CHAPTER IV.

THE LONG DAYS THAT FOLLOWED

Drumsheugh recovered gradually from the consequences of his fall; but he had a long and dangerous illness, during which there was much to subdue any human being to whom he was first and dearest.

Peggy proved herself a harmless, guileless, fond and faithful creature. She was meek in her exaltation, which, to begin with, consisted mainly of the liberty to nurse day and night a young man who had been too much spoilt by rude health, an active life, and the getting of his own way, though it had not necessarily been a base--not even a mean and heartless way--to come out strong as a patient, considerate invalid.

The old lady opened her eyes more and more to the truth, and did not repent of her wise generosity. She was won so far as to take Peggy into a degree of favour on her own account. Still, there could not fail to be an amount of reaction here also. Mrs. Ramsay made the best of Peggy: she brought herself to think that the laird’s mother might be the most suitable person to train the laird’s wife and to mould her in the course of years into the future Lady as well as mistress of Drumsheugh. She, the present Lady, might do it and get over the contact with all Peggy’s innumerable rusticities and gaucheries, not merely out of unselfish regard for her son, but because of some grains of tenderness already springing up, whether she would or not, in her by no means unmotherly heart, for her daughter. Poor little Peggy Hedderwick that was, had been thrust on an undesirable eminence, which brought her in unsuitable rivalry--not with one alone, but with every former aggrieved Lady of Drumsheugh; yet Peggy deferred so sincerely to Mrs. Ramsay in the smallest particular, and looked up to her from such a lowly depth of respect that was almost awe, and of gratitude which in its intensity was well-nigh anguish, that the worst part of the offence became cancelled.

But when all was said and done, it galled and fretted Mrs. Ramsay’s proud, punctilious nature to see Peggy scared and ashamed, floundering and bungling hugely and grotesquely whenever she could not avoid taking the place which had been vacated to her. For the old lady did nothing by halves. The head of the dinner-table, the central seat on the principal settee in the drawing-room, the top of the front gallery ‘bucht’ in Craigture Kirk, the front seat of that coach which Balcairnie had not caused to be driven to the Cotton to bring Peggy home, the ordering of the servants, the receiving of the guests--all belonged now to Peggy’s duties and privileges. She might discharge them very unworthily, but she might not refuse to accept them; and no third person who had Peggy’s interest at heart might decline them for her or appropriate them in order to save her from suffering. This was not to be done for young Mrs. Ramsay’s own sake, to avoid injuring her fatally, since if any rash, short-sighted person were to interfere and adopt this course, worse would be sure to come of it, and for the sake of shielding her present the poor young woman’s future would be irretrievably ruined.

No, as Peggy had brewed she must drink--as she had aspired, and by what would universally be held a wonderful stroke of good fortune, gained her aspirations, she must consent to rise to them, and fit herself for a new sphere. She must learn to live up to the blue china of a hundred years ago. She must agree to learn the lessons of her womanhood, with whatever toil and torture; she must struggle upwards against overwhelming obstacles and crushing defeats; she must resign in exchange for her dearly bought success, all the peace, ease, and happy equality of her hardest day’s work as a labouring woman.

There were others besides Peggy who had to endure mental pain when Drumsheugh was sufficiently recovered to quit the retirement of his rooms and appear even in the small publicity of family life. At first, though the news had gone abroad at once, as the Lady had intended it should, since the marriage was confessed and could never be controverted, that Peggy Hedderwick had been acknowledged in the presence of the household of Drumsheugh, and received by the mother of the laird, as Jamie Ramsay’s wife, there were few witnesses of the cotter’s girl’s lack of qualifications for her dignities. Only the doctor and the minister and Drumsheugh’s confidant, Balcairnie, besides Mrs. Ramsay and Peggy, and the elder servants, entered the sick room. These spectators were bound in honour to keep their own counsel on the subject of Peggy’s mistakes and eccentricities.

Besides, when a man lies hovering between life and that death which ends all social distinctions, grades and rank, with their different standards and clashing practices, dwindle into vagueness and unreality. Love may be as strong as death, and so capable of doing battle with the last enemy; but there is a tendency, even in the noblest antecedents, the best breeding, and the most polished manners, to collapse before the primitive foe with his rude directness of dealing. It hardly signified in these circumstances whether Peggy were a laird’s or a hind’s daughter, though it did matter still that she was Drumsheugh’s first and last love, that it was to her his eye turned in every wrestle with the assailant, that her voice could soothe or rouse him when not even his mother’s tones could penetrate through the turmoil of unaccustomed torture, fever, and weakness under which his senses were reeling.

But everything became different when the first stage was over, and Drumsheugh had returned in a state of convalescence to the family sitting-room, with no further trace of having lingered on the brink of the grave than was to be found in that peculiar unreasonable ‘fractiousness’ or crossness, which in itself caused Peggy to shed salt tears half a dozen times a day, as if she had been the most to be pitied instead of the most to be envied of low-born lasses. The fact was she was incurably gentle and tender-hearted, and had neither the wit to understand nor the spirit to withstand what was merely a passing trouble not worth the reckoning, the natural result of the previous disaster, for which the victim, in his inexperience, was not altogether to blame. Not that Peggy found fault with her laird. It was simply over her own presumption and demerits, and because she could no longer ‘please him,’ that she grew periodically hopeless.

The servants felt the seal set on their powers of observation, criticism and ridicule--and here and there their secret spitefulness, so far withdrawn. Other spies began to drop in: neighbours who, under the plea of inquiring for Drumsheugh, came to take a look and a laugh at bonnie Peggy on her promotion. When they were formally introduced to her as young Mrs. Ramsay they would, in their own minds and in the same breath, praise Drumsheugh’s taste for beauty, and censure his want of sense and worldly wisdom in committing so gross a _mésalliance_. They would seriously debate with themselves whether it would be fit for their wives and daughters to call on Peggy, and make her acquaintance as one of themselves, till the lass could bear herself more like a gentlewoman and less like a field-worker. The old lady had taken care to have Peggy dressed as became her new station; but of what use was it when Peggy huddled away her hands in her black silk apron, just as she had hidden them in her linen ‘brat,’ and bobbed a curtsey, ‘looting’ till she caught her foot in her train, tearing the lace from her skirt, and threatening to come down with violence on her own drawing-room floor.

No, the Lady could not stand the first tug of the social struggle, above all as Drumsheugh had been ordered away from home to avoid the cold spring winds till his chest should be stronger. He was actually going to take a voyage either to Gibraltar or Madeira--great expeditions in those days--promising such adventures and risks of being chased and taken prisoner by foreign privateers, that it quite raised the laird’s spirits to think of them.

Nobody proposed that Peggy should accompany her husband. It would have doubled the considerable expense of the journey, while the laird was but a poor man for his station. Besides, to tell the truth, Peggy, with all her sweetness and humility, would have been of very little use, rather a good deal of an incumbrance, as a travelling companion. She had been rendered just then still more _distrait_ and lost by the sudden death of her own mother, poor Luckie Hedderwick, which happened not long after Peggy had been transferred to Drumsheugh. The melancholy event overwhelmed Peggy with sorrow to an extent which the laird and his mother were inclined to consider unreasonable. They did not mean to be unkind, but it was difficult for them, after their first sympathy with Peggy in her grievous shock and the solemnity of the occasion had worn away, to regard the widow’s death otherwise than as a release to more than herself, an opportune end to one of the most trying of the awkward complications involved in the marriage. It was still harder to be quite patient with Peggy for having so little judgment in her lamentations for my ‘mither’ as not to recognise the compensations in the trial, and to remain the next thing to inconsolable--letting herself get more stupid and shyer than ever in her affliction, when the sole foundation for it was the death of a ‘frail,’ bed-ridden woman well up in years and laden with infirmities, so that she had become betimes a burden both to herself and others. She could not have been long spared to her friends in the nature of things. Peggy could not have seen much more of her mother in the circumstances. If Luckie had not happily been taken away at a stroke, her daughter could not have been permitted to leave her husband’s house to wait upon her mother without signal incongruity and a host of serious objections. Peggy ought to be thankful that she had escaped these divided duties, and to rest content with having been a good daughter to her mother when the girl still belonged to the old woman, before Peggy had married far above her in rank, and thus raised heavy barriers between the pair. The poor soul herself had been reasonable. She had been tolerably reconciled to what was inevitable, while she had cherished the utmost pride and pleasure in her daughter’s lot. Peggy had been permitted to gladden her mother’s heart in this respect: she ought to remember that no woman, whether old or young, could have everything in this world.

As Peggy, with all her submission, could not see this side of the question for the present--on the contrary, kept foolishly reproaching herself and mourning her loss, it would be better on the whole that she should be left to herself--under good guidance, however,--for a time, to recover from the blow she had received and come round to a more cheerful and becoming frame of mind. The old lady would take the opportunity of her son’s going South to accompany him as far as London, from which he was to sail. She, too, would be better for a complete change of scene and interests. She would pay the second visit of her life to the English metropolis, and renew a friendship with some old Scotch families that had removed to England, the members of which she had not seen since they were all school-girls together.

The Lady would have liked to supply her place efficiently. She was really a fine woman and proved more thoughtfully careful of her son’s wife in the absence of both mother and son than he showed himself. In his lightness of heart and simple philosophy he never doubted that Peggy would do quite well if she did not weary too much for him. But he would write and tell her how strong he was growing, that he did not forget her, and would be home to her again ‘belyve.’ She, on her part, must exert herself, write and let him know all about the house and garden, the cows and the cocks and hens; while Balcairnie would look after the horses and cattle, manage the cropping, and the buying and selling in the market for him, and would keep him informed on the business of the farm which was beyond a woman’s comprehension. She must go out and recover her roses which she had lost, good lass! in his sick-room, for he meant to return as brown as sea air and a foreign sun would tan and burn him.

Mrs. Ramsay would have fain done more for Peggy. She would have provided her with a wonderful ally. It was not that the old lady did not think of it or wish it strenuously that she made no motion in this direction. It was because she was conscious that in her former ambition for her son and engrossment with what she had reckoned his welfare, she had wronged this ally, and so did not have it in her power to ask a great favour from the injured person.

As the next best thing, the Lady repeatedly and earnestly recommended Peggy to the good officies of Cunnings,[5] Mrs. Ramsay’s old maid and housekeeper, an excellent servant, devoted to the family, honest enough to be trusted with untold gold, and having but one failing to be watched and weighed against so many virtues. True-hearted, kind Cunnings, powerful in her worth, invulnerable on every other point, was ‘too fond of a drappie’--to put her weakness in the euphemistic words in which it was for the most part respectfully and tenderly veiled. She could not look on the wine when it was red, or more correctly, on whisky when it was clear and colourless as the water at a well-eye, or just tinged with the suspicion of amber which belongs to a mountain stream flowing over a bed of peat, without danger of forgetting her obligations and falling lamentably from her honourable reputation.

But except on rare and unhappy occasions, Mrs. Ramsay’s strong hand had always been able to keep Cunnings from stumbling into the snare. And the Lady argued that Peggy could take care of the keys of the cellar and side-board if she could do nothing else, and that having been solemnly warned of Cunnings’ weakness, she would not be so silly and unprincipled as to expose her servant to temptation. Poor fallible Cunnings, on her part, was incapable, in spite of the flaw in her perfect integrity, of laying snares to induce Peggy to leave the keys about, or abandon them altogether.

Mrs. Ramsay then provided Peggy with a maid of her own; a sort of humble companion, to lighten the tedium when she should be left alone, and to prevent her seeking undesirable associates elsewhere. The person selected was a distant cousin of Peggy’s, five or six years older, who had been in good service, and knew and could teach young Mrs. Ramsay many things of which she was profoundly ignorant. In this way Jenny Hedderwick would break the fallow ground of Peggy’s mind and pave the way for the Lady’s more thorough and farther-reaching cultivation of the soil.

It may sound strange to the modern reader that any relative of Peggy’s should be received as a domestic at Drumsheugh. But such arrangements, of doubtful propriety as they seem to us, were not at all uncommon in those single-hearted, downright days, when the world accepted a situation frankly and made the best of it all round. In the case of _més alliances_ like the laird’s and sudden elevations in rank like Peggy’s, far nearer and less well endowed relatives than Jenny were often received as a matter of course into the household that they might profit in their degree and in their turn by the promotion of one of their kindred. A mother would come as a nurse or a cook, a brother as a groom or a gamekeeper, to the establishment, over which another member of the family ruled as master or mistress. The arrangement could not have worked very smoothly one would think. There must have been rough and tough tugs and hitches; but there were inequalities everywhere, and the seamy side was then unhesitatingly exposed in all circumstances. The one advantage which we have lost, was still in full force; defects and obligations were freely acknowledged, not scrupulously concealed, while plain speaking flourished to an extent which we can hardly conceive in these self-conscious and artificial days. Even Cunnings, old and attached retainer as she was, with a grave defect in her character which ought to have taught her humility, treated Mrs. Ramsay, senior, to her unvarnished opinion on many points in a manner that would not be ventured on or suffered in the case of our polished, accomplished servants--who are also far removed from us.

Indeed, another relative of Peggy’s, with immeasurably smaller qualifications than Jenny could boast, had already been put on the Drumsheugh staff. Peggy had a second cousin, called Johnnie Fuggie, or Foggo, who was a jobbing gardener by trade. The old gardener, coachman, and general serving-man at Drumsheugh had become fairly superannuated and incapable even of the pretence of performing his duties. Whereupon Johnnie, a foolish, conceited fellow of mature years, not hindered by any modest doubt of his abilities, or deterred by the least delicate consideration for the difficulties of Peggy’s position, applied for the honourable post, and actually urged as a strong title to it the fact of his relationship to the young Lady of Drumsheugh. ‘The laird can never ha’e the face to refuse me the place, when he has marriet my ain uncle’s dochter’s dochter. It would be a fell thing if young Mistress Ramsay were not to hand out a helping hand and lend a lift to her ain flesh and blude. Wha but her cuzin should be her gairner and fut-man and a’? Wha will care for Drumsheugh gairden and the coach and my Leddy hersel as he will? Sowl! man, he has his ain share in them, and pride in them, because o’ the kinship!’

Thus boldly urged by Johnnie Fuggie and his emissaries, who had easily procured access to her, Peggy had made her first ignorant, humble petition to her easy-minded, good-natured husband, who answered without thinking twice on the subject, ‘Oh, aye, Peggy, if you like. The place is promised to no other that I know of. Let Johnnie succeed to poor old Robbie Red-Lugs, but bid him mind the cauliflowers and codlins, and the horses’ knees, or I’ll break his head for him the first time I’m across the door.’

The Lady was not so content with this hasty appointment, which had been none of her contriving, but she thought if it did not work well, it could be summarily set aside when she and her son came back.

So Peggy was left--not in solitary state, but doubly fenced with kindred at Drumsheugh after the deplorable day when she hung on her husband’s neck at parting, and saw him and his mother drive away down the fir-tree avenue, with the most miserable forebodings that she would never see Jamie Ramsay in the flesh again.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] Scotticè for Cunningham.