Chapter I: Young Mackinnon’s Marriage Contract

Nearly thirty years ago, three highly-respectable ‘single ladies,’ sisters, of the name of Mackinnon, the youngest of them already turned forty, the eldest over fifty, and showing decided tokens of what had been from the beginning a sort of ready-made old-maidishness, dwelt in what was still a commodious house in one of the old squares of Glasgow. It was a region which had fallen down in the world, since the days when its substantial houses--their line broken here and there by low-browed, covered-in ‘pends’--were occupied by more than one of the ‘Tobacco Lords’--the ancient autocrats of the West, sprouts from the great Highland houses who had pocketed their pride and stooped to prosecute trade in St. Mungo’s city instead of levying blackmail on the Lowland borders. These adventurous spirits had amassed great fortunes, and had strutted on the ‘plainstanes’ in their huge wigs and scarlet cloaks, as haughtily as in the days of their youth they had climbed their native braes in bonnets and kilts. Such magnates had long passed away. The tide of trade and fashion had altered more than once in the interval since sugar had got the better of tobacco, and cotton had rivalled sugar, and iron distanced cotton.

As for the cotton and iron lords, they were no longer content with gloomy houses near the old College and the Cathedral, from which the dweller could patronize learning and hold intercourse with the professors and clergy--ignoring their comparative poverty because they, too, were of gentle birth, while book-knowledge has always had its value in Scotland. Far less were the modern traders satisfied with country houses by the Kelvin or down near the Broomielaw. Glasgow was spreading out north and south, and east and west. The old houses, which had become centres of a great population, instead of standing on the outskirts of a town, were constantly passing into lower hands or changing their character. The buildings were occupied by shopkeepers and warehousemen, or let out in lodgings, or, after sustaining a gutting-out process, flourishing anew as shops, where in former days no shops, however select, had broken in upon the genteel retirement of ‘family mansions.’

Like houses, like people; many of the proud, prosperous old families had fallen from their high estate, and stood on an inferior footing, forced to yield in wealth and influence to new men coming to the front in new branches of industry--men frequently not drawn from the gentler ranks, either of the Highlands or Lowlands, who had been ‘hands’ before they were ‘heads,’ and, along with the sterling qualities which had raised their owners, were apt to retain much of the original clay with which they had been clogged.

The class which was superseded had only the pride of their superior antiquity and gentility to console them, and naturally clung tenaciously and not very amiably to these antecedents. The Miss Mackinnons were come of the outstripped, borne-down rulers of the past. Their father had been a man in a better position than the one they filled. Their grandfather had been far before their father. As for their great-grandfather, ‘a’ Glasgy,’ as Miss Janet was wont to say, ‘trim’led at the wag o’ his finger.’ Unfortunately, his descendants had little more than his memory to plume themselves upon.

But it seemed as if the fortunes of the Mackinnons were about to revive--not in the persons of the ladies, whose prospects of advantageous matrimonial alliances, never great, were slipping slowly but surely from the reluctant women’s grasp--but in the case of their eldest nephew, the head of their branch of the family. Gavin Mackinnon was about to marry an heiress in her own right--not such an heiress as a Glasgow Mackinnon might once have aspired to--but a lass whose family was not without drawbacks and little mortifying objections, which the ladies, if not their nephew, swallowed with a manifest effort of complacence.

Still, here was an undoubted heiress who had succeeded through her mother to a small landed property, the worth of which was increased tenfold by calico-printing and dye-works built on the land, also the property of Miss Craig, when such works had come into repute as sources of trade and wealth that would hold their own against the cotton industries thus supplemented.

No Mackinnon had married a bride with so promising a patrimony for the last two generations. Certainly the trumpeters of the family recoiled a little from the obligation of their nephew to take up calico-printing and dying as a calling, which was something widely different from possessing estates in Virginia, that furnished broad Scotland, and England to boot, with wholesale supplies of the crop of the country.

In addition, the elder ladies could have wished that Miss Craig had been able to claim more commercially aristocratic kindred; nevertheless, she and her dowry were by no means to be despised. ‘There would be plenty of the cotton and iron dirt’--Miss Janet was guilty of indicating the _nouveaux riches_ in these terms--‘who, for all their bragging that they were rolling in wealth, would jump fast enough at Maggie Craig, with her cash and Drysdale--her grand-uncle-by-marriage’s auld farm-house, print-factory, and dye-vats.’

It was more of a recommendation than the reverse to the Mackinnons, that Miss Craig, who had been sent home from India for her education, had few relations in this country, and was so far dependent on the good offices of the Glasgow kinswoman of her future husband. It was a matter of resignation, to say the least, to these fairly humane and well-intentioned persons, that Miss Craig’s mother, from whom she inherited her property, had died when she was an infant, and that her father had married again since she left India. It would have been a thousand pities for her to return there to her strange step-mother, especially when the tenant to whom the calico-printing works were let, who had made a good thing out of them, was retiring at the end of his lease on a competence, leaving the business with the works to a successor, who might or might not be the husband of the owner.

The Craigs were nobodies; and the Drysdales who were before them at Drysdale Haugh were little better, ‘farming bodies’ of a homely kind, though the land had been their own; while calico-printing and dyeing had not yet reached such a magnitude as to elevate calico-printers and dyers to the rank that the tobacco-traders had held--they were hardly on a level with cotton and iron manufacturers.

But when Gavin Mackinnon turned up, crossed Miss Craig’s path, proposed for her, and on her acceptance of his hand boldly undertook to become a printer and dyer on his own account, his aunts were not so destitute of the shrewdness of a trading population as to fail to hail the windfall which had come to the family, and the staff which had been put into Gavin’s not too capable hand.

It was a pleasure to the gradually aging women that the marriage should take place in their house. In addition to the lively interest which women in general find in all that belongs to a wedding, intensified to the highest pitch of excitement when the actors by proxy are past their grand climacteric and have lost the sanguine expectation of becoming brides themselves, the Miss Mackinnons had a natural liking, seldom gratified, for dispensing counsel, and ordering and presiding in matters of consequence.

They were all three tall, stout women, rather imposing-looking in their very plainness. It was an advantage to the two elder sisters that they assumed the matronly style in dress which ought to have been theirs, had fortune been kinder, and men more solicitous of their favour. They wore, if not caps, at least a sufficient quantity of lace disposed about their heads to shade what was gaunt or heavy. Pelerines and huge falling collars had gone out for young women, but older people still indulged in them, and they were not without a certain dignity which suited large proportions. The third sister, Miss Bethia (pronounced with the accent on the ‘i’) did herself less justice. She put on gowns of gayer colours and flimsier materials, and arranged her unsheltered hair in a much more youthful fashion of elaborate plaits and braids.

Miss Mackinnon was developing deafness which she declined absolutely to acknowledge, and the greater part of her time was spent in clearing up the misconceptions--the inevitable growth of habitually hearing and speaking at cross purposes. She had grown both tart and stupid under the process, otherwise she would not have been less intelligent and agreeable than her sisters, which, perhaps, was not saying much, for the Miss Mackinnons had been brought up under desperately narrowing influences and with overwhelming prejudices. Miss Janet had come to the front as the result of Miss Mackinnon’s deafness; she was left to lay down the law, while her long tongue and restless energy kept her from granting her victim a moment’s respite.

Miss Bethia represented the accomplishments of the ladies. She was fondly believed to be one of the best piano-players in Glasgow, which meant that she thundered through half-forgotten pieces with stunning din and astounding celerity, and played reels with more spirit than delicacy. In spite of the family’s income, she worked indefatigably for pleasure, and at considerable cost, in wools and silks, heaping up trophies only too gorgeous in the shape of cushions and stools and screens, in the otherwise faded and antiquated drawing-room. She had a simper hovering about her large mouth which was absent from her sisters’ faces, and seemed to say that in spite of Miss Bethia’s ponderous nose, light blinking eyes, with barely visible eye-lashes, and tow-like hair, much on the pattern of the other members of the family, she laboured under the delusion that she was the beauty no less than the genius of her race. It is hardly necessary to say that Miss Bethia was the most foolish of the sisterhood.

There was a redeeming feature in the Miss Mackinnons’ characters which did something to make up for their intolerable conceit and tendency to constitute themselves and their opinions the centre of the universe, before which all mankind was to bow. They were strongly attached to each other. None deferred more loyally to Miss Mackinnon than did Miss Janet and Miss Bethia; a fond mother could hardly have been prouder of a cherished daughter’s performances than were the elder sisters of the younger’s prowess on the ‘piany’ and in fancy-work.

One of the peculiarities of the female Mackinnon mind was that it scorned any attempt in Scotch people to speak ‘high English.’ As the ladies’ voices were naturally loud, and they had accustomed themselves to speak still more loudly to suit Miss Mackinnon’s infirmities, the effect of their homely Scotch shouted to each other or to any visitor was decidedly startling to a new-comer. Another thing the sisters could not abide was a silly pretence at polished instead of plain manners. Such weak copying of their neighbours, or yielding to changes which were no improvements, were for ‘the cotton and iron dirt.’ Such trifles were far beneath the attention of the Mackinnons. These favoured mortals needed no artificial props. The family’s claims to precedence were so unanswerable that a Mackinnon might do exactly as he or she liked, within the bounds of the moral law, for the maiden representatives of the house were respectable Christians and staunch Presbyterians, assured that the name would grace any speech or action, and confer, not derive, lustre from it.

Only a small moiety of the world took the Miss Mackinnons at their own estimation, and the moiety was ever decreasing. Strange to say, Maggie Craig, a simple yet aspiring girl, was among the worshippers at the nearly deserted shrine. These absurd elderly women contrived to throw dust in her young eyes. Her chief inducement to marry Gavin Mackinnon was that he was the first man who had made her an offer, and that he was big--big in various ways--in speech as well as in bodily inches, and so filled a certain space in her world. But her next reason was that in marrying him she would enter into one of the oldest and best Glasgow families, which to Maggie signified as much as if she had referred to one of the patriarchal houses of ancient Rome, and that she might thenceforth hold up her head in the light of being closely allied to the unapproachable cream of the inhabitants of her father’s native city.

Therefore the bride-elect was highly gratified instead of being intensely bored by the invitation from her future husband’s aunts to make their house her home, and be married from it, rather than from the house of a business correspondent of her father’s or of a school-companion of her own, nearly all the choice she could command.

Mr. Craig had sent home a formal consent to the marriage. It was little more than a form, since Maggie was of age and could please herself. He dimly remembered the Mackinnons as something beyond the common and above his mark when he left Scotland. He had not known anything of them in later days so as to modify his opinion. At the same time, his parental interest in Maggie, and his impression that she was doing well for herself, did not go the length of tempting him to return before his time. He had younger children, who, as they had never been separated from him, had eclipsed the first-born in his affections, and he was at once easy-going and slow to be moved from the plans of his whole life. He left Maggie to her own discretion, and trusted her to her new friends. He would come home, if he lived, at the date he had originally fixed.

It was the night before the wedding--a frosty winter night, which caused a slight shudder in the minds of stay-at-home people at the thought of the railway journey to London--the sum-total of the bridal tour. A jaunt to London in winter, and to the Highlands or Ireland in summer, were the stereotyped wedding-trips which had always floated dimly before the Miss Mackinnons’ imaginations; and it is needless to say the sisters had imposed their standard on the younger generation by sheer strength of will and loudness of tongue. Gavin Mackinnon was something of sounding brass himself, but he was quiet and yielding compared to the redoubtable aunts. Maggie was a cipher in their hands in the meantime.

In spite of what might have been supposed to be the Miss Mackinnons’ skill and experience as tacticians in a general way, they had as a matter of course not been familiar with marriages. The grey house in the weather-beaten, smoke-darkened square was in the greatest disorder. There was not a room clear of bride’s-cake, or white gloves--‘livery,’ the elder ladies called them--or new gowns, or travelling trunks. There was hardly a place in which to receive the two lawyers who came for the important purpose of reading and getting the signatures to the marriage contract. The Miss Mackinnons had talked so much for the last ten days that they were not fit for anything else. The bridegroom, finding it less trouble to agree than to contradict, had acquiesced accordingly--in spite of his pompousness. Maggie was only occupied in considering how soon she would be a Mackinnon, with all the privileges of the race.

The marriage settlement, which was as necessary for the dignity of the family as for the safety of Miss Craig, was left to take care of itself or to be concocted by the aunts. Luckily they were perfectly honest, and had no thought of taking advantage of their new relative. Luckily, too, for the sense and reason of the document, Miss Craig’s lawyer was on the spot, and had been invited to join another member of the profession--the Mackinnon family lawyer--in drawing up the deed. Miss Janet was persuaded that none of the preparations would prosper unless she were, as she said, ‘at the heels of them.’ But she was now entertaining a visitor who had come on a call of congratulation and inspection.

Miss Carstairs was a little woman, a contemporary and old friend of the Miss Mackinnons--one who had come within the charmed circle of old Glasgow. She now sat coolly and contentedly in the middle of the confusion, where old silver dishes and ‘dead-fine’ table linen, hunted out of ‘presses’ to do honour to the occasion, lay about among railway-rugs, leather straps and time-tables on the little ebony tables and bamboo chintz-covered chairs and couches of the drawing-room. The dining-room, with its heavy mahogany and horse-hair furniture, and fine old punch-bowl below the sideboard, pointing back to the days when Glasgow punch had been famous, was given up, as a place of superior gravity and masculine simplicity, to the lawyers with their pen and ink, and the young couple who were to profit by these appliances.

‘Our marriage settlements,’ said Miss Janet in her powerful voice to her crony, as if she and her sisters had been married two or three times over, ‘were aye made siccar, though in the making they covered ever so many pages of parchment. My great-grandfather’s was, like his will, as big as a sma’ book. He married a Fenton--Jean Fenton--and it is through her me and my sisters have an interest in Strathdivie--that is, if ever the Fentons of Strathdivie fail, we’ll come in for our share as heirs female through my great-grandmother, Jean Fenton. Oo aye, this settlement between my nephew Gauvin and Miss Craig is but a flea-bite compared to our former settlements. But that is no reason it should not be made richt and ticht, with a lawyer on our side, Dauvit Milne--we’ve always employed that firm--and a lawyer on hers, new graith [growth], but a decent enough man, I believe, a Mr. Dalgleish. Do you ken him, Miss Carstairs?’

‘I should think so,’ said Miss Carstairs, a little drily; ‘you’ve forgotten, Miss Janet, he married my niece Tina. They’ve a place in the Highlands, where I stayed three weeks with them last summer.’

Miss Janet did not trouble herself to apologize for what might have been a slip of the tongue; on the contrary, she rushed upon a fresh offence. ‘A place in the Hielants, and he a writer body that lives by pen and ink, and cannot date back two generations!’ she exclaimed, in a high, protesting key. ‘After that Dauvit Milne may have his London mansion, and his shooting-box in the Sooth.’ The irony was more plain than gracious; but graciousness was not a quality in which Miss Janet Mackinnon excelled. ‘Weel,’ she added with emphasis, after a pause, as if the world’s verdict hung on her sentence, ‘I’ve nothing particular to say against it--save that “dockens will aye be waggin’,”’ she ended with admirable candour.

Miss Carstairs gave an indignant sniff, but she knew Miss Janet too well to resent her unconscionable rudeness. Besides, it was the Dalgleishes who were stigmatized as ‘dockens.’ Miss Carstairs was as well descended as any Mackinnon of them, and could afford to overlook the sneer.

‘It was touch-and-go with that will,’ remarked the eldest Miss Mackinnon, with her usual irrelevancy, for she had caught only stray fragments of the conversation. ‘If she had died an hour or twa suner, our Miss Craig would have lost every penny. It would have been maist unnatural that she should not have profited by her mother’s succession, but auld Drysdale never mentioned heirs. He was a hot-headed stubborn man, and though he had a great work with Beenie Pryde, he never liked Jock Craig. It was not with the uncle’s will that the niece made the marriage. But, as I said, it was a mercy she died when she did, though I’ve heard tell that if she had so much as given a pech or sech [groan or sigh] after his breath was out, the property would have been hers, and would have come in the course of nature, as it has done, to her dochter, her heiress.’

‘She’s speaking of how Miss Craig’s mother came into her inheritance,’ Miss Janet hastened to explain, carefully lowering her voice; ‘she’s thinking of wills and deaths, instead of settlements and marriages, no that they’re so far apart. Yes, it was just so, auld Drysdale left his money to his niece by marriage. He had no near relations, and though he had the word of being hard, he had aye a soft heart for the memory of his young wife who pined and died long before she saw her prime. He took her sister’s dochter, Beenie Pryde, and brocht her up to keep his house, and was as fond of her as if she had been his ain bairn. But there was an odds for all that; he could never altogether forgive her for marrying Jock Craig, and though he left her his means, as he had come bound to do, when he took her to rear, he did not trouble to mention her wean, that had not a drop of his blude in its veins.’

‘Well, I mind something of the story, but I never heard all the ins and outs of it before. The Drysdales were not in our set, Miss Janet,’ said mild Miss Carstairs, not without what these old-fashioned ladies would have called a ‘fling’ at her hostess, in return for Miss Janet’s treatment of Miss Carstairs’ niece Tina and her ‘writer body’ of a husband.

‘Who said the Drysdales were in our set, Kate Carstairs?’ demanded Miss Janet defiantly.’ They were not such fules as to set themselves up so far beyond their standing. They kenned their place and keepit it, which was more to their credit. But that did not prevent auld Drysdale’s being a man of some substance,’ composing herself to resume her story. ‘When the news of his death and his inheritance was sent out to where the Craigs had gone, it was found that she had died after giving birth to a lass bairn--our Miss Craig--the very same day that the auld man her uncle’s breath went out at Drysdale Haugh. I tell you, Miss Carstairs, it was nothing short of a dispensation of Providence that he was gone before her by the space of three hours, or Maggie Craig could not have touched plack or penny of his,’ ended Miss Janet, excited by the crisis of her narrative.

‘She would have had to hurry if she would overtake him in his journey,’ remarked Miss Mackinnon, with a smile that was a little ghastly, as a commentary on the conversation.

‘What’s she after now?’ inquired Miss Janet, fairly mystified. ‘Oh, I mind,’ her face clearing up; ‘she’s so keen to lose nothing we say. Meye’s very sharp, but she’s apt to jump from subject to subject, by all the world like a bird from branch to branch. She’s off, as she thinks we are, to a joke we had among oursel’s this morning, of the bride’s remaining behind to look after the gear, and the presents that had not made their appearance in time, while the bridegroom went the first stage in solitary state. But I must awa’ to keep Gauvin and Miss Craig in countenance while they hear the settlement read--a trial to young folks in their position--and to append my signature as witness. I’ll leave nothing undone that I put my hand to. You’ll forgive me for leaving you, Miss Carstairs. You know, it’s not an ordinary occasion. If you like to stop till I come back, Meye here can be showing you Gauvin’s “traps,” as he calls them, his dressing-case and the studs and things in it, for I think you’ve looked over the bride’s paraphernely, or Betheye--I hear her coming in, she has been awa’ about the cards--will give you a tune.’

‘No, thank you very much, Miss Janet,’ said Miss Carstairs, rising and expressing all the more gratitude because of the positiveness of her refusal. ‘I must run away myself--you will forgive me for having detained you so long, at such an important time, with so much on your mind as I see you have. The bride can have nothing to think of in comparison.

‘I dare say no,’ Miss Janet accepted the implied compliment unhesitatingly, and without limitation. ‘What has a young thing like her to take up her mind about but to look bonnie and please Gauvin? It is me and my sisters that have to care for them baith and see that nothing’s forgotten, and to keep the cook and confectioner, the session-clerk and the minister, up to the mark.’

‘I can feel for you, Miss Janet. When my niece Tina was married, though it was out of her father’s house, not mine, and it was not quite the same thing’--Miss Carstairs corrected herself hastily, catching a warning flicker of Miss Janet’s light blue eyes; ‘for Tina did condescend a wee bit, though Mr. Dalgleish’s a steady lad, and getting into a fine business, and there’s something to be allowed for a lassie’s choice--my very heels were sore, and I could not sleep for a week.’

‘What are you saying about quadreels, or was it reels, Miss Carstairs?’ asked Miss Mackinnon. ‘No, we’re to have no dance, only a degoonay in the French fashion.’

‘I’ll not forget a bit of the cake with your cards,’ Miss Bethia assured the departing guest. ‘I’m to have charge of the cakes and cards, and you must promise to dream upon the cake.’

‘Hoots! Miss Betheye, I’m done with dreams, which does not mean that you should be, you that can give us “Wooed, an’ married, an’ a’” so that our feet can hardly keep still, while I’m “timber-tuned.” You have so many more pretty pieces of work than those you’ve so handsomely presented to Miss Craig that she may get them made up for her drawing-room, it would be a real pity they should be wasted.’

‘Awa’ with you, Kate Carstairs!’ cried Miss Janet, while Miss Bethia’s simper passed into a giggle; ‘would you rather have Bethia wasted than the ottomans and cushions, however elegant or creditable to her taste and industry? You would not have Betheye stoop to a man not in every way worthy of her and her family; and where is such a man to be found at this time of the day, I should like to hear?’