Chapter XX: ‘a Young Thing Just Come Frae Her Mammy.’

As the party were approaching the main entrance, Tam, who was leading the van, caught a glimpse of an under-gardener, whom he judged to be the defaulter in some trifle amiss with the terrace that had just caught the master’s orderly eye. Without ceremony, he turned aside to call the culprit to account. In the meantime, Guy Horsburgh saw young Tam, who had been over at the works, coming up the avenue, and waited to meet him. Sir Hugo, thinking the others were close at his heels, entered by the door which the servant had thrown open, and was shown by himself to the picture-gallery.

Sir Hugo was not alone. One of the daughters of the house, doubtless--though surely not the one he had seen before--had not gone to dress, and was bending over a flower-stand, and so intent upon shifting a pot that she did not notice anybody was there.

‘Allow me, Miss Drysdale,’ said Sir Hugo, who had too little self-consciousness to feel uncomfortable on his own account, advancing like the pink of courtesy that he was.

Young Eppie started, looked up with parted red lips, and dark eyes so wide open that the long curling lashes ceased to veil them. So far from having gone to dress, she had done nothing to repair the result of her work since luncheon. Her fringe--oh! she could not tell what state her fringe was in; but she did not believe there was a hair that she had not pushed out of her eyes or tucked behind her ears half-a-dozen times. Her hands were green and red from contact with the flower-pots. Her morning gown was the oldest she possessed, and the one which had received the worst usage; it was dragged to one side because Eppie had just trodden on the hem and torn a portion of the skirt out of ‘the gathers.’ All this when the ‘Allow me, Miss Drysdale,’ spoken by an English tongue, confirmed, beyond the possibility of mistake, the impression which her single startled glance had at once conveyed. This strange young man, with his horrible ease, was the very Sir Hugo Willoughby for whom everybody had been making such preparations. What would Clary think! What would her father--nay, what would her mother say, if they knew the plight in which their chief guest had found Eppie!

With a little half-stifled shriek of dismay which she could not altogether repress, Eppie, obeying the first impulse, turned and fled like the wind to the nearest door. In a moment she disappeared, as if no such disordered young figure had disturbed the propriety of the beautiful room. The only relic she had left behind was the very vestige which had remained of Cinderella--one little slipper had dropped in the flight.

Sir Hugo stood amazed--amused. Was this the behaviour of the young Glasgow ladies when they were taken by surprise? But, ye gods! what a beautiful young Hebe. He advanced a step, stooped, and picked up the morocco slipper, regarding it critically. It was small enough to have belonged to Cinderella, or Atalanta--if Atalanta had donned a slipper. At the same time it was a good deal worn, and looked peeled and discoloured, as if it had run over rough stones and damp grass, as well as soft carpets. Finally, it had been thrust down at the heel in a flagrantly slip-shod fashion, for which the wearer had been punished by her loss. But, poor little thing, how frightened she had looked! Was she kept in great order by strict dragons of mother and elder sisters? That must have been an elder sister whom he had met several times, with an air about her as if she could enforce good manners. Would the little one be exposed and brought to book if she were found out? Should he not screen her to the best of his ability? He put the disreputable small slipper into his pocket, and laughed softly. It was the first personal adventure which had happened to him since he came to Glasgow. It was the first thing of the kind that had ever befallen him.

Presently the current of Sir Hugo’s meditations was arrested, and he was recalled to ordinary life by the entrance of the other men, and the appearance of Mrs. Drysdale, who had dressed early, because she knew the picture-gallery would be shown, and she would be wanted while Tam slipped away to dress. _She_ did not look much like a dragon, anyhow, Sir Hugo reflected in parenthesis, as he was introduced to her, while he knew from whom the little one had her lovely face. These Glasgow fellows had the best of everything.

Mrs. Drysdale, on her side, leapt to the conclusion that, to be a fine young English baronet, ‘Sir Hughie’ seemed an innocent lad enough--not more alarming than Guy Horsburgh, who had been a schoolfellow of young Tam’s.

Auld Tam was already turning to the pictures, ‘looking sharp,’ and eager to get through with the job in hand--to introduce the visitor to the Drysdale Hall collection, and witness his surprise and pleasure, before the owner had to go.

‘I cannot promise you much, Sir Hugie. What can one man do? and it seems only the other day I took to the trade. Young Tam, there, may gather something worth a man’s coming to see. I have hardly an auld maister, unless you can call this Keep--which is doubtful--and that Veroneese fit representatives of the auld schules. To tell the truth, I have not a great eye for their merits. Give me the modern artists that can draw, whose colours are not all gone off to fiddle-broon.’

‘But there is your Grooze, Tam, and your Missoneer,’ Mrs. Drysdale reminded her husband. ‘You’re surely forgetting them.’

‘No, mother, but they are not auld maisters, more by token Missoneer is living, like Breeton--I’ve a great wark with Breeton--and Weelems, Sir Hugie. I went out of my way and paid eight hunder doun for a canvas of Breeton’s of no great size, as you’ll see in a moment; but, man, his peasants are to the life. And there’s a Madame Broon here, that I like in her work as well as any woman going. But I must be aff, not to keep the dinner waiting. Mind, mother, the Milly, and do not forget the Wilkie, and the Raeburn, for the honour of auld Scotland. But take care you leave the gentlemen in time to change their feet [boots].’

Mrs. Drysdale did her best with such simplicity and goodwill, that she defied criticism, either on her pronunciation or her art knowledge. Sir Hugo listened with even more than the courtesy natural to him. Presently he turned aside to a flower-stand.

‘You have rival colours here, Mrs. Drysdale. What a show of hyacinths you must have! You beat my mother; and she is rather famous for her hyacinths.’

‘It is very kind of you to say so, sir,’ Mrs. Drysdale acknowledged gratefully. ‘But I know Scotland cannot compete with England in garden flooers. We’ve to send to English nurseries for our best roses and geraniums. But if you like our hyacinths, I wish you had been a little later and seen our rerenunculeses. Tam--that’s Maister Drysdale--is very prood of our rerenunculeses. They can do nothing to them at Barley Riggs.’

‘Horsburgh, you wretched stickler for a syllable,’ Sir Hugo attacked his friend when they were in the privacy of their rooms, ‘why did you nearly break down at the “rerenunculeses”?’

‘I cannot tell,’ said Horsburgh, grinning again at the recollection. ‘She might as well have said “rhinoceroses,” when she was at it.’

‘You might have upset me,’ his companion continued to reproach the offender with youthful severity; ‘and rather than have hurt the good soul I would have swallowed all the ranunculuses in the world. Never mind, I saw a vision before you came, in which I am glad you did not share--you were not worthy of it.’

‘Claribel or Eppie, I take it. Well, they are both handsome enough girls, in different styles, and they’ll have lots of tin.’

‘Handsome enough!’ echoed Sir Hugo indignantly, while he did not deign to notice the mercenary reference to ‘tin.’

But he said no more.

In the meantime young Eppie was hiding her discomfited blushes in her own room, where she not only blushed, but cried a little, she felt so ashamed of herself and of the discredit she had brought on her family. Then her sense, of which she was by no means destitute, came to her aid. It was no such catastrophe after all. Very likely Sir Hugo had hardly looked at her. She could not tell what he was like, or what he wore, further than that he was slim and brown like Dr. Peter, yet with an air--she supposed that of a court--which did not belong to Dr. Peter. Sir Hugo, if it was Sir Hugo, must have taken off his overcoat, for he had on a black coat and a white--was it a white or a black tie? she had forgotten; and no doubt he had forgotten all about her by this time, particularly as he must have seen she was not grown up. Then she appeased her tender conscience by assuring herself that she would tell mother all about it, the moment she came into the drawing-room. She--Eppie--would not mind being scolded. Mother’s scolding was not hard to bear--it was when she was vexed her young daughter could not stand it.

At this stage of her reflections Eppie was able to turn with renewed interest to her white ‘frock’--she called it frock, as her mother did--and the pink ribands she was to wear with it, for the evening.

Clary came in dressed, to see what Eppie was going to make of herself, and did not notice anything amiss with her sister. But Clary, from the æsthetic height of one of her creamy tints, set off by filmy lace, looked disparagingly at Eppie’s pure, clear pink ribands.

‘Child, I wish you would not always wear pink,’ objected Claribel. ‘Nicol will bring you some other trimming and put it on for you. I should say some dim blue, or even maize or salmon colour, or pale coral would be better.’

‘Thank you, Clary, but I prefer pink,’ said Eppie, with a mind of her own.

‘You don’t know that the colour has gone out,’ Clary explained calmly, from the stronghold of her superior information.

‘Have roses gone out?’ inquired Eppie quickly. Then she coloured, and excused herself--‘Oh! Clary, I hope you do not think I’m prideful, and mean that I am like a rose.’

‘Prideful! I wish you would not use such words,’ exclaimed Clary, more in resigned despair than in active anger. ‘But whether you are like a rose or not, you are too pink yourself to wear pink, especially when nobody else is seen in the colour.’

‘Mother is seen,’ said Eppie, with girlish dignity, ‘and I wish to be like her. There is nobody else in the whole world that I should care so much to be like. But neither of us will ever look so well as mother.’

Clary shrugged her white shoulders, then she said good-naturedly:

‘I dare say you are right, if my mother would do herself justice. But because she has an old-fashioned fancy, I do not see that is any reason why you should adopt it.’

Eppie shook her head and closed her lips.

Claribel said, with a laugh:

‘I suppose you must please yourself, you spoilt child,’ and went away.

‘As if mother did not set [become] pink, which she wears to please father,’ protested Eppie junior; ‘and if she sets it, I must set it too, for I am a little like mother. Anyway, I’ll wear it to bear her company.’

During dinner, Tam was bent not only on getting everybody to do honour to the good fare, but to do the greater honour because of the expense and trouble with which it had been brought there.

‘I believe the takes of salmon are not promising well this year, Sir Hugie; every fish costs five pounds to this day. Let mother help you to another slice, Leddy Semple. The lamb ought to be first-rate. Sir Jeames, from what it fetches. No, we can do nothing to early peas and petawties like these in the garden here, till the end of the month of June, at the sunset; but go into the market and open your purse-strings, and you may have sparrygrass and strawberries in Januar’.’

In vain young Tam, with a heightened colour, exerted himself to get up dinner-table talk in a manner foreign to him, while Clary, in her unruffled beauty, showed the greatest imperturbability. She was impartially agreeable to Dick Semple and Eneas Mackinnon--between whom she sat. At the same time she took approving note of every look and word of Hugo’s, where he occupied the place of honour at her mother’s right hand. Her observation of the latter was undisturbed by the uncertainty of what Mrs. Drysdale might be saying to the Englishman. Clary’s good opinion of herself and her claims helped her to be reasonable. It enabled her to extend an amnesty to her relations for whatever offences they might be guilty of, and to expect the rest of the world to be equally indulgent. Not even the excitement of the aspiration she was indulging, and the rivalry she proposed to enter upon--all in the most maidenly way--could provoke her to lose her balance, or force her to feel nervous, agitated, quickly vexed.

It was worse with auld Tam when the wine, on which he piqued himself, came more to the front. This wine had been round the world, and that had lain in other cellars than his, for more than a century. And here was something from a bin which only he and another man in Glasgy could import, at any sacrifice.

Sir Hugo had to explain, in self-defence--to save the semicircle of glasses at his right hand from being filled with a frequency which only Glasgow heads could stand unimpaired--that his mother had been captivated with the information that the Prince Consort, when he first came to England at the age of seventeen, had drunk nothing stronger than water. She had taken to drinking water constantly, that her boy might be reared as simply. The consequence was that though he had lived to know what a college ‘wine’ meant, it was an acquired taste with him. He could not in sincerity profess, though Mr. Drysdale might well be shocked at his ignorance, that he, Sir Hugo, knew much more than the first rudiments of the subject. He was afraid his mother had rashly imperilled the chance of his ever becoming a good judge of wines.

Auld Tam stared a little, and it crossed his mind how many young Glasgow men would hold their claim to be gentlemen irreparably injured by such an admission as Sir Hugo had not hesitated to make, though he had incurred his disqualification by following the example of a prince.

Then Tam allowed his better nature to come to the front, and be heard on the question.

‘Your mither must be a good woman,’ he said magnanimously. ‘But if she exercised the same strictness with regard to your victuals, I should expect to find you confined to vegetables, like the new sect of vegetarians, or content with bread and cheese instead of roast beef.’

‘Oh no! we were not anchorites,’ said Sir Hugo, laughing, ‘though my mother does not care much what she eats, and she would have been annoyed to see me set great store on my plate when I was a boy. I believe she was tempted to regard schoolboys as a combination of ogres and gourmands; but she always took care that her friends should not suffer from her theories.’

‘This is very interesting,’ said Lady Semple. ‘I like men and women to strike out original views.’

‘But unfortunately this is not original,’ said Sir Hugo carelessly. ‘It merely means that my mother was a great admirer of the character of the late Prince Consort. She set about trying if she could find anything: in his training to account for the satisfactory result. She had the presumption--which may be forgiven in a mother, I suppose--to seek to graft that something on her son’s experience.’

‘You must have been a great thocht to your mither,’ said Mrs. Drysdale simply.

‘I am afraid I was,’ said Sir Hugo, between jest and earnest; ‘an only son generally is.’

‘You may say that; I ken it to my cost!’ exclaimed Mrs. Drysdale, with a look at young Tam that awoke a laugh.

‘My impression is that the conversation is getting too personal--what do you say, Mr. Tam Drysdale?’ Sir Hugo appealed to his fellow-sufferer.

‘My mother will tell you that only sons are either deils or daws,’ said young Tam.

‘I have heard of the deil, and I am acquainted with the daw of Rheims,’ said Sir Hugo; ‘but what is he doing here? He is not so far removed from a deil as to form a contrast--he is the incarnation of mischief.’

‘Oh! but he is a duffer in this instance,’ explained young Tam.

‘Well, folks may seek to fricht me as they like about Sir Hughie Willoughby being sic a grand young gentleman,’ Mrs. Drysdale confided to Lady Semple when the ladies repaired to the drawing-room. ‘I’ll never heed another word they say I’m sure he’s quite hamely, speaking of his leddy mither, not as “my leddy,” but “my mither,” as freely as my son Tam might speak of me. I can never think ill of a young lad that is ready to speak of his mither, Lady Semple.’

‘Think ill, my dear Mrs. Drysdale! why should you? You must think nothing save good of Sir Hugo. I am sure he is most anxious to win your favour.’

‘It is very good of you to say so, my leddy,’ said Eppie senior, with smiling incredulity. ‘But what for should he care to have my favour? A fine gentleman has more in his head. He was very pleasant all the denner-time, I will say that for him; but I was not so besotted as not to see he would have been the better of anither pairtner than an auld wife. I kenned it was ane of the rules of gude company that he should take me into the dining-room, but I grudged the needcessity for him--‘deed did I. He would have been far better waured on one of the young leddies that are ready to look sweet on him--and I dinna blame them, for he’s a maist comely, civil-spoken lad.’

‘My dear Mrs. Drysdale,’ Lady Semple protested again, ‘you must not depreciate yourself in this fashion. What are you thinking of? You must not call yourself “an auld wife.” Why, you’ll be teaching Dick the trick, to practise on me before I know what I’m about. I am sure you are ever so many years younger than I am, and I can tell you I do not mean to be set aside, in the light of an old woman, for a dozen years to come.’

‘But the young folk maun have their day, and take our place,’ pleaded Eppie’s soft voice. ‘What have we to do, Leddy Semple, but make room for them, and prood to do it?’

‘Here is somebody that will not be made room for,’ said Lady Semple, coming down on young Eppie, before she could spring from the hearth-rug, on which she had been sitting basking in the glow of the fire--not unwelcome in the chillness of the April evening--‘somebody in no hurry to grow up and render her elders superannuated. Eppie, do you call your mother an old woman?’

‘Mother old!’ cried Eppie, in mingled indignation and alarm, ‘she will not be old till I am old myself; at least, not till I am thirty or forty. Father is eight years older than mother, and he is only a middle-aged man.’

‘Listen to her! That is right, child. I hope Dick will swear as fervently by my youthfulness.’

The moment Sir Hugo entered the drawing-room, his eyes fell on young Eppie, and he tried to get near her. She appeared to him a more Hebe-like vision than before--twice as lovely as he had imagined her. In vain Clary waited for him, keeping others at a distance. In vain Guy Horsburgh, tired of the suavities of both the Miss Vaughans, sought mischievously to draw his friend into their neighbourhood, so that Guy might escape honourably from his station to more attractive quarters, by bringing within reach of the arrows showered fruitlessly upon him a more illustrious, perhaps more vulnerable, prey. In vain Athole Murray, who was there without Dr. Peter, called away to a patient, was stirred by young Tam’s discontent to glance with lively curiosity at Prince Charming. _He_ only wanted to be introduced to young Eppie.

In the meantime the girl, with the weight of trouble on her mind for what had happened before dinner, flitted about the room, to escape the guest of the evening, in the style of a restless fairy. She was here and there and everywhere, like an uncanny will-o’-the-wisp, telling herself, all the time, that it was a very hard and perverse chance which made the grand gentleman torment her by coming in her way.

At last her father arrested Eppie by putting his hand on her shoulder, with the surprised exclamation:

‘Bairn! have you turned yourself into a bird, happing from branch to branch?’ The next moment he wheeled her round face to face with the enemy. ‘It is my little girl Eppie, Sir Hugie. Eppie, this is Sir Hugie Willoughby,’ said auld Tam, in his singleness of heart.

There was no help for it. She could not run away again; she had to behave as if she had been Clary. She heard the young man mutter something of having had the pleasure of seeing Miss Eppie Drysdale before. But it was a slip of the tongue. He did not say another word which could betray the smallest inclination to expose her. He did not even speak of pictures or flowers. He only asked her if she liked yachting, and had ever spent two or three days at sea--idle questions, evidently for the purpose of making conversation. They could have no reference to the grievous scandal of his having found her, when it was time for the guests to assemble in the picture-gallery, with dirty hands, ‘towsy’ hair, and a torn frock, and of her having run off, without waiting to beg his pardon, leaving such an old slipper behind her.

As Eppie saw oblivion settling down on the scrape she had got into, she began to recover her courage, to look Sir Hugo in the face, and to think, like her mother, that he was not so grand, and not ‘fearsome’ at all. He seemed younger than young Tam, and kind and merry. She was ready to commit more solecisms by chattering to him of ‘Beardie,’ her Newfoundland, ‘White Breeks,’ Barley Riggs and all the beasts there, little deaf Willie Finlay, the Glasgow shops, and whatever else came into her head, when she was prevented by somebody calling upon her to sing.

For young Eppie’s gift of singing native ballads was already so decided, and so well known, that where it was concerned, she had broken the chrysalis of her nonage. She was accustomed to make such music wherever it was in request--at home, at Barley Riggs, even at Semple Barns, without thought or fear, as a matter of course. Clary would play the accompaniments, and Eppie would sing, in her fresh, sweet, tuneful voice, ‘Logan Braes,’ or ‘The bonnie, bonnie broom o’ Cowdenknowes,’ a room full of people hanging on her notes, as on the carol of some wonderful bird.

To-night she sang a quaint, old-fashioned ditty--which was a favourite of auld Tam’s, and for that matter of young Eppie’s. It had some appropriateness to those who knew the singer. It began with the wistful appeal of a mother to her son--probably an only son, like Sir Hugo or young Tam:

‘Whaur ha’e you been a’ day,
My boy Tammy?
Whaur ha’e you been a’ day,
My boy Tammy?’

Tammy, thus adjured, has the candour and tender tact to reply:

‘I’ve been by burn and flowery brae,
Meadow green and mountain grey,
Courtin’ o’ this young thing,
Just come frae her mammy.’

The mother, not unpropitiated, goes on to ask:

‘An’ whaur got ye that young thing,
My boy Tammy?
Whaur got ye that young thing,
My boy Tammy?’

To which the son gives answer:

‘I got her doon in yonder howe,
Smiling on a bonny knowe,
Herding ae wee lamb an’ ewe
For her puir mammy.’

Then he makes a frank statement of his wooing of ‘the young thing,’ with her resistance to his suit and naïve assertion of the claims of his powerful rival:

‘The smile gaed aff her bonnie face,
“I mauna leave my mammy;
She’s gi’en me meat, she’s gi’en me claes.
She’s been my comfort a’ my days;
My father’s death brocht monie waes--
I canna leave my mammy.”’

The difficulty is triumphantly overcome by the lover’s generosity:

‘“We’ll tak’ her hame and mak’ her fain,
My ain kind-hearted lammie;
We’ll gi’e her meat, we’ll gi’e her claes.
We’ll be her comfort a’ her days.”
The wee thing gi’es her hand, an’ says,
“There, gang an’ ask my mammy.”’

The little drama winds up with the approving question from the other mother--large-hearted like her son:

‘Has she been to the kirk wi’ thee,
My boy Tammy?
Has she been to the kirk wi’ thee,
My boy Tammy?’

To which there is the glad, soft assurance:

‘She has been to the kirk wi’ me.
An’ the tear was in her e’e;
For oh! she’s but a young thing,
Just come frae her mammy.’

Mrs. Drysdale furtively wiped her eyes, auld Tam cleared his throat; Sir Hugo listened like one entranced, and haunted Eppie till the party broke up.

‘I did not know Willoughby was so fond of music,’ Guy Horsburgh turned the matter over in his mind.

‘Talk of Sir Hugo not giving himself airs!’ said one of the Vaughan sisters. ‘What do you call a young man’s neglecting grown-up people to amuse himself with an unformed child, if such conduct cannot be classed as airs?’

‘He’s making his way with the little one as one means of getting at Claribel. I don’t know that it is necessary, and I did not think that young men had been so modest nowadays, but it is refreshing that it is so,’ Lady Semple settled dogmatically.

Claribel witnessed the first secession from the ranks of her admirers, the first preference on the part of one of them for her younger sister, with a shade of wonder, but with no other visible emotion, unless it were a tinge of amusement. She was so completely mistress of herself that she gave no sign of responding to the dog-like devotion of Eneas Mackinnon stepping forward to fill once more the vacant place--from which he had been at no distant date unceremoniously ousted--looking at her with long, wistful looks. She only made an easy suggestion:

‘Will you help me with this portfolio, Mr. Mackinnon? There are some water-colour sketches in it, which my father bought the other day, that I should like to show to Lady Semple. Thanks. Do you care to see them too? Oh, if you like.’

That night Clary, in her dressing-gown, went into her sister’s room, where Eppie was combing her hair, with her eyes closing.

‘What is it, Clary?’ asked Eppie in surprise, starting round wide awake. ‘Is there anything the matter?’

‘Nothing at all,’ answered Clary lightly, and began talking and laughing over the events of the evening--how people had looked and spoken, how much improved Guy Horsburgh was. Then she asked what was Eppie’s opinion of Sir Hugo, now that she had seen him.

Eppie was quite ready to give it. He was just like other people, she thought, only a good deal nicer. Could it be possible that he had such a wonderful old house, and was cousin to an earl, and might go to Court and speak to the Queen?

‘Be spoken to by her, you mean,’ corrected Clary.

‘Well, isn’t it the same thing?’ asked unsophisticated Eppie. ‘I did not have time to ask him about the Queen. I don’t think he would have minded though I had. He looked as if he would be easier to live with than our Tam--not that I would like to change Tam, though he is dorty sometimes,’ with sudden relenting towards her brother.

‘I don’t suppose Sir Hugo understands what “dorty” means,’ said Clary, raising her eyebrows.

‘Oh! but you’re wrong, Clary,’ said Eppie very decidedly; ‘he told me that he understood every word I sang. He had read Burns, and was fond of Sir Walter. I was just going to ask him which was his favourite character in the Waverley Novels, when Mr. Horsburgh came to say the trap was at the door.’

‘You may have another opportunity of asking him,’ said Clary, a little vaguely. ‘In the meantime, I came in to tell you that you sang your best, and looked very well in your white and pink. I am not sure that pink is not the most becoming colour for you, after all. But I should like you to have a pink _crêpe de chine_, or something of that sort, made by Madame Sophie. Pink and silver,’ repeated Clary, with the air of a connoisseur; ‘I think that would suit you.’

‘Oh, Clary!’ was all that Eppie could say, for she was by no means insensible to the promotion.

Clary’s dressmaker and pink _crêpe de chine_ and silver--the very idea was a high compliment.

‘You see I am proud of my pretty little sister, though I don’t wish to make her vain,’ said Clary, kissing Eppie with real affection, before the elder lighted her candle and disappeared.

Eppie gasped. Clary proud of her! She lay awake for fully ten minutes puzzling over the flattering problem. She had always known that Clary liked her, in the light of their near relationship, though Clary tormented her with plans for improvement, and made her furious by proposing to send her away from home. Still Clary was sorry when she--Eppie--was ill, and did her best for her, and proved to her that her sister was fond of her in Clary’s quiet, self-occupied fashion. But ‘proud’ was a very different feeling--proud of little, Scotch-speaking, blundering Eppie, with her lack of accomplishments!

Eppie felt bound in honour to tell Clary what had happened in the picture-gallery. The girl took the next opportunity when she and Clary happened to be in the garden together the following morning. But Clary only laughed, and said:

‘Never mind--what could have put it into your head to run away? Don’t do it again. On the contrary, you ought to learn to make the best of yourself. But though it would not look well in me to be childish and silly, I don’t believe either Sir Hugo or any other man will take it ill on your part.’

Clary was not speaking sarcastically--she was in perfect good faith.

Eppie did not gasp again, but she lingered behind by the violet-bed, letting Clary stroll on. In truth, Eppie was overcome by the delicious consciousness of some attraction in her which disarmed hostility. She knew she was like her mother, for everybody said so. Therefore she must be a little bonnie, but she had never suspected that she was so bonnie as Clary’s words seemed to imply. The discovery did not fill Eppie’s head with nonsense, as her father and mother would have said: for she began, after a moment’s innocent elation, to distrust the existence of youthful beauty, and to seek to under-value it, if it were there. She was well enough; she might be rather bonnie, inasmuch as she had a share of mother’s looks; but for the rest, it was only a foolish fancy of Clary’s, for which Eppie was much obliged to her sister, and would always like her the better for it. _She_ was handsome, like a picture, like a queen. Eppie would never look like that--not that it mattered very much when beauty was only skin-deep, and people liked each other just as well without it. Would father and mother care for her a grain less though she were to be seized with small-pox to-morrow, and be left a disfigured object for the rest of her days? There was Athole Murray. Everybody said, and Eppie’s eyes told her, that Athole was plain, in spite of her eyes, with a wide mouth and a dumpy nose; but then she was so clever and nice; and Eppie shrewdly suspected, if nobody else did, that young Tam would sooner have a pleasant word from Athole Murray’s witty tongue than all the smiles of all the beauties in Glasgow.

The truth was, Clary had seen Eppie with another person’s eyes, and her own were too reasonable to remain sealed in such a case. She had received an enlightenment. It was the first tribute, little as Eppie suspected it, to the possibility of her becoming Lady Willoughby of Willoughby Court, or some equally distinguished person, and Clary was ready to pay the tribute. There was nothing grudging or unmagnanimous in the young woman’s pride.

‘Tam,’ Mrs. Eppie confided to her husband in the privacy of their luxurious chamber, after she had sung the praises of Sir Hugo till she had nearly sung auld Tam asleep, ‘did you not see that he was ta’en with our bairn?’

‘What, Clary!’ cried Tam, rousing himself to the dawning glory of becoming father-in-law to a baronet and squire of many acres.

‘No, Eppie; the lamb, who had no more thocht of what was in the lad’s mind than when she was a wee thing playing round my knee.’

‘Then leave her without the thocht,’ said Tam gruffly. ‘For shame, woman, to even a lassock like her to a lad of ony kind, aboon a’ to a lad by richts no in her ain station--here the day, and awa’ the morn! She’s not dreaming of lads, and you may catch her leal licht heart and brush the bloom aff, like the dew from the gowans in the morning, and break it before she’s weel in her teens.’

‘I never said I would breathe a word o’t to her, Tam; I would not be so bold. A young lassie’s heart is like the kirk itsel’--no to be lichtly entered,’ said Mrs. Drysdale reproachfully; ‘and what for should I seek to promote sic a distinction for little Eppie? Lifted up and lonely, and torn from a’ her frien’s; her that is friendly and fond of her ain folk! You and me never to see her again, or ken richt how she’s farin’, unless aince or twice in as mony years! All the same, the fine lad’s ta’en with the bairn. You may tak’ my word for it, Tam.’

‘And all the same, you would gie her to him, and hae your reward in kennin’ young Eppie a fine leddy, though everything were to happen as you say.’

‘I would not stand in her road, Tam; nor would you,’ said Mother Eppie, with spirit.

‘Have it any way you like then, and let me sleep,’ said auld Tam, with a pretence at despair. ‘But mind, the felly’s going back to Cambridge in little more than a week, and there’s small chance of our seeing his face again, even if he had not uncles and aunties, and what not, to come forrit and cry out at his demeaning himsel’ to think of matching his title with a bleacher and dyer’s dochter.’

‘He’s coming back to see mair of Scotland and Glasgy in the Long Vacation. I heard him say that mysel’; and he’s of age and his ain maister, with a gude mither, that Leddy Semple says would never conter him in onything he set his heart on, that was richt! And you ken, Tam, you’re a man in a big way--no just a common bleacher and dyer; while you’ve often telled me bleachin’ and dyein’ and calico-printin’ will come to the front of the treds. You can gie your twa lasses muckle tochers. No doubt I would be wae for my bonnie bairn to gang so far awa’ from me, where I could not see her sweet face ilka day of my life, though she would never forget you and me, however we were sindered, for a’ her grandeur--that I’ll come bund for. But, eh, Tam, to think of our ain little Eppie being “my leddy”!’

‘Hoot, awa’ with you, big Eppie! you’re takin’ leave of your senses!’ Tam put an end to the conversation.

But though he was too much of a man to own it, the feminine ambition tickled him mightily. He fell asleep and dreamt--now of saying an eternal farewell to his darling--now of seeing her with a coronet on her head (it was easy to change a baronet into a baron in a dream)--on her way to a State ball at Buckingham Palace, or the opening of the House of Lords, he was not sure which.