CHAPTER VI.

‘LADY PEGGY.’

Jenny made use of Johnnie Fuggie and employed him in her aim. Her motive here was twofold. Johnnie was a person interested in Peggy’s kindred making their own out of Peggy, since she had become a powerful woman with favours in her right hand. It was better for all concerned that there should be a safe understanding rather than a dangerous feud between the rival claimants for young Mrs. Ramsay’s bounties. In other respects Johnnie himself was a despicable object to Jenny--a crouse, clavering carle, up in years, with a silly wife and family keeping him down. But Johnnie’s relations were not all detrimentals. He had a spruce, pushing nephew, who had risen to be a commercial traveller for ‘a big Edinburgh house in the drapery line.’ This nephew was considerably younger than Jenny, therefore flattered by her notice, while the disparity in years did not prevent her from making sheep’s eyes at him.

The double inducement caused Jenny to be particularly attentive to Johnnie Fuggie, who was even more taken in by her graciousness than his nephew had yet proved himself. If the innocent man had known it, she wished that Johnnie should be art and part in her manœuvres and aggressions. Her clever tactics were to compromise everybody all round, and when each person was deeply involved, to rule the roast, and play her own winning game by means of her accomplices.

One afternoon, in the end of April, when the weather was unusually warm for a Scotch spring, so that the gooseberry bushes were covered with their pale green blossom, and there was a fine sprinkling of red and lilac ‘spinks’ (polyanthuses) and white daisies already brightening the garden borders, Jenny come coolly into the dining-room at Drumsheugh, followed slowly by Johnnie Fuggie in his corduroys, velveteen jacket, and woollen comforter, which he wore summer and winter.

Johnnie had the grace to pause, glance ruefully at his earth-laden feet, and even execute half a scrape of a bow on the threshold. He was a small, rickety-looking man, with a slight halt in his gait--more perceptible in his fatigue. He was not wont to be troubled with scruples, still he hung back a little.

But Jenny explained his presence there volubly. ‘It’s Johnnie, cuzin Peggy,’ she said, with a wave of the hand to the unanswerable proposition and unnecessary introduction. ‘He has been a’ the way to the Knockruddery planting for pea-sticks, and has carriet them hame, the gomerel, on his back instead of ordering a cart from the offices, though Balcairnie could not ha’e said strae to that. Johnnie, puir chap, is clean forfochten, as ye may see, with the long walk and the load; sae, as he would ha’e needed to gang round by the Cotton to slocken his drouth, I ha’e just brocht him in here to eat his fower hours, but ceremony wi’ you and me. I ha’e telled Cunnings in the by-going, and gin you’ll send her the keys, she’ll bring in the Hollands and yale wi’ the dishes o’ tea, which are no for a man’s refreshment. Sit ye doon, Johnnie, my man; dinna be blate, rest ye, and mak yoursel’ at hame in the muckle chair in your ain cuzin’s hoose.’

He was her own cousin, once or twice removed, and Peggy would willingly have given him of her best for his rest and refreshment; but Johnny Fuggie in Drumsheugh’s absence in the laird’s chair at his table, was what she could not authorise, whether or not she had strength of mind to forbid it. She stood up, trembling from head to foot, growing very pale, and gasping for breath.

Johnnie took pity upon her. The girl’s tremor still farther abashed instead of emboldening him. It reached even through his coarse and thick skin.

‘Na, Jenny, ye’re wrang, lass, this time,’ he mumbled. ‘This is no’ the place for me. I couldna be comfortable, ony mair than ither folk could be. Gude e’en to you, young Mistress Ramsay, mem, I give you a’ your titles wi’ a’ my heart. I’ll gang my ways and you’ll forgie this mischanter. It is a’ the wyte o’ this sorry Jenny. She means weel, but her frien’liness runs awa’ wi’ her at times.’

‘You’ll no gang out o’ this house without tasting for the house’s ain credit, Johnnie Fuggie; no’ sae lang as I’m to the fore and under its roof, though I suld ha’e to set up a bottle and a kebbock wi’ a fardel o’ cakes on my ain account, as I have never needed to do yet,’ protested Jenny clamorously. ‘Na, I’ll tell you what,’ with the ready adaptation of her scheme to circumstances which is the gift of first-rate conspirators, and is for that matter an attribute of genius, ‘we’ll sally but to Cunnings’s room, if the dining-room flegs you, and I’m sure Peggy will not refuse to grace us wi’ her presence.’

Poor Peggy caught at the compromise, overlooking the sneer scarcely hidden under Jenny’s accommodating suggestion. She would cheerfully bear her relations company in the housekeeper’s room for half-an-hour, if that would keep them out of Drumsheugh’s dining-room or the Lady’s drawing-room.

Peggy little guessed that the visit was destined to be often repeated, till it became almost a daily occurrence, brought about, as it was, by Jenny’s determined, deliberate design, Johnnie’s sloth and folly, Cunnings’s desperate self-indulgence, and Peggy’s humility and incapacity.

But Peggy was only a troubled, frightened spectatress of those feasts, which were rapidly degenerating into orgies where Johnnie and Cunnings were concerned. Jenny herself was as sober a woman from inclination and policy as Peggy was in her innocence and purity. Many women of grosser nature, in Peggy’s position--raised suddenly from penury and frugality to what is to them luxury and lavish abundance, without work to do, destitute of any faculty for such duties as the women have to perform, without the smallest capacity for the poorest kind of intellectual recreation--sink piteously and repulsively into gulfs of gluttony and excess. But Peggy was secure from such hideous pitfalls--on which Jenny may have counted, by Providence, Peggy’s goodness, and the refinement which belonged, to be sure, to the core, and not to the surface of her nature.

It was the season for Johnnie Puggie’s nephew making his spring rounds in the way of business, and Jenny was strongly bent at once on gratifying and benefiting him, and on raising herself in his estimation by proving the terms she was on at Drumsheugh. She persuaded Peggy that it would only be doing her duty and being barely hospitable if she invited young Baldie Puggie to spend a quiet evening at the house, during which he might let them see his ‘swatches,’ or patterns, and young Mrs. Ramsay might have the opportunity and pleasure of giving him a handsome order, for old acquaintance and kinship’s sake, since Drumsheugh did not stint his wife either in house-money or pocket-money.

Peggy in her simplicity was rather pleased that she had one relation on her side of the house in so good a way as Baldie Fuggie, who wore a cloth coat, and could handle his knife and fork, and was almost a gentleman. He might rise to be ‘a merchant’ in his own person. He might sit down even now at the same table with Balcairnie and the laird, though his tone was not just like theirs, and he was not altogether without the traces of the pit whence he had been dug. Yes; she was glad to be able to grant Jenny’s request on Jenny’s account too.

Peggy was ready to welcome Baldie Fuggie to a supper at Drumsheugh, and she would be proud to give him a lady-like commission. She must have a braw new gown in glad anticipation of Drumsheugh’s home-coming safe and sound. Her laird must see her at her best, so that all his admiration might revive, and he might fall in love with his wife afresh.

There are some people to whom to vouch-safe an inch is to grant a yard, in whatever request is pending--people who, if they are permitted to insert a finger in an opening will forthwith introduce the whole hand and break down every impediment to their will. This was true of Jenny and the family supper to which Baldie Fuggie was to be bidden. First, Johnnie must come also, because he was Baldie’s uncle and nearest surviving relation. Next, Johnnie’s wife and children could not be left out, and after them Baldie had one or two other friends with whom he had been much more intimate, among the shopkeepers, sewing-girls, and maid-servants of Craigie--honest lads and lasses well-known to Jenny--and Peggy also in the days when she was not mistress of Drumsheugh. It could do no harm to have them for once up at the house to see that their old friend had not forgotten them and wished them well. She could take leave of them, for that matter, in this handsome, informal manner.

Then the gathering might be in Cunnings’s room, and it might be called Cunnings’s and Jenny’s little party, merely permitted and countenanced by young Mrs. Ramsay. Thus no reasonable person could find fault with ‘the bit ploy.’ Peggy was led on, half unconscious how far she was going, with dust thrown into her eyes at every reluctant step. But for any preparation she had received and permission she had given, she was not the less overwhelmed and aghast at the size and style of the entertainment when it burst fully upon her in the hour of its celebration. It was far too late then to stop the details--supposing the mistress of Drumsheugh had possessed the strength of mind and the mother-wit to issue an interdict and organise on the spur of the moment something very different.

Jenny had actually bespoken a fiddler. Before Peggy could believe her eyes that Tam Lauder, the young gauger, had taken it upon him to bring his fiddle in its green bag, there were reels forming on the floor, and she could not refuse to let herself be ‘lifted’ (led to the top of the set) to take the first turn, lest folk should say she was proud and held herself above dancing in the same rounds with her old friends, she who had been born and bred a cotter lass, and had footed it blithely with the laird and Balcairnie at many a maiden! Oh! how far removed from this those dances had been, when she had lived free from responsibility, and her grandest title had been ‘Bonnie Peggy.’

It goes without saying that Peggy had no heart for that unsuitable, inopportune merry-making when her laird was far away and her mother’s grave had not grown green. Bitter self-reproach for what she had been powerless to prevent, with aversion to the ill-timed gaiety and dismay of what might come of it, wrung her gentle spirit. Notwithstanding, Peggy was swept on with the current and compelled to take a part in the fun which grew fast and furious, and was maintained far into the small hours, while Baldie Fuggie betrayed that his small amount of polish was but skin-deep.

Peggy escaped at last from what had become a homely edition of the situation of the lady in the Masque of ‘Comus,’ crying, ‘Oh, mind, I’m a marriet woman, I’m the laird’s Leddy,’ to shut herself up in her room, sink scared and remorseful on the first seat, stare with tightly-clasped hands at one of Drumsheugh’s three-cornered hats which she had kept fondly hanging on the most available peg behind the door, and finally begin to sob and cry her heart out. Cunnings had been removed in a state of insensibility from her presidence over the festivities, and Jenny was leading a troop of skirling women racing over the house, pursued with loud shouts by Baldie Fuggie and his fellows, who did not pretend to Baldie’s scraping of veneer, bent on extorting forfeits of kisses and inflicting the penalty of rubbing rough beards on blowsy cheeks.

The report of Peggy’s party--it was never called Jenny’s, not to say Cunnings’s--spread far and wide, and created as lively a sensation in select circles as if it had been the inauguration of a county Almacks. In the days and places where hardly anybody read a line of anything, save of the newspaper on one day a week and of the Bible on the Sabbath, local gossip counted for a great deal. Without it conversation would have languished, and men and women’s minds become stagnant. Every scrap of gossip was therefore carefully collected and made much of. Peggy’s party was reckoned very racy and droll gossip, essentially characteristic and not without its moral. It proved a great boon and set off half a dozen teas and three dinner-parties among the neighbours. Fine doings at Drumsheugh, but no more than what was to be expected. See what came of low marriages. Time the laird were home, whether to reap the fruits of his folly, or to stave off a worse catastrophe, if that were possible. Poor old Mrs. Ramsay, who had held her head high, and had hardly reckoned a young lady in the country-side a fit match for her son. But pride comes before a fall.

It was at this time that the mocking title of ‘Lady Peggy’ was first bestowed on the interloper, the heroine of all these good stories. For Jenny Hedderwick and Cunnings were beneath these worthy people’s notice, and little mention was made of either delinquent in the arraignment of their victim.

Though Jenny had to some extent achieved her purpose, and it might have been said that nobody resisted her will, she began to bear a greater grudge against Peggy, and to go near to treating her with a purely vindictive malice, strangely unreasoning, in so reasonable a woman. This was not merely because Jenny had taken advantage of Peggy in every way, and wronged her to the utmost of Jenny’s power, though that is generally a fertile enough source of ill-will in the wrongdoer, but because Peggy beyond a certain point remained invulnerable. Jenny had a secret resentful conviction that while apparently successful, she was really foiled in her chief object of dragging down her cousin below Jenny’s own level, and so obtaining a firm, permanent hold on the poor girl through her errors and fears.

Jenny lost her prudence and her temper with it. She proceeded to cast aside the semblance of kindness which she had kept up and even felt for Peggy. Jenny now treated Peggy with positive rudeness and insolence. She was for ever jeering at the young wife because of her unfitness for her position, her ignorance, and her mistakes. And Jenny taunted Peggy on the tenderest point, dwelling on Drumsheugh’s protracted absence, broadly hinting that he, and all belonging to him, were mortally ashamed of the low-born intruder in their ranks. Was there not a cousin of the laird’s who had spent most of her early girlhood at Drumsheugh, and who was now on a visit to the doctor’s wife in Craigie, in the immediate neighbourhood? But though Miss Ramsay did not think it beneath her to come and stay for weeks with an old schoolfellow who had only married a country doctor, did she ever dream of walking out to Drumsheugh nowadays, to hear tell how the laird was getting on, and to make the acquaintance of her new cousin? Mrs. Forsyth, Miss Ramsay’s friend and hostess, could not advise her to the condescension--not even though Drumsheugh was a good patient of Dr. Forsyth’s, and Peggy herself was acquainted with the doctor.

Lady Peggy was crushed and heart-broken in her helplessness and her miserable sense of culpability, though she was hardly accountable for her faults as a matron. She found no resource in reading, though good books would have been a strengthening and sustaining influence; while Peggy, as a carefully instructed Scotch child, had been fond of her book--a little rustic scholar, and the taste would have remained with any food for its sustenance. But when we learn in ‘Lord Campbell’s Life’ that the library even of a well-born, classically cultivated divine consisted of some odd volumes of the ‘Spectator,’ two volumes of ‘Tom Jones,’ and the ‘History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless,’ some idea may be formed of the dearth of profane literature at Drumsheugh. The stock of books had not increased since the reign of the second George, and was scarcely a whit better than Peggy might have found in her mother’s cottage room. Certainly Luckie Hedderwick had not owned a cookery-book or a work on farriery, which would have been in a measure supererogatory, seeing that she possessed few and simple materials for cookery, and had no horses to keep in health. But she had thumbed, well-preserved copies of the ‘Death of Abel’ and ‘Blind Harry’ to match ‘The Cloud of Witnesses’--this branch of the Ramsays having been on the Whig and Covenanting side in politics and religion--and ‘Allan Ramsay’s Songs,’ in a much more tattered condition, at Drumsheugh.

Peggy’s sole earthly stays consisted in the faithful reading of the little pocket Bible which had descended to her from her mother, and the somewhat rigid observance of the sabbath and unfailing attendance at the kirk in which she had been brought up, to which she clung, and from which neither fraud nor force on Jenny’s part could detach her. The minister was Peggy’s old friend, the Dominie, who took an interest in her, and had always a kind word and glance for her when they met, though in the ordinarily dreamy, absorbed life of a book-worm, he never guessed she was again in circumstances well-nigh as perilous as those from which he had helped to deliver her. But, however rambling and incoherent his prayers, or dry and doctrinal his sermons, they were always solemn, holy words delivered by God’s commissioned messenger to Peggy. They served as balm to the wounded spirit, and bracing to the unnerved will, they saved her from despair. Yet Peggy was fast losing all modest satisfaction in her front seat in the ‘laft,’ all womanly pride in her appearance and surroundings. Disengaging herself with difficulty, and almost running away to get to the kirk, walking there in all states of the weather rather than provoke discussion by summoning Johnny Fuggie to drive her, Peggy would reach her destination with disordered, shabby, black dress, ill-arranged head-gear, shoes almost as cumbered with the soil as ever were Johnny Fuggie’s on working days--a poor, hunted, forlorn-looking waif of a laird’s lady. The sight would disturb Balcairnie in his worship. ‘If I had thocht she would be left like this--what for doesna Drumsheugh come hame and look after her?’ He would enter silent, broken, indignant protests. ‘But the laird, puir fally, canna help himsel’;’ the loyal yeoman would correct his assumption, ‘and puir Peggy was ay a saft, silly quean to let hersel’ be put upon.’

The late spring was waning into early summer; the budding roses were replacing the withering lilies alike in Drumsheugh and Balcairnie gardens, and still the laird tarried abroad, though the news was always of his amendment, while every day Peggy was drifting into more heavy-hearted helplessness on her own account and a falser report in the mouths of her neighbours.