Chapter IX

LIEUTENANT ENEAS MACKINNON DUE IN ST. MUNGO’S SQUARE.

The Miss Mackinnons were as loth to deprive their grand-nephew of his military title as Mrs. Drysdale had shown herself. Indeed, they persisted, in spite of his protests, in giving it to him whenever they spoke of him. Even among themselves it was as often the ‘Lieutenant’ as ‘Eneas.’

It would have been hard to deprive the old ladies of one of the scanty rewards of a step for which both he and they paid dearly--how dearly in his case they had happily no idea. It would have gone far to break their hearts if they had guessed that he had cause to rue sorely the boyish delusion and the family pride--to which they had ministered--that had ended by placing him in his present position. It was at once a great deal less and a great deal more than what was in the Miss Mackinnons’ eyes the gallant calling of a gentleman, which transferred him instantly to the society of his equals, and raised him triumphantly above all further difficulty, with nothing to do save ‘wear his regimentals,’ which, to their great regret, the grand-aunts almost never saw him do; ‘go where her Majesty and his country ca’ed him,’ which as yet had only been to a tame routine of town and country quarters, not even to any corner of Africa; ‘fecht like a hero,’ for which there was literally no opportunity; and wait for promotion which was never likely to come.

The abolition of the purchase system was not calculated to be of any service to Lieutenant Eneas Mackinnon. He had neither special military ability, nor spirit, nor heart to urge him to study theoretically the art of war, go in for a series of competitive examinations, and come out with a new brevet rank from every encounter. And if it were possible for him to remain thirty years a lieutenant, like Havelock, it was certainly very improbable that he would complete the similitude, and end by dying a victorious general. He would need to be as lucky as Sir Frizzle Pumpkin to accomplish such a feat, for though Eneas was brave enough not to be a disgrace to his Trojan namesake, he had no head for organizing and manœuvring bodies of men--not even on a chess-board. He was a great improvement on his father, but was still a reflection of the paternal nature in its slowness and heaviness. The best thing about him was his honesty and modesty, the ingrained attributes of a real, not an imitation, gentleman, which he had acquired somehow from some far-off Mackinnon. He was true, he was unassuming in place of being pompous like Gavin Mackinnon.

Eneas was silent and long-suffering in the thorny path of poverty on which he had been launched among richer men, without the smallest hope of bettering himself. He was as inoffensive a member of a family as Lady Semple had described him, winning sympathy and a certain amount of respect by the magnanimity which caused him to bear his own burden without inflicting it on the shoulders of another. The forbearance might be due to pride as much as to generosity or veritable humility; still, it was a respectable quality, and one to be thankful for. He was one of the passive young men of the period, who looked on and smiled a little languidly--even without complaint changed his course in a leisurely manner, to suit that of his neighbour, and did not do more than shrug his shoulders at what went against the grain with him. He formed a complete contrast to young Tam Drysdale, who was naturally of the aggressive order, in danger of doing something desperate, in the rash arrogance of youth, which burns to set right the world that has been rolling on its path thousands of years before he came into being.

Eneas Mackinnon, as he was more of a gentleman, was also handsomer than any of his race who had appeared for two generations. The clumsy features of his great-aunts had in him taken a symmetrical mould. He was less large for a man than they were for women; still, he was broad-shouldered and long-limbed enough for a soldier. He had borrowed from the plebeian Craigs chestnut instead of tow-coloured hair, with blue eyes, which had a certain bucolic mildness and softness in them. As he stood in a doorway or on a flight of steps, or leant his back against a tree on a lawn, or propped himself upon a table or the arm of a couch, he was a little like a statue of a fine phlegmatic Englishman, but it was a statue which would have done the sculptor fair credit.

The Lieutenant, supposing he ever became a general, would be a general without a penny of private fortune, who must at the same time support the increased dignity of his rank. He must continue a bachelor, and by so doing restrict his expenses to his personal wants, ‘collaring’ the increase of income through the grades of captain, major, etc., to furnish him, and him alone, with an increase of comforts proportionate to the advance of age and the infirmities of age. If he permitted himself to marry, perhaps to bring into the world a small clamorous family, in addition to an exacting wife, he would be as painfully put to it, in spite of his laurels--as pressed, worried, stinted--as threadbare--as miserably anxious for the future not only of himself, but of those connected with him, as any light-pursed subaltern writhing under the yoke of bondage he had unwittingly assumed. This was an age of luxurious living and regardless extravagance, a commercial age, when a pseudo-working man like Tam Drysdale of Drysdale Hall set up an establishment fit for a laird of many acres or a peer of the realm, and left gentlemen and officers far behind.

Eneas Mackinnon submitted to destiny with the fatalism of the Gael. His regiment was now quartered at Dumbarton. He was often in Glasgow as well as at Semple Barns. The last opportunity had been decidedly a boon to him. The former was the occasion of his being extensively taken out in the richest, and sometimes the vulgarest houses of certain gorgeous circles in Glasgow. He had availed himself of the chance, even while he rebelled in a stony fashion against the infliction, as a lawful means of relieving his over-taxed resources. He despised himself for it, but what could he do?--especially if he were to bestow small gifts on the ‘aunties,’ who were certainly growing more penurious every day, and beginning to deny themselves the very necessaries of life in an exasperating manner, not uncommon with old women, he had heard. Better that he should stand being fêted by pipe-makers and retired spirit-dealers, and have to hobnob with their bumptious sons and dance with their bouncing daughters, than that he should run into debt and shoot himself, and bring his particular tabbies to the grave with horror at the catastrophe. As yet the notion that he might some day have to sell himself bodily by marrying one of these tochered lasses to keep body and soul together, only loomed before his imagination as a dark necessity in the distance.

The young man groaned inwardly over his visits to St. Mungo’s Square, as he groaned over most of the acts of his purgatorial life. To his credit he paid the visits with tolerable frequency and regularity, though latterly he had been plagued by an unaccountable rule established by Miss Janet, that he should always send them an intimation of his coming beforehand.

‘Your auntie Meye is getting frail, you see,’ Miss Janet had the excuse, ‘and a wee thing starts her; and me or your auntie Betheye might be out of the road and miss you, which would be a thousand peeties.’

So, with one more of his many smothered groans, Lieutenant Eneas was in the habit of perpetrating small notes and despatching them as _avant couriers_ every time that he descended on St. Mungo’s Square.

‘It is making such a fuss about a fellow’s movements, and one feels as if one ought to bring handsome presents,’ he reflected, glancing deprecatingly at the little parcel of gloves--women always wanted gloves--his own size suited ‘the aunties.’ His cast-off Hexhamians would have been better than new pairs, for the last had been surreptitiously exchanged as misfits, by Miss Bethia, for more of the yarn she was constantly knitting now, in the intervals of the white seam which was kept in the background. The gentleman’s socks might be for ‘the Lieutenant,’ though soon after entering his regiment he had, somewhat to his aunties’ mortification, declined politely further services from their knitting-needles, or the woollen articles might be muffatees and _what-nots_ for the Dorcas table at a bazaar; but plain needle-work was more difficult to explain away. Shirtmaking had gone out of fashion as a becoming attention from ladies to their male relations, and it might well be thought that the Miss Mackinnons had each an ample stock to last her all her days of under-linen of her mother’s bleaching and her grandmother’s spinning.

Eneas would add to the gloves a brace of partridges of his own shooting, or a basket of grapes from the Semple Barns vineries, or from other and less aristocratic mansions--the contents of which were at his disposal if he chose. The grapes went the same way as the gloves, the luxuries were exchanged for necessities. But the partridges, if they were not adroitly confiscated to the use of the donor, made a feast-day in the old house in St. Mungo’s Square. They constituted what the ladies called ‘a flesh denner,’ a gross meal in which the eaters had ceased to indulge every day.

The whole establishment always put on its best face. The blanks and deficiencies were hidden by a series of elaborate manœuvres which sometimes took an hour or two to carry out. The Miss Mackinnons wore their company gowns and caps on the days when they expected their grand-nephew. It was a temporary return, however halting, to the glories of the past, and though the effort cost trouble, it refreshed the jaded spirits and put new life into the drudging, sordid existence of the hard-tried women.

‘I wonder if he’ll notice that anything more is missing,’ suggested Miss Janet mysteriously. ‘There’s the clock and the ile picture of the Pretender, whom our great-grandfather waited on at Shawfield House, though he had no thocht of going out with the Prince. Both the clock and the picture are gone since Eneas was here. The last time, you mind, we took him up to Auntie Meye’s bedroom, where less has been lifted. But men are not noticing, and if the Lieutenant minds the twa things, he may think the one is at the watchmaker’s and the other at the picture-cleaner’s, and put no questions. But mind, Betheye, you maun be ready with your answer that he maun have forgotten we have a spring cleaning, when we pu’ things about. It’s just a divert to out-of-the-world auld leddies like us. It’s true in the main, and for a white lee or twa--they cannot be helped--I trust we may be forgi’en in a gude cause. Better tell them than break a fine lad’s spirit. The Mackinnons--the men of them--had high spirits, that would not have brooked what we could tell.’

‘How could they have helped brooking it, Janet?’ asked Miss Bethia a little stolidly; and then, without waiting to learn the result of an idle inquiry to which Miss Janet vouchsafed no reply, Miss Bethia continued--‘What I’m maist feared for is Meye coming out with some piece of information she should keep to herself. I have signalled to her to ca’ canny [be prudent], in case o’ mistakes, till she’s grown dorty [cross] about it, and she wonders if I want her, the auldest, to be dumb as well as deaf.’

‘Puir Meye!’ said Miss Janet in accents of loud commiseration, which, however, did not penetrate the sealed ears of what looked like the image of a woman huddled up in shawls, with eyes that, in place of showing the dimness of age, had a bird-like brightness about them as they darted swiftly, trying to do the work of two senses, from the one to the other of the speakers.

‘Preserve us a’, she’s reproaching us at this minute,’ said Miss Janet, as she rose with some signs of rheumatic stiffness, went to the slate hung on the wall behind her sister’s chair, took it down, and wrote on it in large letters, as if Miss Mackinnon were blind as well as deaf, ‘We’re feared for you letting out anything before the Lieutenant.’

‘Do you tak’ me for an eedit?’ Miss Mackinnon retorted with asperity, while Miss Janet was heedfully erasing in the most primitive manner what she had written.

‘Since the Beelyie has lent us back the punch-bowl to lie for the day in its auld place below the sideboard,’ reflected Miss Janet with some complacency, ‘and Kate Carstairs has sent ower her cut crystal claret joog, which is the marrow o’ what ours used to be, the room may pass.’

‘If he’ll not draw up the blinds,’ said Miss Bethia anxiously; ‘men have aye such a wark with licht. I’ll be sitting on eggs lest he should find out that half of the chairs now are bedroom chairs.’

‘Hoots! he’ll be at the fit of the table, and he never moves aince he has set down. Eneas is not a jumping-jack--he gangs about his business with deliberation, as befits a gentleman, and no a waiter that’s aye bobbin’ up at your elby. I wish he had gotten something better than the toasted cheese that nane of us can touch even in the middle of the day, for our stamacks,’ ended Miss Janet, half unconsciously committing a pious fraud on herself and her sisters, and not caring to recall that, for the price of the cheese and such-like dainties, the family had been obliged to go without a scraping of butter on their bread for more than one breakfast and tea--their principal meals lately. ‘But it is only his lunch before his mess denner, and there’s jeely and bread--he had a great troke [trade] with jeely and bread when he was a laddie--and the claret in the claret-joog to set aff the table.’

There was a pause, during which a kind of scared look came into Miss Bethia’s pallid and haggard, no longer simpering face.

‘If everything gangs bit by bit, Janet,’ she said with a little catch in her breath, ‘and we eat them a’ up, there will sune be--not to say not a table to set a meal upon, there will not be a meal left--the very parritch and trecle will fail. How will we keep it from the Lieutenant, and what will we do then?’

‘Wheesht! things will never come to that pass,’ said Miss Janet with whitening lips, but still speaking resolutely. ‘You never ken what may happen--a silly [delicate] man cannot last for ever.’

‘Oh, Janet, if you mean Archie Fenton of Strathdivie,’ cried Miss Bethia, to whom a nod was not as good as a wink, and every innuendo must be made a plain statement, ‘it’s ill countin’ on dead men’s shoon, and he’s younger than either you or Meye.’

‘I ken that without your telling me,’ Miss Janet said snappishly. ‘But none of us, auld or young, can live for ever. Surely he may dee as well as another. Forbye, we’ve been telled the insurance offices refused a policy on his life when his sister was still to the fore ten years syne.’

‘But, oh, it’s fearsome to speak of it!’ murmured Miss Bethia, as if the next act in the drama would be a plotted murder.

‘I’m sure I’m not wanting to think or speak about it,’ protested Miss Janet.

‘And I’m not sure but we’ve gane the wrong way,’ said Miss Bethia, hanging her head, not so much with conscious guilt as at finding fault with her elder sisters. ‘If, before we had let the furniture gang, we had tried a gentleman lodger or twa--- ’

‘Betheye Mackinnon, do you ken what you’re sayin’?’ demanded Miss Janet, in a voice the sternness of which was awful in the culprit’s ears. ‘Is this like a common lodging-house? I mind the day when for the word “lodgers” to have been breathed in St. Mungo’s Square would have been for all Glasgy to be up in arms. Are we like lodging-house keepers? Does the trade fit the auld Virginian Mackinnons? And what of the Lieutenant’s honour, I should like to ken?’

‘Well, I’m sure, Janet, I meant no harm,’ said Miss Betheye, almost reduced to tears; ‘and folk were not so nice lang syne. I aye mind how our mother used to speak of Leddy Mary and Leddy Betty Bogle, who thocht no shame to be dress-makers, though their father claimed an earldom.’

‘The earldom claimed or allowed made all the difference in the world,’ said Miss Janet oracularly. ‘Not that the Mackinnons have not their richts as well as the Bogles. Forbye, the mantua-making and millinery was held a genteel trade. But a lodgin’-house with maiden leddies waitin’ on strange men! I wonder at you, Betheye!’

The last stroke overwhelmed Miss Bethia.

‘Eh! I didna think,’ she cried so falteringly that her judge was mollified.

‘Weel, you maun mind another time and not be so heedless with your words. You’re not a bairn now, Betheye. But say no more about it. Let me hear about the order that Walkingshaw’s has given you for hand-made nicht-gowns. I micht manage the hemming of the tails [skirts] and the running up of the seams, though even with my glasses I cannot attempt the stitching.’

‘I could manage it all fine mysel’, and let you lie down in the afternoons; you’re that troubled with the fires, and the flures, and the beds, and only auld Tibbie to wash out the door-steps and carry awa’ the aiss. Then Meye’s winter hoast [cough] is not awa’, so that ye cannot get rested in the nicht. Oh, I could manage fine! But they say there’s little demand for hand-sewing, so muckle is done now with the machine. The feck o’ folk are pleased even though the ends are not fastened and the sewing does not last. They have ta’en fourpence aff the price, and they find faut with the heathering,’ ended Miss Bethia, in a deplorable voice. ‘The very thing that I prided myself on--me that was sic a gude worker of sprigged and heathered collars--do you mind?’

‘Set them up!’ cried Miss Janet indignantly. ‘They suld be proud to have a leddy sew for them, that was the best fancy-worker, as well as the best piany-player, in Glasgy. But they ken nae better. What suld some auld mill lass, ganging trailing now in silks and satins, understand of heathering and sprigging? It is a disgrace to the auld shop-folk that they humour sic low gentry. I wonder what Walkinshaw’s would say if I sent Eneas to them, ganging tramping into the shop, and maybe drawing his swurd, if he were in his regimentals, because of the insult to his auntie?’

‘Na, na, Eneas maun never hear a cheep [whisper] about it; you would be the last to tell him. It would be a fell-like thing for him if it were ever jaloused that ane of his aunties--auld Eneas Mackinnon’s great-grand-dochters--wrocht for a shop. Sirs! my heart came into my mouth the last time he was here, and spoke of the Macmasters’ ball, and me kennin’ all the time, and having only the word of Walkinshaw’s it would be kept secret, that I had just sent to the shop a set of slip-bodies--cammysoles, they ca’ them now--for the Miss Macmasters!’

‘_Miss_ Macmasters! quo she,’ echoed Miss Janet, in the highest key; ‘_Lass_ Macmasters would be liker the thing. Why, her faither was the lamp-lichter in the Square, and his faither a ferryman up the water. I thocht, when he spoke, offishers mak’ theirselves cheap noo-a-days, and the Macmasters’ was not a house for Eneas Mackinnon to set his foot intil.’

‘For a’ that, he said it was the brawest house on that side of the Park, and the Miss Macmasters were not ill-lookin’, and did their dancing-maister credit, if they could but get rid of the Glasgy tongue. I wonder what there is in the Glasgy ony mair than in the Edinburgh or the Perth speech. But they’re no leddies, or it wouldna signify how they spoke.’

‘Leddies! Rab Macmaster’s dochters leddies! Are you daft, Betheye? But it is aboot Eneas’s hour. Meye’s watch--the last we have left--is not to be depended on, and we havena the knock [clock] to correct it by. I wish we were nearer a toon knock. There are the factory bells in the morning, and at the denner hour, and the sun on the wa’; but when one has not been bred to lippen [trust] to them, they’re apt to be deceitful. I maun see to the cheese. Yes, you’ll do,’ as Miss Bethia brushed down her shabby, turned silk gown. ‘You’re looking uncommonly weel, Betheye, and I’ve just to draw on my gloves before I go to the front door.’

‘The Lieutenant thinks you’re getting pridefu’, Janet, with your gloves.’

‘What for no?’ asked Miss Janet, between jocoseness and defiance. ‘I was entitled to my pride in my youth, and sae may I be yet. But I mauna forget a parting word of caution to Meye.’

She crossed to the stationary, isolated sister, and began an incomprehensible pantomime of pointing with her finger, moving her jaws, shaking her head, and waving her hand. When it seemed lost on Miss Mackinnon, Miss Janet had again recourse to the slate and slate-pencil, saying regretfully, ‘Poor Meye! she’s no sae gleg [quick] as she was wont to be; we’re so ta’en up, she’s left ower muckle to hersel’.’ Miss Janet wrote--‘If you please, Meye, you’ll not touch the cheese, lest there should not be ower muckle for the gentleman. We’ll have some of the bread and jelly, which is the proper lunch for ladies. If there is any cheese left in the dish, it will toast up again for your tea.’

Miss Mackinnon understood now, and answered in a voice hoarse and harsh from the absence of modulation--she did not appear propitiated. ‘I think I ken what is fit for leddies eating either at lunch or denner, without you giving me a lesson. But you and Betheye are for ever whispering and colleagin’ thegither, like a pair of ill-bred bairns. I wish you had found some other lunch for our nephew than what makes the smell of a moose-trap all over the house. You micht have had ham and eggs.’

‘And the ham so dear, and the eggs extortion!’ broke in Miss Janet, in an aside to Miss Bethia.

‘Or a chop; it is long since I have tasted a chop,’ Miss Mackinnon continued to complain.

‘Puir body! you would not have been likely to taste it. The Lieutenant would have eaten ane, maybe twa, for his ain share, having a healthy young appetite, and being without a care,’ commented Miss Janet once more.

Then Miss Mackinnon relented a little: ‘Dinna fash [trouble] to keep cheese for me. It is kind of you to think of it, but I would not touch it if you and Betheye had not your share, though it were but a curran’ [a crumb]. ‘Deed, when I come to think of it, I believe it does disagree with my stamack; but you, with your housework, and Betheye with her walks back and forwards to Walkinshaw’s, should be able to digest whin-stanes.’