Chapter XV: Young Tam’s Partnership--Gay Doings

In the course of the winter the terms of partnership were settled and signed between young Tam and his father, to the immense private satisfaction of the latter, and the innocent jubilation of Mrs. Drysdale. The word ‘Son’ was added to the halting inscription on the office door. Young Tam began not only to relinquish the college lectures and learned societies to which he had been addicted, in order to stick to the business he had entered upon--he insisted on going back to the beginning and passing through all the preparatory drudgery from which he had till now stood aloof. He wanted to acquire a thorough acquaintance with every stage and department of the business of which he had elected to be one of the masters.

Auld Tam’s judgment went with his son’s decision. He was in his heart pleased with young Tam, and proud of him for his resolution. The senior partner rejoiced to see the junior in an office coat, or even in a dyer’s suit, more than he had ever magnified him in a dress-coat among his peers; yet the father would have willingly spared the son any ordeal that could well have been avoided. He would have treated young Tam’s early reluctance to become a dyer and calico-printer, now that it was overcome, with the greatest delicacy, dealing gently with the deficiencies which were likely to be its fruit. Auld Tam dreaded the young man’s becoming soured at the outset, and turned beyond recall, in his heart, against the business, though his father had enough confidence in him to feel sure that he would keep his word and the terms of the partnership. He would be nominally ‘son’ in a business sense, though he had lost all save a pocket interest in the matter, and though he ended by being the veriest of sleeping partners raised up to serve as a tool for rogues.

But young Tam doggedly declined to suffer himself to be spared. He was one of the few people who, in the course of every fault and blunder they commit, when punishment is going, choose to punish themselves first and most, and derive a grisly solace from such atonement as can be afforded by the hard lines the culprits compel themselves to endure. But it is not a pleasant process to go against the grain, and swallow huge mouthfuls of irksome details in a cause that is apt to look like nothing better than mercenary enterprise. The worst does not turn to the best, to the brave, at once.

There are many things to be taken into consideration. There is a natural reaction from the exalted mood in which a man gives up his will and makes what appears to him a signal sacrifice, which includes the subsequent depression, mortification, and irritation with which he finds he has not counted all the cost, and is hardly equal to the payment of the pound of flesh. Hitches are certain to occur in late concessions. Among the hitches are the lurking jealousy and latent malice of subordinates who have been disappointed in little schemes of their own, and do not want a new master.

In addition, young Tam Drysdale’s temper was not of the best; and although he was perfectly sincere in what he was about, he did not accomplish his transformation into a man of business altogether gracefully or graciously. It was far from being uninterruptedly smooth water in the Glasgow office, and at the Drysdale Haugh vats and bleaching-greens in those days; yet auld Tam was wonderfully forbearing, and young Tam, having once given in his adherence to his natural destination, practically kicked against it no more.

There was a considerable amount of gaiety this year, as there always was in winter among the young people of the Drysdale set, notably among Clary’s peculiar allies. Dick Semple was much at home, and his friend Eneas Mackinnon was frequently with him. Lady Semple had a couple of young ladies, English cousins, paying her a visit, whom she turned over as much as possible to Clary Drysdale, because her ladyship was a busy woman, and because she honestly believed there was a free-masonry between young people which rendered them the best company for each other. Yet there was nothing more conspicuous about Lady Semple--that is to the members of the mercantile class on whom she bestowed her countenance--than the perennial youthfulness of her character. It was not juvenility of dress and make up, for she happened to be a woman who cared little for such things. She said it was impossible for her to compete with the Glasgow ladies. She never failed to call the most dubious specimens on her visiting list ‘ladies’--the mere circumstance of their knowing her gave them rank so far. She feared to enter the lists, she declared, not only in skunk and silver fox, Brussels point and cut velvet, but in French and Court millinery. Her old gowns were comfortable; and her maid fitted her as well as she cared to be fitted. Lady Semple wore her own grey hair, though she was not more than midway between fifty and sixty. She had never either powdered or painted in her life. She patronized bonnets which, whatever else they did in the way of becoming her, covered her head. Her mantles were not tight to her figure, neat and light as that figure still was for her age. Her nearest approach to full dress did not go beyond dinner-dress, and failed to expose her neck and arms.

When a young woman, Lady Semple had married a man much older than herself. She had always been perfectly respectable, without the smallest taste for the platonic admiration of a circle of idle young men, which might explain what even Claribel Drysdale, who permitted a great deal to Lady Semple, called her well-bred dowdiness. No competition with other women, no attempt to attract the attention of any man save her husband, who gave her _carte blanche_ to dress as she liked, for that matter hardly noticed how she dressed, accounted for a good deal.

But whatever youthfulness of person Lady Semple had early lost, her mind remained as buoyant, versatile, and superficial as ever. The influence of her husband, by this time far advanced in age, had not quenched those attributes in the least. She was always starting new pursuits, new systems, new studies, to this day never doing anything more than skim over the surface, while she hopped from one to the other in a fashion most distracting to those who were not accustomed to her middle-aged schoolgirl ways.

All the same, Lady Semple was convinced that she had very little to say to the Vaughan girls--that, having no daughters of her own, she had well-nigh forgotten what young women would care for. On the other hand, their constant dependence on her for entertainment would seriously interfere with her music-practising according to the last Stuttgart method, the hangings she was working in _appliqué_, her cottage lectures, her acquisition of dates by an original method never thought of before. Claribel Drysdale, who was always disengaged enough to help her friends, would know what the Vaughans would like.

Clary was nothing loth to become, with Dick Semple’s and Mr. Mackinnon’s help, Lady Semple’s representative. Miss Drysdale was quite willing to introduce the Miss Vaughans to everything and everybody they might care to know, in a sphere rather different from that to which the daughters of a well-connected but poor English vicar had been hitherto accustomed. Clary was ready to get up riding-parties, skating-parties, walking-parties, singing parties, carpet-dances, for the strangers’ benefit.

Perhaps it was somewhat unreasonable in his sister to expect young Tam to join her in incurring similar trouble, particularly when the Miss Vaughans presented no attraction to him. He was over-burdened with worries and weariness from his new course of life, returning every night from the office or the Haugh dead-beat, without confessing it, by engagements which would have been child’s play to his father. To the Miss Vaughans young Tam was a surly Scot--an ungenial if not exactly unmannerly--for modern manners give great scope for rudeness--mercantile young man.

Florence and Louise Vaughan were neither very young nor very sympathetic. Their standard of duty was framed largely for clergymen’s daughters with a view to parish-work. They could tell a good deal with regard to English Church schools, village choirs, and charitable clubs--excellent things to know; but the same judges had few and vague opinions as to what should or what should not be said or done by laywomen, especially by laywomen who were not of the clergywomen’s species.

The Miss Vaughans had come to Scotland and Semple Barns, in the immediate neighbourhood of a great commercial city, deeply impressed beforehand with the shocks and surprises the travellers would receive, as if they were about to invade African kraals or Indian wigwams. The new-comers did not miss the sensational element in this visit. They heard a new language, saw a new style of person, looked at life from a different standpoint. Not the least of their discoveries was the abounding wealth which made life so much easier, and endowed a girl like Claribel Drysdale with a hundred advantages in dress, amusements, and power--in a republican world--of going where she liked, doing what she chose, and commanding to a great extent her friends and associates--all with a quiet mind and a clear conscience. No young women who were so unfortunate as to own parents with straitened means, though the parents’ descent was aristocratic, and their occupations and behaviour unimpeachable, could hope to attain like privileges.

The strangers, however restricted their experience might have been, were not fools. Their eyes were opened. They saw what a good thing it was to be commercially rich, since their mission of religion not only did not include a vow of poverty, but made no stand against worldliness, so long as worldliness went to daily service, paid respect to saints’ days, and decorated the church for festivals.

Lady Semple’s cousins were content to accept Claribel Drysdale as a friend. They put due value on her father’s carriage, very much at her disposal, her riding-horses, her high-class dress and appointments. Neither was a home like Drysdale Hall left out of the count. It might be over-gorgeous, but it was the perfection of luxury and comfort in its way, where nothing was stinted and nothing grudged. If there were serious objections to Claribel’s rustic father and mother, the house was spacious enough; her individual pursuits and engagements were sufficiently respected to allow her to see as little of her near kindred as she chose.

The Miss Vaughans were so won by the material gain that Glasgow trade can produce, they ceased to wonder at their cousin Lady Semple’s extending the right hand of fellowship to the wives of those calico-printers, cotton-spinners, and boiler-makers, with whom her husband was on excellent terms. The English ladies went so far as to contemplate the possibility of merging the natural superiority derived from their father’s and mother’s birth and breeding, name and profession, in commercial husbands with the opulence and the indulgence to their wives’ whims and fancies which these moneyed men were bound to show.

But young Tam Drysdale did not betray the smallest sign of appreciating Lady Semple’s visitors’ condescension, or of properly esteeming the severe simplicity of their looks, dress, and ornaments. It was a simplicity which was in honourable accordance with the Rev. Reginald Vaughan’s limited income, but it was not of the same order as Lady Semple’s simplicity, being studied and elaborate, where hers was unstudied and careless. Neither was it like that of Athole Murray, which was full of individual character and clever touches.

Young Tam was not vulgar; he had very little of the bagman about him. He had risen above his surroundings still more than his sister Clary had risen above hers. He might pass for a gentleman anywhere. But if he did not happen to be the man for either of the Miss Vaughans, it mattered little, however eccentrically gentleman-like he appeared in other respects.

In lieu of the support of young Tam, Claribel had to fall back on the adherence of Dick Semple and Eneas Mackinnon; though, alas! they were still less eligible in a matrimonial light. Young Tam wanted the will in relation to the Miss Vaughans; but the other two men wanted both the will and the way. Dick Semple had no chance of marrying in his own station without Sir James’s concurrence. Lady Semple had always been easy in her mind about her son, even with regard to Claribel Drysdale, however much they were thrown together, and however friendly the terms on which they stood to each other. For her ladyship’s liberal ideas of fraternization with the families of Glasgow ‘bailies,’ as she was apt to call them, whether in or out of office, did not extend to proposing to Sir James that his and her solitary chick should quit the ranks of the country gentry to intermarry with sugar or shipping, or Turkey-red dye, however gilded.

Lady Semple was sure of Dick’s sentiments--that they did not incline in the direction of Drysdale Hall, but in that of a baronial castle, not of yesterday, and still in the hands of a family as old as the time of Queen Mary. Dick did not stoop--he aspired; and if he persevered long enough, and if no better suitor came for one of several daughters, why, the Semples of Semple Barns, with a baronetcy of a date not quite so far back as the baron’s charters, but not of yesterday either, and an estate as unencumbered as the deplorable condition of agriculture would permit, were not to be despised. Dick might live to have his innings, with the full consent of his father and mother, and of a greater man.

But apart from the Honourable Lilias and Claribel Drysdale, the Vaughan girls, who would never see six and eight and twenty again, and had no looks to speak of, were quite out of the question for Dick.

As for Eneas Mackinnon, to speak of marriage in the same breath with him was a wild absurdity, unless he married a fortune--and every heiress was not so easily attracted by a Mackinnon as poor Maggie Craig had been; while a dowered young lady, unless she drew her dower from the lower walks of trade, was hardly likely to look on the imposing rank of a lieutenant with the reverential eyes of the old aunties in St. Mungo’s Square. Where there were no fortunes, Eneas Mackinnon, in his youth, was as much vowed to celibacy as any old Knight of Malta, any monk among them.

No doubt Claribel might have summoned to her aid, for the better entertainment of the Miss Vaughans, other young men, sons of her father’s friends, better inclined than young Tam or Dick Semple--better supplied with the means of setting up establishments than Eneas Mackinnon. But Clary had for a long time hung back a little from her natural companions. She had no desire to enter the lists with the Honourable Lilias. She had not the ghost of a passion for Dick Semple, who, though a good enough fellow, was still less a man to die for than Clary had once stated Eneas Mackinnon to be. But though she did not care in that sense for Dick, she was fantastically attached to the grade to which he belonged, even in its farthest ramifications, in preference to her own. She exaggerated the advantages of the one, and underrated the benefits of the other. She lacked entirely the Miss Vaughans’ experience of the stints, shifts, and shams--the unsatisfactory make-believes--of genteel poverty. Clever young woman as Clary was, she showed herself a person utterly ignorant in this respect, while she was willing to stand aside and bide her time, and rather put up with a good many serious objections than relinquish her beau-ideal.

Notwithstanding the drawbacks, the group of young people who had so many appointments together, or in common, presented an attractive enough aspect to lookers-on at Semple Barns and Drysdale Hall, at the meets in the neighbourhood, at the theatre or assembly-rooms, to which Mrs. Drysdale chaperoned them with some trepidation, but abundant kindly good-humour. Claribel Drysdale and her mother were handsome enough in different styles for all the four women. The Miss Vaughans were supposed to make up by that severely simple air of theirs for what they lacked in fairness of face and costliness of apparel. Some unsophisticated people held that they were distinguished-looking, because of the uncompromising absence of the very gifts and graces which the mass of the assembly prized and struggled for, and pretended to have if they did not possess them.

The Miss Vaughans were Lady Semple’s cousins, which meant much in the mercantile community, and their presence at public places under Mrs. Drysdale’s care was further promotion for her, of which her daughter Clary was well aware, if the mother, with her humble-mindedness in the middle of her gratified vanity, made little of it.

Poor young Eppie, who was still prohibited from the gaieties of a grown-up young lady, pined longingly after the people who had carried off her mother. Eppie thought Dick Semple, who was thick-set and plain, quite nice-looking when he wore his cat’s-eye studs, and a bouquet in his coat; and Eneas Mackinnon an Adonis, though his studs were of the plainest, and he had only a couple of ivy leaves, which Clary had given him, in his button-hole. The same partial critic considered her mother, in her velvet and diamonds, and Clary in her satins and pearls, as ‘grand and lovely.’ But Eppie had not much admiration to bestow on Florence and Louise Vaughan. She did not care for their clinging gauzes, or whatever the material of their gowns might be; the oxydized silver girdles, which replaced the austerely plain leather belts with which the sisters encircled the waists of their morning dresses; the natural flower-trimming for their corsages; the coronals of natural flowers in their hair. It might all be elegant and æsthetic, but there was a mummy-like swathing in the arrangement of the folds, while the flower-trimmings withered, and the result was not satisfactory. Unless a man or a woman was naturally gifted, he or she had to be trained up to such fashions, as to the profusion of yellow daffodils used not long before at a city banquet by a confectioner of advanced principles of taste.

‘Sheafs of common yellow lilies, auld-fashioned daffondondillies!’ more than one of the guests had exclaimed in scorn and derision, feeling himself shamefully balked of the hot-house flowers to which the price of his ticket entitled him.

Auld Tam sought to console his younger daughter left at home.

‘Never mind, my lassie, your day will come. I’ll be a proud man when I see you setting out with mother for your first ball--you’ll make all the other young leddies stand about.’

‘You’ll go with me yourself, father, or I’ll not stir a foot!’ cried Eppie, recovering her spirits, and tyrannizing by anticipation. ‘But, eh, I wonder young Tam can bide at home. To think he might dance with the best, and that he should stay away to smoke and read. I’m sure he has plenty of time for smoking and reading.’

‘Not so much as he was wont to have,’ auld Tam corrected her; ‘but the felly is well aff if he would but think so; he has a hantle privileges if he would only use them. He is on thrawn [cross] terms with the world, that’s what it is, poor Tam!’ his father added in a softer tone the next moment. ‘For all that has come and gone, will his day ever come?’

‘Never mind him, father,’ said Eppie cheerfully, ‘he’s a gowk [fool] not to make the best of his opportunities. He’ll come to himself some day, without you troubling your head any more about it. He has gone into the business, and that is something that has pleased mother and you. You’ll be my first partner at that ball.’

‘Bairn, I would be a fell-like pairtner,’ protested Tam, by no means displeased by Eppie’s selection. ‘I have not danced since I stood up at a kirn [harvest-home]; I believe it was your grandfather’s. Your mither was my pairtner, and I dare say she was so far left to herself as to admire my steps, and the cut and shuffle I had learnt for the occasion.’

‘You used to dance with me--at least you made me dance and ride when I was a wee thing. Do you not mind how

‘“Jenny rode to Ru’glen”?

and

‘“Shu! shuggie! shug!
A little birdie in the moss,
Aneath a bunch o’ fug.
Shu! shuggie! shug!”’