Chapter XXV: Strathdivie

It was afternoon when the Miss Mackinnons were set down, sorely wearied, at the roadside station which was the nearest to Strathdivie. Happily, the day still kept ‘up,’ in country phrase; but it was grey and still, as was the scantily-populated moorland country which the travellers had reached. They had left the black country round Glasgow behind them; but they had come to a region which needed all the summer sunshine to render it cheerful--a peaty, boggy, clayey district--where land had been brought in from the waste with much labour that seemed wasted, for when all was done the grass looked sour and the corn dropsical. Yet the prevailing colours of the landscape would have delighted an art student, since they hovered between the olive-brown of moss, the sombre green of rushes, and the blue-green of late oats in a sparse and unthrifty condition. Brickfields with their clay hillocks and smoking kilns, rows on rows of half-dried bricks, and piles of broken and crumbling-down bricks, like ungainly masses of sordid ruins, were the most flourishing form of industry. Strathdivie was in sight, a discoloured, tall and narrow last-century house, reminding the gazer of a gaunt face foul with weeping, half hidden in a neglected fir-wood. Fenton of Strathdivie had not possessed spirit or ability, for long years back, to keep his surroundings trim and fair to see.

This was the paradise the Miss Mackinnons had sighed for. But the sight of it did not daunt them--at least not Miss Janet--more than a second.

‘It is an auld-fashioned pairt, without ony nonsense,’ said that indomitable woman; ‘and auld-fashioned farmin’ aye paid. I dare say these brickfields have been Archie Fenton’s--they say there’s no such flourishin’ trade now as the buildin’ trade, and that there is a grand profit got out o’ drain-tiles. I wouldna wonder though he has doobled his capital, and that there is plenty of stouchrie [stowed away goods] in the auld hoose.’

‘He’s had to leave it a’,’ said Miss Bethia, mentioning the undeniable truth in a low, grave tone, that sought instinctively to subdue the loud excited key, verging on exultation, in which Miss Janet spoke.

‘Would you have had him tak’ it wi’ him? I call that a very haythen notion,’ Miss Janet retorted successfully.

The most serious difficulty which presented itself was that there had been a miscalculation of the strength of Miss Mackinnon. She was trembling in every limb. Certainly she could not walk even the short distance to Strathdivie, if her journey to claim her legacy were not to prove her death. After an anxious consultation with the station-master, it was found that a cart with a straw-stuffed sack could be had from the small wayside inn opposite the station. In this primitive conveyance, sitting all three elevated on their uncomfortable perch, tired and faint, for they had long ago eaten the few biscuits they had brought to break their fast, the descendants of the Virginian Mackinnons drove up to the goal of their hopes.

The rough paddock, the neglected flower-border, the walled-in garden where the mossy wall was conspicuously broken and out of repair, the pigeon-house, which was tottering to its fall, so that no prudent pigeon would abide within its crazy shelter; the dead trees left within sight of the windows; the old, empty dog-kennel, adorned by a rusty chain, kicked over, and lying rotting in a damp corner, were unfashionable enough in their untidiness to please Miss Janet, and appeal to her enthusiasm; but whether the tokens were those of sluttish plenty, or of narrowing means growing squalid in despair, remained to be proved.

Mr. Fenton had been without near relations, or, indeed, kindred in any degree, dwelling under his roof. He had been taken care of in his latter days by a couple of old servants--a man and his wife, who, in their very fidelity, looked with jealous suspicion on all invaders of the dead man’s domains, where his retainers had long ruled paramount.

The woman, who was the housekeeper, in a black cap and plaid shawl, opened the door, that creaked inhospitably on its hinges, as if it had grown rusty from the rarity of its opening, in answer to the challenge of the Miss Mackinnons’ young carter rudely rapping with his whip on one of the panels. He horrified his freight, who were not in time to stop him with the stern remonstrance, ‘Man, are you forgetting there’s death in the house?’--a reminder that he was disturbing the quiet of that within which was greater than the presence of kings, before which all must bow.

The housekeeper, with blinking eyes and a tightly closed mouth, offered a passive resistance to the strangers, though Miss Janet immediately recovered her confidence, and made a bold approach to the citadel. She announced herself and her sisters as the late Mr. Fenton’s Glasgow cousins, who were come to Strathdivie as a matter of course, to be in the house when the master was carried out of it, and to ‘take charge of things’ after he was gone, in consideration of what was due both to him and to themselves.

Mrs. Todd, the housekeeper, stood there like stone, filling up the gap made by the half-open door, not yielding an inch to Miss Janet’s intrepid advance, simply asking with sharp significance where was the ladies’ authority for requiring her to admit them to her master’s house? She did not even say her late master, thus acknowledging that his rule, which he had delegated to her and her husband, was an affair of the past, and that others might now be entitled to lay down the law where he had once given his orders. He must be fairly ‘in the mools’ (earth) before such a reversal of matters took place, and she would know the reason why before she consented to it.

It seemed doubtful whether the Miss Mackinnons could make good their entrance, even after unseemly contention; whether they would not find the door shut in their astounded faces, and the old travellers turned back on the inhospitable wilds--that is, thrown with their small purse on the deficient accommodation of the station inn--as Miss Janet would have said, ‘Fell-like quarters for maiden leddies!’

Fortunately this catastrophe was avoided. There was already shut up in the most convenient room, with an open desk and a few papers before him, an elderly experienced country lawyer. He was well known to Mrs. Todd, and had established his right to be there. He had been Mr. Fenton’s man of business, and was appointed to conduct the funeral. He was the same lawyer who had written to the Miss Mackinnons with the news of the death. Mrs. Todd obeyed him all the more implicitly since, clever woman though she was for her station and opportunities, she had a vague idea that the joint legacy which she counted on for herself and her husband depended on ‘the writer’s’ goodwill.

Thus, when Mr. Mair, attracted to the window by the rumble of wheels, bustled out, introduced himself to the Miss Mackinnons, handed them from their cart, and directed, with no lack of the necessary authority, that they should be taken in and made comfortable, Mrs. Todd submitted with a decent show of civility. But all the more because of the compulsion to change her bearing, the enmity pretty sure to have arisen between her and the new-comers was established.

It was a restrained enmity as yet, however, even where Miss Janet was concerned. She was a little subdued now that she had come into the near neighbourhood of death, and she and her sisters were too tired and disturbed generally not to avail themselves thankfully of the refreshment and rest afforded them--however grudgingly. The plausible writer-body was willing to receive them, and that was a good sign. Who would mind a sour servant? Auld bachelors like poor Archie Fenton aye spoilt servants, who went on trading upon former privileges.

It would have been well if the Miss Mackinnons had been troubled with no further _arrière pensées_ than belonged either to Mrs. Todd’s churlishness or her forced politeness. The sisters were not imaginative women. Their minds did not wander off to the days of the dead man’s youth and his high hope, to the hour of his birth in that very house, where his entrance into the world had doubtless been hailed with pride and joy, equal to the exultation with which they, his remote kinswomen, had hailed the arrival among them of their grand-nephew, Eneas. They did not ask what had become of all the shattered dreams which had come into existence since then, and whether this lonely end were the fitting conclusion to the blithe beginning of more than threescore years before. The Miss Mackinnons would have said that they were Christian women, and it was the Lord’s will; and, if anything more was to be added, they trusted Archie Fenton had gone to ‘a better place.’

Yet the sisters could not get rid of the wonder of what he who was lying motionless within four oaken boards in the best bedroom would have thought of their being here in what had been his house. Mrs. Todd had not failed to point out a closed door, with grim attention, as the ladies passed with trembling feet and bated breath. ‘That is where the master is lying,’ Mrs. Todd had said. He was no longer master; still, what would he have thought--nay, what did he think now, if thought remained to him? But surely he was in a position to acknowledge their right when he had joined the great company in which his and their forbears mingled--among them that very Jean Mackinnon who had brought her tocher to Strathdivie, whose half-washed-out name Miss Janet detected with an irrepressible thrill of delight on the towel which she got to dry her hands. Another member of that company was Jean’s father, the haughty Virginian merchant that had made ‘a’ Glasgow trimle at the wag of his finger.’ Well, he might be in regions where men had ceased to tremble before a fellow-creature. Still, not even in another world could it be believed that he was wholly unmoved by the fate of the descendants for whom he had provided so carefully, looking forward, as it had happened, ‘well on for a hundred years.’

‘Yes,’ Miss Janet assented fervently, glancing round on the coarse, clumsy, and shabby, rather than quaintly grotesque, antiquely-solid or richly-wrought furniture--on the faded out-of-date drugget protecting the hideous red and green carpets--the blackened portraits of gaunt or plethoric, hard or heavy-featured men and women on the wall--on the absence of all that was fresh, bright, open-minded, and cheerful. Strathdivie was all her fancy had painted it, and it was like coming to another home to be there. She wrote her sensations to Miss Mackinnon, who responded to them, though with less effusion.

Nevertheless, it was a somewhat ghastly home-coming. The absence of almost all personal acquaintance with the deceased, and of anything like grief for his loss, together with what had been the inevitable reckoning on his death beforehand, lent a peculiar character to the situation, in which, when the conditions had to do with any feminine nature less unconquerable than Miss Janet’s, intolerable restlessness and nameless terror were apt to usurp the foreground. Miss Bethia, even Miss Mackinnon, though her feelings were more shut up within herself, might well have been forgiven for starting nervously every time the door opened. In truth, Miss Bethia woke up half a dozen times during the night, in spite of the negus which Mr. Mair had considerately brewed and sent up for the ladies, her hair standing on end, in a bath of perspiration, fighting with a nightmare, that Fenton of Strathdivie had come out of his coffin in the chamber below, mounted the stairs and entered her room to ask, as his servant had done for him, but with an awful face and gesture, what the Miss Mackinnons were seeking there.

To the relief of Miss Bethia, if not of Miss Janet and Miss Mackinnon, who saw no occasion for the appearance of rival claimants on the scene, a few gentlemen, distant relations of the Fentons of Strathdivie, straggled in to occupy the vacant bedrooms and represent various branches of the family at the funeral and the reading of the will. But the nearest of kin and in affection, as had always been understood, were unavoidably absent. These were first cousins on the mother’s side, who had been brought up with the late laird, and had been his intimate associates all his life, till they had emigrated to New Zealand several years back. Thus, the persons who had most reason to mourn the last of this line of Fentons would not so much as hear of his death for many a week, far less have it in their power to attend his funeral. It was a still greater comfort to Miss Bethia, and she believed in her heart to her sisters, though she did not dare to express her conviction, to wear their long-prepared mourning, and peep behind the closed window-blinds at the solemn procession which conducted Fenton of Strathdivie by a bleak moorland road to his long home. But the poor woman could hardly appreciate the advantage of having one burden lifted from her mind, because of the fever of expectation into which she and the remaining Miss Mackinnons were thrown with regard to the removal of another and a lifelong weight by the reading of the will, which was to take place on the return of the so-called mourners.

There was no question of what Jean Mackinnon’s marriage settlement had ordained, but some uncomprehended, undefined power was supposed to remain in the hands of the Fenton who was to return the loan which his house had enjoyed for generations. Besides, the law had many a quirk and quibble, and was proverbially unchancy. Though Miss Janet would not allow it to be breathed for an instant, Miss Bethia had a quaking fear in her sinking heart that there was still the risk of a miserable slip between the cup and the lip, and that she and her sisters might not only have made fools of themselves, they might be irretrievably ruined--it was so easy to ruin the last of the Virginian Mackinnons--in the little hold they had recovered of the world by favour of Tam Drysdale and Dr. Peter Murray. The sisters might be rouped out of house and hold, and the family mansion in St. Mungo’s Square lost to Eneas through the fruitless journey to Strathdivie, because Miss Janet had been so strong-willed and high-handed.

In spite of not admitting a doubt of the result, Miss Janet’s sense of honour could hardly restrain her, in the dreary, torturing interval of waiting, from taking the law into her own hands, setting about an instant search for the will and mastering its contents, without the help of Mr. Mair or any other official. Why not, when that clause in Jean Mackinnon’s marriage contract had still to be fulfilled? But, even if the temptation had proved too strong to be resisted, in the absence of all the other connections of the family, who, being men, had gone in the van of the friends and neighbours to the churchyard, the depredation would have been circumvented by Mrs. Todd, who kept a vigilant watch over the brow-beating, interfering ‘auld maid,’ dogging her footsteps, and never losing sight of her. The former custodian of Strathdivie intercepted and baffled poor Miss Janet at every point, when she sought to indemnify herself for the horrible delay by roaming through the house and making a mental inventory of all it contained, including audacious, not surreptitious, efforts to open closed cupboards and locked drawers.

‘That muckle, loud-tongued woman--I hate the very sicht of her, and I ken the puir maister would have hated it too--is no honest.’ Mrs. Todd was guilty of a gross libel on the lady to one of the undertaker’s men engaged to wait at the dinner which was to follow the funeral.

Miss Janet was perfectly honest, but it would have been difficult to say to what Jean Mackinnon’s marriage settlement did not extend in the eyes of her descendants, unless it were the servants’ trunks in their room, or the strangers’ wraps on the hall-table.