Chapter XXXII: In the Balance

The world went on much the same this autumn, though everything under the sun was altered to Tam Drysdale, as he knew. The slight sprinkling of grey, which had been all that had appeared formerly in his brown hair, was on the road to become a heavy powdering of white.

A wistful light had crept into the happy eyes of the elder Eppie, which were now so often resting, as she would have said, stowlins [by stealth] on her husband. Her rampant prosperity was subdued by a hidden sorrow. Something was wrong with her Tam which she could not divine; she only knew that he did not come to her for consolation; so she supposed the evil, whatever it might be, was beyond her power of alleviation, and she was silently sorry, with a meek devoted woman’s unscorning, ungrudging pity.

Mrs. Drysdale was not half so fine or nearly so ridiculous as she had been. What did she care for finery when there was something amiss with Tam? And as she ceased to pay heed to the good things of her position, and the suitable deportment they called for from her, her vulgarity was toned down, and she lost much of her self-consciousness and superficial affectation. A new charm was added to her other attractions. Something like the dawning of dignity--the dignity of indifference to the accidents of circumstance, and of a soul occupied by higher things--began to show itself in Eppie. But these were subtle signs, and they were the sole indication that anything had happened; though they might be indirectly felt, they were not distinctly recognised.

Drysdale Hall was, to all outward appearance, the same as it had ever been since it was created by its present owner; and since young Tam and Clary had grown up, bringing with them fresh life and movement--animated, full of the thrills and throbs of passion in natures endowed with the strength and ardour of their early prime, even while it was most divergent and discordant where the general current was concerned. And now a new figure in the second generation--young Eppie, in her simplicity and sweetness, was hovering on the threshold of that flight into the world which boys and girls must take sooner or later.

As the tides obey the moon, so do the lower strata of society answer to the higher, though the distance between them is more or less great, and there are no conspicuous points of union. Because Parliament is up, and London deserted by the upper ten thousand in September, so those who are not in Parliament, and have nobody connected with them affected by its sitting and rising, choose that season when the daylight is beginning to shorten and the moderate heat to cool, when wild flowers are mostly gone and birds have ceased to sing, for their annual holiday and their sojourn in the country. Rural resorts which have no call to answer to the necessities of legislators become inundated with temporary residents who have not even the excuse of being bandsters [binders of corn], or theekers [thatchers] of stacks, or peripatetic owners of thrashing-machines, and are callous to all the delights of June with her long days and broomy braes, and July with her meridian heat, her bluebells by the wayside, and her dog-roses in the hedgerows. But there is one glory gilding the fall of the year, that exists alike for gentle and simple of the more combative sex. It is not compelled by the breaking-up of Parliament, the partial closing of Government offices, the vacations of the law courts, though it does much in its turn to compel these pauses in the business of the country. The name of this potent charmer is ‘Sport,’ which reigns from the 12th of August to the last hunt of the advancing spring. The enchantress is rampant in her sway when the moors, the turnip-fields, the coverts, are possessed by an army of men in shooting-jackets, with staghounds and pointers for their allies, and the air is full of the bang of small artillery.

St. Mungo’s City is not an exception to the rest of the world, in the desire to kill the beautiful wild creatures of the hills and the fields. After Glasgow has poured her swarms ‘down the water,’ in early summer, she sends fresh swarms of the wealthier grades to render the heather and the stubble alive with more than deer and grouse, hares and pheasants. Autumn always brought a pleasant excitement of company and gaiety to Drysdale Hall, with crowded breakfast-tables, meetings at the scene of action, open-air luncheons, frequent guests to dinner, little dances when there were enough young people in the house. Doubtless the fashion was borrowed from Semple Barns, where members of Parliament on the wing did alight on occasion, and refresh their nervous systems, exhausted by services to the nation, with tramping through briars and brambles, leaping over ditches, and bringing down partridges.

Auld Tam commanded a little good shooting on his property, and he rented a moor within two hours’ journey by railway, on which active men, accustomed both to business and hunting hours, starting with the lark and reaching their destination before the dew was dry on the red ling, could traverse the ground, fill creditable bags, and be back to dinner several times a week, from the 12th to the 1st, when prey nearer home afforded the coveted pursuit without the sacrifice of a railway journey.

Tam Drysdale hardly took his gun in his hand this season, but in the other direction young Tam allowed himself greater indulgence in the natural propensity of the biped that can pull a trigger. The only eccentricity he displayed was that he was quick to share moor and shooting with any of his managers who had taken out licenses, and that the son kept up the father’s practice in the disposal of the spoil of his gun. Instead of sending the game to fetch a fair price in the Glasgow poultry-shops, he despatched what did not find its way to the Drysdale Hall larder, to Dr. Peter Murray for distribution among his patients, or to the appreciative wives and families of bleachers and dyers who would otherwise have had little chance of tasting hare or pheasant that was honestly come by.

Young Tam was not left to cope with the fowls of the air and the hares and the rabbits of the pasture single-handed, save for his subordinates or his Glasgow acquaintance who could exchange a shooting with him. Eneas Mackinnon, who was understood to be indebted to his friends for such sport as he got, came over with Dick Semple whenever they were not better employed elsewhere.

A far more brilliant ally arrived in good time. Sir Hugo Willoughby had kept his word. He had reappeared just when he had said he would, and was making himself more popular than ever by declining to herd with his kind and by casting in his lot with the young Glasgow men. In fact, he kept hovering in the immediate vicinity of St. Mungo’s City, with its roar of traffic, its smoky abominations, its boisterous superfluity and ostentation. He defied Guy Horsburgh, who began to look uneasy in the office of bear-leader, which he had taken upon himself, to wile him, Sir Hugo, to any distance--to induce him to take a yachting voyage to Iceland or a walking tour in Ross or Sutherland--to try a bout of deer-stalking in any of the deer forests, the tenants of which were friends of his. He would not even go down with Guy to that Court in Lincolnshire which he had often proposed to show to his friend, where Lady Willoughby sat lonely in her castle hall, awaiting her truant son in vain, and where preserves choke-full of all the lowland game which could satisfy the heart of a man or the muzzle of a gun were wasting their sweetness on the desert air, and calling loudly for an absent, inconsiderate squire to diminish the _embarras des richesses_, else he would have a host of farmers, his natural allies, rising up in open rebellion against him. Not above a certain radius of miles would Sir Hugo budge from Glasgow--Glasgow in August and September, not Glasgow down-the-water, fresh with sea and mountain breezes, but Glasgow inland, with her thick carpet of grimy dust and her black pall of filthy smoke--Glasgow squalid, careworn, miserable, when the depression of trade caused the fitful rattle of the machinery to sound eerie and hollow as when slaves shake their chains, and the sweat of men’s brows began to gather in the big drops of despair. There was nothing more terrible to fear save the silence of death, when a great strike testifies to the revolt of one class and the rending asunder of two.

It might have been that young Sir Hugo was so true a philosopher and so promising a patriot that he was bent on becoming acquainted with all shades of life in one of the great trade centres which he had elected to study. But so far as this went, Sir Hugo turned his back on the city and was engrossed with the wonders of his own young existence. At this time he neither knew nor cared much for its sins and sorrows, cherishing a sanguine hope that they would all cure themselves somehow, and be mended by an alchemy with which he had nothing to do. It was the neighbourhood of Glasgow, and not Glasgow itself, to which he was nailed. The Horsburghs had their country-house not far from Drysdale Hall, and though it was the most commonplace of modern dwellings, he was content with it.

Be it said also that Sir Hugo had returned to his first love--to the pursuit of the Cinderella who had fled from him in the Drysdale Hall picture-gallery, the ‘young thing, just come frae her mammy,’ who had sung to him in the Drysdale Hall drawing-room. He had called Athole Murray charming, but he had forgotten her wit long before he saw her face again. It was the recollection of young Eppie’s guileless sweetness, combined with her spring-time loveliness, which he called divine, that had taken fast hold of his mind.

Sir Hugo could not display these inclinations without causing a flutter of marvel and speculation; but first when he came back auld Tam took no further notice of the young man, about whom he had made such a fuss at Easter, than if he had been an ordinary mortal. It seemed as if a benumbing power was at work on the master of Drysdale Hall. He became cold and passive to what would formerly have roused him to hot and strong approbation or opposition. He made no more sign of displeasure at the continued presence of Eneas Mackinnon at Drysdale Hall, than of pleasure at the pertinacity with which Sir Hugo Willoughby seized every opportunity of renewing his visits. Not the lifting of a finger, the flicker of an eyelid, the raising of the voice, uttered an imperative protest when young Tam showed again his exclusive preference for Barley Riggs among the houses of his acquaintance, and, under pretext of watching some chemical experiments conducted by Dr. Peter in his laboratory, spent three evenings of the week there.

It was as if a dull indifference was settling down on auld Tam--a strange insensibility to what had been wont to affect him in the liveliest manner. His wife, who but for him would have been at the height of a mother’s mingled pride and pain, quivering with excitement like the youngest hero or heroine among them, whose fortune was hanging in the balance, grew more and more puzzled, chilled, frightened, by Tam’s want of sympathy, even of angry interest, in the affairs of his children at what looked like a turning-point in their destiny.

Clary, who had braced herself for a contest--violent while it lasted--had her whole ideas upset by finding that there was apparently to be no altercation--she was to be let alone to go her own ways. It was not an inspiriting change to a woman of her temperament, and she was the next thing to piqued by it. If she had cared only for asserting her will, and had not been thoroughly honest, with a capacity for steadfastness where her affections were placed, she might have been driven to give up Eneas Mackinnon.

As for Eneas, in spite of all the encouragement that a young proud woman could give him, he had been tempted to hang back, in an agony of mortified self-respect, sensitiveness and shame, from the inevitable explanation and the almost equally inevitable accusation of presumption and unworthy motives on his part, which the announcement to auld Tam would call forth. Eneas, too, was dumbfounded, and in some degree overwhelmed by the amnesty that was granted to him. Was he to go on shooting Tam Drysdale’s partridges on the land which had belonged to Eneas’s mother, eating auld Tam’s dinners--the usual end to the day’s shootings--making love to his beautiful capable daughter, with her free consent, under her father’s very nose, or was Eneas to fail Claribel and withdraw at the last moment, vanquished by the strange trust put in him?

Young Tam was lordlier in his behaviour. He acted as if he did not see that his father had any right to dispose of his son’s spare time or modify his taste for this or that company. He made no bones of going over to Barley Riggs. He did not condescend to the smallest concealment. He had even the coolness to borrow his father’s lantern on a dark rainy night, looking auld Tam in the face as the son proffered the request, telling the owner where the light was to guide the willing feet that scouted a carriage, and were ready to trudge through wind and rain to reach their goal.

‘Tak’ the lantern, laddie. You’ll find it in the harness-room,’ said Tam gruffly, but without boiling over, without even wincing, though he let his head drop a little on his breast.

Was nothing else worth caring for so long as that thing hung over his head? Might his children all come and go--they for whom he had striven, who were as the apple of his eye, whom not so long ago he would fain have curbed and bent to force them into other channels than those they had formed for themselves, for the lad and lass’s good? Could they do as they liked for anything their father cared, he was so hopeless and heartless for them, for himself, for the whole world?

Dr. Peter, in wholesome unconsciousness, was as blind as ever; and all that Athole Murray did was to laugh at young Tam till the tears came into her own eyes, to twit him with his opinions and performances, to shut herself up with her patterns, pets, and books, and excuse herself from coming to see the retorts, disappointing both of the operators--to keep away from Drysdale Hall and every other place where she was likely to encounter the young man.

But Athole was beginning to meet her match. Tam the younger was fast out-growing that sour effervescence of greenness and youth to which Dr. Peter had once alluded. The junior partner in Drysdale and Son’s was losing his self-consciousness and susceptibility. He was settling down into calm, strong manhood, knowing what it wanted, and not to be easily turned from seeking to supply its wants. Young Tam was ceasing to mind Athole’s flouts. He had advanced so far as to smile at them--a little grimly, perhaps, but still to smile and go on his way without being in the slightest degree deterred by her bearing. He did not mean to show it, but a certain quiet, far from unhappy masterfulness was stealing into his looks and tones. She did not know that she betrayed it, but a certain humility and nervousness, which were not altogether unhappy either, though the unacknowledged restraint provoked and affronted her, lurked under her most audacious sally and sharpest repartee.