Scotch marriages, vol. 1 — Sarah Tytler

SCOTCH MARRIAGES

I. SCOTCH MARRIAGES

SARAH TYTLER

AUTHOR OF

‘SCOTCH FIRS’ ‘CITOYENNE JACQUELINE’ &c.

IN THREE VOLUMES

VOL. I.

LONDON
SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
1882

‘Choose not alone a proper mate
But proper time to marry’

COWPER

THE FIRST VOLUME.

LADY PEGGY.

CHAPTER PAGE

I. BRIDEGROOM AND BRIDEGROOM’S FRIEND 3

II. PEGGY’S WEDDING 22

III. PEGGY’S WELCOME HOME 48

IV. THE LONG DAYS THAT FOLLOWED 71

V. THE REIGN OF MISRULE 92

VI. ‘LADY PEGGY’ 111

VII. ‘HUNTINGTOWER’ 133

VIII. PEGGY’S FRIENDS 158

IX. THE LESSONS THAT PRIMROSE GAVE WHILE BALCAIRNIE LOOKED ON 182

X. ‘A’ WILL BE RICHT AGAIN GIN JAMIE WERE COME BACK 209

JEAN KINLOCH

I. JEAN SCORNED 223

II. BOB MEFFIN’S AMENDS 247

III. JEAN’S REPRISALS 275

LADY PEGGY

CHAPTER I.

BRIDEGROOM AND BRIDEGROOM’S FRIEND.

During the last century there was little real difference between young Drumsheugh and young Balcairnie, the young laird and the young yeoman,[1] who was also the laird’s chief tenant and chosen friend. Jamie Ramsay, of Drumsheugh, and Jock Home, of Balcairnie, both rejoicing in a territorial appellation, had sat together on the same bench in the same parish school. For that matter Jock, though not particularly scholarly, as the cleverer of the two, had generally sat above his companion. The boys had played together in the same games of ball and hockey. In company they had scoured the fields together after birds’ nests, nuts, and haws. They had in their green youth worn and torn the same corduroys little different in quality, and satisfied their hearty appetites on the same wholesome porridge and kail, oatmeal cakes, and ‘bannocks o’ barley,’ for the laird’s table was not much more daintily supplied than the farmer’s.

Even the lads’ homes were on the outside not so different as might have been expected. Drumsheugh had an avenue of crazy fir trees, and the dignity of a ruined tower about a bow-shot from the high, narrow, free-stone house which represented the modern mansion. Balcairnie was just such another house, a storey lower, without the avenue and the tower. It was not destitute of compensation for these deficiencies in the comfortable-looking stack-yard, which sheltered it from every wind that blew, and in the square of the farmyard which abutted on the house, and was alive and cheerful with domestic animals, and the constant work going on among them. Balcairnie was the livelier dwelling of the two. Both houses had long gardens very similar, prolific in hardy vegetables and primitive fruit, as well as in old-fashioned flowers. The gardens found room for umbrageous bowers and Dutch summer-houses, and included beech and holly hedges, which enclosed washing-greens.

Inside, the best parlour of Balcairnie might have stood for the dining-room of Drumsheugh--furnished as they both were with Scotch carpets and oak, and adorned alike with silver cups, won in coursing matches, and great Chinese punch-bowls brought home by friendly sea captains. The chief difference lay in the fact that the dining-room at Drumsheugh was in constant use, while the pièce de résistance among the apartments in Balcairnie was the ordinary parlour, given over to drugget and blue-and-white checked linen, with ornaments of no more costly material than cherry-wood pipes, pink-lipped shells, and peacocks’ feathers. Again, there was no drawing-room at Balcairnie, with spindle-legged chairs in painted satin-wood and white chintz covers, such as was the company room at Drumsheugh. But the boys’ bare little garret dormitories were much alike.

On the rare occasions, when the lads went from home, unattended by their parents, they journeyed by one conveyance which served the whole neighbourhood, except on special occasions--Tam Fleemin’s carrier’s cart.

True, on leaving school young Drumsheugh had gone to the Edinburgh University, as became his birth and rank, while young Balcairnie had entered on the apprenticeship implied in holding a plough and drawing a straight furrow under the critical eyes of his father and his father’s foreman, according to the standard for young men in his class; but on the return of the one lad from the college and the promotion of the other on the death of his father to the possession of all the pairs of horses on the farm, instead of the obligation to work one pair, the occupations and amusements of the old allies tallied once more at many points.

Young Drumsheugh--young only in years, for his father had died long before Balcairnie’s father, and the laird had grown up under the rule of a widowed mother--was a scion of the great house of Dalwolsie, the representative of a family of respectable though not very wealthy country gentry that had held up their heads among their equals for the last three hundred years at least. Young Balcairnie, though his father, grandfather and great-grandfather had been tenants of Balcairnie as long as the oldest living man in the neighbourhood could recollect, knew nothing further of his origin than what was to be deciphered on a few mossy stones leaning over in Craigture kirk yard. These did not condescend to mention whether the Homes of Balcairnie came of the great Berwickshire Homes or not. The rude, half-effaced letters only gave the brief, if graphic, statement that here lay ‘the cauld corp’ of ‘Dauvit,’ or Alexander, or John Home, as it might be.

But blue blood must have spoken out very unmistakably, if it had drawn a sharp line between two lads whose rearing, casts of mind, tastes and pursuits were so much in common. For the laird farmed the home farm, and the yeoman was one of the first in the hunting field, though he did not attend the hunt ball. The young men, like the boys, wore as a rule the same every-day suits--no longer of corduroy, but of home-spun. Good brown woollen stuff, shorn, spun, and woven in the district, diversified by yellow buckskins, boots and tops, red waistcoats, and three-cornered hats. The manly build of the pair rivalled each that of the other. Both were deep-chested, broad-shouldered, long and clean-limbed, with arms, not unused to fencing and boxing, quite capable of keeping the owners’ heads. The corresponding legs came out strong at coursing matches without the aid of riding horses, while the feet beat the floor resoundingly in reels and country dances for well-nigh a round of the clock at every merry-making, great and small, far and near. The comely ruddy faces under the three-cornered hats might almost have been those of brothers, except that Drumsheugh was dark and Balcairnie fair in hair and complexion.

The men met at the kirk, they met at the market, they dined at the same table in the George Inn of the little town of Craigie on the market-day, they resorted to the same coffee-room to read the same newspaper, with its chronicle of war prices, victories of His Majesty’s forces abroad, and meal mobs at home, while the laird and the farmer frequently rode home together, so long as their roads were one.

Balcairnie would dine several times at Drumsheugh in the course of the winter, and if the Lady--Drumsheugh’s mother--was a thought stately, and kept her visitors somewhat at a distance, all in a perfectly courteous way, that was not the laird’s fault. He did his best to make up for it by being ‘Jack-fellow-alike’ with his tenant when Drumsheugh returned Balcairnie’s visits at the farm-house. Indeed it was well known to the Lady herself that Drumsheugh, though he could carry himself well enough in any society, was not guilty of offence against any and was liked in all ranks, showed at this stage of his development a perilous preference for humbler company than he had been born to. He would rather accompany Balcairnie to a ‘maiden’[2] or penny wedding, and enter with all his soul into the prevailing fun and frolic, rendering himself the most acceptable guest in the motley assemblage, than go where Balcairnie could not go with him, to what was by comparison the high and dry hunt balls and subscription assemblies.

There is this to be said in excuse for Drumsheugh’s low tastes, that the maidens and weddings--penny and otherwise--not less than the markets of those days were freely frequented by guests--male guests especially--many degrees higher than the mass of the company. Besides, as is sometimes true in a thinly peopled district, it happened that about the time Drumsheugh came of age, the county circle round him was remarkably deficient in young people of his own age, above all in young people endowed with such attractions as were likely to seize and retain the laird.

Neither could the step be called a great descent, when in mind and manners so many were nearly on one level. For instance, not only had Drumsheugh and Balcairnie been fellow-scholars at the same parish school, but another contemporary scholar was little Peggy Hedderwick, the daughter of a hedger-and-ditcher, who had brought her doubled-up scone and whang of cheese tied up in a napkin for her dinner at school, just as she had carried her father’s dinner daily when the field of his operations was within a girl’s walk from home. Peggy, though she was the junior of both the lads by some three to four years, had darted nimbly ahead, with the precociously quick wit of girls, in all learning, save sums. She had been ‘out of the Testament’ and ‘into Proverbs’ before either of the boys, and she had been such an expert in repeating the shorter catechism, from ‘man’s chief end’ to the Creed, without halt or blunder, that the master himself could not ‘fichle’ (puzzle) her. She had frequently coached her seniors and betters in that, to them, most difficult performance. As for the Psalms and Paraphrases, she could repeat them by heart in her shrill sing-song, till the master, though he was a licentiate of the Kirk, grew weary of hearing her. It was even seriously believed in the school that she had surmounted the Ass’s Bridge of the curriculum and could say right off, if anybody would stay to listen to her, the whole of the Hundred and Nineteenth Psalm. She could write a fine round hand, with an occasional clerkly flourish at the tail of a letter. It was at sums that Peggy hung her head. The multiplication table, with its barren chart of commercial details, unbrightened by a green spot on which fancy and sentiment could feed, had brought her to grief, and taken the pride of intellect out of the white-headed lassie. The lads who came through this test triumphantly had tried to help her in turn. But it was in vain--poor Peggy would never make even a decent arithmetician. It must only be by counting her fingers that she could ever reckon her earnings and her spendings.

Peggy Hedderwick, grown up into the bonniest lass for many a mile, was now the acknowledged belle of every rustic merry-making in the parish of Craigture. She was a great deal more and better than such a distinction often implies. She was something else than a blue-eyed, white-skinned, red-cheeked maiden, with a slim yet well-rounded figure, a pretty foot and ankle, though they went bare six days out of the seven--unless in the depth of winter, a trim waist, a slender throat, a delicate chin, a dainty mouth, as good a nose as if she had been born a Ramsay--or, as far as that goes, a Stewart, and a broad enough brow to explain her early attainments in the Psalms and Paraphrases. She was even something more than an innocent creature in whom there was little guile, a modest child to soil whose modesty would be a gross sin and shame in the eyes of every man worthy of the name. She was an industrious, upright, pious soul, the stay--by means of Peggy’s busy wheel principally, of her widowed mother. For the hedger and ditcher, exposed to every inclemency of the weather, had early paid the debt of nature. Peggy discharged faithfully all obligations known to her. She was a reverent, unfailing worshipper--one of the favourite lambs of the flock with the elderly uncouth book-worm of a dominie, who had progressed from the parish school to the parish kirk, and was in either place an excellent man, master, and minister.

It was to this fair, sweet, and good young Peggy Hedderwick that Drumsheugh, wilful and masterful in his simple condescension, paid unfailing homage. He sought her out--for she never threw herself in his way--wherever she was to be found. He went with Balcairnie under a hundred pretexts to wherever the laird fancied there was the most distant chance of meeting Peggy. To bleaching-greens, quilting-parties, Handsel-Monday games, even kirk-preachings, her sorely-smitten swain followed Peggy desperately. He made little disguise of his infatuation, and put small restraint on his inclinations in scenes, where, as a welcome visitor from another sphere, he was allowed, it must be confessed, a considerable amount of license. He would dance with no other, he would sit by no other, he would convoy Peggy home when the play was ended.

Soon the state of the case was no secret in the neighbourhood, with its various circles, among them that presided over by the old Lady of Drumsheugh. The folly and the danger, with what would come of it all, were commented on and canvassed everywhere. The sole cover to his actions, which Drumsheugh chose to assume, was that he went about in these lower regions under Balcairnie’s wing, as it were. The laird insisted on taking the yeoman with him in all his excursions and escapades.

This was some small comfort to Mrs. Ramsay. Balcairnie was, if anything, the wiser and more prudent of the two, and she felt he was, in a sense, on his honour to protect his friend from the consequences of Drumsheugh’s rashness. Perhaps the Lady also counted a little, in the imminence of the peril--for Drumsheugh was already of age and his own master, on a theory which was prevalent among the gossips. They said Balcairnie had been the first captivated by the charms of young Peggy, though he had at once drawn back from rivalry with his laird, and that Peggy on her part had smiled on the farmer till a bigger star appeared in her firmament.

Even Balcairnie’s marriage with Peggy would be a great mésalliance, but it would not be so heinous an infringement of all social laws as Drumsheugh’s stooping to a cotter lass, either honestly or in sin and shame. Balcairnie’s mother as well as his father was dead, his sisters were married, and his brothers out in the world, so that he was a lone man--if a man can ever be called lone, able to disgrace nobody save himself, by an unequal marriage.

The old Lady of Drumsheugh was particularly gracious to Balcairnie at this time. She inquired after his house, if it was in good repair with the plenishing in order? She hinted at the propriety, no less than the probability, of his stiff old housekeeper being superseded by an active young wife. After the next sentence or two, she went the length of asking meaningly for bonnie Peggy Hedderwick, who was so good to her mother and so clever with her hands. Had she not won the maiden at the last harvest? Was not her yarn more in request in Craigie market than that of any other girl or matron in Craigture? And the Lady had heard that from Luckie Hedderwick’s couple of hens Peggy had reared the finest brood of chickens that were to be seen that Candlemas. Such qualities in a young woman were worth her weight in gold, Mrs. Ramsay declared impressively, with her keen eyes fixed steadily on the listener. She had the greatest respect for that girl. The Lady plainly suggested that a farmer, whatever might be said of a laird, need seek no richer dower with his wife than Peggy had to bestow. If the laird’s mother were a consistent woman, no doubt she would call on Peggy and do the Lady’s best to countenance her son’s tenant’s wife, should Peggy receive the promotion of becoming the mistress of Balcairnie.

To this stroke of policy Balcairnie merely replied by returning the lady’s fixed stare, with a full and grave stolid look from blue eyes which were not unlike Peggy’s.

If Balcairnie had ever entertained a tender inclination towards Peggy, it made no ill-blood between him and his friend the laird. It was probably early nipped in the bud by the fact that Peggy’s favours had been swiftly transferred, ere they were well bestowed, from Balcairnie to Drumsheugh. Balcairnie was once heard reproaching her, more waggishly than bitterly, ‘Ay, Peggy, when I gie you a turn in the reel, fient a kiss you grant me now, gin the laird be by.’ For Peggy, with all her virtues, was a woman still. She was caught while her fancy was yet hovering in its flight, by the glamour of superior rank. Both of her admirers were bonnie and fine lads to her, in the first blush of their admiration, and while both were above her in station, there was not much to choose between them. But the lairdship, and perhaps the greater boldness of Drumsheugh, turned the scales, and after a few months of ardent courtship Peggy was as far gone as her lover. She would no more have permitted a comparison between the merits of Drumsheugh and Balcairnie--though the latter was her very good friend just as he was the laird’s--than she would have suffered the old bed-ridden mother who had borne her and toiled for her to be matched with any other woman in the kingdom, be she Queen Charlotte seated with her golden sceptre in her hand by the side of King George on the throne.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] In Scotland the distinction between a yeoman farmer--one who owns his farm--and a tenant farmer is not strictly preserved. The term yeoman is, or was, employed indiscriminately to any farmer.

[2] A harvest-home, so called from the last sheaf of corn cut on the farm for the season. It was allowed to fall to the share of the best shearer or reaper, who tied it up with ribands so that it might take the semblance of a doll. It was then hung conspicuously as the chief adornment of the principal wall of the barn in which the ‘maiden’--called in the north of Scotland the ‘kirn,’ was held. The decked-up sheaf was finally carried home by its proud winner, and suspended on the wall of her cottage, where it was treasured as a token of her prowess.

CHAPTER II.

PEGGY’S WEDDING.

There came a crisis to all those thoughtless daring doings, and it did not proceed from the old Lady of Drumsheugh, much as she loved to lead in life. She had ruled with a high hand her old husband, who, if all tales were true, was not an easy person to guide; but his young son, with his easy temper and pleasant speech to the world at large, though he was a good son at home when he was let alone, threatened to prove too much for her.

There was another mother in the case, as has been signified,--poor old Luckie Hedderwick--who had never been considered more than a sickly ‘feckless’ body in her best days, and who was now bed-ridden and dependent on her daughter’s industry for her daily bread. Whether Luckie had been from the first an accomplished and hardened deceiver so that she could at last bring forward a strategy worthy of the rival mother--the Lady of Drumsheugh; whether the approach of death began to unseal her dim and dull eyes, and to teach the foolish, ignorant old woman wisdom beyond all earthly sagacity; whether the former dominie who visited his aged and sick parishioner at the cottage in Peggy’s unavoidable absence, was secretly at the bottom of the manœuvre, Luckie Hedderwick suddenly set an interdict on all future friendship and love-making between Peggy and the laird. The old woman had been till then as silly and inconsiderate as any lass in her teens in taking the greatest pride and pleasure in Peggy’s triumphs and conquests, and in encouraging the girl in what other people held to be Peggy’s sins of vanity and unwarrantable ambition; but she now forbade her child, under pain of her mother’s lamentations and reproaches--which were worse than her wrath--so much as to have a meeting with the gentleman, if she could possibly foresee and prevent it.

Peggy was broken-hearted and in despair, but she never dreamt of defying, and still less of cheating, her mother.

The laird, arrested in the full force of his passion, was goaded to the brink of madness and driven half beside himself. No more well-understood foregatherings with Peggy; no more interceptings of the girl on her way to the well, or the shop, or a neighbour’s house; no more strolls among the whins and broom[3] in the twilight, careless who saw; no more walking of his horse--or leaping from the saddle and walking himself--beside her when he came up with her, which he was pretty sure to do, on the return of both from Craigie market; no more climbing of the breezy, heathery hill and descending on the other side where the green trees shaded the road, throwing a white shower of blossom there in the spring, being full of birds singing as they rifled the fruit in summer, and in autumn dropping blood-shot leaves among the mud and mire. The laird would gallantly insist on placing Peggy’s basket before him on the saddle, or would carry it for her. Balcairnie either trotting on with a passing nod, or falling discreetly into the background, determined to show that he was not curious over much, or bent on spoiling sport.

The spectacle had hardly been an improving one. The young laird had been demeaning himself in some lights, trifling with a poor country girl, and exposing her, as he ought not to have done, to serious misconstruction and harm. Peggy, like a senseless girl, had been laying herself open to scandal and slander and a hundred graver dangers. Still the pair had been a pretty pair, however ill-matched--there is no denying it. The laird in his riding-coat and boots and tops, gaily flourishing his silver-mounted whip; Peggy in her blue-and-red striped linsey-woolsey petticoat, white apron, blue-and-buff striped jacket, and her duffle mantle if it chanced to be wintry weather; her fair hair either bare and tied up with a riband--the relic of the old snood or cockernonie, or else covered by a Bessie-kell-a quilted cotton or woollen hood--under the curtains of which the bonnie face beamed with the mingled shyness and gladness of a child’s face.

In a similar manner the larger groups, in which many minor figures had been represented with varying effect, were effaced from the canvas. These had shown Peggy on the harvest field where the laird, like Boaz of old, shared the labour and the mid-day meal of his servants. Detaching Peggy from the rest, he would act as ‘bandster’ to her shearing, or he would sit at her feet, and decree that as an equivalent to dipping her morsel in the vinegar, she should have her choice of the scones in the basket and the first draught of ale from the pitcher. In those days Peggy was the queen of the autumn fields--a gentle queen who bore the honours thrust upon her meekly. Still she did not fail to arouse animadversion, and the entire tableau tended rather to the entertainment than the edification of the spectators.

The sensations of the company were not of a much more generous or amiable description when Peggy was persuaded to fling her handkerchief to Drumsheugh in the coquettish old dance of ‘The Country Bumpkin;’ or when, at the entreaty of her lover, she sang with her flute-like pipe to a decorously hushed assembly, or sat as mute as a mouse while he sang in his trumpet tones. Her song might be ‘Ye Banks and Braes,’ or ‘Aye wauken O! wauken aye and weary’--both of which ditties held tender warnings to heedless girls, if they would but have taken the hints--or it might be some blyther measure. But his song never varied. It was always the bold, barefaced declaration--

Young Peggy blooms our bonniest lass,
Her breath is like the morning,
The rosy dawn, the springing grass
With early gems adorning.

with a peculiar emphasis on the verse--

Ye powers of honour, love, and truth,
From every ill defend her;
Inspire the highly-favoured youth
The destinies intend her.

The laird could not stand the abrupt, harsh interference which in the twinkling of an eye dissolved these enchanting scenes. It would cost him his wits. He would rather carry off Peggy, with or without her will, where nobody should ever come between them. What did she mean by giving him up at any third person’s word, be that person her mother twice over? Had the two-faced lass no heart in her breast? He would be upsides with her yet, for the pain and mortification she was causing him. He confided all this to Balcairnie, who gave no further answer than a shake of his head and a resolute ‘I’ll no be your man in sic an ill job, Drumsheugh,’ so the laird went on fuming and storming if he did not speak of ‘louping ower a linn.’

The comical side of the question was that he was his own master all the time to do what he liked in the circumstances. He had been left the Laird of Drumsheugh without limitation. He could marry Peggy Hedderwick to-morrow, in spite of his mother, and it was not likely that Peggy or her mother for her, would decline a plain offer of marriage from so high a quarter, or that either would draw so fine a distinction as to refuse the proposed honour, unless it were accompanied by the free and full consent of the Lady to her son’s throwing himself away.

But, somehow, the laird stopped short of such rank insubordination and thoroughgoing independence. There was a strain of weakness in his wilfulness, or else the times were against him. People had not yet shaken off the old feudal prejudices. Drumsheugh, in his simplicity and homeliness, was still, both in his own estimation and in that of other people, the Laird, the scion of the great house of Dalwolsie, and Peggy was the cotter lass, come of hynds and nobodies. Balcairnie, who was not so far before her in the last respect, might have married her without reservation, though she was by no means his social equal; but the most disinterested unworldly version of the affair which the most single-hearted judges looked for from Drumsheugh was that he should be found fond enough of Peggy, and faithful enough to her, while he was sufficiently regardless of his own interests, to engage in a secret ancient troth-plight equivalent to a marriage with her, and right in the eyes of the law, though it was censurable by the Kirk. It would be a contract which must hamper him all his days, and if he were ever so far left to himself as to seek to evade it, might drag him down to crime and misery. Why on such small temptation, out of two courses--the one clear and above-board, the worst consequences of which would be faced at once--the other a flattering more than half-cowardly compromise done in the dark, and only coming to the light and encountering the natural results after a long interval--a manly fellow like the laird should inevitably, as if it were a matter of necessity, have adopted the second and lower course, remains a testimony to the force of habit and of one-sided reasoning.

The laird had been accustomed to set his mother at nought in what seemed right in his own eyes. He was not dependent on her in money matters, and did not give a thought to the risk of forfeiting the savings of her jointure, since he was at this stage of his development as free-handed as he was open-hearted. Still, he could not summon up his courage to brave the high-spirited, determined old woman altogether. In the same way he could not make up his mind to despise the clamour and opposition of his circle of gentry, little as he had hitherto prized the hereditary association with them.

Drumsheugh, when he was compelled to a decision, never dreamed of a more generous and honourable step than that of running away with Peggy, and vowing that he was her husband before two available witnesses; nay, the idea of anything less temporising and more magnanimous did not even cross Balcairnie’s mind. It was in serene satisfaction with the concession that he agreed to back the laird as usual in waylaying Peggy, in spite of her mother’s commands, and in propounding to her the grand yet sorry expedient for getting rid of all objections in future, by establishing the couple in the sure, if unacknowledged, relations of man and wife.

After some spying and picking up of floating information, the two friends learnt that Peggy, while she now kept religiously indoors with her mother, for the most part of her time, was in the custom of recompensing the neighbour who went most of the girl’s errands. This reward consisted in Peggy’s ‘ca’ing,’ or driving out, the neighbour’s cow in the cool of the morning and late evening of the June season, to feed for an hour or two on the grass by the dyke sides and ditches, or on the short turf of a single knowe, which rose in solitary dignity among the flat corn-fields. The road to the knowe was for a certain distance that to Craigie, so often trodden in happier circumstances. The knowe itself, with its patches of rushes, had been Peggy’s seat when as a child she had played at plaiting the ‘thrashies’ into a crown and sceptre. She was an only child like her lover, and had known few playmates save her school companions. She had been used to lonely hours and single-handed games. Her most intimate friend in later times had been her ardent admirer the laird, whom she was now forbidden to see or speak to. He had been with her on this knowe when the dew lay on the grass and the corn-craik was ‘chirming,’ as it was at the present moment. He had made a posy for her of what Peggy merely called ‘bonnie floors,’ but which were in detail the dead white grass of Parnassus that grew among the rushes, together with the crimson and pink fumitory and the yellow avens which he had gathered idly as they came along, leaving hedge-row and dyke-side behind them. He had shown the greatest kindness and patience in helping her to draw out the pith of the rushes and plait it--no longer into a mock crown and sceptre, but into a real wick for her mother’s cruizie.

All these soft recollections proved too much for poor Peggy, as she ca’d Hawkie; the girl put up her apron to her eyes to dry the blinding tears which rendered her more incapable of detecting prowlers in her vicinity.

Then with the practical agility of the riever of old, the laird ‘cam’ skipping ower the hill’ from the little hollow on the other side, to which he and Balcairnie had ridden, and where the latter stayed with the horses.

In a moment Jamie Ramsay was by the sorrowful girl’s side, detaining her when she sought to retreat.

Peggy wore her summer house dress, the pretty light cotton jacket which has been immortalised by Wilkie and Sir William Allen. It had a little collar or ‘neck,’ turned over where the sunburn of the throat met the whiteness of the bosom, and was only confined at the waist by the string of her apron. Her round arms were bare to the elbow, the sleeves of her jacket being rolled up for convenience’ sake. The arms were mottled and dimpled like those of a child. Her brown little feet too were bare. Her uncovered hair was arranged in the most primitive style--after all it is the fashion of the great Greek statues. The locks ‘which the wind used to blaw’ were ‘shed’ behind the ears, wound round the head, rippling in natural ripples as they were wound, until they were fastened in a knot at the back of the shapely head. Yet no stately ball-room belle in flowing gauze or rustling brocade, with high-heeled shoes and a higher powdered tête, had ever appeared half so sweet as Peggy to the enamoured young laird. He was not caught in undress. He came a-courting her--as he was bound to do, though she had been a beggar maid, and not merely an industrious cotter lass, who supported herself and her mother by the fruits of her honest industry. He wore his best snuff-brown coat, his last flowered waistcoat, his dress buckles in his shoes, with his dark hair combed carefully and neatly back and tied in a queue, the riband of which, in skilfully disposed bows and ends, hung half-way down his shoulders.

‘I mauna bide. Let me gang, laird. Oh! why are you here, when I canna lichtlie my mither’s word?’ cried the faithful and despairing Peggy, with streaming eyes and heaving bosom, torn as she was by conflicting obligations.

‘Na, but hear me, Peggy,’ insisted Drumsheugh, strong to carry the day in his confidence in the honesty of his intentions, and the truth of what he was going to say. ‘Take a message from me to your mother, and she will not stand in our gate, or make another thrawn rule to keep us apart. Tell her I am willing to join hands with you and exchange written lines. Lass, I’ll take the half-merk with you the morn if you like; neither king nor minister has power to come between us after that. You’ll be to all intents and purposes my wife and the young Leddy of Drumsheugh from that moment.’

Peggy was not only staggered, she was deeply touched and proudly joyful. She had it in her power to become the ‘Leddy of Drumsheugh.’ The laird had vindicated his sincerity and honour. There was no more question of tampering with her affections and betraying her trust. He had come out of the test nobly, as not one man in a thousand would have come.

Peggy had not the least doubt that her mother would feel more than satisfied--she would be greatly uplifted by her daughter’s wonderful good fortune. Instead of thwarting Drumsheugh again in his wildest fancy, Mrs. Hedderwick would now defer to his least whim, and consent to pay him the humblest, most grateful homage. Peggy was ready to go with the laird to her mother and see if it were not so--to settle for life her grand and happy destiny.

The laird, carried out of himself by the excitement of the moment, delighted with the effect of his words, thinking himself nearly as true and kind as Peggy thought him--more in love with her than ever--was prepared to start that instant to fulfil his pledge and knock the nail on the head.

To Luckie Hedderwick, accordingly, the infatuated couple went straightway, without an attempt at concealment, widely removed as they were, in the exaltation of their feelings, from any consideration of prudence. They only waited till Drumsheugh hallooed for Balcairnie to come up and wish Peggy and the laird joy, and then to bring on the horses to the Cotton.

Poor old Luckie, lying powerless in her box-bed, could hardly believe her fast-failing eyes and ears, when Peggy came in (followed by Drumsheugh in full feather), and when he sat down on the kist in the window, which was the only disengaged seat, her own arm-chair being occupied by the unmannerly cat, and Peggy’s stool at the wheel taken up by the tray of reeled pirns of yarn.

There was no vow of vengeance on the laird’s smooth brow, or of reprisal on his smiling lips. On the contrary, there was the most abundant security and provision for Peggy Hedderwick in his presence there in her mother’s cottage, and his frankly undertaking to marry the lass at once, before competent witnesses. It was not from such a good end as this that her conscience and her minister alike had begun to frighten the widow. Her dear little Peggy would be a lady after all, and some day she would take her stand among the best and be freely acknowledged by the whole of the county side. She could not expect that just at first, but anyway she would be kept an honest and innocent woman. Her children, if she ever had children, would be born in lawful wedlock. She need neither fear God nor man, and poverty would no longer hover at her door, only held at bay by her courageous, diligent young arm.

Of course, it was not for Mrs. Hedderwick to say the laird nay. It was for her to thank him from a lowly, thankful heart for not merely doing justly by her daughter, but for being minded to endow her with his favour and with her share of his portion of the world’s goods, which many people would reckon far beyond her deserts.

A glimpse of Balcairnie and the horses as they walked up and down the road, which the old woman saw through the bole of a window at the head of her bed, completed the dazzling of any sense Mrs. Hedderwick possessed. She described the scene afterwards as too splendid for this world--like a verse of the Bible, or a line of an ‘auld ballant.’ It was as when ‘Abraham’s servant baud the lassie munt and ride wi’ him to be the wife of his maister’s son. To be sure the horses were camels then, whatever the odds. It was as when the auld knicht crossed the sea to bring the king o’ Norrowa’s dochter ower the faem to be his queen, and then the nags were boats--whilk it was a mercy they were not here, lest the cobbles had coupet wi’ her Peggy among the prood waves, as gude Sir Patrick Spens’s ship sank down, in forty fathoms deep. Whatever, it was a maist fine ferlie for Drumsheugh to come wooing and speering for her dochter at a puir body like her, and for Balcairnie--with whose mither, worthy woman, she hersel had been a servant lass for three year afore she and Simon Hedderwick yoked thegither--to sit or stand at her door wi’ the beasts in braid daylicht, in the sicht of the whole Cotton, as gin she were the leddy and Balcairnie the serving-man.’

The entire arrangements were agreed on that evening, the laird chalking them out very much according to his vagrant fancy, Peggy and her mother assenting with meek, swelling hearts, simply entering a humble protest and venturing on a mild amendment when he suggested a clean impossibility. It would be far pleasanter as well as safer, since the marriage was not to be made public immediately, for the affair to take place from home. Peggy had a cousin--a decent man--a cow-keeper near Edinburgh. She could go on a visit to his wife. Such a visit would be made worth the couple’s while; in fact, they were likely to be filled with importance at the part they were called on to play. Drumsheugh and Balcairnie could easily take a ride to town treading on Peggy’s heels early one fine morning, or late one propitious evening; Peggy, with her cousins to bear her company, and the laird, with Balcairnie as his supporter, would join in a stroll to look at the shop windows or admire the big houses, until they reached the particular house the laird spoke of as the Temple of Hymen, to the mystified ears hanging on his words. There Peggy and he would take the half-merk together in the most popular mode. They would acknowledge themselves man and wife, and sign the lines before some queer sort of mass-John and a notary, as well as before Peggy’s cousins and Balcairnie; and the knot would be so securely tied that only death could sever it. Peggy would come back to her mother and the Cotton, and he would return to his mother and Drumsheugh. Nobody need be any wiser till the couple chose to proclaim what had been accomplished, when he should be at liberty to put his wife into his mother’s seat. But he felt sure his Peggy would not refuse to bide a wee for her honours, and would not weary while she had his love and care. And Mrs. Hedderwick would not seek to come between the pair when they were man and wife.

Peggy would not weary, would not refuse to wait a hundred years--always supposing she lived a century and retained Drumsheugh’s unshaken love and faith while the years lasted. Was she to dictate terms and exact favours which were far beyond her original estate? She would be well off if Drumsheugh owned her for his wife, though it were but with his dying breath. As for Luckie Hedderwick, she would no more interfere with the laird’s rights when he had established them, than she would challenge the prerogative of the King.

It all came to pass as Drumsheugh had ordained it. In an irregular and yet in a deliberate, formal manner, quite legal according to the liberal law of Scotland, and with ancient custom to justify the act, by no mock marriage, but by a binding rite, as both knew, Jamie Ramsay wedded Peggy Hedderwick. No exposure followed the event, though it did not go unattended by vague suspicions and fitful rumours. Such marriages were not so unheard of as to prevent the signs of their recurrence from being quickly noted and eagerly caught up.

But as the Lady of Drumsheugh did not see fit to cause an investigation, to cross-question her son, or to go out of her way to assail and harass Peggy; as Peggy’s mother in her box-bed did not stir in the matter by proxy; as it was the old daffing intercourse between the laird and the lass, which was openly resumed, and went on much as formerly to hoodwink the public, what was everybody’s business proved nobody’s business. Nothing was said or done to clear up the mystery as to the precise terms on which the Laird of Drumsheugh stood with the lass of low degree.

FOOTNOTES:

[3]

He’s low down, he’s in the broom,
That’s waiting for me.

CHAPTER III.

PEGGY’S WELCOME HOME.

Balcairnie could have spoken out and enlightened the neighbourhood, but he did not. Affectionately attached as he was both to Drumsheugh and Peggy, he had not as yet any strong temptation to speak out and shame the Devil, while delivering his victims. Granted that the position was most awkward and indefensible, it had not become so untenable as to shock and scare a man like Balcairnie--not wholly unaccustomed to such difficult conditions--into breaking his word and exposing the offenders, with whom he had been ‘art and part,’ for the good of one or both.

It was hardly possible that Drumsheugh’s passion would remain at its first white heat. It was too probable that it might pass into weariness, even disgust, where the poor girl he had married was concerned. True, there had been no such fundamental disparity between the two as may be imagined. Still, Drumsheugh was a man with a man’s power of varying his life. He could not rid himself of his blue blood and his lairdship. The likelihood was that the longer he lived their claims on him would increase and intensify, till what he had slighted in his youth might, in inverse proportion, become a heavy chain on his mature years. He might come to clutch his hereditary advantages and brandish them in a surly fashion in the face of poor Peggy, who not only lacked such on her own account, but would to a considerable extent qualify and damage her husband’s privileges. The shallowness of the laird’s nature, in the middle of its single-heartedness and transparency, would tend to this result.

In the meantime Peggy, arrested and isolated by her own deed, instead of moving on and becoming transplanted, would stand still or retrograde in her false suspended position. Half envied, half doubted, and blamed by her former equals, wholly distrusted and shunned by those who were still her social superiors, her heart would grow sick under the painful ordeal, her gentle, modest nature wax bold and defiant. The very appearance of evil--which is to be avoided in its turn--would work much of the harm of the evil itself.

But long before this deplorable conclusion was reached, within three or four months of the unceremonious marriage, while the laird was still the fond bridegroom and Peggy the tender bride, an accident happened which brought matters to an unexpected crisis.

One windy October afternoon the laird had been helping to take down the first new stack to be thrashed or flailed out from the stack-yard of the home-farm, when by some chance he missed his footing, fell headlong from the stack-head among the horses’ feet below, and received a kick in the chest from one of the startled horses. He was taken up insensible and carried to the mansion-house. The misadventure created a lively sensation, and the news gathered gravity and tragic horror as it spread abroad.

It was said that Drumsheugh was dead, that he had been vomiting blood, that he had never spoken, that he had cried loudly for Peggy Hedderwick to bid her a last farewell. In the conflicting testimony one serious bit of evidence was certain. Dr. Forsyth had been summoned post-haste from Craigie. Balcairnie had been seen riding like a madman from his biggest potatoe field, in which the gatherers had been toiling anxiously all day, for frost was in the air, and if the potatoes were not ‘pitted’ in time there would be havock among the earth-apples.

It was almost night-fall before the calamitous tidings got Peggy’s length. They were thrown in at the half-open door of the cottage in which she and her mother dwelt, by an ill-conditioned drunken brute of a carter, who was driving by, and had caught a glimpse of the girl as she moved about between the dim gloaming without and the fire-light within. In the spirit of mischief and strange pleasure in inflicting pain which belongs to very small, low, and morbidly hostile natures, just as the man in other circumstances might have pelted her with a snow-ball in which lay lodged a cruelly sharp stone; so he called out to her in a bullying, inhumanly indifferent tone, ‘Hey! Peggy Hedderwick, what are you doing there? Do you ken your fine laird’s felled? He’s met his dead in the corn-yard of Drumsheugh an hour or twa syne.’

Peggy gave a piteous, plaintive cry, like that of a wounded hare--the most helpless, timid creature in its misery; but she did not sink down or faint away, and the next moment she was beginning to make nervous preparations to set forth for the scene of the disaster. She would not listen to her startled mother, imploring, in the mingled terror and weakness of age, for the explanations and reassurances there was nobody to afford. The informant had driven off after launching his thunderbolt, and the occupants of the neighbouring cottages were still about in the potatoe fields. ‘I maun gang to him at aince,’ Peggy kept muttering as she groped instinctively in the waning light for a shawl to fling over her head--not so much as a shelter from the bitter blast which had been scouring along the floor and causing her to spin by the warm hearth-side, as with a lingering sense of what was womanly and fitting, because it would not be wiselike in a lass to go abroad at such a season without a screen from inquisitive eyes. ‘He wouldna forbid me ony mair. He’s my man. Oh! Jamie, Jamie, if you’re felled outricht, and there is nocht left for me to do for you, but to streek you and dress you in your dead-claes, it is for your puir lassie’s--your wife’s hand, to steek your een and kame your hair for the last time. I dinna mind your leddy-mither now; I’m nearer to you than she is, and I’ll daur her to do her worst the nicht--as if the worst were not come already, gin my Jamie be felled dead! Wae’s me! wae’s me! And it was but this mornin’, and no a terrible lifetime syne, that he clasped and kissed me at parting.’

Peggy did not even notice to lift off the gridle on which cakes were toasting. She who had been reared in the most frugal habits was abandoning the good oaten bread which must ‘scouther’ unheeded. The room was full of the sharp, searching smell of scorched oatmeal, at which every mouse in the farthest recesses of its hole in the clay biggin’ was snuffing with relish as at the potent odour of toasted cheese.

Luckie was feebly protesting and whimpering over the waste, when Peggy unheeding stepped across the threshold and ran right against Balcairnie in the act of entering.

‘Balcairnie, is the tale true? Is he living or dead? For the love o’ Heaven, speak,’ gasped Peggy, clasping the friendly arm and making as if she would fall on her knees at the yeoman’s feet, treating him like the arbiter of fate.

‘Oh! Balcairnie, sir, will you stop her--she winna mind me--frae goin’ on a fule’s errand?’ implored Luckie from her bed, wiping her bleared eyes with a blue checked linen handkerchief; ‘and gin you will forgie me for the liberty, will you turn the cakes and tak’ them aff, or do something to hinder sic a wicket throwing awa’ o’ gude victuals and me no able to steer a finger.’

‘Canny, canny,’ remonstrated the doubly-assailed Balcairnie. ‘Yes, Peggy, he’s livin’ and life-like in spite of this mischanter, thank his Maker and yours and mine--no me. Oo, ay, gudewife, I’ll see to the cakes. Mony a time I had a hand--not always a helping hand--in your bakings--do you mind? When you were my puir mither’s douce lass and I was a mischievious deil o’ a laddie birslin’ peas among your bannocks.--Peggy, have I given you time to draw breath? If so, you maun come wi’ me this minute. I’m sent to fetch you: no by Drumsheugh alone, by his mither the Leddy: “Go and bring Peggy Hedderwick here,” were her words, and you maun haste ye to do her bidding.’

But Peggy hung back. The reaction had come. She was relieved from her depth of despair and extremity of fear for Drumsheugh’s life. Her old childish dread of the Lady and reluctance to encounter her reproaches and scorn revived in full force. ‘Oh, Balcairnie, I canna gang,’ she protested incoherently, twisting her fingers. ‘Does he want me? What has she sent for me to do to me?’

‘To gie you your paiks (whips),’ Balcairnie, who was somewhat of a humourist in his way, could not resist saying dryly, taking off the abject fright of poor Peggy. But the kind fellow relented the next moment. ‘If so, Drumsheugh and me had need to come in for muckle heavier skelps, as the Leddy is a just woman, who has a name for uprightness, and has ta’en pride in the fact all her days. Na, Peggy, dinna be a cawf,’ he admonished her with great friendliness though little ceremony. ‘You maunna stand in your ain licht. You must tak’ the wind when it blaws in your barn door. Forbye you maun obey your gude mither and your man, like a gude bairn. Drumsheugh cried for you as soon as he cam’ to himself, and vowed he but to see you richted, or it’s like his mither the Leddy micht not have minded your existence or mentioned your name. And he does want you, lass, for his breast has gotten a bit stave in from that ugly brute’s cloot; he’s lying groaning and peching yonder, though the doctor promises to put him richt in a wheen weeks or months.’

Thus urged and alarmed anew, Peggy prepared to go home to Drumsheugh a weeping, downcast bride with a troubled home-coming--altogether different from the happy woman making the triumphant, if late, entrance on her honours which she and her laird had confidently pictured to themselves.

Balcairnie would not suffer Peggy to tarry for any change of dress. He had spoken the truth and he was fain to hope the best, but he was by no means so sure as he tried to pretend of the laird’s ultimate recovery, or even of his long surviving the bad injury he had received. And when Peggy detected some gleam of this dire uncertainty in the mind of his friend where her husband’s fate was in question, she had no more heart to put on her best clothes and seek humbly to make as favourable an impression as could be hoped for, on the mind of the Lady.

Indeed, Mrs. Ramsay had often enough seen Peggy before, and till lately had been in the habit of speaking to her in a gracious condescending way, becoming in a laird’s mother, when the girl worked in the fields, or carried in her yarn and eggs to the market at Craigie. But that notice and these salutations had been bestowed on Peggy Hedderwick, a cotter lass. It was Peggy Ramsay, the Lady’s son’s wife by a lawful though summary marriage, who in other circumstances might have been tremblingly desirous to prepossess the dowager-lady in the younger woman’s favour.

As it was, Peggy could but take down from their respective ‘cleeks’ her ordinary duffle cloak and rustic straw bonnet as the articles of dress which came readily to her hand, and tie their strings in such desperate speed and confusion that they at once fell into ‘run knots,’ which must be cut or torn asunder before she could be freed from their encumbrance when she arrived at Drumsheugh.

‘God bless you, my lass, gin this be fare-you-weel,’ her mother’s quavering voice said wistfully, and Peggy minded so far as to turn quickly before quitting the room and bend over the prostrate figure with a half-choked reply, ‘Mither, Merrin will be in next door or I’m weel gane, gin you gie a chap she’ll look ben and see to you. If I dinna come back the nicht, I’ll send ower the first thing the morn, and I’ll never forget you, mither, only I can think o’ naething but him the nicht.’

Peggy had no other idea than that she would trudge on foot all the way through the cold, darkness and storm, too thankful to have Balcairnie’s escort to Drumsheugh. But he had made a more considerate arrangement, though his care for Peggy had not impelled him to so bold a measure as ordering out the Drumsheugh coach to fulfil the lady’s commission and for Peggy’s benefit. When it came to that, he had never dreamt of such a step. Peggy and the family coach--the chief symbol of the country gentry’s rank and state, were still far apart even in Balcairnie’s loyal eyes. If Peggy should ever arrive at ordering out the Drumsheugh coach, and driving in it at her pleasure, as another young Mrs. Ramsay might have done in the sense of an unquestionable right, it could only be after a considerable apprenticeship still to sufferance and dependence on the part of the low-born wife.

Balcairnie had merely brought his horse, with a pillion fastened to the saddle. There was no ‘louping-on-stane’ at the cot-house door. Nobody except the laird had been in the habit of mounting and dismounting there, any more than of driving up in a coach with horses taken from the plough. But the example of Katherine Janfarie’s lover, though it had not yet been sung in more than the rough border ballad, could very well be followed in one respect--

He’s mounted her hie behind himsel’,
At her kinsmen speer’d nae leave.

Balcairnie was far too true, generous, and reverent, with too well-balanced a mind in his yeoman estate, to find a further analogy in the situation. But it was on the cards that he should have his thoughts, as he rode on, stooping forward to see and guide his horse in the gathering night and tempest on the rough road, with the feeble woman’s arms clinging to him. For Peggy became forced, in order to keep her seat, to cling tenaciously to the other rider, and let her drooping head rest on his friendly shoulder, as she shook and quivered with the sobs into which she broke out now and then in her distraction and dismay, and as she was further flung here and there by the hard trot over the stones and through the holes, in a painful, perilous mode of locomotion to which she had been totally unaccustomed. Did he ask himself was it thus that Peggy would have held by him and depended on him utterly, had that vision which he was supposed to have entertained for a fleeting moment come to pass long ago--had she been for more than a year now the goodwife of Balcairnie, and had he been taking her home as a common event from kirk, or market, or friendly visit in scenes where she had already established her claim to be treated like the best of the company? Faithful as he was to the laird no less than to Peggy, Balcairnie knew that in such a case it would have been infinitely better for Peggy, whatever it might have been for himself.

Other thoughts and associations thronged thickly on the young couple as they rode on in their excitement and suspense. The first snow of the season began to fall blindingly and blow strongly in their bent faces, before they passed between the two battered pillars originally crowned with stone balls, one of which had fallen down and been suffered to lie, like a decapitated head, at the side of the entrance to the avenue. By some means the stone ball had become split in two and could not be replaced on its site. In this condition the two halves always reminded Balcairnie, who was tolerably familiar with Scotch history, though it was the only history he had ever read, of that unlucky De Bohun, Earl of Essex, whose head good King Robert clove with his battle-axe, just to give the blustering champion of England his due, and as an earnest of the feats the warlike monarch was to perform that day on the field of Bannockburn.

Balcairnie sought to cheer Peggy by claiming the snow as a good omen; she was ‘ganging a white gate,’ which, as everybody knew, boded high prosperity to a bride. But, in spite of themselves, another and very different picture arose in their minds. It was that which in song and legend has formed the burden of many a local tragedy. The scene is familiar to all when the betrayed and ruined woman wanders in her despair to her cruel lover’s door, while the ‘whuddering blast’ pierces her to the marrow, and the deadly white and chill snow threatens to prove her winding-sheet. She knocks, and implores piteously in vain for admission and shelter. ‘Oh, ope, Lord Gregory, ope the door!’ cries the sobbing, wailing voice, fast sinking into everlasting silence.

Balcairnie and Peggy were now riding down the avenue of firs, sombre in the height of summer, with their black canopies blacker than ever under their powdering of white, while the bare stems were ‘swirled’ by the wind in the wildest, dreariest manner. The ruin of the old tower was faintly visible. Shaken as it was, with its loose stones rattling in the hurlyburly, it seemed as if it might fall and crush Peggy in punishment of her heinous sin against the ancient dignity of Drumsheugh, and her audacious intrusion within its precincts.

The front of the house was lit up with lights stationary in ordinarily obscured windows, or flitting up and down staircases, showing that something out of the common had happened, and that the whole household was roused and restless.

At the moment when the clatter of Balcairnie’s horse’s hoofs might be heard, the hall-door was suddenly thrown open, showing what, by contrast with the darkness without, looked a blaze of light within. A group of servants was in the glare, but still more prominently in front of them stood the Lady in her black mode gown, tippet, and mittens, with her lace lappets fluttering in the night-wind as they framed a high-nosed, high-browed face--the face of a born ruler.