SAINT MUNGO’S CITY

A Novel

By SARAH TYTLER

AUTHOR OF ‘THE BRIDE’S PASS,’ ‘WHAT SHE CAME THROUGH,’ ‘BEAUTY AND THE BEAST,’ ETC.

colophon

IN THREE VOLUMES
VOL. II.

London

CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1884

[All rights reserved]

CONTENTS OF VOL. II.

CHAPTER PAGE

XIII. THE COMMON ENEMY 1

XIV. ATHOLE MURRAY COMES TO THE RESCUE 28

XV. YOUNG TAM’S PARTNERSHIP--GAY DOINGS 42

XVI. THE DINNER-PARTY 65

XVII. THE COMMON TEMPTATION, WITH ITS USUAL ACCOMPANIMENT 97

XVIII. DR. PETER AND ATHOLE MURRAY MAKE THEIR STAND 117

XIX. SIR HUGO WILLOUGHBY ENTERS THE
LISTS, AND IS CAPTIVATED BY THE
MERCHANT PRINCES 139

XX. ‘A YOUNG THING JUST COME FRAE HER MAMMY’ 160

XXI. SIR HUGO DRAWN BY ‘LE GRAND SIMPLE’ 200

XXII. RORY OF THE SHELTIES COME ALIVE AGAIN 219

XXIII. THE CONTENTS OF THE KNAPSACK 235

XXIV. THE DEATH OF FENTON OF STRATHDIVIE 255

XXV. STRATHDIVIE 282

XXVI. THE READING OF THE WILL--JEAN MACKINNON’S TOCHER 300

SAINT MUNGO’S CITY.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE COMMON ENEMY.

That winter there was one of the most terrible outbreaks of typhoid fever, which had stricken Rory of the Shelties, ever known in St. Mungo’s City. The sickness extended to the suburbs, and sent long arms into the country, reaching to the Aytoun Water, which was so valuable an auxiliary of Drysdale Haugh, creeping up and down its banks in foul malaria, which prostrated alike strong men and weak women, robbed families of their breadwinners, or slew the strapping lads and blooming lasses who were the hope and pride of elderly fathers and mothers.

There was no doubt the first signs of the plague had made their appearance after the excesses and exposure of the Fair week. There had been no spell of short hours and starvation wages to induce such a low state of body and mind as to form a fit foundation for the mischief. But whatever its origin, it soon extended far beyond the defaulters whose deeds had wrought their doom. The fever, after a certain course, appeared to strike impartially the sober, industrious workman, and the idle, dissipated hanger-on for a day’s ‘turn’ to relieve his most pressing wants. The evil rose in the scale of society, and fell upon the well-to-do, scattering sickness and distress among the rich, while naturally its vantage-ground was the quarters of the poor. It clove to them as to its fitting haunts, and, like a cowardly assailant, did deadliest injury where there was least power of resistance.

It was a busy time for Dr. Peter and Athole Murray, who acted from the first as her father’s indefatigable assistant, feeling no fear to go on the call of duty where he went with his life in his hand, day and night.

Auld Tam took the greatest interest in the nature of the outbreak, and showed not the slightest shrinking from a contact with which, indeed, he had been familiar in his early days. It was a mortification to him to discover that his best cottages were not spared; but he fell back on the comfort that there the remedies were applied with the least difficulty and the greatest average of success.

But the tug of war came when the epidemic raged so fiercely in the worst Glasgow slums that it roused an apathetic public. Tam Drysdale was not the man to stand and gape and groan or merely moralize or sermonize over the calamity, far less was he the heartless egotist who would employ his resources to flee from the foe, leaving a helpless multitude in its clutches. He was ready to fight it hand to hand, as he had fought all the early obstacles in his career. He was not only foremost in appointing and attending meetings of men in high enough places to cope with sanitary mischief; but when a house-to-house visitation was started, he, who might have pleaded that his interests were at Drysdale Haugh, was one of the first to put down his name as a visitor in the darkest places of the city. His strong firm step was the readiest to enter the infected dwellings, where there was not a breath of air that was not heavy with poison. He was known to pull off his coat, on an emergency, and carry a patient--a man mad with delirium, whom it would have required two ordinary men to master--on his back from one room to another; and where he found none save exhausted, half-distracted women to watch the sick, he sometimes sent the watchers to bed, and took their vigil till some other good Samaritan relieved him in turn.

Every morning the two Eppies--not to be deceived, knowing too well the expeditions on which auld Tam was bent--clung to him at parting with prayers and tears. He put the woman and the girl gently from him, and went his way; and on his return, for the first time in his life, he would not permit them to hang about him till he had passed through such processes of bathing and changing his clothes as should ensure his wife and daughter’s safety. His obduracy would have half-broken their hearts if the stayers at home had not been encouraged to be as busy as bees in Tam’s absence, concocting such stores of jellies and soups, and manufacturing such loads of sick-room clothes, as not the most accomplished cook and housekeeper in the world could have achieved single-handed--even if she had condescended to employ her talents day after day--not for the dining-room or the linen-presses at Drysdale Hall, but for afflicted sections of the Gallowgate and the Sautmarket.

The strait was so great that everybody with time and means and a heart to feel was called into requisition. Neither did Claribel Drysdale refuse to obey the call, but she worked in the ranks of Lady Semple, to whom she was an available auxiliary, while the two Eppies were sufficient for themselves at home.

The first thing that staggered Tam Drysdale was stumbling on his son Tam engaged in the same work as himself. The father’s hale colour sensibly paled, and a troubled look came into his eyes.

‘What are you seeking here, Tam?’ he asked almost roughly. ‘This is not a place for a student fellow like you. You are not used to the ways of the poor folk; you’ll only add to the trouble if you come to grief; you can do no possible good. Go home to your books, but take care you do not come near your mother and sisters in that coat and these breeks.’

Young Tam looked his father more fully in the face than he had done for some time, with more of an answering challenge in the brown eyes which were so like his mother’s in tint, and yet had his father’s determined glance. There was no sullenness in Tam’s face at this moment--rather a sense of grim amusement and something that might have stood for fellow-feeling.

‘I’m not such a mere bookworm as you think me, sir. How should I not know the ways of the working people, among whom I have dwelt all my life? I’ll not come to grief any more than you will. What are you seeking here, may I ask, father?’

‘Don’t talk nonsense, Tam,’ said his father testily; ‘you know it is my place, as the maister of a public work, to see into the condition of the people, both here and at Drysdale Haugh, on an occasion like the present. Forbye, I am familiar with the situation. I mind the last bad outbreak of the fivver. It was when I was in my ‘prenticeship and staying with my uncle Geordie. There were five in the hoose laid down with it. My cousin Nancy deed, poor lass! and there was nobody to look after Sandy during the night, and keep him from louping over the windy, but me. I had a regular training to such scenes.’

Young Tam hesitated for a moment.

‘I have not quite understood hitherto what duties a master’s position is supposed to include,’ he said at last, a little stiffly; ‘but if I am ever to undertake them, I should say my training had better begin.’

Auld Tam’s whole aspect brightened indescribably.

‘Plenty of time for that,’ he said gruffly, but heartily, ‘and your experience should come by degrees, Tam, not in a dunt [sudden blow], as it comes to working lads bred hardily as I was, and called to face the best and the worst all round from the beginning. It is not easy, but it is in the day’s work--part of their lives. Besides, they say,’ added Tam hastily, ‘the fivver is more catching for the young than for the auld.’

‘You’re not old,’ said young Tam hastily, with a quick sharp denial that sent a glow through his progenitor’s veins. ‘You are hardly middle-aged. People should call stages of existence by their right names.’

‘Anyway, I’m auld Tam when you are to the fore,’ said his father, much as he would have spoken to his daughter Eppie, ‘and it is richt the young should be spared to take the place of the auld.’

‘It is nothing of the kind,’ answered young Tam doggedly. ‘Take your place! very likely. I wonder which would be most missed. You know very well, father, you could ill be spared. You ought not to run risks like these, while it does not matter for a fellow like me.’

‘Lad, you are tempting the Almichty!’ cried Tam almost fiercely; ‘are you so left to yoursel’ as to think you could well be spared by your mither--and me?’ he ended with a gulp of the words, and a grip as of iron of young Tam’s shoulder. ‘But it is all nonsense!’ he said, putting force upon himself the next moment. ‘We’ve got a trick of disagreeing; that is what it is.’

‘And I am afraid there is little prospect of our doing anything else, if the alternative is my keeping out of Glasgow, and your going on as you have been doing for the last ten days,’ retorted young Tam, defying his father openly.

And auld Tam gave in with the moisture in his eyes, and his hand still on his son’s shoulder.

‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘have it your own way, laddie; you’ve always been as kittle [ticklish] to deal with as a woman, Tam--far worse than your sisters. But if we sail in the same boat for once, it will be some sma’ comfort.’

The sailing in the same boat through a crisis of life and death meant from this moment a certain alteration of tone between father and son--a certain fraternization--temporary, and only on one point as yet, but never entirely lost sight of in their subsequent differences, when young Tam was born to object, and auld Tam hated to be contradicted. For one thing, they saw a good deal of each other during the next week or two--more than they had seen since young Tam was a schoolboy. For another, it was understood between them that there was a probability of auld Tam’s gaining the desire of his heart, by his son’s becoming, under whatever variety of opinion, his father’s partner and successor.

Some of the fever cases in Glasgow were of the most virulent kind. Occasionally they assumed the form of the worst sewer-poisoning, from which there was hardly a chance of escape. The inspector of nuisances had neglected his duty. A man and wife--a helpless, handless, poverty-stricken, though honest and sober couple--had been suffered to live, with a large family, in a house which was not fit for a pigsty. First one child sickened, and then another, and died in the briefest interval of time, so that four little bodies were carried away in one hearse, and the expense even of a combined funeral threatened to add starvation to the other pangs of the living. The skin of the last child attacked took green and livid hues before the breath went out of his body.

Auld Tam bent his brows sternly, and swore it was social murder. He half conceived the idea, if he lived and continued to prosper, of doing something more than found a family, and bring Drysdale Haugh to perfection--something to atone for the neglect by the better endowed and better informed of the less qualified and more ignorant--something in which young Tam might be with him heart and soul, till Glasgow should speak of the father and son, as, indeed, they were speaking of them at this moment, though auld Tam paid no heed to it.

The fever, as it raged, was turning up in the more respectable quarters, in the old squares and streets, where the houses were good and spacious, but the drains had been little thought of, and the sun seldom shone.

Young Tam Drysdale saw his father at the office one afternoon, and remarked with consternation that he looked as if he had received a shock to his whole system--at the same time he was deliberately delaying the ordinary hour of his return to Drysdale Hall. He pooh-poohed the idea of anything wrong with him physically, or of rest being desirable, at the very moment that he was moving about in a perturbed manner, showing signs of trouble and perplexity in every line of his usually strong, sagacious face.

‘Shut the door, Tam; I do not want those fellies out there to catch a sough [murmur] of what I have got to say. Yes, I have come across something that has grieved me. Grieved is not the word. Gude Lord! it is enough to shake a man’s faith in the established order of things. What would your mither think? Her that was wont to stand in fear and trembling before such gentlefolks. But, there, she said, only the other day, that it was a mystery we should be so weel aff in the world’s gudes, and others as gude--maybe a hantle better (she’s a humble lass, your mither)--brought to want what they had been bred to from their cradles. Well, well, it comes to this, I had speech with one of the doctors, and he mentioned there were cases of fever in St. Mungo’s Square.’

‘So I heard,’ said young Tam.

‘One of them was an auld Miss Mackinnon, and as I’m a living man, Tam, he added that he did not believe the leddies had enough to eat, though they put the best face on it to him; and it was a delicate matter to propose to get parish or any other relief for them. The Lord preserve us! the auld Mackinnons--Gavin Mackinnon’s aunties, come of the Virginian Mackinnons--to be in want of food, very likely of clothing! Is the end of the world come upon us? I mind of them being about Drysdale Hall when their nephew had it--no very weel-faured [handsome], but gallant, portly, gabby [talkative] leddies, as they had a gude title to be, since they were real edicate leddies for generations back--none of your upstarts that do not know their finger from their thoomb, while they wear silks and velvets. I mind ane of them cracked [talked] like a pen-gun--on things she did not ken muckle about, I must confess, but she had the gift of conversation for a’ that; and another--an aulder woman than mother is now--played the pianny better than Clary can do, at a dance and supper that Mackinnon gave the men before trips down the water were the order of the day; and now to say that the auld leddies have come to want--Tam, it’s seeckening!’

Young Tam had not his father’s keen susceptibilities where real ladies and gentlemen were concerned. His mind went off on another tack.

‘They must be relations of Mackinnon who stays so often at Semple Barns. Why does he not look after his people? I suppose you would call him a real gentleman?’ suggested Tam, somewhat sardonically.

‘It is a burning shame to him!’ auld Tam swore stoutly, ‘though a young offisher has not much to spare. Maybe the lad does help them, and they are ill managers, as these gentry often are. But that is neither here nor there. Something must be done, I could not sleep in my bed with such a burden on my mind; and if your mither were to hear of it, she would not break bread for the next twal’ hours. I want you to come along and call with me, Tam. We can pass ourselves off as sent on an inspection among great and small throughout the town. The leddies cannot be going much about to hear the story contradicted. We can see and judge for ourselves. And it may be possible to put in a word about the superiority of country provisions, and whether the Miss Mackinnons would do me the honour to accept a specimen of meat and dairy produce and vegetables and fruit from Drysdale Hall. I think it might be managed in that way, and the favour could be repeated. I have been turning over in my mind whether I could not get up an auld debt to Gauvin Mackinnon, but sic a lee would stick in my throat; then the young lad Mackinnon might interfere, and detection would be awkward.’

‘Upon my word, father, I never knew you were so accomplished a deceiver,’ said young Tam, grave as he was, unable to keep from laughter. ‘I never thought to pay visits with you under false pretences.’

‘Do not gibe, Tam,’ said his father, as solemnly as he would have rebuked a jest at a death-bed. ‘This is not a subject for gibing. You heard what the doctor said--it is a most delicate matter to ask leddies to take anything save a parcel of idle compliments from you. If stratagems are ever allowable, it must be here.’

Indeed, death was very near, in more shapes than one, to the old stripped house in St. Mungo’s Square. It was Miss Bethia, the youngest and the most able-bodied sister who had been smitten, and when she was ‘sooming [swimming] for her life,’ as Miss Janet admitted brokenly, the chief source of livelihood for the other sisters was withdrawn from them. The moment the disease had declared itself, Miss Janet had written to her grand-nephew, forbidding him to come near the house on account of the infection. He broke through the prohibition, but he never got beyond the front-door, where Miss Janet consented to parley with him, solely on condition that he held his handkerchief to his mouth and did not cross the door-step.

Such aid as the Lieutenant sent consisted of trifling delicacies, while, alas! there was dismal lack of the commonest necessaries.

While Miss Bethia was at the worst, it seemed that her sisters needed little more food than sufficed for the sick-room. They lived upon their anxiety--hope and fear acted as stimulants to them. It was when the patient had got the turn, and required more nourishment than milk and beef-tea, that the exhausted state of Miss Janet and Miss Mackinnon began to show itself plainly. But as people can grow accustomed to abstinence up to a certain point, and cease to feel the cravings of appetite, after they have failed by degrees to be appeased in anything save the most partial and perfunctory manner, so the feeble, shaky, but still dauntless scarecrow, Miss Janet, preserved an attitude of heroic stoicism throughout her interview with the two Drysdales.

Miss Janet had two motives to nerve her to endure to the end. She had never quite forgiven Tam Drysdale for having succeeded her late nephew at Drysdale Haugh; therefore he was the last man in Glasgow to whom she would have consented to be beholden in the direst extremity. It made no difference that the grudge was groundless and utterly unreasonable. That was one link in the argument; another, and still stronger, turned on the fact that if she ever consented to waive her displeasure and accept the overtures of the Drysdales, it must be, as before, on the plea of a marriage, and she was not going to spoil Eneas’s chances by betraying the poverty of the land in St. Mungo’s Square. No; there were still some potatoes and oatmeal in the larder, and Miss Janet felt as independent as Andrew Marvel with his mutton-bone.

Miss Bethia might have behaved differently, when she lay on her bed, weakly crying, with the stirrings of new life in her, and the promptings of a child’s fresh hunger, never satisfied; but she would have been the first to feel ashamed of her infirmity when strength was restored to her.

Tam Drysdale was nearer to breaking down in his manliness than he had been in the whole course of his life, when he sat in the bare wreck of a room, without a fire, on the chill autumn day, waiting for the appearance of one of the ladies. He kept muttering, half under his breath, ‘Gude Lord, Tam!’ and, ‘Have the leddies come to this?’ He ‘thought shame’ when he recalled the prized grandeur and substantial comforts and luxuries of Drysdale Hall. He rubbed his forehead, and screwed up his courage for the carrying out of his mission.

When Miss Janet entered, Tam’s heart was wrung anew. He would never have known his old acquaintance--the gallant, portly lady of the past--in the fallen away, haggard woman in the old-fashioned garments, that looked so much too wide, they appeared to flap about the big-boned figure; only the remembered ‘gabbiness’ of the lady remained as a present trait. For if Miss Janet did not receive her late nephew’s former servant with ‘becks and bows and wreathed smiles,’ she treated him and his son with a kind of brow-beating condescension. She made her explanations with wonderfully little cutting short of her long tongue, considering the small amount of fuel in the form of nourishment it and the rest of her bodily powers had to work upon. But the voice was at once weaker and shriller in what timbre it possessed, and a little faltering occasionally, while a tremulous movement passed from time to time over the hard-favoured features; and the worn hands, which she had not been sufficiently mistress of herself to encase in gloves, shook beyond the power of control as they lay in her lap.

Miss Janet said she and her elder sister had been sitting in poor Betheye’s room, and had dispensed with a fire elsewhere. Betheye was doing very well now. Oh yes! she had every advantage--a good doctor, and her grand-nephew the Lieutenant was constantly sending fruit, and what not. They--the Miss Mackinnons--felt for the poor sufferers from the sickness. It was quite right a fund should be raised for them. She would look about, when she had time, and see if she could find any odds and ends that might be useful. She spoke as if she and hers were as far removed as the Drysdales themselves from the deprivations and dependence of poverty.

Young Tam had never seen his father so deferential as to this ‘genteel, half-crazy object of charity,’ the younger man was guilty of calling poor Miss Janet. It was with absolute trepidation and a doubly-respectful ‘Miss Mackinnon, mem,’ that auld Tam delivered the sentence he had laboriously composed of the excellent unadulterated character of all articles of food in the country, and the comfort to be derived from availing one’s self of them in an unhealthy season. This was the prelude to a petition that Miss Janet would permit him to send her ‘a basket from Drysdale Haugh which might remind her of “auld lang syne.”’

Perhaps the reference was not very happy; anyhow, Miss Janet gave a quavering laugh, and told him she was greatly obliged, but he must not trouble himself. The town and the country were brought so near now, they were equally well supplied with victuals of every description; she and her sisters had all they could wish. She did not think even the Strathdivie curds and cream, new-laid eggs, and stubble chickens could taste better than what could be found in Buchanan Street. She remembered hearing that her grandfather would always have fowls from Strathdivie when he wanted cockie-leekie or hen-broth, but farm troke [goods] were rife everywhere now. She would offer the gentlemen wine (there was only a thimbleful in Miss Bethia’s room), but she understood from her grand-nephew that it was not the fashion now to taste anything after luncheon; so Miss Janet, with flying colours, dismissed the intruders. Neither father nor son was in the least degree deceived, and young Tam, at this stage, felt as little inclined to gibe as his father.

‘The puir leddy is reduced to skin and bane,’ said auld Tam, with a groan. ‘I do not believe she has had butcher meat, or any other support than a bit bread and a blash [watery mixture] of tea, for a month. If we do not get the better of her quickly, she’ll be past the reach of mortal man. And there are three of them--one just out of the fivver--in the same plight. Gude Lord! something must be done. Shall we drive to the Barracks and break the story to that careless puppy of an offisher? It is for him to interfere, and not suffer his aunties, who brought him up, to perish, though he has to force meat and drink down their craigs [throats].’

Certainly, if no other resource could be hit upon, Eneas Mackinnon must be appealed to, however painful the appeal to both parties.

But young Tam had another idea which might obviate the disagreeable step, for the present at least.

‘The Mackinnons and Murrays were old acquaintances when Gavin Mackinnon and Dr. Peter’s father were partners. Send in Dr. Peter to see the ladies, as a piece of attention from an old friend. That will save them the expense of further medical attendance, if it does nothing else, and he will make his observation and deliver his report.’

Auld Tam was only too thankful to take his son’s advice, and secure another coadjutor in the ticklish business.

CHAPTER XIV.

ATHOLE MURRAY COMES TO THE RESCUE.

Dr. Peter, in the middle of his work, responded readily to the call. It proved that he had not only known the Mackinnons in his youth; he had always kept up some intercourse with them, and Athole had been in the habit of calling in St. Mungo’s Square occasionally. He looked grave and resolute when he saw Tarn Drysdale by appointment afterwards. Yes, the poor old ladies were at the wall, sure enough; and even viewing the matter in a professional light alone, something must be done immediately, or there would be more than one death to answer for. But he had his proposal ready. Athole must take up her abode in St. Mungo’s Square for a week or two, till Miss Bethia was able to be removed for change of air to Barley Riggs. Only a woman could cope with the circumstances where women were concerned, and he had paved the way for his daughter’s arrival. He had told Miss Janet that he wanted a little change for Athole, asked if she--Miss Janet--would take in the girl for a while, and hinted at a board. The old lady, with her instincts of hospitality, her necessities, and her pride, had been too bewildered to make any decided opposition. Now he would not stand on further ceremony; he would act as if he took Miss Janet’s and her sister’s consent for granted, despatch Athole the next morning, and when she was once in the house, it would be hard for the Miss Mackinnons to turn her out. Athole would bring the sinews of war, and would propose to undertake the housekeeping on the plea of relieving the sister-nurses, who were too weak and worn out to make any effectual resistance.

Auld Tam as he listened, stared fixedly at Dr. Peter.

‘But, man, she’s your dochter, your last-hame lassie, the very apple of your eye,’ he remonstrated, with wonder and rising vehemence. ‘I ken what Tam and little Eppie and Clary are to me, and I have their mither--that I sometimes say is worth them all--while you have only this lassie left at hame; and you are sending her where the fever has just been, and where a great burden of responsibility, work, and fatigue will fall upon her young shoulders.’

‘I know,’ said Dr. Peter, bowing his head as if sealing a bargain. ‘But did you never think, Tam, that the way to keep a thing you prized was to give it freely in the name of God and your neighbour? I never would shut Athole out of the way of the fever, when she could be of use. She had no fear, and I believed I could take care that she ran little more risk than if she had stayed locked up in the parlour at Barley Riggs. I was right, and you’ll see I’ll be right again. You may trust me to take care of Athie,’ he ended, with a smile.

‘But what if you should be mistaken, Peter?’ Tam felt bound to press the point. ‘If an accident were to happen, if you were to lose your lassie by her foolhardy exposure?’

‘There is no foolhardiness, and there is very little exposure,’ maintained Dr. Peter unflinchingly; ‘not more than happens to every doctor and nurse--indeed less, for I shall be always in the background, ready to step in at the first note of warning. And if it were to come to the worst, Tam,’ he said slowly, with a peculiar light coming into his eyes, ‘what then? It would be the will of God. It is given to every man and woman once to die; nothing--not all the love and care in the world--can prevent the execution of that sentence. And can death come better to any man or woman than in the way of duty? I know what is in your mind--it is not of the one to be taken, but of the one left behind, you are thinking. Well, what is to come of somebody’s journey might be shorter, as the road would be darker--that is all--not so very much when the day is far spent and its work three-fourths done.’

‘Peter Murray, I honour you with all my heart,’ said auld Tam warmly; ‘but I could not do it, man--I could--not--do it. It is with no will of mine that young Tam is in the thick of this fray; but he’s man-grown, with a mind of his own. I’ll not say that it has been all loss that I’ve seen a bit of the lad’s mind lately, and we’ve focht together against the fivver--young Tam and me; only the price might have been ower heavy, God help me! and I could not have sent him into the battle, or even given my consent to his entering the ranks, if he had condescended to ask it. Na, not though it is the first time since I was a wean that I’ve had a glimmering that the auld Bible story of Aubraham’s offering up his son, his only son Isaac, is more than an allegory or a prophecy, and holds a lesson for men and faithers,’

Auld Tam continued sorely exercised in his mind about the Miss Mackinnons, with Dr. Peter’s lassie Athole in the midst of them. To him she was a slip of a young lady whom he knew best as a clever pattern-designer, a bit gentlewoman, with her inalienable rights as such, though neither bonnie nor braw, only as bright as a mavis thrush, as quick as a needle, the charm of whose womanly blitheness and lively wit Tam himself had felt, while he was well aware she was the light of Barley Riggs, the delight of her father’s heart. In spite of what Dr. Peter had said, was this a creature to put in the breach, to send to share the privations she was seeking to lighten, and to brave the hardly overcome fever?

Tam was so troubled in his mind that he forgot to watch the effect of the news on his son. He neither saw how young Tam set his teeth, nor how he reared his head, and his loss of colour was succeeded by a warm glow.

Sure enough, if any harm happened to Athole Murray, it might be laid at the door of the two Tam Drysdales. Who was it that had summoned her father on the scene, and offered a temptation to Dr. Peter’s Quixotic philanthropy?

Both auld and young Tam took it upon them to go as far as Eneas Mackinnon had gone--indeed, to go farther, to enter the hall of the house in St. Mungo’s Square, and solicit speech with Miss Murray, to hear how her father’s scheme was prospering.

The first time that Athole came down to the two men, who were together, as she spoke to them the tears ran down her cheeks without her knowing it, and she was half laughing, half crying, though she was not naturally hysterical.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I could not have imagined anything like it. If I had guessed a hundredth part of it, I must have got the better of Miss Janet’s scruples long ago, though I had let meat and drink down the chimney, as the barber and his wife disposed of the body of the Caliph’s favourite in the “Arabian Nights;” I would have come after it was dark, rung the bell, pushed in the basket, and run away. Maybe Miss Janet would have thought the angels or Elijah’s ravens had come to her aid. If the Miss Mackinnons had advertised for the owner of that basket they would have been clever if they had found her. Now, we are all right, thank you--at least, we are fast getting right. I open the door, for of course I am the youngest, and the stairs try me least, and I take in all the parcels. If there is anything very suspicious, even for my extensive requirements, I carry it to my room, and Miss Janet is too much of a lady to meddle with what I do there. My father fills the pockets of his overcoat, and has always to speak to me, in private. I can’t tell if Miss Janet suspects--I think she must--but her endurance had been stretched to the last thread, and now she submits and ignores my manœuvres. She is so tired that when she has once given in she can’t rally her forces for some time. Indeed, my father feared she would either have a bad illness or sink from sheer exhaustion for the first ten days after I came. Oh yes, she’s a great deal better, and Miss Mackinnon is pretty well--I am sure Miss Janet must have managed to give her the larger share of the little that was going--and Miss Bethia is progressing favourably. She is by far the most manageable. She and I have quite little feasts in her room.’

‘I am most happy to hear it,’ said auld Tam, with enthusiasm.

‘But, oh! the gaunt emptiness, the gnawing want, the fainting hopelessness that must have been in this house!’ cried Athole passionately. ‘The mice had deserted it months before, Miss Bethia told me. But Miss Janet and I never speak of it. We winked at it even when I was labouring, like a well-disposed brownie, to fill the cupboards as if they had never been bare, without anybody witnessing the performance, and to make a great display of my accomplishments in cooking--the fruits of my last lessons at the cooking school. But I never saw anything at all like what I beheld first, in the most miserable cottage at Drysdale Haugh.’

‘I sincerely trust you have not suffered yourself, Miss Murray, mem, from your great pity and kindness,’ said auld Tam, standing with his hat in his hand before her.

‘I!’ she cried incredulously; ‘how should I suffer? It was a bit of an adventure for me, and I had “a piece in my pocket” all the time. You know, Mr. Drysdale, the task was to get older people, more in need of it, to halve my piece with me.’

Athole had recovered her composure by the time the next visit of inquiry was made, and her accounts grew always cheerier and cheerier, till she began to laugh quite naturally at young Tam coming alone to ask for the three Miss Mackinnons, and to affront him by making game of his odd contributions to the larder in St. Mungo’s Square, on the whole rather more unsuitable than the Lieutenant’s gifts to his aunts. ‘It is not the same as a picnic, Mr. Tom,’ she was at the trouble of explaining to him.

At last she nearly quarrelled with him by flatly refusing to take it upon her to have anything to do with scalloped oysters and preserved ginger. The Miss Mackinnons were pretty sure to disapprove of both them and their donor, and she must also decline wasting another fraction of her valuable time in telling him that Miss Bethia’s convalescence was an established fact, and that there was nothing the matter with any other person in the house, while it was too absurd that he should constitute himself a purveyor for their wants. He had better go and shop with his sisters. Oh! she did not despise shopping--she was quite fond of it, when she had plenty of time and money, and nothing better to do. If he did not attend the Nasmyths’ ball--the first ball of the season--the more fool he; the loss would be his, for she could not flatter him that one gentleman would be missed, and balls were excellent things to those who were not above dancing and making themselves agreeable and useful.

‘That is all she thinks me fit for,’ he told himself in a rage; ‘she regards me as a perfect humbug. When she is so grossly unfair I wonder I trouble myself what she thinks: though there is nobody like her that I know, nobody so good to everybody except me, so brave and bright--but I will let her alone in future.’

Miss Bethia was not hard to persuade to try a change of air at Barley Riggs, and her sisters were induced to accompany her. During their absence as much of the old furniture of the house in St. Mungo’s Square as could be hunted up was restored to it, without a word said on either side, until its absence appeared to have been part of an uncomfortable dream.

The next step was to make Miss Janet let her name, and the names of her sisters, be put, in strictest privacy, on the list of impoverished better-class families helped by a certain fund. She was led to do so by being shown the signature of her grandfather among those of the early subscribers to the fund, and by the facts being impressed upon her that she was only taking back what he had given. Miss Bethia was, as Athole Murray had found, by far the most pliable of the sisters, and she lent herself half willingly, half with fear and trembling for what Miss Janet would say if she ever found out the unbecoming traffic, to sundry wiles and devices of Athole’s, as the instrument appointed by her father and Tam Drysdale for lending the Miss Mackinnons substantial assistance. At the same time Miss Bethia had never received so many or such well-paid orders for work; altogether, there was hope of the Miss Mackinnons keeping soul and body together till a share of Strathdivie fell to their lot.

CHAPTER XV.

YOUNG TAM’S PARTNERSHIP--GAY DOINGS.

In the course of the winter the terms of partnership were settled and signed between young Tam and his father, to the immense private satisfaction of the latter, and the innocent jubilation of Mrs. Drysdale. The word ‘Son’ was added to the halting inscription on the office door. Young Tam began not only to relinquish the college lectures and learned societies to which he had been addicted, in order to stick to the business he had entered upon--he insisted on going back to the beginning and passing through all the preparatory drudgery from which he had till now stood aloof. He wanted to acquire a thorough acquaintance with every stage and department of the business of which he had elected to be one of the masters.

Auld Tam’s judgment went with his son’s decision. He was in his heart pleased with young Tam, and proud of him for his resolution. The senior partner rejoiced to see the junior in an office coat, or even in a dyer’s suit, more than he had ever magnified him in a dress-coat among his peers; yet the father would have willingly spared the son any ordeal that could well have been avoided. He would have treated young Tam’s early reluctance to become a dyer and calico-printer, now that it was overcome, with the greatest delicacy, dealing gently with the deficiencies which were likely to be its fruit. Auld Tam dreaded the young man’s becoming soured at the outset, and turned beyond recall, in his heart, against the business, though his father had enough confidence in him to feel sure that he would keep his word and the terms of the partnership. He would be nominally ‘son’ in a business sense, though he had lost all save a pocket interest in the matter, and though he ended by being the veriest of sleeping partners raised up to serve as a tool for rogues.

But young Tam doggedly declined to suffer himself to be spared. He was one of the few people who, in the course of every fault and blunder they commit, when punishment is going, choose to punish themselves first and most, and derive a grisly solace from such atonement as can be afforded by the hard lines the culprits compel themselves to endure. But it is not a pleasant process to go against the grain, and swallow huge mouthfuls of irksome details in a cause that is apt to look like nothing better than mercenary enterprise. The worst does not turn to the best, to the brave, at once.

There are many things to be taken into consideration. There is a natural reaction from the exalted mood in which a man gives up his will and makes what appears to him a signal sacrifice, which includes the subsequent depression, mortification, and irritation with which he finds he has not counted all the cost, and is hardly equal to the payment of the pound of flesh. Hitches are certain to occur in late concessions. Among the hitches are the lurking jealousy and latent malice of subordinates who have been disappointed in little schemes of their own, and do not want a new master.

In addition, young Tam Drysdale’s temper was not of the best; and although he was perfectly sincere in what he was about, he did not accomplish his transformation into a man of business altogether gracefully or graciously. It was far from being uninterruptedly smooth water in the Glasgow office, and at the Drysdale Haugh vats and bleaching-greens in those days; yet auld Tam was wonderfully forbearing, and young Tam, having once given in his adherence to his natural destination, practically kicked against it no more.

There was a considerable amount of gaiety this year, as there always was in winter among the young people of the Drysdale set, notably among Clary’s peculiar allies. Dick Semple was much at home, and his friend Eneas Mackinnon was frequently with him. Lady Semple had a couple of young ladies, English cousins, paying her a visit, whom she turned over as much as possible to Clary Drysdale, because her ladyship was a busy woman, and because she honestly believed there was a free-masonry between young people which rendered them the best company for each other. Yet there was nothing more conspicuous about Lady Semple--that is to the members of the mercantile class on whom she bestowed her countenance--than the perennial youthfulness of her character. It was not juvenility of dress and make up, for she happened to be a woman who cared little for such things. She said it was impossible for her to compete with the Glasgow ladies. She never failed to call the most dubious specimens on her visiting list ‘ladies’--the mere circumstance of their knowing her gave them rank so far. She feared to enter the lists, she declared, not only in skunk and silver fox, Brussels point and cut velvet, but in French and Court millinery. Her old gowns were comfortable; and her maid fitted her as well as she cared to be fitted. Lady Semple wore her own grey hair, though she was not more than midway between fifty and sixty. She had never either powdered or painted in her life. She patronized bonnets which, whatever else they did in the way of becoming her, covered her head. Her mantles were not tight to her figure, neat and light as that figure still was for her age. Her nearest approach to full dress did not go beyond dinner-dress, and failed to expose her neck and arms.

When a young woman, Lady Semple had married a man much older than herself. She had always been perfectly respectable, without the smallest taste for the platonic admiration of a circle of idle young men, which might explain what even Claribel Drysdale, who permitted a great deal to Lady Semple, called her well-bred dowdiness. No competition with other women, no attempt to attract the attention of any man save her husband, who gave her carte blanche to dress as she liked, for that matter hardly noticed how she dressed, accounted for a good deal.

But whatever youthfulness of person Lady Semple had early lost, her mind remained as buoyant, versatile, and superficial as ever. The influence of her husband, by this time far advanced in age, had not quenched those attributes in the least. She was always starting new pursuits, new systems, new studies, to this day never doing anything more than skim over the surface, while she hopped from one to the other in a fashion most distracting to those who were not accustomed to her middle-aged schoolgirl ways.

All the same, Lady Semple was convinced that she had very little to say to the Vaughan girls--that, having no daughters of her own, she had well-nigh forgotten what young women would care for. On the other hand, their constant dependence on her for entertainment would seriously interfere with her music-practising according to the last Stuttgart method, the hangings she was working in appliqué, her cottage lectures, her acquisition of dates by an original method never thought of before. Claribel Drysdale, who was always disengaged enough to help her friends, would know what the Vaughans would like.

Clary was nothing loth to become, with Dick Semple’s and Mr. Mackinnon’s help, Lady Semple’s representative. Miss Drysdale was quite willing to introduce the Miss Vaughans to everything and everybody they might care to know, in a sphere rather different from that to which the daughters of a well-connected but poor English vicar had been hitherto accustomed. Clary was ready to get up riding-parties, skating-parties, walking-parties, singing parties, carpet-dances, for the strangers’ benefit.

Perhaps it was somewhat unreasonable in his sister to expect young Tam to join her in incurring similar trouble, particularly when the Miss Vaughans presented no attraction to him. He was over-burdened with worries and weariness from his new course of life, returning every night from the office or the Haugh dead-beat, without confessing it, by engagements which would have been child’s play to his father. To the Miss Vaughans young Tam was a surly Scot--an ungenial if not exactly unmannerly--for modern manners give great scope for rudeness--mercantile young man.

Florence and Louise Vaughan were neither very young nor very sympathetic. Their standard of duty was framed largely for clergymen’s daughters with a view to parish-work. They could tell a good deal with regard to English Church schools, village choirs, and charitable clubs--excellent things to know; but the same judges had few and vague opinions as to what should or what should not be said or done by laywomen, especially by laywomen who were not of the clergywomen’s species.

The Miss Vaughans had come to Scotland and Semple Barns, in the immediate neighbourhood of a great commercial city, deeply impressed beforehand with the shocks and surprises the travellers would receive, as if they were about to invade African kraals or Indian wigwams. The new-comers did not miss the sensational element in this visit. They heard a new language, saw a new style of person, looked at life from a different standpoint. Not the least of their discoveries was the abounding wealth which made life so much easier, and endowed a girl like Claribel Drysdale with a hundred advantages in dress, amusements, and power--in a republican world--of going where she liked, doing what she chose, and commanding to a great extent her friends and associates--all with a quiet mind and a clear conscience. No young women who were so unfortunate as to own parents with straitened means, though the parents’ descent was aristocratic, and their occupations and behaviour unimpeachable, could hope to attain like privileges.

The strangers, however restricted their experience might have been, were not fools. Their eyes were opened. They saw what a good thing it was to be commercially rich, since their mission of religion not only did not include a vow of poverty, but made no stand against worldliness, so long as worldliness went to daily service, paid respect to saints’ days, and decorated the church for festivals.

Lady Semple’s cousins were content to accept Claribel Drysdale as a friend. They put due value on her father’s carriage, very much at her disposal, her riding-horses, her high-class dress and appointments. Neither was a home like Drysdale Hall left out of the count. It might be over-gorgeous, but it was the perfection of luxury and comfort in its way, where nothing was stinted and nothing grudged. If there were serious objections to Claribel’s rustic father and mother, the house was spacious enough; her individual pursuits and engagements were sufficiently respected to allow her to see as little of her near kindred as she chose.

The Miss Vaughans were so won by the material gain that Glasgow trade can produce, they ceased to wonder at their cousin Lady Semple’s extending the right hand of fellowship to the wives of those calico-printers, cotton-spinners, and boiler-makers, with whom her husband was on excellent terms. The English ladies went so far as to contemplate the possibility of merging the natural superiority derived from their father’s and mother’s birth and breeding, name and profession, in commercial husbands with the opulence and the indulgence to their wives’ whims and fancies which these moneyed men were bound to show.

But young Tam Drysdale did not betray the smallest sign of appreciating Lady Semple’s visitors’ condescension, or of properly esteeming the severe simplicity of their looks, dress, and ornaments. It was a simplicity which was in honourable accordance with the Rev. Reginald Vaughan’s limited income, but it was not of the same order as Lady Semple’s simplicity, being studied and elaborate, where hers was unstudied and careless. Neither was it like that of Athole Murray, which was full of individual character and clever touches.

Young Tam was not vulgar; he had very little of the bagman about him. He had risen above his surroundings still more than his sister Clary had risen above hers. He might pass for a gentleman anywhere. But if he did not happen to be the man for either of the Miss Vaughans, it mattered little, however eccentrically gentleman-like he appeared in other respects.

In lieu of the support of young Tam, Claribel had to fall back on the adherence of Dick Semple and Eneas Mackinnon; though, alas! they were still less eligible in a matrimonial light. Young Tam wanted the will in relation to the Miss Vaughans; but the other two men wanted both the will and the way. Dick Semple had no chance of marrying in his own station without Sir James’s concurrence. Lady Semple had always been easy in her mind about her son, even with regard to Claribel Drysdale, however much they were thrown together, and however friendly the terms on which they stood to each other. For her ladyship’s liberal ideas of fraternization with the families of Glasgow ‘bailies,’ as she was apt to call them, whether in or out of office, did not extend to proposing to Sir James that his and her solitary chick should quit the ranks of the country gentry to intermarry with sugar or shipping, or Turkey-red dye, however gilded.

Lady Semple was sure of Dick’s sentiments--that they did not incline in the direction of Drysdale Hall, but in that of a baronial castle, not of yesterday, and still in the hands of a family as old as the time of Queen Mary. Dick did not stoop--he aspired; and if he persevered long enough, and if no better suitor came for one of several daughters, why, the Semples of Semple Barns, with a baronetcy of a date not quite so far back as the baron’s charters, but not of yesterday either, and an estate as unencumbered as the deplorable condition of agriculture would permit, were not to be despised. Dick might live to have his innings, with the full consent of his father and mother, and of a greater man.

But apart from the Honourable Lilias and Claribel Drysdale, the Vaughan girls, who would never see six and eight and twenty again, and had no looks to speak of, were quite out of the question for Dick.

As for Eneas Mackinnon, to speak of marriage in the same breath with him was a wild absurdity, unless he married a fortune--and every heiress was not so easily attracted by a Mackinnon as poor Maggie Craig had been; while a dowered young lady, unless she drew her dower from the lower walks of trade, was hardly likely to look on the imposing rank of a lieutenant with the reverential eyes of the old aunties in St. Mungo’s Square. Where there were no fortunes, Eneas Mackinnon, in his youth, was as much vowed to celibacy as any old Knight of Malta, any monk among them.

No doubt Claribel might have summoned to her aid, for the better entertainment of the Miss Vaughans, other young men, sons of her father’s friends, better inclined than young Tam or Dick Semple--better supplied with the means of setting up establishments than Eneas Mackinnon. But Clary had for a long time hung back a little from her natural companions. She had no desire to enter the lists with the Honourable Lilias. She had not the ghost of a passion for Dick Semple, who, though a good enough fellow, was still less a man to die for than Clary had once stated Eneas Mackinnon to be. But though she did not care in that sense for Dick, she was fantastically attached to the grade to which he belonged, even in its farthest ramifications, in preference to her own. She exaggerated the advantages of the one, and underrated the benefits of the other. She lacked entirely the Miss Vaughans’ experience of the stints, shifts, and shams--the unsatisfactory make-believes--of genteel poverty. Clever young woman as Clary was, she showed herself a person utterly ignorant in this respect, while she was willing to stand aside and bide her time, and rather put up with a good many serious objections than relinquish her beau-ideal.

Notwithstanding the drawbacks, the group of young people who had so many appointments together, or in common, presented an attractive enough aspect to lookers-on at Semple Barns and Drysdale Hall, at the meets in the neighbourhood, at the theatre or assembly-rooms, to which Mrs. Drysdale chaperoned them with some trepidation, but abundant kindly good-humour. Claribel Drysdale and her mother were handsome enough in different styles for all the four women. The Miss Vaughans were supposed to make up by that severely simple air of theirs for what they lacked in fairness of face and costliness of apparel. Some unsophisticated people held that they were distinguished-looking, because of the uncompromising absence of the very gifts and graces which the mass of the assembly prized and struggled for, and pretended to have if they did not possess them.

The Miss Vaughans were Lady Semple’s cousins, which meant much in the mercantile community, and their presence at public places under Mrs. Drysdale’s care was further promotion for her, of which her daughter Clary was well aware, if the mother, with her humble-mindedness in the middle of her gratified vanity, made little of it.

Poor young Eppie, who was still prohibited from the gaieties of a grown-up young lady, pined longingly after the people who had carried off her mother. Eppie thought Dick Semple, who was thick-set and plain, quite nice-looking when he wore his cat’s-eye studs, and a bouquet in his coat; and Eneas Mackinnon an Adonis, though his studs were of the plainest, and he had only a couple of ivy leaves, which Clary had given him, in his button-hole. The same partial critic considered her mother, in her velvet and diamonds, and Clary in her satins and pearls, as ‘grand and lovely.’ But Eppie had not much admiration to bestow on Florence and Louise Vaughan. She did not care for their clinging gauzes, or whatever the material of their gowns might be; the oxydized silver girdles, which replaced the austerely plain leather belts with which the sisters encircled the waists of their morning dresses; the natural flower-trimming for their corsages; the coronals of natural flowers in their hair. It might all be elegant and æsthetic, but there was a mummy-like swathing in the arrangement of the folds, while the flower-trimmings withered, and the result was not satisfactory. Unless a man or a woman was naturally gifted, he or she had to be trained up to such fashions, as to the profusion of yellow daffodils used not long before at a city banquet by a confectioner of advanced principles of taste.

‘Sheafs of common yellow lilies, auld-fashioned daffondondillies!’ more than one of the guests had exclaimed in scorn and derision, feeling himself shamefully balked of the hot-house flowers to which the price of his ticket entitled him.

Auld Tam sought to console his younger daughter left at home.

‘Never mind, my lassie, your day will come. I’ll be a proud man when I see you setting out with mother for your first ball--you’ll make all the other young leddies stand about.’

‘You’ll go with me yourself, father, or I’ll not stir a foot!’ cried Eppie, recovering her spirits, and tyrannizing by anticipation. ‘But, eh, I wonder young Tam can bide at home. To think he might dance with the best, and that he should stay away to smoke and read. I’m sure he has plenty of time for smoking and reading.’

‘Not so much as he was wont to have,’ auld Tam corrected her; ‘but the felly is well aff if he would but think so; he has a hantle privileges if he would only use them. He is on thrawn [cross] terms with the world, that’s what it is, poor Tam!’ his father added in a softer tone the next moment. ‘For all that has come and gone, will his day ever come?’

‘Never mind him, father,’ said Eppie cheerfully, ‘he’s a gowk [fool] not to make the best of his opportunities. He’ll come to himself some day, without you troubling your head any more about it. He has gone into the business, and that is something that has pleased mother and you. You’ll be my first partner at that ball.’

‘Bairn, I would be a fell-like pairtner,’ protested Tam, by no means displeased by Eppie’s selection. ‘I have not danced since I stood up at a kirn [harvest-home]; I believe it was your grandfather’s. Your mither was my pairtner, and I dare say she was so far left to herself as to admire my steps, and the cut and shuffle I had learnt for the occasion.’

‘You used to dance with me--at least you made me dance and ride when I was a wee thing. Do you not mind how

‘“Jenny rode to Ru’glen”?

and

‘“Shu! shuggie! shug!
A little birdie in the moss,
Aneath a bunch o’ fug.
Shu! shuggie! shug!”’

CHAPTER XVI.

THE DINNER-PARTY.

‘You’ll tak’ the high road,
And I’ll tak’ the low.’