Chapter XII: The Pleasures of the Rich

Auld Tam and Mrs. Drysdale went a good deal into company like themselves--rich millowners with whom Tam had large connection in business, and the heads of some of the most flourishing trades in Glasgow, who had become, in one way or another, acquainted with the wealthy dyer and calico-printer, and who had often the common ground with him that they too had risen from the ranks. There is a spell in money, as in many potent things, which draws the possessors into an alliance--offensive and defensive.

It would be hard to sum up the thousands represented by Tam Drysdale’s acquaintances. Though he had not forgotten his poorer friends, and did them many a good turn, he had a genuine respect for money, or rather for the qualities concerned in its acquisition. He made excuses for the rich man no less than for the poor. ‘He’s made a grand job o’ that mill, or that pit,’ he would say. ‘They cry he’s near-handed, or he’s fond o’ the bottle, or he’s grown an imperious dug in his age. But what would you have? Think of what he’s been and dune! Money has its temptations. Them that have spared in their youth may be led into stinting still in their riper years, or they may be beguiled into menselessness, as it were, to make up for the past. If men commence to scrape and boo at your biddin’, it’s no aye easy to refrain from walking over their necks. More by token, a man that has made and keepit riches has as frequently as not shown his superiority--that he has the brains, the smeddum [spirit], the self-restraint, and the energy that render men fit to rule.’ Tam put a prosperous man’s high value on prosperity, while with his feeling for adversity there mingled, in spite of his kindness of heart, a shade of impatient scorn.

Mrs. Drysdale had also her estimate of her friends--those richly clad, frequently overgrown as well as overweighted women, who for the most part formed her circle, affected by the texture of their satins and velvets, and the contents of their jewel-boxes. She did not apply the same test to Lady Semple, for even Eppie’s simple judgment was quick enough to discern that her ladyship, who had a habit of wearing shabby silk gowns without ornament, belonged to a different class and must be measured by another rule.

The visiting consisted largely of dinners conducted with the greatest formality. The great points at those dinners were the costliness of the table equipage and the expense and unseasonableness, rather than seasonableness, of the viands. So much silver glittered on those mercantile tables that it began to be a drug and little thought of, as the metal was at Jerusalem in the days of King Solomon. There was a talk of silver-gilt, even of a sprinkling of gold vessels, to create a sensation. The givers of the feast were still dead to the merits of rock-crystal, else there would have been an opening for it. Salmon, the first day the Act of Parliament permitted the rivers to be drawn; lamb when the frost-bitten grass was still sprinkled with snow, peas and strawberries, not half-withered importations from the shores of the Mediterranean, and yet not brought to maturity before the month of May by an unaided Scotch sun; the earliest oysters, grouse and venison.

Tam and Mrs. Drysdale viewed those feasts--not necessarily of reason--with the greatest respect, and dressed in the man and woman’s best to do the entertainments honour. The husband and wife took their station as host and hostess in the Drysdale Hall drawing-room, or drove off as guests in the Drysdale Hall carriage, with something like solemnity, as for an imposing rite. Notwithstanding their laudable endeavours to grace the scene, neither looked half so well as in his or her ordinary attire. There was a specially clownish air about Tam in his fine broadcloth and fine linen. Mrs. Drysdale suffered more than ever from the disadvantage of being ‘braw’ in her richest velvet and most delicate lace. It was to little purpose that he wore on one of his little fingers a sapphire fit to be an heirloom, or that her bracelet, brooch, and ear-rings far outshone that broken diamond necklace, found after a fire among the ruins of Shawfield House, of which there is still an old Glasgow tradition.

But the excellent couple were not singular. Their fellow guests were, to use a Scotch phrase, ‘as fine as they could hing,’ rejoicing in the costliest materials and the most expensive of tailors and _modistes_ to furnish the toilette. Dockens were wagging with a vengeance. The result was not cheering when the personal comeliness which distinguished the Drysdales was wanting. It was positively depressing. Nobody seemed quite at home in his or her clothes. They were not as if they had grown upon the wearers’ backs--which is the perfection of dressing, and the women had the expression of thinking of nothing else but their wardrobes and those of their neighbours displayed for the general benefit.

Young Tam and Claribel were only occasionally present at these dinners. St. Mungo’s city drew a hard and fast line between the old and the young in these matters. The visiting of the latter included the staying for two or three days at a time at a friend’s house where there were young people like themselves (the seniors rarely paid a visit which lasted over a night), balls, public and private, junior clubs, the theatre, the hunting-field, and all picnics that were not purely family affairs. But the solid dinners lay in the province of the elders, and formed their dissipation.

If an exception was made it was in young Tam’s favour, for his benefit or loss. His sex and the probability of his entering into his father’s business entitled him to greater consideration than any girl, however handsome or well-dressed or otherwise mistress of the situation. He was fitter company for the elderly men, since Young Glasgow can generally talk business with as much zest as his father can talk it--nay, sometimes with a glitter of the eye under the smooth forehead and hair the hue of the raven or the squirrel, which hints at an increase of the gambling spirit in the population.

As for Claribel, though she knew what she was about, and could suit Lady Semple, who found her a most useful and obliging young friend, Clary had very little to say on the stock themes of servants and tradespeople to matrons of her mother’s type. It was to this level that Mrs. Drysdale’s conversation fell in society; though when she was alone with her daughter Eppie, she could tell charming tales, idyls of old country and town life, embellished by queer figures and quaint customs--Egg Jean, Bell Geordie and Creepy Kate; Milky May-day, and Hallowe’en with its nuts and apples.

But from the time that Tam and Mrs. Drysdale started, sitting side by side like a pair of wedded doves, he with a glove in one hand and she with her laced pocket-handkerchief in her lap, talking with bated breath of the richest and greatest persons they expected to meet, they were ‘upon their manners,’ she naturally more subdued than he, but both considerably impressed. Solemnly Tam stepped from the carriage at their destination and handed Mrs. Drysdale out under the awning put up to shelter them from the elements. Arm in arm, in spite of modern usage, the two were passed from one officiating domestic to another, in the line of servants stationed in the hall, on the staircase, in the corridor, a tolerably numerous band, when, according to the way in St. Mungo’s city, Tam tipped each servant, crossing every palm with silver as he passed its bowing owner.

At last came the stentorian announcement, ‘Mr. and Mrs. Drysdale;’ and the door was flung open to reveal another pair, generally portlier and as well clad, standing in the centre of another gorgeous drawing-room, with a stream of black coats, gold chains, white ties, velvet and moire, flashing stones and choice bouquets, circling or subsiding into a stationary ring round the central couple.

The dinner itself was a very serious, not to say ponderous, business, in which each eater not only dwelt on the merits of soup and entrées, but appraised the madeira which had travelled round the world, and the home-raised pines. The circumstances did not admit of much talking, unless in a word or two to next neighbours. It was only when the pheasant made its exit, and the port and the cheese took its place, that the sense of responsibility was lessened, and a strain of good-fellowship, always increasing in joviality, began to prevail.

The tongues of the men commenced to wag on politics, local interests, and when two of a trade met, ‘shop’ was not absent. There was no lack of shrewdness, broad common-sense, and fair intelligence, for these men--reckoning them from those who had made the humblest beginnings--had all received a fair parish-school education, and their acquirements had been enlarged and rubbed into the best condition by intercourse with the world, and the calculations and speculations of trade. There were college-bred men among them, and members of the old Glasgow houses--not stranded like that of Mackinnon, but borne on to this day on the full tide of prosperity. It was among the last that the best attributes of the born and bred diner-out showed themselves in a fund of appropriate anecdote--not coarse or worse--and in a peculiar humour not so much caustic as dry in its ripeness, like the champagne, sometimes with a dimly perceptible current of sadness in its mirth, as the best Scotch wit, unlike English wit or French wit or American wit, seems always to play on the wan face of

‘The mighty waters sounding evermore.’

The guests who thus contributed to the entertainment of the company were not entitled to complain that they were not in request, or were not the men whom their hosts and fellow-guests delighted to honour. Such men need never have sat at their own tables, and though they were often by no means the richest men present, their shadows never grew less, and they kept their own even in a money-making, money-respecting community.

Young Tam could not for the life of him imagine what his father, especially, could see to like in such feasts. The young man was at war to the knife with all the luxury and parade. He hated to find his father and mother making part of them. They did and said more things to vex him then than at any other time, though they were not worse or nearly so bad as other people present. Tam and Mrs. Drysdale’s knowledge might be at fault, but their native modesty and kindly instincts--which forbade them to render themselves conspicuous or to offend anybody’s prejudices when the husband and wife were aware of them--were almost always to be trusted. If young Tam had been wiser he might have let his parents alone, and thought no more of them, with an easy mind.

Mr. and Mrs. Drysdale were not like the Nimmos, who had begun life with a small eating-house, and were now wholesale exporters of provisions to a vast extent; but though her apparel matched that of the best gentlewoman in the room, and she had a set of rubies without its equal in St. Mungo’s, she could never be allowed to have any other partner at table than one of her sons who was familiar with her little habits, and took the liberty of engrossing her conversation on the petawties and the piz, and that donnert deevil of a servant; and what for should she not pyke her teeth when a curran’ had got into ane of them? and she minded when a whole glass-fu’ of toothpicks was provided for the customers at the shop in the close. Her husband was not so objectionable, but he was the better of his daughter-in-law at his elbow. She was a sharp, determined little woman of better standing, and warned off the servants with the sherry and the liqueurs, under his very nose.

No; young Tam was a prig and an ass if he imagined he had any real reason to blush for the authors of his being. He was bound rather to be thankful to them for more than the goodly heritage they had provided for him, at which he ‘cast laith,’ even for their manly and womanly courteous self-mastery. Still he would have been relieved if his father had not brought forward his Burgundy, and promised his host the next time he came to Drysdale Hall the taste of such a brand as was not to be found in Hamilton Palace, and his mother had not called macaroni ‘mikeronis,’ and Charlotte à la Russe ‘Chaurlotte-ally-Rice.’ He did not care half so much when she cried out, ‘Keep me, the day!’ at the most exciting of Mr. Rowland’s stories, and his father was surprised into a guffaw that seemed to shake the table.

Small faults to rankle in a mind that was not little. It was only sore in a transition phase, and raw in its youthfulness.

Young Tam had not time and attention to spare for good stories. He felt angry with himself when he was forced to laugh. A set of old tomfools, he was tempted to style his companions. Life was earnest: he could not afford to waste it in such child’s play. He thought of the gross revelry of the Fair-days, he recalled the misery of times of strike and failures in cotton, and he wondered that men and women with souls to be saved could thus trifle with the signs of the times. He would not have exposed himself to the purgatory of these dinners, at which he sat in his goodly young manhood like a killjoy, had he not known that to refuse all such invitations would incense his father as much as anything he had yet done.

It was not only by his father and mother’s satisfaction with these pompous gaieties that young Tam felt aggrieved; he was still more exasperated with Athole Murray’s barefaced enjoyment of the ridiculous proceedings. There was an exception made for Athole sometimes, as for young Tam, in putting her name on the dinner-lists. Her father was frequently one of the guests, for two reasons. First, he was an old and respected native of the locality; in the second place, when he was in the mood, he was one of the most accomplished story-tellers of the circle, one of the most learned in the curious records of the great city of which all her citizens are proud. His comparative poverty was thus condoned, and he was welcomed to rich men’s tables, at which he did not refuse to sit because he was not himself rich.

Dr. Peter had boasted that he had friends among the wealthy as well as the poor. He did not grudge the former a farthing of their hundreds of thousands. He could make as much allowance for their temptations as one of the men themselves--Tam Drysdale--could do. It pleased Dr. Peter to exercise his faculty on their behalf. They were worthy fellows, many of them, he maintained, and few knew, as he was in circumstances to know, the good they did, not only by their public works, but by their private charities. If he could contribute to their entertainment--they were not always easy to entertain, as they were not particularly entertaining in a mixed company--that was their weak point; if he could help them to a right good laugh, he should always think it a privilege and a compliment to himself to play his part.

It was awkward to invite Dr. Murray to a party which included ladies, and exclude Athole, his solitary specimen of womankind. As the mistress of her father’s household, she had something of the brevet rank of a matron; therefore she appeared occasionally, like young Tam, at the elderly people’s dinners. She had no individual taste for heavy, prolonged meals, and there was sometimes not another young person present to keep her in company except the young Turk from Drysdale Hall. Athole was at ease and contented in her home-life, but she did not despise a change. She thought it good for her father. She liked to see him among his contemporaries, and she had a cordial esteem for some of them, not altogether derived from him.

The girl was an exceedingly simple figure among the magnificent dames. It would have been absurd in her to try to cope with them, or even with the daughters--when there were daughters--of the houses where the entertainments took place. For the husbands’ or fathers’ incomes far more than outnumbered in thousands what her father could claim in hundreds. Athole’s silk gown was not as thick as leather, according to a definition which she had heard some of the favoured matrons apply to their silks. It was generally supplemented by some gauzy material with which she rang changes. She hoped her single state and her twenty and odd years carried off her failure in the virtues of the Worth School, on which not only newspaper paragraphs, magazines of fashion, and novels by benighted female hands, but novels concocted under male auspices, insist, with a sort of man-milliner gusto distressing to realize. If her supposed probation did not justify what fine ladies might call her shabbiness--what then? It did not signify. Athole laughed at the idea, and her thin, dark face and brilliant eyes looked more bizarre and expressive than ever. A ‘shilpet, blecket, poorly got-up lassie,’ many of the ladies called her, with disdainful pity. Yet their husbands were fond of talking to the Cinderella who had not yet met her fairy godmother.

And, after all, this Cinderella’s rags were no rags, and by no means without womanly and artistic taste in their disposal; only they were not rich and rare like the approved garments of the day. Athole knew very well, under her philosophy, what became her, and used to say that though she were as rich as Crœsus, she did not think she would adopt costly array. In addition to the consideration she professed for her maid Jeannie, to whom Athole was a law in dress--who, like many hand-maidens, copied her mistress at a humble distance--Athole was satisfied satin and velvet and the cunning devices of the most ingenious and extravagant of dress-makers did not suit her style as they suited Claribel Drysdale’s outward woman. Athole was plain, and simplicity did best with plainness. She did not wish to look like a fantastic Frenchwoman.

Besides being set apart for each other when they were the only young people at these dinners, there were mingled attraction and repulsion between Athole Murray and young Tam Drysdale. She knew that he was affronted by her levity in relishing these feasts, and it tickled her that he should be so affronted. He knew that she did not believe in his modified Communism, and looked upon it as a particular kind of juvenile disease--not so common as the measles, but occasionally to be seen even in the sons of rich men. He was aware that she laughed at him, and he was piqued by her laughter--piqued to bring her to a juster frame of mind by proving his sincerity. When he meditated anything desperate--resigning his birthright, going to Australia, turning out to work for his own hand at any work for which he was qualified--he always took into account how Athole Murray would look and what she would say; if she would believe in him then, and if she would be sorry for having mistaken him.

‘I hope you are enjoying yourself, Miss Murray,’ said young Tam frigidly, on one of these occasions. His tone sounded as if his hope partook more of the nature of a fear. He was standing before her, after the gentlemen had joined the ladies in the drawing-room. Athole was sitting on a couch, near a knot of gentlemen who occupied the hearthrug with cups of tea in their hands, and a _raconteur_ improving the moment till the whist-tables should be set out. A chorus of laughter testified to the capabilities of success on the part of the narrator.

‘Thanks, exceedingly,’ answered Athole, suddenly brightening her whole appearance by the expansion of a curious little scarlet fan which she held in her hand. ‘But don’t let me miss Mr. Rowland’s next story--he is in great force to-night.’

‘I wonder you can be entertained by stale Joe Millers.’

‘But as I am entertained, and as he is just going to tell a story which always makes me laugh, though I have heard it a hundred times, please don’t talk just now. Perhaps it is not so familiar to you; if so, you cannot guess what a treat it will be.’

She stopped, and set herself to listen, and he was compelled to follow her example. Mr. Rowland was retailing the strait of a Highland dancing-master, whose steps were unassailable, but whose music was confined to his voice, with which he sang, to improvised appropriate words, the tunes of the strathspeys and reels through which he was assiduously marshalling his pupils. Mr. Rowland gave examples, humming the doggerel in alternately slow and fast time, with his comical cracked voice, in keeping with the comical jiggy airs:

‘Now, Jock, for sure and certain,
Come tiddle and come tartan,
You’ll dance with Betty Martin,
She’s a pridefu’ little queen.’

‘And you there, White Breeks, White Breeks,
Set you to Red Cheeks, Red Cheeks,
Or you’re no worth a preen.’

‘Mr. Tam,’ said Athole behind her fan, ‘have you forsworn laughter? Have you taken the pledge in that direction? Oh, I should not like to be Clary and Eppie! Now hear my story. There was once a very great lady listening to the reading of a very small book. The hapless author--a misled young woman--mutual friends supposed, mistakenly of course, might profit by the great lady’s patronage. “Oh!” she said, with a shudder at a certain point in the tale, “whatever she’s going to do, I hope she’s not going to be funny.”’

Young Tam was driven to smile, and at the unusual sight auld Tam, whose eyes were resting on the couple, experienced a second twinge of doubt regarding them. Young Tam could not be so depraved in taste as to be making up to that insignificant, nearly ugly, lassie of Dr. Peter’s, with all the beauties and all the fortunes in Glasgow awaiting his choice. The next moment Dr. Peter Murray walked up to his daughter and young Tam. Auld Tam took heart of grace, and made a fourth in the group.

‘By-the-bye, do you know anything of a Highland tramp who has been down with fever in the servants’ offices at Semple Barns?’ young Tam was asking the doctor. ‘I met him with Macnab, Sir James’s dog-man, in the Rothesay boat, on one of the Fair-days. The Highlander had come to Glasgow, as I understood his countryman to say, full of some talk about Drysdale Haugh, and the Mackinnons and Drysdales, as if he had business with one or the other. But his wits, if he ever had any, were far to seek when I saw him. The poor, miserable fellow seemed at the last gasp; indeed, I should not wonder if he were not alive.’

‘I never heard of such a person,’ interposed auld Tam in surprise. ‘I’ve had little troke [traffic] with the Highlands, and the queer thing is how this mon should ken of Drysdale Haugh--that is, if he is not a Glasgy Highlander, born and bred within a hunder yards of the Gallowgate. I am not so full of conceit as to fancy the fame of my works has crossed the lochs, and floated as far awa’ as Skye, or John o’ Groat’s.’

‘I attended the man,’ said Dr. Peter, ‘and I can bear witness that he had heard of you or somebody of the same name, and of your works, and that they had belonged to a Mackinnon. I was curious to know if his acquaintance extended to the Murrays, but I could never find that he paid us that compliment in his delirium. He’s not dead, but he’s as bad. His mind became affected to such a degree, and he grew so unmanageable, that I had to apply to have him lodged as a pauper in the asylum. He may recover his judgment, or he may not. I thought, to begin with, it was simply bodily and mental weakness, following on the fever in a bad subject, and that when the first was better the second would mend in a measure. But I can no longer pronounce on the case.’

‘I hope the poor sinner was not an impostor trying to get up a begging story, and turn a penny on some scrap of information he had picked up,’ suggested auld Tam. ‘You mind Mackinnon went to the Hielands for sport every season; but, preserve us, he’s been dead for mair than twenty years!’

‘And this man--a shauchled [ill knit] half-natural at best, broken down by hardship and poor living--is not above thirty or thirty-five, judging of him professionally. He was never likely to trump up a story to much purpose, and now he is _hors de combat_ either in the business of imposition or in any other. That word “business” is sometimes oddly applied. Have you heard what Inglis, our oldest elder, said to that new-fangled chap Cairns, who has come into the session, and is fain to put the other elders through their facings in the discharge of their duties? “Muster Cairns, I have been an elder for thirty years, and I know my buzness!”’

END OF VOL. I.

BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD

THREE-VOLUME NOVELS AT ALL LIBRARIES.

=PRINCESS NAPRAXINE.= By OUIDA.

=DOROTHY FORSTER.= By WALTER BESANT.

=SAINT MUNGO’S CITY.= By SARAH TYTLER.

=A DRAWN GAME.= By BASIL.

=HEART SALVAGE BY SEA AND LAND.= By MRS. COOPER (KATHERINE SAUNDERS).

=THE NEW ABELARD.= By ROBERT BUCHANAN.

=A REAL QUEEN.= By R. E. FRANCILLON.

=FANCY-FREE.= By CHARLES GIBBON.

=THE WAY OF THE WORLD.= By DAVID CHRISTIE MURRAY.

LONDON: CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY