Chapter VIII: Friends Meet at Barley Riggs

Barley Riggs was an old-fashioned country-house, left stranded among the bleach-fields of Drysdale Haugh. Instead of surroundings of woodland pasture or corn-land, it was encircled by acres of white webs, Turkey-red webs, or webs of divers colours, the aspect being something like that of a rainbow brought down from the skies and spread out on the dull earth.

For convenience the house had been appropriated, at different times, by the different partners in the works. The original Drysdale had never dwelt in it; but the Mackinnons on their marriage had preferred it to the old farmhouse. Soon Gavin Mackinnon had ceased to take any active interest, or rather to do any active mischief, in the business; then Barley Riggs had been made over to his partner, Mr. Murray, a fussy, fault-finding man, whose continual meddling and rating had been little more to the purpose than Mackinnon’s helplessness. After Tam Drysdale’s purchase of the place, he had come there while Drysdale Hall was building round the nucleus of the farmhouse. Finally, Barley Riggs was again occupied by a Murray, though no longer as proprietor or tenant of the works, which had grown and spread till the buildings, vats, cylinders, and blocks were nearly doubled, like the men, women, and children who earned their bread by them, compared to what they had been five-and-twenty years before.

Dr. Peter Murray had been born at Barley Riggs when it overlooked a far smaller colony of working-rooms, machinery, and working people’s cottages, when the ground-rainbow was but a handbreadth to the size it had reached now. He had come back to his first nest, as some men will, while others avoid their early homes with dogged dislike or nervous repugnance. He bore no grudge against the prosperity in which he had no share. He maintained that he had been so soon inured to the smell of chemicals that he rather liked it, though it was stronger now than in his young days.

Dr. Peter had been bred a doctor, and had earned his little independence as a medical man at a foreign station. But he said that he could practise nowhere so well nor feel so much at ease with his patients as among the hands at the old works, of which he was now the doctor by the appointment of Tam Drysdale. Many of the people had stayed long enough for them to have been known to Dr. Peter in his and their calf-days. He could tell yet whom he had first bled, whose tooth he had tried his ‘prentice hand at pulling, what baby had led the troop of his babies, so that it had been christened ‘Peter’ in compliment to him; and he had still the pleasure of bailing ‘Peter Murphy’ out of a Glasgow or local police court at least three times a year.

Dr. Peter Murray was a philosopher whose character was a puzzle to Tam Drysdale, just as some of Tam’s idiosyncrasies bewildered Dr. Peter, though he understood his man much the better of the two. Yet the two men had not only a high esteem for each other--they had many points in common, such as their scientific bent, particularly with regard to chemicals, in which they had both dabbled more or less since their boyhood, and their humane feeling for their fellow-creatures, represented by the workpeople at Drysdale Haugh. But how Tam Drysdale could build a great showplace and pretend to be comfortable in it, and how Dr. Peter could be satisfied to dose away the end of his days in a shabby house without a single modern improvement, were samples of riddles which neither man could read to his satisfaction.

Dr. Peter was not alone at Barley Riggs, though his wife was long dead and his family out in the world, married, and scattered far and wide, with one exception. This was his youngest child--the daughter Athole--who kept her father company, took care of his house, and was as pleased with her position as he could be with his.

At Barley Riggs, Dr. Peter and his daughter practised what people are told in these days has all but gone out of the world--‘plain living and high thinking.’ They had to be frugal, for the income of the head of the house was not large, and he had determined to leave a sufficient provision for his unmarried daughter, though she had besought him with tears in her merry eyes not to stint himself on her account, in the modest indulgences he craved. She could work for herself at any time. He had taught her both how to be independent and how to be easily satisfied.

But even if necessity had not been laid upon the Murrays to be frugal, their inclination pointed that way. They were disposed to be simple, not luxurious in their habits. They had so many higher enjoyments that the couple could hardly wait or stoop to occupy themselves much with the gratification of the senses. So long as books were left--they allowed themselves great scope in books, which are the finest and cheapest luxury--they did not object to faring simply. It did not trouble them that the furniture at Barley Riggs, which Dr. Peter had carried across the globe and back again, was almost as out of date and lawfully worn as that of the Miss Mackinnons in St. Mungo’s Square. Rivalling books, in the estimation of father and daughter, was life in every aspect--human life, animal life, plant life. It afforded them treasures beyond price. It was a divine problem they were never weary of seeking reverently to work out for themselves.

The old-fashioned parlour at Barley Riggs was somewhat hard in angular forms and cold in neutral tints, such as were in fashion a good many years ago. The chairs and tables were of mahogany, black with age; the carpets and hangings, in colour, held chiefly by drabs and browns. There were here and there foreign touches which told of Dr. Peter’s long residence abroad--a cabinet of strange shells which he had gathered on a distant seashore; specimens of primitive pottery in dull red and thick yellow; a curious weapon or two hanging on the walls; but the place was marvellously homelike. It was a sitting-room lived in, where most things were for service and in constant use. It was scrupulously clean and bright, for cleanness and brightness not only cost little--they were conscientious duties and joys to Athole Murray, which she felt bound to discharge and cherish, and to hand on to her single handmaiden Jeannie, culled from the Drysdale Haugh working-girls. To have failed in these respects would have been to risk something by the admission of dust and gloom in spoiling a candidate for life’s blessings and immortal gains.

Bookshelves, carved by Dr. Peter’s skilful hands, and full to running over, occupied every inch of vantage-ground, and relieved the homely style of the rest of the furniture. For though the volumes were not chosen on account of their binding, and were mostly well-worn, buff calf, and red and blue cloth, they did brighten up with soft and gay tints the Quaker-like groundwork. Summer and winter the room was never without green leaves and very often flowers, which Dr. Peter and Athole managed to rear in perfection, to the piqueing of the pride of the gardeners at Drysdale Hall, and even to the smothered mortification of Tam Drysdale. Tam was generous, but he desired as his right to have the best that money could produce; and was not money the engine of engines, even in the delicate domain of lilies and roses?

Above all, the Barley Riggs parlour had a wealth of pets, remarkable, considering its narrow bounds and constant occupation by the family--a dog, a cat, and a kitten lived on the best of terms with a variety of birds. But these were only the indoor stock. Outside, pigeons fluttered on the roof of the house and on the window-sills; swallows built in the eaves; tame pheasants sat on the branches of the nearest trees; a couple of hedgehogs scuttled away across the walks. In the paddock a goat and its kid were tethered; and Dr. Peter’s pony, and an old Shetland pony, which Athole had ridden as a child, roamed at their own sweet will, sharing the pasture with an Alderney cow and her calf. A large family of poultry looked out from behind the wire-net fencing their poultry-yard, like nuns from the other side of a grating. The whole little territory was teeming with life, and the occupants took the keenest interest in it all--down to the butterflies and beetles among the wallflowers and irises, the caterpillars on the cabbage-leaves, the bees on the thyme. If it be true that

‘He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small,’

then surely Dr. Peter and his daughter Athole prayed well.

He was a long, lean man, very brown and very grey, whose coats had a trick of looking shabby, yet who had something positively noble in his air, he was so entirely beyond being touched by circumstances, so sufficient for himself and those he belonged to, so born to confer benefits of their kind on all with whom he came in contact.

Athole was very like him in being thin and brown and dark-haired, as he had been before he became grey. Her features were refined, but so irregular as to be positively bizarre. Her chief beauty lay in her grey eyes. For reasons of her own, Athole Murray was fond of dressing in grey of all shades, from slate to silver, in linen or silk occasionally, and frequently in woollen stuffs with the texture shifting to suit the different seasons, and with names significant of demureness and retirement from the world--Carmelite nun’s cloth; and yet nobody could be less demure or nun-like than Athole Murray. She was a busy, cheerful girl, a little over twenty. She had an amount of humour and fun, liable to mislead her neighbours with regard to her earnestness, which made men’s hearts glad, and cost her some pains to keep within reasonable bounds.

On the evening of an April day, Athole was sitting in the parlour at Barley Riggs, at a little table which was peculiarly hers, diligently drawing designs for the calico-printers. She had lithe, capable hands which could not be idle. They had been early trained to a variety of occupations. Athole could not only sew all manner of needle-work, cook daintily, clean deftly: she could carve in wood better than her father could. She could etch like a second-rate etcher; she could paint on china, not merely for exhibitions of amateur performances, but so cleverly that a china manufacturer of some reputation had offered her regular work and good wages. She had compounded with her father for his persistence in making a provision for her future, by taking upon her a share of the present household expenses, and supplying the necessary funds from a neat little income which she gained by being the most original designer employed at the Drysdale Haugh Works.

Athole was in grey as usual, but she had a blue knot where her little white collar met the neck of her gown, and companion blue knots where her sleeves terminated above her slim round wrists. She had told her father in confidence--these two were great friends--that were it not for the hindrance they would offer to her going out to look after the beast tribe, and the temptation the fashion might present to Jeannie, their handmaiden, she (Athole) would sport another pair of blue bows in her shoes. She was entitled to compensation for always appearing as ‘a grey lady’ when all the colours of all the Drysdale Haugh dye-vats were perpetually before her eyes.

What made her do so? It was so oblivious and so like a man to ask. Of course familiarity bred contempt. Of course she chose to be out of the common in plainness, since she could not witch the world with splendour like Clary Drysdale; and it would not suit her complexion to be always in pink like Eppie. Did he not know green was the complement of red, and if she figured in any tinge of rose-colour she would come out as the Green Woman. She would be solicited by half a dozen caravans to give them the benefit of her unique charms for Glasgow Fair. How would he like that?

No, grey was her safeguard. Besides, grey had nothing to lose, and did not fade, and many cheap materials were considerately dyed that colour. It was her duty as a sensible woman, especially in relation to their handmaid Jeannie, to set before her an example of economic and rational clothing, not unbecoming under the difficult circumstances. It was little she could do; but, like the man who would not wear a miller’s hat though it cost him his life, she was prepared to make a stand--to go to the scaffold if she were sent there in a righteous cause, in a protest against the extravagance--whether in art-colours or in aniline dyes, in straight lines or in puffs and folds--of her sex, in the matter of dress in this generation.

As Athole drew in her particular window, her father entertained a visitor. The stranger’s presence did not disturb the young lady in her occupation, not even though that stranger was young Tam Drysdale, the son of the master of the calico printing-works. She did not stop her work. She made no pretence of concealing the pattern on which she was engaged. She did not even go on stiffly and awkwardly, as if she ignored a spectator.

She asked him once to look at what she was doing. ‘Are you acquainted with this geometrical flower, Mr. Tom? I am afraid it “never grew,” like the tree in the city arms.’

When he answered, a little put out by her appeal, that he had no doubt her design was an excellent one for the purpose, she knew better than he did, she acquiesced quietly with a laugh that had some pleasure and no annoyance in it. ‘I dare say I do. I have worked for eighteen months in this way, and if I have not failed in my reckoning, I have done this pattern with variations twenty-two times. No, don’t pity me, I beg,’ she interrupted young Tam as he prepared to address her with a portentously grave face. ‘I am not an object of pity. I am not a struggling artist nipped in the bud, or a martyr to the wants of a numerous family. I think that I am neat-handed, have some notion of colour, and some idea of what a calico-pattern ought to be, if you will allow me to say so; but that is the extent of my capacity. And it is not a hardship in other respects to work like this for two or three hours a day from choice for liberal pay, considering the nature of the work. It rather soothes than wearies me. My father has trained me to do something of the kind to keep me in order, lest I should get so audacious that I should not be fit to live with.’

She told him this easily and composedly, but for the twinkle in her grey eyes. It did not enter into her head that there was anything unworthy in itself or disparaging to her in working for pay--working for his father. She was more than his equal by birth, for the Murrays were of gentle descent as far back as they could count, and his equal by education, though she did not dress in purple and fine linen, or fare sumptuously every day. She was his mother’s and sisters’ friend, though Clary, with her own engagements, did not come half so often to Barley Riggs as Eppie came. It did not seem to Athole Murray that any drawing of patterns, though it had been ever so repugnant to her, while, as it chanced, she liked it, could alter these facts.

Young Tam took one part of her speech seriously, and answered her, standing, looking a protesting giant by her side:

‘I beg your pardon, Miss Murray; I was not going to pity you. I agree with Goethe that life is earnest, and work, so that it is real, is about the best thing we have. I only pity the workers who have no advantage from their work, or, if they have, advantage of the grossest kind or in the scantiest degree. I pity still more the men and women who think they are profiting by toil that is done by proxy, while they are simply pampering what is lowest in their own natures and reducing themselves to the _rôle_, if not of brutes, of fools and dolls.’

Young Tam spoke with bitterness, but with freedom, as he could not do at home. He was in another atmosphere--more congenial, nay, with a fascination for him, widely as his hearers differed from him.

Dr. Peter took the trouble to contradict his visitor most decidedly, to remonstrate with him strongly. The elder man’s life-long friendship with Tam senior, in spite of their divergences, warranted the step. Besides, Dr. Peter had known young Tam more or less for years, entertained a considerable regard for him, and would not let him go far wrong if he (Dr. Peter) could help it.

‘Come, come, young Tam Drysdale, you are going a great deal too far. Communism--not to say Nihilism--has been proved rank folly over and over again. If you think so little of wealth, ease, and luxury, why need you grudge them to the favoured few, and cry out like a bairn or a fanatic against the want of them in the many?’

‘Well, sir,’ said Tam, with a grim smile, ‘you are about the last person I should have expected to find upholding riches, with the power they are supposed to confer and the sacrifices they entail.’

Dr. Peter shrugged his narrow, stooping, student’s shoulders. ‘I suppose that is a hit at me because I have not made a fortune with my lancet and stethoscope. To tell the truth, I do not greatly miss it. Athie and I can get along famously with what we have; we’ll not say how much or how little, lest I should make you open your eyes, Maister Tam. But I don’t want to compel all the world to have our tastes; the uniformity would be inconvenient, to say the least, and a trifle tiresome.’

‘You don’t mean to say that you approve of keeping some noses at the grindstone in order that the same feature in other people may be cocked in the air,’ said Tam satirically--‘that you, who are a medical man and expound the laws of health, give your consent to cellars and garrets on the one hand, to match palatial mansions on the other? You are something of a reformer, and you are a church-going man. Are you satisfied as a patriot and a Christian with the physical, moral, and intellectual condition of the two great classes in a commercial centre like Glasgow?’

‘How so? In what light?’ asked Dr. Peter cautiously.

‘Take the well-to-do,’ young Tam explained. ‘They are never weary boasting what they can get for their money. They lay themselves out to spend at the greatest rate. They glory in the reversal of their early practice--not merely where a little cheap refinement and higher education are concerned. They turn their backs on the past, and load themselves with burdens too heavy to be borne, of altered habits, late hours, unpalatable arrangements, uncongenial associates. They make asses of themselves in dress, at table, with their hunters and hounds, their plate, their pictures and books--all for the sake of showing what fine gentlemen they have grown, when the truth is they were a deal nearer being gentlemen, if gentlemen were true men, in the rough guise in which they started.’

‘You are going a great deal too far, Tam,’ repeated Dr. Peter severely; ‘but what of the other class?’ very much in the tone in which the prisoner at the bar interrupted the summing-up of the judge with ‘It’s a lie, my lord; but go on.’

‘Do I need to tell the poor men’s doctor, who attends them more for love than for money, what their case is like?’ asked young Tam, with his voice softening a little. ‘While they are toiling in the sweat of their brows, without hope of rising to greater ease and leisure, their hearts are eaten through and through with envy at the distant sight and sound of good things which the audience is too ignorant to understand are no better than fairy gifts--glittering pinchbeck and spun glass. They are worse--heavy clogs to weigh down men and women unaccustomed to lives of parade and sensuous indulgence, cankers to destroy the bravest manliness and the sweetest womanliness. The working class, with their desperate strikes, their fits of starvation and their fits of excess, their gross materialism, their worn-out bodies and trampled-down souls, their conceited atheism--you know better what they are than I do, Dr. Peter Murray.’

‘I should think so, lad--I should hope so; and the rich too, for I am happy to say I have some of them for my patients and friends also, though it may lower me in your estimation to hear it. Young Tam, you are flying in the face of Providence, you are counting the spots in the sun, and challenging its lustre. There are such things as faults that lean to virtue’s side, and vanities which are but the dust of the earth that gathers on some of the noblest works of God and man. No man, be he rich or poor, is bound to be a slave either to his gains or his deprivations. Tam Drysdale, you have no more respect for the poor than for the rich. You do not honour all men. What do you take the poor for, that you should speak of them as if they were debased helots, instead of honest men and women who call no man master, in one sense? Every sturdy dyer and patient bleacher, every hammerer and weaver and mill girl among them, has his or her destiny in his or her hands, in all essentials as much as you or I have. A poor man or woman can be as decent and intelligent as you or I, with the intelligence of mother-wit, which is infinitely higher than the thin veneer of education that, to tell the truth, sometimes covers up and wastes what finer grace and natural polish the wood ever had.’

Tam looked taken aback, and remained silent, while Dr. Peter waxed more and more indignant.

‘The times are hard, indeed, and things have come to a pretty pass, if a respectable working man or woman--it is all one--who is not a fool and can practise self-denial, like a man or like a woman, cannot earn independence. Such independence means comfort and the power of showing you a bien [comfortable] house and a canty [cheery] fireside, whose owner has no cause to grow green with envy at the masters, no call to ruin himself or herself in a wild attempt to pull them down and reign in their stead. No doubt, trials are rained on some poor sinners; it happens so occasionally, and shuts our mouths. But we cannot see the end from the beginning, and even then the back is made for the burden. No, spare your pity, sir, or pity yourself,’ ended Dr. Peter, flinging himself back in his chair.

‘Never mind him, Mr. Tom.’ Athole looked up from her drawing to come to the rescue. ‘You have rubbed him the wrong way, as I often do. Nobody is to pity, rich or poor, except yourself, father--is that not it?’

‘Bairn, I see a great deal to pity, and I have no objection to my neighbours sharing that luxury, if they find it such. But I will not have wholesale condemnation, or stock of abuse in the guise of pity. Maister Tam, you who are fresh from the schools should know a trick worth two of that. Surely the philosophy of all the centuries has found out something better than to keep on pitting the classes against each other, and setting them by the ears when their strength is in the union--not of the men alone, but of the men and the masters, in making the best and not the worst of each other.’

‘Then you judge trades’ unions to be a mistake in social economy? You condemn them in the face of all they have got for the people, which was only their just right?’ said young Tam, eager to catch at the inference and nail down his adversary.

‘I neither judge nor condemn. The question is beyond me, and may be beyond you too, if you will allow me to say so,’ Dr. Peter excused himself, with a comical twinkle replacing the gleam of indignation in his eyes. ‘There are great difficulties here, as there are in every human problem. However, I can see that many, both rich and poor, are doing their best, and I for one won’t quarrel with them, though they do not find the solution at once, or blunder in the search as their fathers have done before them. I have seen great changes and improvements in my day.’

‘Of what kind?’ inquired young Tam dubiously.

‘For instance, here at Drysdale Haugh, I remember when there were few cylinders in comparison with the blocks. The work was ten times harder than it is now, and took ten times as long to do. There was no thought then of machines to relieve the men who had to keep and turn the yarn on the rods, hanging for hours over the cisterns of boiling dye liquor. As for the houses or hovels for the hands, you might have had occasion for your attacks in those days, Maister Tam. I tell you that your father has been nothing less than a benefactor to his folk, and I’m proud to say you’ll not find better quartered, more fairly and liberally treated workpeople on this side of Glasgow. I only hope you may do as much for your neighbours when your time comes.’

‘I don’t wish to smother my father’s honour,’ said young Tam, with a faint smile and a slight increase of colour. ‘There is one thing, he knew by experience what the people lacked. What I regret is that he was not content to remain one of them, to share the joys and sorrows he was so well acquainted with--to raise them if you will, but not to break off from them and put himself into a position which is not natural to him. Well, it sits ill upon him, and makes him lose his proper dignity. It brings out what is least admirable in him--there can be no disrespect in saying that,’ observed young Tam with some ingenuousness; ‘and it exposes him to the ridicule of people who are immeasurably his inferiors.’

‘If they are his inferiors, why need anybody heed? Fools will laugh whether you give them cause or not--not that I see anything to laugh at in your father, or any laughter going. He is one in a thousand, who has not only done well by himself, but by all around him. He is held in very high and general respect, as he deserves to be, I would have you to understand, Maister Tam. As for not rising above his original footing, or not taking the benefit of the labour of his hands, supposing he holds it to be a benefit, and not occupying the post he is fitted for and called to fill, you are speaking arrant nonsense. You would have castes, in hard and fast lines, in Christian England as in heathen India. Fine sources of progress they have proved in the East! You would remove one of the greatest inducements for ordinary men to struggle and endure, and bring the work of their lives to perfection.’

‘And if every man acted as he spoke,’ retorted Tam, ‘you should be a court physician at least.’

‘I square no man’s life by my rule. If I have found that my tastes are all of a homely kind, it is my own look-out. In point of fact, artificial and complicated forms interfere with what I like and can do. Athole and I flourish best on a moderate income, in a plain old house, with a single servant-lass.’

‘Speak for yourself, father,’ asserted Athole from her coign of vantage. ‘How do you know that I would not prefer to be a Turkish sultana, or an Arcadian shepherdess, or the principal of a Ladies’ College? But there, speak of angels--I see Mr. Drysdale and Eppie--her visit is to the Newfoundland puppy--at the gate.’

There was a little commotion of welcome as old Mr. Drysdale and Eppie entered Barley Riggs house, in which young Tam Drysdale fell into the background. His father’s eyes followed him, and then glanced with a quick suspicion from his son to Athole. Was there any loadstone here which drew Tam from his useless studies and might serve to make or mar him, independent of his other vagaries? No; it could not be a brown, shilpet, plainly-dressed lassie, working as a designer, though she was a lady born and bred--auld Tam did not deny that. Tam never addressed Athole, even in giving her his views on printed calico patterns, without calling her ‘Miss Murray, mem,’ paying the respect due to her in double measure, as it were. Still, though she had not forfeited her young ladyhood in his eyes, he was alive to the light in which many people would regard her; he fully recognised her disqualifications as a possible match for his son. She would have no more than a penny or two, if Dr. Peter could scrape together that for her, and young Tam might have a fine girl like Clary, with as good a tocher. If ‘Sir Jeemes’ had owned a daughter, Tam might even have pretended to her. No, he could not be so blind and besotted. Dr. Peter’s daughter was a good lassie and a clever lassie, and auld Tam rather liked her on his own account; but she was not for young Tam. His eccentricity could not go the length of fancying her.

Eppie was come after the Newfoundland dog, and without the smallest disguise she announced her errand, drew Dr. Peter out to the stable, and was presently seen in the distance hugging a black fluffy ball in her arms; while her companion, nothing loth, for both of the Eppies were pets of his, marshalled her round the paddock, introducing her in succession to every member of his numerous family.

Auld Tam remained where he was. In spite of his boast the night before of being able to walk to Glasgow and back, he was tired enough to be glad to rest in one of the heavy, roomy Barley Riggs parlour chairs. Athole was under the necessity of bearing him and young Tam company.

She had no objection; she had as great a liking for the elder Tam as her father had for Mrs. Drysdale and Eppie. She seemed to know exactly what suited him, as if she belonged to him. She brought him with her own hands, in spite of his protest, such a glass of draught ale and such a water biscuit as he had been wont to refresh himself with twenty years before, and still liked from old association. While he drank the ale and munched the biscuit, to his evident solace, she chatted with him about the weather, about her flowers and his, admitting herself fairly beaten in polyanthuses before she claimed the superiority in white primroses. She gave him her lively report of the pattern-room, and the good effect with which the last designs were likely to come out. It was she who, before the others returned, introduced the subject which lay very near Tam Drysdale’s heart. This was certain experiments he was making in mordants and pastes. He grew radiant in describing the improvements he hoped to bring about in dyeing and printing, until young Tam was stirred up to ask a question or two, and to offer a sensible suggestion. As a boy he had gone considerably beyond the ordinary boyish stage of dabbling in chemicals, and threatened to blow himself and his family to atoms in gratifying his taste. There had been a time when young Tam, to his proud father’s delight, had shown decided promise in what might have been called the paternal field. The son had mortified the father deeply by abandoning the laboratory for the library; but to-night, with Athole Murray for a link between the two men, young Tam testified some of his old interest in the subject.

Eppie came in crying, ‘Father, I have seen such a heap of beasts;’ but auld Tam did not heed her. The fascination of the theme entrapped Dr. Peter also. The three men engaged in a conversation in which the words ‘retort,’ ‘deposit,’ ‘affinity,’ ‘discharge,’ ‘hold fast,’ were for ever coming to the surface.

Athole fell out of the talk, apparently without being missed. She set herself to entertain Eppie, who was too much entranced with her baby Newfoundland to stand in need of amusement.

The discussion was not ended when the party of Drysdales left together. For the moment the division between the father and the son had been so bridged across by the sympathetic warmth of the interest evoked, that auld Tam as he walked away plucked young Tam by the sleeve in a way he had not done for months. The action was for the better emphasizing of an additional reason for the course the experimenter was taking in order to get an unsurpassable tint of orange, which by a junction with an unapproachable blue was to lead to an unassailable green; but the motive did not signify, the result was everything.

Athole Murray smiled as her eyes followed the departing figures. Then she came and stood by her father’s side on the hearthrug and assailed him for an opinion.

‘Don’t you think, father, that some day young Tam Drysdale will go heart and soul into his father’s business; that he will pull down Drysdale Hall and build it up bigger and grander, or have another place in finer taste, which will cost a great deal more, and take twice the pains to create its delicate harmonies? and don’t you imagine that, earnest as Goethe found life, young Tam will take heart before all is done, and dance the night out and the morning in, as many times as there are hairs in his head, without regard to the excusable occasions of Clary’s and Eppie’s weddings.’

‘I don’t know about the dancing and the building, Athie; but the young fellow will ripen, and lose his sour flavour, and be wholesome social food in the course of nature, if he does not contrive to make a mess of himself and his life in the meantime, before they have righted themselves. He is in a transition state and a morbid frame, disgusted with himself and the world. He has come into auld Tam’s gains without going through the process of earning them, and he cannot digest them.’

‘Are they so ill to digest?’ inquired Athole incredulously.

‘So it seems. Young Tam has approached the question of employers and employed without practical knowledge, and he is all at sea. Yet it is to the honour of the lad that he will not leave the question alone. But he sees every discrepancy magnified and distorted. He has an honest regard for his father and mother--that thrawn chiel [cross fellow]--you heard what he said of auld Tam; but that is just why it galls him past bearing to see them make themselves ridiculous. Between you and me they do it oftener than I like to think when poor Tam brags and blaws [boasts and puffs] of his fields and gardens, his sheep and cattle, his table and his cellar, his man-servants and his maid-servants, and brings forward their prices; and when she mince-minces her words, and tries some “lang-nebbet” [long-nosed] name that trips her up. I do not wonder at young Tam. I could shake the kindly auld fules myself.’

‘But young Tam need not see it,’ maintained Athole, with her head held high and her eyes alight, ‘I should like him a thousand times better if he were deaf and blind, if his honour for his father and mother were a shield to screen them from his own over-critical eyes, as well as his neighbours’ carping tongues.’

‘That is a woman’s way of thinking,’ said Dr. Peter, at the same time giving his daughter’s hair a not disapproving stroke. ‘All feeling and no reasoning--all heart and no head. Some people would call it “high fantastic,” but I never object to a good woman’s flights--least of all am I likely to do it here, where I profit by them, being a father myself, my dear.’

‘But, father,’ interrupted Athole quickly and indignantly, ‘you are not like that.’

‘I can only say I have not been tempted,’ he answered, with a laugh. ‘But remember it is not easy for young Tam when, as he hints, there are people mean enough to “sorn” [trespass] on the hospitality of Drysdale Hall, and jeer and laugh at its master and mistress. I take it that men are different from women here--I’ll not say that it is to their gain, with sharper eyes, harder to blind, rougher tongues that go straighter to the mark, and a greater tendency to use the scalpel though they cut into their own flesh.’

‘He knows how good and kind they are, and that should be enough for him,’ said Athole stoutly. ‘I admit they are laughable sometimes; they force me to laugh to their faces, and then I am “black ashamed” of my heartlessness, and could bite my tongue out if I have said anything.’

‘But he does not laugh, lassie; he leaves that to Miss Clary, if any of them is guilty of such light laughter. Ay, if you must do either in the circumstances, it is a mighty deal better to greet [weep] if you are a woman, and gloom [frown] if you are a man, than to mock with the mockers, as it is safer--taking a certain parable into consideration--though I grant you less pleasant, to be disgusted than to be charmed with yourself.’

‘Young Tam will never be half so nice as his father,’ said Athole, still betraying tokens of discontent, while she arrived at her conclusion meditatively. ‘I’m fond of auld Tam.’

‘So am I, Athole. But young Tam, with all the expense bestowed on his education, has not had the same chance; and he’s a chip of the old block in many respects. He may be led, but he will not be driven; yet that auld fule Tam, who knows himself, and ought to know his son, seeks to drive him.’

‘He’s so horribly self-conscious; he has mounted such a very tall hobby-horse, and he rides it so pragmatically and unmercifully. He rejoices so in his superiority and consequent martyrdom; he is so ridiculously young in his grievances.’

‘That is a fault which will mend every day,’ her father told her hopefully. ‘I think of many of the young men of his class, of their entire engrossing satisfaction with their pretty selves, their bit toy yachts and hunters, club dinners, and dances such as you propose for young Tam Drysdale’s heavy head and exercised heart. I reckon up these gentlemen’s small ambitions of being noticed by the country gentry, of pushing themselves up to marry into the higher ranks, and have wives as silly as themselves, that despise their commercial partners. And the conclusion I come to is that such fellows are but a parcel of spoilt boys compared to a lad, ill-conditioned you may say as yet, but who has the making of a man in him. More than that, you must remember, Athole, all that I have mentioned is innocent enough, but there are other ways--not to be spoken of to ears like yours, while it is right that you should know of their existence. There are means of selfishly indulging in prosperity, and wildly rioting in the days of a man’s youth, that end--as surely as the rivers run to the sea--in the foul wallowing of swine in the mire, or in the wickedness of devils. Contrast young Tam and his troubles with such rich men’s sons and their brutal experiences, and his father and mother may thank God for the day that he was born to them.’

The conversation had grown too serious to be prolonged, and it had taken a turn which rendered it impossible for Athole to contradict her father further.