Chapter VI: More of the Drysdales

So Eppie was at home, to run out, in sweet rivalry with her mother, to claim her father’s first look and word.

‘Oh, father, I’m so glad you’ve come! I’ve been wanting you this whole afternoon. Dr. Peter and Athole have been here, and they can give me one of their Newfoundland pups; and will you walk over with me, after dinner, and fetch it, for mother cannot leave the house, in case the Carricks should call, and Tam will come in ower late, and be cross-tired? And, oh, father, how long has “White Breeks” taken to do the road to-day? Simpson--now, Simpson, you need not make a face, I’m not going to say any ill, and you know that you said he would beat Dr. Peter’s “Lady Fair,” if you, father, would only let Simpson lick aff the bairns, when they hang on behind, at the Birlie Brae.’

‘And how would you like your licks yourself?’ demanded her father, with an assumption of grave reproach. ‘Was that the way I brocht up my last little girl?’

‘Well, but I would not lick them sore, father,’ explained Eppie, in earnest good faith; ‘only such a skelp [slap] as I would not have minded taking myself. But you will walk over to Barley Riggs with me for the pup?’

‘Bairn, your father will be tired,’ remonstrated her mother. ‘The pup and you can bide a night apart, sewerly,’ with the little mincing pronunciation which served as the queerest finish to her broad speech.

‘Oh! if father is tired, I can wait; I’ll not mind the pup,’ said Eppie heroically, without being able to carry out the heroism effectually, so as to conceal that the twelve hours’ delay in the appropriation of the puppy would be as twelve years to her. Tam could not keep up the joke to the hurting of his favourite.

‘Feint a hair am I tired!’ he exclaimed triumphantly; ‘I could walk to Glasgy, let alone to Barley Riggs. But I’m thinking, my lassie,’ he added more seriously, surveying his daughter, while Simpson drove away with the dogcart, and the family group were left on the terrace, ‘you’ve little need of a towsy tyke [rough dog] to set you an example in rouchness; you’re more like a Newfoundland dug yourself than a young leddy, sitting with your hands in your lap in your mammaw’s drawing-room.’

In truth, Eppie’s silky black hair, at which her father glanced with mingled admiration and disapprobation, was more after the fashion of a furze-bush than even the style of the day required. Her thin pink gown, designed to replace her morning-gown with something more akin to evening-dress, was decidedly creased and tumbled, and two neglected ends of white tape were straying disconsolately down from her waist behind.

Eppie looked only a little abashed, however, as she made two conscious clutches at the ends of the tape.

‘It’s just my strings that I’ve forgotten. Why should a lassie have strings as well as hooks and eyes to fasten? I believe dress-makers send them on purpose to plague their customers and make life a burden to them. I was in a hurry in case you should be back before I was ready. No, mother, I had not Nicol to look after me. Do you not mind she was dressing Clary for the first tennis-party this year? I do not care for tennis, with young ladies and gentlemen running about flourishing bats and keppin’ [catching] balls, but never forgetting their steps and their carriages; and I know young Tam hates the whole thing as much as I do. I used to like croquet when I was little, and you and father came out and played too, and helped me through the girds [hoops]. I have been giving wee Willie Finlay such a grand jow [swing] in the jow father put up for me lang syne, between the saughs at the end of the osier-beds.’

‘But, my lamb, you’re getting ower big for a jow,’ her mother remonstrated gently; ‘and Willie Finlay’s an impident little sorry, to let you jow him,’ with a quick flash of indignation--‘the manager’s wean, and you the maister’s dochter!’ for the worthy woman was by no means without the sensitive feelings of the employé who has become the employer, especially where her children were concerned.

‘Mother, you’ve forgotten,’ said Eppie, with soft reproach, and a shade of gravity on her round rosy face. ‘Poor Willie is as deaf as a horn, and cannot play with the other bairns.’

‘No doubt the little chappie’s afflicted,’ granted Mrs. Drysdale relentingly, ‘and you may send him in to Wood or me for a jelly-piece whenever you like; but it’s time you let jowing alane.’

‘Why, mother, I’m just sixteen,’ protested Eppie in her turn, with a swift resumption of her light-hearted gaiety: ‘I have heard you say that you and my aunties had a jow fixed between two of grandfather’s stacks, and that many a time when you had gone out to play hide-and-seek in the gloamin’, father here would give you the best jow you ever had, till grandmother called you in to your supper.’

‘Bairn, it’s not canny to tell you tales,’ said Mrs. Drysdale, with one of her old bright coy blushes. ‘Manners have changed since then,’ she said, seeking to dismiss the subject, with a disturbed sense of how it would sound to Clary, her own eyes glistening at the same time at the remembrance of the innocent ‘daffing,’ which was so much freer and merrier than anything she saw now among young people--some of them doucer and more doleful than their elders.

But Tam Drysdale struck in, inspired by the recollection:

‘Weel do I mind it, Eppie, my doo [dove]; many a brave jow I gave her, without her saying so much as “hooly” [stop]. If the coast were clear and the rope stout enough, I would give you both a fine jow, though mother there is not so licht as she was in the auld days.’

‘Fie for shame, Tam!’ cried Mrs. Drysdale, as the other Eppie laughed in high glee; ‘you maun be daft to speak such nonsense. What would Clary think, and poor young Tam, who is so solid, if they heard you? What would the maids and the men, and Sir Jeames and my leddy say, forbye Captain Mackinnon, who is in the same regiment as young Semple, and is paying a visit to Semple Barns--no less?’

‘I do not care a bawbee what any of them say, if I am doing no harm,’ maintained Tam stoutly. ‘I may surely give my ain wife a jow or a kiss--it’s a’ ane which--if it pleases me, an’ hip ower what the world says about it. But it’s true, mother, we’re growing ower auld for play; we had better leave it to the young anes, if they were but as spunky [spirited] and blithe as we were a score of years syne. Are you two women to keep me waiting here all night? Do you know I’m as hungry as a hawk, and I’m to sort myself before the gong sounds?’

Eppie and her mother retreated obediently to the drawing-room--an apartment gorgeous in satin damask, ebony, gilding, mirrors, and china--which Clary had striven in vain to subdue according to the Queen Anne standard. The redeeming features of the room were its good pictures--several landscapes of the last schools--French and Belgian, as well as English and Scotch--in addition to a presentable family group, taken by a clever artist when the children were still young, and an abundance of flowers, of which both the Eppies were very fond.

Claribel was absent; young Tam did not make his appearance till the last clash of the gong. He had inherited the good looks of both father and mother on a larger scale. He was a big, bearded fellow of three-and-twenty, with his father’s square forehead and massive face, and his mother’s brown eyes. But there the resemblance ceased. There was either a load of care or a burden of discontent, or both, in his low knit brows and the drooping corners of his mouth. For whatever reason, he was at war with himself and with his world. He looked even as if he had dressed against his will, and with some scorn for the operation. He ate sparingly, and as it were with reluctance and self-disgust, of the plainest food that was to be had at the sumptuously provided table. He drank nothing save water. He hardly joined in the conversation, answering briefly the observations addressed to him. He either bestowed no attention on Eppie’s liveliest sallies, or repulsed them with pained sharpness--a treatment which she requited by not minding it.

Withal there was a determined gravity approaching to solemnity, and a certain self-consciousness about young Tam, which did not imply that he was not in earnest; it simply hinted that without knowing it he was playing a part, and however worried and perplexed, was receiving considerable high-flown, melancholy satisfaction from the sense of an heroic performance. His whole aspect belonged to his age, and could hardly have existed at any other stage of existence. It had an aroma of exaltation and self-martyrdom about it, which had its comical side for those who could see it. Unfortunately the audience were blinded. They did not understand the phenomenon with which they had not before come in contact, and it affected them too nearly for them to measure it correctly. The young man withdrew on the earliest opportunity, muttering an excuse about a lecture he had to prepare.

‘That fellow gets worse and worse every day,’ said Tam Drysdale, holding up his glass of port and staring into it as the door closed on his son. The elder man spoke with a mixture of gloom, displeasure, and wounded feeling, which, unhappily, is a tone not altogether new or strange to fathers. ‘What would he have? What would he be at? One would think he has all that the heart of a young man could desire, if he would only see it. A fell difference in what I had to do and to bear when I was his age. No choice of dishes for me to despise. No wine standing untouched at my elbow. By George! I was glad of a whang of bread and cheese, and my pull at a jug of sma’-beer to wash it down, many a day; or I went without, hungry and dry, till I could pay my way, and lay by a penny to rise in the warld, provide for a family, buy back the auld place, and make my own out of it, as I have done. No turning up my nose at gude victuals, preferring the worse to the better, and turning upon my heel like a lord--or an ass,’ ended Tam, with a snort of resentment.

‘His books and his lectures,’ he began again, with strong disdain. ‘Is the lad never to have done with his edication? I have not grudged it to him. I could call the whole town of Glasgy to witness that he has got the best I could find for him at home and abroad, and welcome. But what is he the better for it? In my day a man was fain to be out of his ‘prenticeship and start as a journeyman, once and for all. But Maister Tam, there, seems willing to bide in his ‘prenticeship till he’s grey-headed, and what he’s to do then I’m not likely to see. He’s such a clever hair-splitter that he can’t make up his mind. Well, he is a bauld beggar! As fine a business as any of its kind in Glasgy, ready-made to his hand, and he stands aside and casts laiths [corn] at it. Ah! if I had gotten the tenth part of his chances!’ he finished, with angry emphasis.

His wife and daughter were listening in respectful silence--not awed, but daunted, as the kindest of men will daunt his womankind, when the men begin, in contrast to their usual indulgence, to launch vials of wrath at domestic grievances.

‘Maybe, Tam, you were better without the chances,’ his wife ventured at last to say mildly. ‘It’s finer to win your success than to have it gifted to you. The gift maun have its drawbacks and temptations. It’s just that our Tam, poor chiel, has ower kind a heart and tender a conscience. He’s no easy about the rich and the poor, though I’m clear the Bible owns them baith. He cannot bide that the one should be so well aff and the other perishing for lack of the necessaries of life, though there does seem a needcessity for the inequality. Yet it whiles troubles me mysel’ that we should be sitting here, not to say aboon the danger of want, but with our wines and wa’nuts, hiz that were not bred to anything great, and folk we have kenned not worse than ourselves, maybe a hantle better, and used to different treatment, are ill aff, and trembling for what’s to come.’

‘We’re not here to mend the whole economy of things,’ said Tam gruffly. ‘We can but make the best of what we find, and well for us if we do as much.’

‘Folk did not ask so many questions when we were young,’ poor Mrs. Drysdale went on, with what was in fact a crafty defence of her son. ‘The most feck had not the time, if they had been gude enough to have had the will. You need not screw your face,’ a little angrily. ‘Our lad is gude--we may be thankful for that, Tam Drysdale; no just decent outwardly, but gude at the heart, for as little as his father thinks of it. It is his gudeness partly that torments him. I could trust him far and near. I maist think,’ with a sigh, ‘that though it would have been a sore wrench, and it is hard for you, poor auld lad, that your son you thought so muckle of should not consort with you and succeed you in the works and the Hall here, that you’ve wrocht so hard to bring to perfection--it would have been better, since you twa are not like to agree, to have let young Tam go out to Australia as he had a mind to do.’

‘And what would he have done there, I should like to know?’ inquired Tam contemptuously. ‘I have yet to learn that Australia, though it offers an opening for shepherds and blacksmiths, has a market for book-learning.’

Mrs. Drysdale held up her head. There was a crimson spot on each cheek, and she ceased to mince her words. No one--not even his father--should sneer at her son in her hearing, and she not speak up for her bairn.

‘He could fecht his way as well as anither. He’s young and strong, has wit, and is as steady as a rock, and can thole [endure] like his neighbours. None could tant him there with the fine chances and the dainty faring that he flings awa’--not because he’s saucy, but because he thinks shame to take what he has ne’er earned, when he kens there are hard-working men fain to be content with a soup of thin kail or a bit of fat pork, a crust of dry bread or a cauld potatie at mony a meal. There may be mair britherliness--were it but of hardship--out yonder; and it might help him to be at peace with God and man--my braw lad!’

‘And what does your son think himsel’?’ retorted Tam, in the irony of the question disowning his relationship to the culprit; ‘that he is to redress the wrongs of the world, and flee in the face of his Maker? I’ll tell you what: he must have consorted at his colleges--I wish he had never seen their faces--with a pack of blackguaird demagogues and democrats that never earned an honest penny, and so cannot bear to see a decent man enjoy what he has striven and spared for, but would take it from him, or by their tales go share and share alike--a grand piece of generosity with another man’s goods--whenever they had the luck. I’ve always had my doubts of your superfine friends of their kind, that ken a lot better and are a deal more disinterested than ordinary mortals. Trust me, that those extraordinary gentlemen will come out at the tail of the cart, morals and all, before they have done.’

‘Oh, Tam! you’re ne’er evening young Tam, your ain flesh and blude, to such gentry?’ cried Mrs Drysdale, ready to break down in her distress.

Then young Eppie, having finished her grapes, put her oar into the entanglement. She had been a spoilt child, accustomed to give her opinion, and it was seldom that she remained so long silent in any discussion between her father and mother when she was present.

‘If I were you, father, I would let young Tam alone, and take no notice of his strum. He always comes round sooner to what I want, if I just let him alone.’

‘Hold your tongue this moment, Eppie!’ exclaimed her father with unwonted asperity, for he could not bear even his favourite daughter to interfere between him and his son. ‘What does a bairn like you ken o’ such matters? It is true what Clary says, that you’re ower forward in some things and ower backward in others.’

‘Oh! if it’s Clary I’m to please, and if it is her word that is to be taken for what I ought to say or do---- ’ protested Eppie, with a lump in her throat that prevented her from speaking further.

‘Tam, you’ve hurt the bairn. I do not know what has come ower you,’ said Mrs. Drysdale reproachfully, turning again upon her husband. ‘What harm has she done? Is it so great an offence that she should speak up for her brither? You let her have her head out the one moment, and you curb her the next. What justice is there in that? Yet you men pretend to be sae just!’ with a fine scorn that sat as strangely on her as wrath on a mother-hen.

Thus sat upon on all sides, Tam Drysdale began to find himself in the wrong, and to give way.

‘I did not mean--- ’ he said, growing abashed before his wife and daughter; but before he could get any further, Eppie sprang from her seat and flung her arms round his neck.

She could no more bear to hear her father reflected upon--and it was all the worse that it should be on her account--than her mother could stand an attack upon young Tam.

‘Say what you like, father; scold me if you please; who has so good a right? You have been ower kind to your youngest lassie, and to us all. Tam will not be the last to see that, some day. But I did not mean to be forward; only I thought I would like to tell you how I managed Tam.’

‘Managed him, you gipsy! you’ll be managing me next,’ protested the head of the house; but it was said fondly, harmony was restored, and the bone of contention dropped.

In the course of the evening, when after all Eppie and her father did not go to Barley Riggs--for the engagement slipped out of his mind, and, at a hint from her mother, Eppie docilely let it go--Claribel came in from her tennis-party, which had merged into a dinner. A dinner-dress had been sent to her, the carriage had followed the dress, and she returned in it in full array, and joined the others for half-an-hour. She was a decidedly handsome young woman to those who put full weight on a tall, broad-shouldered figure, regular if somewhat strongly-marked features, and a neck and arms like alabaster. There was also something in the girl’s expression that recommended itself to many people--not without reason--something resolute and fearless. There was nothing weak, nothing in keeping with her sentimental Christian name, which, to tell the truth, Mrs. Drysdale, in the dawn of the family prosperity, had borrowed from the title-page of a sheet of music. Claribel knew her own mind, and obeyed its dictates without hesitation. There was an absence of anything either faltering or paltering, unstable or underhand, about her. She was a person to be comfortably relied upon, so far as she went.

Claribel Drysdale was a year younger than her brother, and six years older than her sister. She had prized the worldly advantages which were hers as highly as her father or mother could prize them, and she had never had any warring inclinations or lingering first loves to dispute the sway. She had made the best of being a handsome girl, and a rich and popular man’s daughter, in a society of wealthy and pleasure-loving people. She had young-ladied it as a man might lord it, with all her heart and soul, not so much arrogantly as with an agreeable forgetfulness of any other state of being. She had been incapable of being deliberately unkind or unfeeling, but she had been full of herself and the good time she had of it, her dress, her jewels--many and costly to belong to a young girl--her horses; the dances, dinners, and picnics in which she joined; the plays, operas, charity bazaars and sermons at which she figured, to the exclusion of all besides.

But this was only a stage in Claribel’s existence; as she had soon grown up, so she had soon passed beyond her earliest development. She had quickly grown dissatisfied with the fruits of mere wealth, and taken to the products of rank and generations of culture instead. She had inherited her father’s respect for real ladies and gentlemen, without his contented hopelessness of ever attaining to their merits. Nothing was beyond Claribel Drysdale’s ambition, and the neighbourhood and friendship of Lady Semple afforded her an opening for gratifying her tastes.

Beyond this she was, as her father said, ‘not minding.’ She had the grace not to interfere much with the others, unless on Eppie’s behalf. She left young Tam to his ‘Radical fads,’ contented that time would cure him of them. She swallowed down lightly, with no more than a slight grimace at times, the discrepancies, which no one saw more keenly than she did, between her father and mother and the style in which they lived. If she did not show great filial respect and regard, and never dreamt of rushing out to meet her father, or being never so happy as when she was with her mother, like Eppie, Claribel did not fail signally in her duty and affection to her elders. She behaved with proper deference, and acted with far more philosophy and apparent good-humour than her brother, young Tam, displayed.

Fine feathers were not wanting to set off a fine bird. Miss Drysdale, of Drysdale Hall, was too well instructed and paid too much heed to details--for she was one of those strong women, wise in their generation, who never neglect a detail--to dress for dinner as she would have dressed for a ball. But while she complied with established rules and stopped short at the appointed limits, she gratified her natural liking for what was not so much soft or bright, elegant or exquisite, as for what was rich and magnificent. Claribel wore a pale moire, with lace trimmings and such a set of coral as a countess might have envied. She was quite a splendid figure in her shimmering silk and red and gold necklace, as she presented herself without her opera-cloak in the drawing-room, where Eppie was initiating her mother into the mysteries of ‘bézique’ to replace ‘birkie’ and ‘catch-the-ten,’ coming in natural succession, which the two had played together, of an evening, ever since the younger Eppie was old enough to hold a card, while Tam Drysdale read his newspaper.

It was comprehensible that the father and mother should look with pride on such a daughter, that even Eppie, whose bright eyes were more critical, should bestow her meed of approval on her sister. Here was something to show for the parents’ pains that was not to be found in young Tam, though the lad was a scholar, and out of the ruck of ordinary young men. Here was a more satisfactory conclusion, if it were a conclusion; neither was the satisfaction fatally qualified.

True, as a rule, Mrs. Drysdale was not quite at ease before her elder daughter; less so than before her son, who seemed to be above noticing trifles. Even Tam senior, though too manly and too much of a philosopher in his way to have any serious apprehensions of what Clary might think of his sayings and doings, was troubled with an amount of respectful consideration for her which on special occasions was apt to hamper him in her company.

But the effect she produced on her father and mother was rather the result of the working of their minds than of hers. Claribel was reasonably good-natured. She had a general friendly, if somewhat condescending, wish to have her family share in her pleasures, though they could not always comprehend them. She was a fair talker, when she was disposed to talk, and as she sat discoursing lightly on the company she had just quitted, indicating the individualities of its different members, touching upon their eccentricities, here and there mimicking, not very maliciously, their defects--how Mr. Muir stumped about as he walked; the constant use Sir James made of the epithet ‘ridiklous;’ the manner in which Colin Hunter contrived to look past the epergne at Mary Campbell--though the gossip was superficial, sometimes a little hard and caustic, never indicative of height or depth or fine sensitiveness, beyond dispute it was entertaining.

‘And what did you think of Captain Mackinnon, Clary? What was he like? I mind well his father was master of the Haugh when your father came back here and brought me with him. I mind his mither too. She died when he was born, poor woman! They said she had murned for want of a bairn, and she laid down her life for this one,’ said Mrs. Drysdale compassionately.

‘If you mind Gavin Mackinnon,’ said Tam, ‘you mind a feckless, incapable man; a sort of fellow with a grand manner and big words, if that were enough.’

‘Well, his son is not like him,’ said Claribel, with a laugh. ‘He is too lazy, and has too much “pride that apes humility.” I dare say he’s not a bad sort of young man. Dick Semple seems to have a regard for him, and Lady Semple says he is the tamest cat she ever had about the house. The last curate did not efface himself half so effectually. Only it is not modesty in this case; it is pride and poverty. He has not a captain’s commission, mother; he is only a lieutenant yet, like Dick Semple--a rank which does not count.’

‘What do they call him, then?’ inquired Mrs. Drysdale; ‘an offisher used to be muckle thought of in Glasgy, and the power to put Captain or Major or even Lieutenant before the name was prized next to the uniform.’

‘Uniform has become mufti,’ said Clary, ‘and is only worn on parade; and lieutenants have disappeared, unless in the Gazette. They have fallen back among the civilians, and are heard of only as plain Mr. Semple, or Mr. Mackinnon.’

‘Keep me! I would have thought I had been insulting the lads if I had not given them all their honours,’ said Mrs. Drysdale, musing upon what would have been the consequence of the two young gentlemen’s calling at Drysdale Hall, while she had laboured under such a mistaken impression.

‘They get honour enough,’ said Tam, ‘even without their uniform and the handles to their names. All the silly lads and lasses--and aulder folks that should know better--are fain to run after them, because the trade of war is genteel, and a prince may be a cornet, or whatever you like to call him.’

‘But you like to read about battles, father,’ interposed Eppie, ‘and you’ve helped at the presentations of swords to officers.’

‘Of course, my lass, of course. The wabster [weaver] and the dyer in the wabster’s train, could not weel do without the warrior, and there’s many a good sodger come from Glasgy, forbye Lord Clyde and Sir John Moore. But the warrior must be the genuine article, and not a carpet knight, like a good wheen of the soldiers we see in the piping times of peace--the heroes of Glasgy drawing-rooms. The worst of it is that some of the puppies look down on their entertainers, laugh at them to their faces, and would give them the cauld shoulder any day if they met them at Semple Barns, or Pollock, or Blantyre.’

‘Mr. Mackinnon could not very well do that, father, with his father before you in the works here,’ remarked Clary carelessly; ‘neither would he if he could--he is too much of a gentleman. All the same, I think his mother will be the only woman to die for Mr. Eneas Mackinnon, which is but fair, since if the _rôle_ were reversed I do not believe he would take the trouble of dying for any woman under the sun.’

Clary had not heard of the old aunts in St. Mungo’s Square, and she was an entertaining young woman when she was in glib speech. She promised to be as great a social success as any woman could aspire to be; while her brother Tam, in his own room, engaged in reading up for one of the lectures which would come to nothing, threatened to be as great a social failure.