either in the business of
imposition or in any other. That word “business” is sometimes oddly
applied. Have you heard what Inglis, our oldest elder, said to that
new-fangled chap Cairns, who has come into the session, and is fain to
put the other elders through their facings in the discharge of their
duties? “Muster Cairns, I have been an elder for thirty years, and I
know my buzness!”’
END OF VOL. I.
BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD
THREE-VOLUME NOVELS AT ALL LIBRARIES.
=PRINCESS NAPRAXINE.= By OUIDA.
=DOROTHY FORSTER.= By WALTER BESANT.
=SAINT MUNGO’S CITY.= By SARAH TYTLER.
=A DRAWN GAME.= By BASIL.
=HEART SALVAGE BY SEA AND LAND.= By MRS. COOPER (KATHERINE SAUNDERS).
=THE NEW ABELARD.= By ROBERT BUCHANAN.
=A REAL QUEEN.= By R. E. FRANCILLON.
=FANCY-FREE.= By CHARLES GIBBON.
=THE WAY OF THE WORLD.= By DAVID CHRISTIE MURRAY.
LONDON: CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY