Chapter V: Tam Drysdale at Drysdale Hall

This was not one of the days when any of Tam Drysdale’s womankind were in the town with the carriage, laying an obligation on him to make his way to them; for he did not care that they should come to him, unless they walked to the office and accompanied him on foot to the private corner at which he was to sink Tam Drysdale the city man, and take up Tam Drysdale the proprietor of Drysdale Hall and of its sundry equipages, who was bound to show himself sometimes in the second character. On the present occasion he could drive out to his country house in the modest state which, as a matter of personal propriety and taste, he preferred--starting from the office door, not without a little commotion within and a little flourish without, nodding to the various acquaintances he met, and looking about him like a man at his ease.

Tam had driven along that road almost every lawful day for a number of years. He knew and noticed all the landmarks both in town and country. He was at leisure to observe them, for although, like most countrymen, in whatever station they have been reared, he could drive, the practice did not recommend itself to him, as it would have lent itself to a younger, more self-conscious or more restless man. He liked his own particular groom, a steady old countryman like himself, to drive. The master was on the best terms with the servant, unless when Simpson, for the sake of his horse, his honour, or the principle of the thing, like his master, felt bound to cry out against a bad habit of Tam Drysdale’s. This was a practice of letting the children that he passed twice every day on the road, going to and from the parish school, hang on behind the dogcart during the slow progress of the horse, after it had slackened its pace to accomplish the ascent of a hill which was in convenient proximity to the children’s village.

‘Sir, it’s what no ae beast in a thousand would put up wi,’ remonstrated Simpson, every time, looking grimly over his shoulder, and fingering his whip with the strongest inclination to lash out behind, though he was a man and a father when he did not happen to be touched in a professional quarter. ‘What will folk think of our driving wi’ sic a tail at our heels? It’s not respectable. Forbye, these bairns will go to the mischief some day, through being let tak’ such unwarrantable liberties with a gentleman’s dugcart and horse.’

‘And driver,’ added Tam Drysdale, with a twinkle in his eyes. ‘Do you no mind, Simpson, how grand sic a ride was lang syne? How it tasted all the sweeter because there was the risk of a backward cut across your fingers and your face, and you left dancing with the pain of the worst pawmy you ever got, in the middle of the road. I cannot find it in my heart to deprive the puir bit things of the pleasure. There, be aff, bairns!’ he admonished his tail, as the curricle reached the brow of the hill. ‘The horse will be awa’ again like a fire-flaucht in a couple o’ minutes, and ha’e some of you down in the stour, wi’ broken banes, if ye dinna tak’ care.’

The dull, grey spring day cleared up when the heavy pall of city smoke was left behind, and the sun shone in a blue sky, dappled with white clouds over a green country--a fair morsel which had escaped the pits and blast furnaces that honeycomb and blacken the earth, and burn with a red glare throughout the night, for many a mile around Glasgow. Here was left a remnant of the orchards and woods which once made the whole of Clyde’s banks ‘bonnie.’ The humid air that comes on the wings of the west wind promoted verdure, and rendered the spring vegetation early and luxuriant beyond any standard it attained on the bleak east coast.

But it was not a spot given up to Pallas and Pomona. Their province was not uninvaded. Tam Drysdale’s works were within a mile of his house, or hall as he had chosen to call it; but whatever their offences, they were mild by comparison with those of the coal and iron plagues. The stretch of meadows devoted to bleaching glistened white in the spring sunshine, as if strewn and silvered with millions of gowans. The dyeing and printing operations either did not include all the chemical abominations of St. Rollax’s, or dispersed them over so large an area that they were little felt. They might colour with a sanguine hue, for the most part, the water of Aytoun--the tributary of the Clyde on which the works were built--and poison the fishes, at least so anglers complained; but the compounds did not impregnate the air with hideous odours, or disfigure the landscape with blights.

Indeed, as Tam Drysdale drew near the house he had made for himself, just as Geordie Dunlap had been figuratively the architect of his ‘bien’ house at Pollokshields, Tam held up his head and snuffed the air with a great increase of satisfaction. The fields and hedgerows on each side of the road were part of the inheritance to which, though it had belonged to his forefathers, he had _not_ succeeded by ordinary succession from his father and his father’s cousin, the old laird of the land and owner of the dye-works. What was far better in Tam’s eyes, he had won them back by the sweat of his brow and the wit of his brain, and valuing them by the cost of the acquisition, he did not believe there were fields or hedgerows like them in Lanark--nay, in broad Scotland. The cattle and sheep in the pastures, the horses in the furrows, were his. It is doubtful whether he did not also claim the crows in the air. If the office in Glasgow was a spot to which his mind went out, for which he started with a will, to be in the swing of business, Drysdale Hall, down to every clod of its clay and stone of its walls, was the pride of his heart, like his wife Eppie and his son Tam. The latter, though he thwarted and galled his father because he was his son, his only son, his might and the beginning of his strength, ‘the excellency of dignity and the excellency of power,’ however contumacious he might prove, came nearer to Tam’s heart than either of his daughters--even than his young pet Eppie.

It is hard, after all, to say whether a man loves more profoundly, with a more passionate attachment, the paternal acres which have belonged to his race from time immemorial, on which he first saw the light, that have been associated with every act of his life, or the land which he has bought by the hard toil of his youth and manhood, the fruits of which are the fruits of his own labours, the reward of his self-devotion. Drysdale Haugh had in some measure both of these claims on Tam Drysdale.

Drysdale Hall had only escaped being a huge staring pile of white masonry from the circumstance that Tam, proud as he was to have built up a house, was also proud, with the Scotch hankering after gentle birth, that the place had belonged to Drysdales long before it had come into the hands of Mackinnons or Murrays, and that these Drysdales had not simply been respectable yeomen-farmers--they had been enterprising enough to erect dye-works on their property, and they had been undeniably ‘sib’ to his less flourishing branch of the Drysdales. For this reason Tam had spared the old farmhouse of Drysdale Haugh, and left it the nucleus of the new building, rendering it more incongruous certainly, but less raw and purely aggressive.

The farmhouse had been, and was still, a two-storied building of substantial freestone, with a heavy stone porch, the whole grown over with ivy, which, luckily, its present proprietor had spared, not so much from a sense of its beauty, as because of its memories, especially one tender recollection linked with it. He had been held up by his mother to see his first bird’s-nest under the glossy, dark-green leaves on a Sunday evening, one of the rare occasions when the poor relative had been invited to visit the rich. To this ivied centre, with its small windows and narrow door, no longer suitable for a main entrance, Tam had tacked on two spacious wings fit to fly away with the body of the house between them. The hall, with its big door, was in one of these wings; the other ran out in a long one-storied building which was, in fact, Tam’s picture-gallery, where he stored the specimens of art he had taken pains and delight in collecting.

Originally the farmhouse stood in a little garden on the edge of a stackyard, built, for winnowing purposes, on the side of a hill. Garden and stackyard, with the old farm-offices, had alike disappeared, and the ground was converted into a really fine terrace, commanding not only Tam’s snow-white bleach-fields, but much of the adjoining country. The hillside, which had been transformed into the terrace, had descended naturally into a little wooded den that remained enclosed in the grounds, and served for a short avenue. A somewhat perking porter’s lodge, guarding gorgeously wrought iron gates, led from the high-road into the carriage-drive that now ran through the den, and terminated with a broad sweep on the terrace. Nature had done something for Tam’s mansion; and his architect had availed himself of nature in a praise-worthy manner.

On the opposite side of the house were the gardens and greenhouses, of some extent, maintained with a sovereign disregard of expense. Beyond the gardens lay the stables, coach-house, kennels, and servants’ offices generally; and there, whatever drainage, ventilation, encaustic tiles, and every recent invention could do for the comfort and well-being of man and beast, was done thoroughly, to the credit of Tam Drysdale and his myrmidons--be they builders, grooms, or grieves.

So perfect was the smooth order in every department, where money, freely used without abuse, served to oil the wheels of the domestic machine, that the Drysdale Hall farm-offices, like the Drysdale Haugh Works, figured as models for men to copy. Strangers would bring introductions, and request to be taken over the place. Sir James Semple, of Semple Barns, who was Tam Drysdale’s next neighbour, and on the best terms with him, brought three-fourths of his visitors to wonder and admire.

As Tam Drysdale drove along the terrace, at the well-known sound of his wheels, greetings met him from two different quarters, with a swiftness suggestive of the pleasant explanation that he had been watched and waited for.

In the porch of the old part of the house, which now sheltered a side door, there suddenly stood, framed by the ivy and rose boughs, which were only sending out green shoots as yet, Eppie the elder, Eppie the matron. Mrs. Drysdale was already dressed for dinner, like a rose in full bloom, in her rich dark silk, and always with fluttering lace and pink ribands about her head and throat--unless when she went into company, and replaced the ribands by flowers, dew-dropped with diamonds. She was persuaded that they ‘set’ her, and that Tam liked her with pink bows and strings, such as she had worn in her Sunday bonnet (she called it ‘hat,’ though it was no hat), long before the days that she put on caps, when he had come to the kirk where her family worshipped, to meet and court her in the face of the congregation--like an honest man--as well as to pray to his Maker like a good Christian.

Mistress Eppie was buxom and bonnie still, of a type of beauty--dark-haired, dark-eyed, white-skinned, with summer roses on the cheeks, and teeth white as milk, between ripe red lips--which, if not peculiar to Clydeside, is oftener met there than elsewhere. It belongs to strapping lasses who are matches for stalwart men, though in this case the wife was not more strapping than the husband was stalwart; both had missed the superior stature which is the frequent accompaniment of their style of good looks. Mrs. Drysdale was accustomed to say, with apologetic regret, that her Tam and herself were but ‘sma’ bouket’ (of short stature), matched with many of their compeers. Husband and wife were alike in this respect, as in many another. If the type has little of what is purely intellectual or spiritual, it has, as has been said with regard to Tam Drysdale’s comely person, a great deal that is wholesome and full of health and vigour, that will endure, and, what is more, will retain much of its attractiveness after the black or auburn hair is grey, and the fresh, firm cheek withered and shrunken in its wintry red.

Mrs. Drysdale came out to meet her husband, as she had come, unless necessity was laid upon her to be elsewhere, ever since the two had become one. She had done it when Tam had taken her first to a four-roomed house in a village street, when she had but to cross the threshold into the hallan, to greet the young working-man trudging home after his day’s toil. She had known the sound of his foot then, as she knew the sound of his horse’s feet to-day. She never failed him when she had a grand staircase and a long corridor to traverse, instead of a doorstep to cross. He was still the light of her eyes, whom it was as natural for her to hail, as it is for the newly-awakened sleeper, after the hours of darkness have passed, to turn instinctively to catch the first stray beams of light. A contented and happy woman in most respects, as she found herself, it was still her night when Tam was up in Glasgow at his office, or even over at his bleach-fields and dye-works; her day when he came home with the sunset or the starlight to her and the bairns, to be theirs till the next morning rose and called him forth to play his man’s part of making a great business, earning a heap of money, and being a prince among his fellows. And she was sure that Tam was glad to see her standing there, the first to welcome him, though in his proud, shy, Scotch way he said no more than, ‘Well, are you there, mother?’--as if he ever expected her to be elsewhere!--‘What have you all been about the day?’

The pink bows and ends of her ribands were a little too much like a reflected glow from her cheeks, brighter and less delicate than of yore. Her dress had a tendency to rustle. There was an excess of trimness about it in every plait and pucker. She was too smart. The very apron which she wore, though she was dressed for dinner, was embroidered in silks all over, and she had too many and too costly rings on her plump white fingers.

She had somehow managed, with misdirected ambition, to give an undesirable varnish to the native Doric of her tongue, which, in robbing it of its simple rusticity, lent it a false lustre that by no means improved its quality. She shared with her husband a positively exasperating exuberance of satisfaction with their acquisitions and surroundings, so as to tempt the world into seeking to lower the couple, were it only by an inch, from their pinnacle of self-conceit. It served as a mortifying reminder to their friends that Mr. and Mrs. Drysdale, in spite of their many virtues, were made of common clay after all: for if man and wife had been composed of finer, rarer stuff, they would have understood for themselves that a man’s life does not consist in the things he possesses; they would have known that wealth can do no more than confer the lower gratifications, and would have ceased to be infatuatedly elated by their outward prosperity.

The other person, who opened a French window on the ground-floor of the new part of the building, and came skipping out of it, the faster to reach and greet Tam Drysdale on his arrival, was likewise a woman. She also had been wonderfully constant in her attentions since she had been able to toddle, with or without her mother or nurse’s consent, into dangerous proximity to the horse’s feet, sidling up to the dogcart, standing confidently, her little face one broad grin, which cast out the smallest conception of fear of repulse, till she should have her reward. It was to get the whip, twice as long as herself, to hold, or to be caught up and tossed in strong arms, placed in the seat of honour, and driven up and down the terrace, shrieking with delight at the promotion. This was Eppie the younger, who had grown from a lovely child to a slim and beautiful girl of sixteen--such a juvenile copy of her mother in hair, eyes, complexion, teeth, smile, in her very fondness for soft pink, like the colour of her own cheeks--that the striking likeness between the mature matron and the slender lass became almost comical in the points of agreement and of difference in the two versions of the same original.

Little Eppie, in the changed circumstances into which she fitted, had even caught up something of the broad Scotch which--varnished or unvarnished--fell, as a matter of course, from the elder lips, but sounded so quaintly on the younger. Eppie’s brother and sister were free from this lingering distinction. Mrs. Drysdale could pride herself on the fact that her son, young Tam, and her elder daughter, Clary, spoke as if they were reading out of a printed book. Young Tam did so from sheer earnestness; Claribel from set purpose, in all moods. It was not so in Eppie’s case; and with traces of the speech she had inherited a portion of the rustic tastes in which the heads of the house now only indulged as a relaxation--a private relaxation. To eat oat-cake and drink buttermilk, when they might have had the richest of plum-cake and the dryest of champagne; to sup on new potatoes and salt herrings, when the eaters might have dined at the same hour on turbot and turkey, or salmon and lamb, were treats to Eppie no less than to her father and mother--only the girl, if she had got her own way, would not have taken them surreptitiously.

There were other enjoyments for which Eppie had an hereditary inclination, though the knowledge of them could only have come to her by hearsay. She would have liked to work in the harvest-field, to seek and find hens’ nests and bring in the eggs, to carry home every sick chicken and deserted lamb she could come across, and become its foster-mother. She would have liked to milk the cows, and in default of so high and hopeless an attainment, she haunted the dairy to skim the milk in the basins and press the whey from the curd in the cheese-tubs. She would, if there had been any chance of her gaining permission, have sought to ride her pony bare-backed, and tried to groom him with her own little hands.

Claribel cared for none of these practices any more than if she had been born a duchess; indeed, the chance was that if she had been her Grace, she would have looked at them longingly, as Princess Elizabeth looked at the milkmaid carrying her pails.

If Claribel Drysdale suffered herself to feel aggrieved by any of the manifold contradictions in the bearing of the family, it was by her younger sister Eppie’s perverse disposition ‘to run wild,’ as Claribel called it emphatically, in aping primitive sayings and doings which were all very well, or at least excusable, in her father and mother, who were elderly, and had been more plainly brought up. Claribel would never allow herself to approach nearer to the hole whence she had been dug than such a vague phrase as this. But it was wrong as well as absurd in Eppie--such folly would damage her prospects if she were let alone--her conduct might even prove injurious to the fortunes of the rest of the family.

As it had happened, this was one of the instances in which Claribel’s power failed. Her mother, to whom she was polite, sometimes even affectionate, stood greatly in awe of her elder daughter, still more so than of her son Tam. Claribel had also an odd double influence over her father. He respected in her the education and tastes which were beyond him: and he felt bound to support her, in the career which he had opened up for her, by removing, as far as possible, every hindrance out of her path. Altogether, Mr. and Mrs. Drysdale might have been worked upon to the painful extent of denying themselves a good deal of Eppie’s society, checking her in the very expressions and practices she had learnt through love for them and sympathy with them, and sending her away to the finishing school of which Clary so often spoke.

But Eppie was a tower of strength in herself. She proved too much for them here. She had no more fear of her sister Clary than their brother young Tam had. She laughed at and defied her. Clary was all very well sometimes, when Eppie had toothache and Clary nursed her, or when Clary was in a communicative mood, and chose to give the details of her parties; then she was ‘a dear,’ and quite nice and amusing. At other times she was ‘prideful and upsetting,’ and had little time or attention to spare for home. But in neither case was she ever to come between Eppie and her father and mother. She would not yield her consent to being sent away from her happy home, Drysdale Hall, neither would her father and mother have the heart to force her.

Why, what would they do without her? Who would bring father his slippers and his posy? Who would cut his hair and read the newspapers to him? Who would be mother’s companion when father was at business, help her to give her orders, and see the stores weighed out, and be her little ‘prentice housekeeper? No doubt Clary pretended there was no need for mother to keep house when Mrs. Wood was so clever and experienced, and had been housekeeper as well as cook to Lady Semple’s brother--as if mother could live without a house to keep, although there were twenty Mrs. Woods to do it for her! Who would walk to the gardens and the washing-green with mother, and gather the lavender, and pull and shell the peas, and fold the clothes, as she was fond of doing; and surely mother could please herself, and do what she chose, else where was the good of her being married to father, a rich man, Eppie would like to know?

Why, mother would feel quite lonesome and eerie in a great big house like Drysdale Hall, though Tam and Clary were both ‘to the fore.’ Little good they were--Tam buried in his books and papers, and Clary away with her grand friends. Mother must have her silly little daughter Eppie to sit and sew beside her, and get her to tell stories about the sewing-school and the singing-school mother attended when she was young; and how she had sold her mother’s butter and cheese so well that she had been granted a quarter at the dressmaking, where she had been clever, and picked up enough of the trade to make all Tam and Clary’s frocks when the children were little, which was more than Clary, with her accomplishments, could do for herself, now that she was big.

Eppie did not hesitate to assert that she would rather learn dressmaking from mother, and perhaps some day make a gown which mother herself would be proud to wear, and to say, ‘My daughter Eppie made it for me,’ than jabber all the French which mademoiselle could stuff into her. For Eppie had possessed governesses, both native and foreign, and it was from no want of such polite literature as they could impart that she had developed an out-of-date rusticity and homeliness.

In the end, Eppie’s own strenuous, indignant, tender will, coinciding with her parents’ secret strong inclinations, carried the day against the wishes of ‘Madam,’ as Eppie and her mother--the latter with bated breath and sundry twinges of her tender conscience and pricks of her soft heart--were sometimes driven to call Clary.