Chapter II: Time’s Changes

Seven-and-twenty years had passed with all their changes since the winter night on which Gavin Mackinnon and Margaret Craig’s marriage contract was signed. Six-and-twenty years had intervened since Mr. David Milne--the solitary representative of an old firm of Glasgow ‘writers’--had wound up their century-long business, disposed of what was left, and retired with the accumulated gains to buy an estate in Kirkcudbright, and begin a new life as the founder of a family of Galloway lairds. Four-and-twenty years had elapsed since Mr. Dalgleish, the husband of Miss Carstairs’ niece Tina, finding the field too well occupied already, or that law was not so profitable in the West of Scotland as it had been, accepted a colonial appointment, and sailed with his family for New Zealand, to sit on endless boundary questions and judge the rights and wrongs of Maoris and settlers.

Seven-and-twenty years, with all their vicissitudes--vigorous, full lives vanished like shadows, leaving no traces behind; new lives which had dawned and risen above the horizon, advancing to the hot glow of their noon; old stranded lives lingering on, apparently without use or purpose.

The superannuated house in the old square was little changed, except that the narrow means of its occupants had grown narrower, until they pinched with the sharp pinch of poverty. Each one of the Miss Mackinnons was in her place, though it was becoming always harder and more comfortless. There had been a business speculation--soon coming to grief--into which the ladies had rashly let themselves be drawn, with the urgent desire of getting higher interest for their small capital. The end had been that the disaster which followed had swallowed up the larger part of the Miss Mackinnons’ pittance.

The poor ladies had eked out what was left by the secret sale, bit after bit, extending over a period of years, of what they had been accustomed to cling to fondly as the proofs of their old gentility--quaint silver plate, a few jewels, a considerable quantity of fine lace--until the disposal of the family’s effects had come down to table and bed linen, and articles of furniture in daily use, which would fetch little money, while their absence would be severely felt. And always as the surreptitious sale approached its conclusion, starvation or the workhouse stared the unfortunate gentlewomen more fully in the face. Still they lived on, though the middle age of twenty-seven years ago was the old age of to-day--old age without its privileges and indulgences; while Miss Mackinnon was stone-deaf, and could only be communicated with by means of the slate and slate-pencil which hung behind her chair, or through a set of signs which the patient ingenuity of faithful affection had invented and maintained for her use.

Miss Bethia, after a futile attempt to teach her antiquated system of music, had relinquished her piano and laid aside her embroidery, which proved unsaleable, to work at plain sewing, secretly disposed of at the very shop where the Mackinnons’ custom had still been an esteemed compliment in the days of Miss Bethia’s youth. Miss Janet did a servant’s work behind backs, in addition to taking her place before the world among the ladies of the house.

Withal something heroic had crept in with the suffering into these narrow lives--something of Spartan endurance of hardship, of generous self-denial, of steadfast submission to the Providence that knew best what was fit for all. The Miss Mackinnons were frequently absurd enough, and in the increasing isolation of their experience they were getting homelier and more rugged and uncouth, falling back more and more on their old Scotch and their primitive manners, which they had always declined to lay aside, as something which had been good enough for former Mackinnons, so was good enough for their descendants and for the world till the end of time. But the women had never been so like ladies as in their silent, desperate fight with overpowering odds.

A grain of hope remained at the bottom of this Pandora’s box. The Fentons of Strathdivie had not been so tenacious of existence as the Mackinnons in St. Mungo Square. One after another had dropped into his or her grave without direct heirs, till at last there was but one ailing man between the ladies and their share of Strathdivie.

It had better be said at once that Strathdivie in its entirety was nothing more than a moorland farm in one of the wards of Lanarkshire, which, in the present state of agriculture, was anything save a flourishing possession; and it had not the supplement of dye-works or bleachworks, or coal or iron seams, to multiply its worth. Divided into portions, the allotment that might come to the Miss Mackinnons was so trifling that no man need have led a grudged life because of it. Yet that pittance meant such comparative ease and security to these hardly-bested souls that they could not help contemplating it afar off with longing eyes. It was the hidden burden on the consciences of all the three that they were wishing ill to poor Archie Fenton, not caring to hear that he had any chance of getting hale and hearty again, privately calculating on the probable length of days of a man who was younger than two of the sisters.

To intensify the cruel uncertainty, it was suspected that on the few occasions on which Mr. Fenton and the Miss Mackinnons had met, for the connection between the families had belonged not to the present but to former generations, the two elder sisters--Miss Janet especially--had been so unfortunate as to give offence to the disposer of Strathdivie. She had interfered, as usual, where it was a particular want of tact and taste to interfere; and she had perhaps betrayed only too unmistakably what were her expectations with regard to the farm in the Middle Ward; while, it was believed, Archie Fenton was not without some power to ‘will away’ from his distant cousins their share of his property.

But surely he could not be so unnatural and unjust, the Miss Mackinnons argued with whitening lips. Blood was thicker than water, and a dying man would not dare to face his Maker after he had robbed his kindred, however remote, of their lawful patrimony.

Where were Gavin Mackinnon and his wife that they did not come to the help of their aged kinswomen? One might as well ask where were last year’s leaves that they did not continue to clothe with fresh green the gaunt grey boughs of some venerable tree. The years which had spared the Miss Mackinnons had been as fatal to their nephew and niece as to the Fentons of Strathdivie. Both had gone to their long home many a day before. Ere their deaths the dyeing and calico-printing had thriven so badly in his incapable hands that first he had tried a partner in the concern, and that device not succeeding, he had, in the course of three or four more years, got from his wife the power of selling the property to the same purchaser to whom he had, in conjunction with his partner, already disposed of the business. The buyer of both was the son of a cousin of old Drysdale’s, the original laird of Drysdale Haugh. The younger Drysdale was a man whose father had sunk to a very inferior position. The son, on the contrary, had risen through every grade, till he was not only the sole proprietor of works and farm, but had improved and extended them, had made them a great concern, and had ended by building a fine mansion-house as an addition to the old farmhouse.

Neither Gavin Mackinnon nor his wife had lived to hear what another man’s sagacity and energy had made of what they had let slip through their fingers. She had not seen the fifth anniversary of their marriage, and he had not survived her as many more years. There were people who said the couple had been done to ruin and death by the Miss Mackinnons’ powers of talking and interference in their nephew’s private affairs. But everybody who knew anything about it was aware that Gavin Mackinnon could never have made anything of a trade to which he was not bred; and what was she fit for save to spend or spare as much of her own money as came into her hands? Then she died, as her mother had done before her--in giving birth to an only child, about whose arrival in this world his grand-aunts had certainly made as much fuss as if he were the heir to an earldom. Still, all things considered, these were circumstances over which the Miss Mackinnons could not have had much control. Neither ought they to have been held accountable for their nephew’s premature demise, seeing that no amount of enlarging even on disagreeable topics, and putting fingers into other people’s pies, could cause a wet autumn, telling considerably on a man who had never been alert about anything in his life save sport. In this particular instance he pursued it in soaking rain, till he caught a violent cold, which settled on his lungs and carried him off in ten days.

During the lives of the husband and wife the sale of Drysdale Haugh had furnished them with a considerable sum in ready money, which they had not had time to spend, though he especially had done his best to get rid of what was so unfamiliar to him. What was left fell to their son, who had been reared, so far, under the care of his grand-aunts. But while he was a minor he could do nothing for them, and by the time he was of age so much of his patrimony had been spent on his education--worthy the last of the St. Mungo Square Mackinnons--and so much more in gratifying his kinswomen’s shortsighted pride and his own boyish fancy by the purchase of a commission for him in an infantry regiment, that there was little left to spare from his small income.

Lieutenant Eneas Mackinnon was the pride and delight of his old relatives, the one cause of congratulation in the middle of their reverses, the single gleam of light in their far-spent, darkening days! For his credit and advantage they would sacrifice the little that remained to them, while he had only a dim idea of the straits to which the old ladies were reduced. He had wished to do something for them out of his chronic impecuniosity, and it was in a great measure their fault that they would accept next to nothing at his hands, lest the dear lad should be stinted and not able to make a fair show among his brother officers.