CHAPTER VIII.

PEGGY’S FRIENDS.

The woman who sang ‘Huntingtower’ as Primrose Ramsay sang it could neither be hard-hearted nor narrow-minded, Balcairnie said to himself, and he acted on the speech.

The visit to Balcairnie was paid. The ladies behaved as graciously as the host was intent on rendering the visit a pleasure to his guests. Everything was propitious, even to a recent fortuitous moulting of the guinea-fowls. There was quite a heap of the clear grey and black and white spotted feathers, which Primrose called ‘second mourning feathers,’ at their fanciers’ disposal. The cherries were at their best, the curds and cream as rich and sweet as could be desired. Yellow ragwart, small pink and white convolvuluses, great purple mallows grew among last autumn’s russet stacks, which sheltered the farm-house more effectually than the fir-tree avenue sheltered the mansion of Drumsheugh. The garden was fragrant with red and white gilliflower, pink cabbage-roses and lilac lavender, and gay with orange marigolds. The kye were coming home from the pasture, the sheep were in the fauld, the pigeons were flying back to the pigeon-house as the evening drew on. The whole place looked so ‘couthie’ and sweet and bright, so home-like and cheery, that the women felt it hard it should be wasted on a single man and his servants. The hardship to her sex surprised Mrs. Forsyth into something like an aggrieved wonder that Balcairnie did not take a wife.

The remark in its turn startled a deeper colour into Balcairnie’s ruddy cheeks, and provoked a laugh from Dr. Forsyth and Primrose Ramsay.

At last Balcairnie found an opportunity when the party were still strolling about the garden, and Dr. Forsyth had called away his wife to examine one of the Dutch summer-houses which were then in great favour, and of which he proposed erecting a specimen in their garden at Craigie. Balcairnie and Primrose Ramsay were left sauntering along a broad box-edged walk, listening to a blackbird in a neighbouring lilac bush. Balcairnie interrupted the bird, and went to the gist of the matter and of his purpose at once. He had no notion of courtly fencing. Artful preambles were not in his way. ‘Miss Ramsay, I want to speak to you about your cousin’s lady up at Drumsheugh.’

Primrose met his request, which was more like a demand, with a look of surprise and some annoyance. She was not easily offended, but she felt vexed that this man--her cousin’s friend, whom she had begun to respect as well as to like--should introduce an unpalatable subject, one on which they could not be expected to agree, at his own place too. He was less of a gentleman--one of nature’s gentlemen--than she had been thinking him. Then she said, with a shade of distance and dryness in her manner and tone, ‘I beg your pardon, Mr. Home, but I am not acquainted with young Mrs. Ramsay, though she is my cousin’s wife.’

‘That is the very reason I want to speak to you about her,’ he said, looking her straight in the face. ‘What for are you not acquainted with Drumsheugh’s wife?’ he asked bluntly. ‘You should be. Not only has she become your relation by marriage, you could be of the first service to her; you could do her all the gude in the world. And I have conceived such an opinion of you, madam, that I believe you would be pleased to confer a favour even on a stranger, and do gude to one you might never see again.’

She stood still, perplexed and a little softened.

He was forced to go on; he must speak out now or be silent for ever. ‘Young Mrs. Ramsay is lonesome in the laird’s absence. For mair reasons than one she has great need of a friend. If I mistake not, you could be the best friend she has ever had in this world.’

‘How could I?’ stammered Primrose. ‘She is your acquaintance, not mine. Why cannot you help her if she requires help?’

He waived aside the proposal with an impatient swing of his arm. ‘A man body is worse than nothing to a woman in some straits. A woman friend--a gude woman to give gude advice from her own experience, is everything. If I were even to mint the trouble in a letter to Drumsheugh, I might only breed more mischief. I tell you what, Miss Ramsay, you may rue it to the day of your death, if you do not give a thocht to what I’m asking from you.’

‘Be reasonable, Mr. Home,’ remonstrated Primrose, whom his earnestness infected and stirred with agitation. ‘How can I interfere? I have no commission from my cousin Jamie or my aunt, even supposing I could move in this matter. From what I have heard--forgive me, if she is a friend of yours--I could do no good. Young Mrs. Ramsay is taking her own course--a foolish, downward course, I fear--with which it would not be fitting that I should intermeddle.’

‘Then what is the gude of your being a young leddy, so muckle cleverer and wiser and better-bred, with no chance of your making a mistake or the world’s finding faut with you?’ Balcairnie put the question sharply, almost sternly, and the next moment grew abashed and shocked at his own rudeness. ‘I beg your pardon, humbly, Miss Ramsay, I’ve no manners, as I need not tell you, but it makes me mad’--with a quick groan--‘to think of another woman, a leddy gude and kind, as I can see, leaving a poor sister lass to be sorned on, trodden down and driven desperate--never by her own wickedness and hardness of heart, but just because she’s as tender and gentle as any leddy in the land.’

Primrose was struck by his passionate advocacy. How he must have loved this girl, who had forsaken him for a grander suitor, to be so deceived in his view of her character--if he were deceived. She had already had a conception of him as a larger-minded man than Jamie Ramsay, and his present appeal proved his largeness of heart.

‘I daresay she is to be pitied, poor thing, with her man so long away, though he is recovering,’ she granted slowly and doubtfully, for even Primrose Ramsay’s prejudices were strong. ‘But has she not been very thoughtless, to say the least, in bringing so many of her own folk about her and letting them run riot--disturbing Drumsheugh and the neighbourhood by their pranks?’ Primrose ended more severely.

‘How could she help having her own folk when they were ordained, and placed about her by Drumsheugh and the auld lady? When no other body would look near her to see whether she could say her head or her feet were her ain, or speak or go but as her so-called servants would let her!’ maintained Peggy’s champion stoutly. ‘I grant you Peggy ocht to have been firm,’ he admitted, forgetting in the half-bitterness of the admission the scrupulous ceremony with which he had been previously naming his laird’s lady. ‘She should have stood like a rock and defied all inroads on her dignity and authority as the new-made Leddy and mistress of Drumsheugh--as you, madam, with your birth and breeding, would have done, no doubt. But when, you find a poor bit leveret behaving like the dog that chases him, or a lintie like the hawk that’s striking her down, then you may reasonably--you spak’ of reason, Miss Ramsay--count on sic behaviour from a meek, young creature like Peggy.’

‘Has she no spirit of her own?’ Primrose was goaded on to inquire.

‘I do not know what you mean by spirit,’ said Balcairnie, doggedly. ‘She had enough spirit to do her mither’s bidding, and save the laird from being betrayed into becoming a scoundrel who might have ruined her and flung her to the dogs. But as for the spirit to hold her ain and keep off all that would rob and murder her, where her gudes and credit are concerned, I trow Peggy has not muckle of that spirit to boast of. There is some word about the wind being tempered to the shorn lamb. I wuss it may blaw lown ower Peggy’s grave, for, so far as I can see, the best thing she could do would be to dee soon, poor lass. Then when her head’s lying among the mools, the fact that it was ever raised to be one of the heads of the house of Drumsheugh may be forgiven her, and the scum of her folk cannot prey on her any longer.’

‘Oh! do not say that,’ cried Primrose in real distress. ‘It cannot be so bad as that. Think of Drumsheugh who has cared so much for her--what would he do?’

‘I’ve thocht of Drumsheugh long enough, ower long; I’m going to think of Peggy now and what she’s to do. It was I who brocht her hame to Drumsheugh, and I swear to you, Miss Ramsay, if I had kenned what the innocent, loving soul was coming to, I would suner the beast had fallen and broken his neck--baith of our necks. For it is true I was Drumsheugh’s aider and abettor--his blackfoot in courting Peggy Hedderwick. He was my friend and Peggy’s choice; it was not for me to conter them.’

Primrose looked in the manly, honest face, and believed every word he said, to the last syllable. Her dauntless spirit rose and her generous heart swelled. ‘There is a better resource,’ she said, with hearty sympathy and goodwill, relinquishing her opposition all at once, and, womanlike, passing in a bound to warm partisanship. ‘She shall not be set upon like that! How base of her kindred! But we will circumvent them, sir. You and I will beat them before the game is played out. I’m not afraid that my cousin Jamie will be seriously angered by my interference. I’ll venture to take him in my own hand. As for my aunt, she’s an upright woman, Mr. Home. She would never countenance such wrong-doing. She is ignorant of it. When she welcomed Bonnie Peggy home she meant to receive her as a daughter and behave to her as a mother should--I am sure of it.’

It was a difficult enough task which Balcairnie had set Primrose Ramsay, and he could render her no assistance in the beginning. It must not even appear that she was acting on his prompting.

Mrs. Forsyth was exceedingly aggrieved by Primrose’s proposing to pay a visit to Peggy, and opposed the step violently. Doctor Forsyth, who should have known better, shook his head at his wife’s instigation. Primrose’s happy first visit to the couple was in danger of having its harmony entirely spoilt, and the girl suspected that her friends’ opinion was a tolerably sure sign of the light in which the world generally would regard her conduct. It was mean, time-serving, and unworthy of her to go near ‘Lady Peggy,’ and seek to get the foolish mistress of Drumsheugh out of the mess into which she had floundered.

But Primrose was as strong and staunch in facing and overcoming difficulties in what she recognised to be a good cause as Peggy was weak and yielding. There was the courage of a lion in the small, pale, pleasant-mannered, merry-tongued girl.

Primrose walked out alone to Drumsheugh, claimed the right of entrance to the drawing-room, which could not well be denied to her, and begged young Mrs. Ramsay to be told that her cousin, Miss Ramsay, had come to wait upon her.

Peggy did not pause, like ‘Mistress Jean’ in the ‘Laird o’ Cockpen,’ to ask petulantly what brought her visitor there ‘at sic a like time,’ for it was early in the day. She was overwhelmed with consternation and shame while Jenny coolly informed her cousin that here was one of the laird’s family come to call his wife to account, to require a statement of her stewardship, and to pounce on all her shortcomings.

‘Oh! what sall I do, Jenny? Mercy on me! what sall I do?’ besought the poor changeling in the foreign nest.

‘Say you’re no weel--I’m sure that’s true eneuch,’ suggested the temptress. ‘Say you never trysted her here, and you maun bid her excuse you for you’re no fit to receive a visitor, you’ve gotten the heartburn, or the headache, or ony other convenient ailment.’

Accordingly a message was brought to Primrose: ‘Young Mrs. Ramsay was very sorry, she was not able to see a stranger.’

But Primrose was more than a match for Jenny. The young lady had quite as much ready wit at her command as the woman owned. It would be strange if the powers of light did not sometimes overcome the powers of darkness. Primrose presented her compliments, and she too was very sorry to hear that her cousin’s lady was ailing. But it did not matter so much--Mrs. Ramsay need not put herself about, or exert herself when she was not fit for the exertion. She--Miss Ramsay--had walked out from Craigie with the intention of staying for a few days at her cousin’s house of Drumsheugh. If its mistress was not well enough to come down to her visitor to-day, no doubt Mrs. Ramsay would be better to-morrow or the next day. In the meantime Miss Ramsay could entertain herself, and her old friend Cunnings would see that she had everything she wanted.

‘Hech, sirs! hech, sirs! sirs the day!’ moaned Peggy, shrinking away in the fastness of her chamber from the most distant sight or sound of her deliverer.

‘Send the bauld cutty about her business. Bid her leave the hoose this minute,’ stormed Jenny.

‘Oh, I canna do that, Jenny,’ insisted the cowering Peggy. ‘Drumsheugh’s leddy cousin--she maun bide here as long as she likes, till he come back, if she takes it into her head, though I wonder what pleasure it can be to her to force herself in and sit in judgment on a puir lass like me. Oh, Jamie, Jamie! will you never come back and stand by me?’

‘It’s no your chirming will bring him back. If he had wanted to come he might have been here long syne,’ said Jenny scornfully. ‘Peggy, tak your choice--either that insolent hempie maun gang, or me.’

‘Jenny, Jenny, will you leave me, when the auld leddy engaged you to stay with me till she came back?’ implored the girl, to whose transparent mind infidelity to a pledge was simply incomprehensible. ‘How can I put Drumsheugh’s cousin to the door? It would come ill aff my hand; I could look neither him nor his mither in the face again if I were guilty of sic sauciness.’

‘Then you’ve ta’en your choice, Peggy, my woman, and you maun abide by it,’ said Jenny, beginning instantly to gather together her ‘pickings’ and belongings. ‘It’s muckle gratitude I’ve gotten for a’ the trouble I’ve wared upon you. But you’ll maybe think on me, madam, when you’re in the hands of your gaoler. For Drumsheugh and his mither have sent you a rale gaoler at last, and it’s little pity she’ll ha’e on your fule tricks, you heartless gipsy.’ Jenny had the wisdom to anticipate defeat, and beat a masterly retreat, while the wretched Peggy was weeping and quailing, and abjectly beseeching her tyrant to reconsider her resolution.

However, Jenny was not sufficiently prudent to avoid altogether an encounter with her adversary, in which Peggy’s ’cuzin’ came off second best.

‘Gude day to you, mem.’ Jenny flounced past Primrose who had gone out to stroll in the avenue. ‘I wuss you joy o’ the charge you’ve underta’en. I suld ken something o’t, and I tell you for your comfort you may as weel be a daft woman’s keeper. Peggy Ramsay is bund to gang daft as sure as ever lass gaed. I may tell you a bit o’ my mind since you’ve not stucken at treating me like a common thief.’

Primrose turned round upon Jenny with a flame of outraged righteousness in the girl’s aspect like the flaming sword which the angel held to bar the way to Paradise. ‘These words are very ready on your lips, Jenny Hedderwick. I believe they are too ready. If young Mrs. Ramsay were to lose her wits, it would be you who had scared them away. Woman, you are worse than a common thief! You have seethed a kid in its mother’s milk.’

At that terribly mysterious accusation even Jenny looked cowed for the moment and slunk away, muttering a denial. The first news she heard when she entered Craigie was that the firm to which Baldie Fuggie was attached had broken--become bankrupt. ‘Sae that door is steekit for the present,’ Jenny said to herself without equivocation. But she had her pickings--a profitable four months’ work, in addition to her wages to console her, and for such as Jenny open doors are plentiful.

Cunnings was also stumbling and fumbling about, in trembling preparations to be gone without delay from what had been her home for forty years; but Primrose anticipated her. She came softly into the housekeeper’s room and looked shyly and sadly at the sinner. Primrose said no more than ‘Oh, Cunnings, Cunnings, I’m sorry, sorry,’ and the grey-haired delinquent groaned out her abasement: ‘Ye may weel be sorry, Miss Ramsay, for I’m a lost woman, and yet I’m no worth the sorrow o’ the like o’ you. I’m just a miserable, auld drucken drab.’

‘Oh! whisht! whisht! Cunnings,’ cried the girl, hiding her face, and thinking how the trusted servant had been proud to teach her many a secret of housekeeping, and had made much of her and petted her in the old happy days, when Primrose came between a child and a girl to Drumsheugh.

‘Let me gang!’ cried Cunnings desperately, ‘afore the auld mistress claps her een on me again. She’ll walk in neist and speer what I’ve dune wi’ the hoose and the keys when they fell into my keeping. I’ve betrayed them baith, Miss Ramsay, and what’s waur I’ve sided wi’ that limb o’ Sawtan Jenny in betrayin’ the puir simple bairn up the stair. Mind ye she was betrayed. She would never o’ hersel’ had ony troke wi’ sic doings as we were fain to carry on to cloak our ill deeds. I’ve selled my sowl for drink, and I’ve betrayed the young mistress (Maister Jamie’s wife). Let me gang, Miss Ramsay, if you’ve a thocht o’ sorrow for a wicket wretch like me.’

‘No, Cunnings, you shall not go,’ said Primrose brave and steadfast, like a pitying guardian angel this time. ‘You’ll stay and help me to undo all the wrong, and then your own fall may be forgiven and forgotten. You’ll trust to me and I’ll protect you from your fell weakness. I’ll speak to my aunt and cousin when they come back. I’ll tell them that you wanted to go. I’ll bear the blame of keeping you here. You were a faithful servant once; you’ll be faithful again, please God. It is never too late to repent and win back respect and confidence. Cunnings, you do not need a girl like me to tell you that.’

Cunnings hung her head more and more, and wept the few scalding tears of age; but she stopped her packing and submitted to Primrose Ramsay’s guidance when at the words of sympathy and encouragement, remorse was converted into repentance.

Primrose had frequently and anxiously conned over the part she should play in her first meeting with Peggy. Miss Ramsay would approach the young mistress of Drumsheugh with studied deference and all the formal homage which was now Peggy’s due.

But when Peggy, compelled to stand at bay for the second time in her life, after a hasty, ineffectual effort to arrange her dress properly and remove the traces of tears from her face, crept like a guilty culprit or a forlorn ghost into the room, Primrose forgot all her preconceived theories and studies and thought only of the fair young creature thus blighted in what should have been her pride of bloom. Instead of advancing in a stately fashion, curtseying and waiting for Peggy to offer her hand, Primrose went swiftly to the wife, clasped her in the girl’s kind arms and kissed the cold cheek, which began to blush warmly with amazement, doubting relief and trembling pleasure. ‘My cousin Peggy,’ said Primrose, in her clear, sweet voice, ‘I’m glad to know you. Will you forgive my intrusion? I’ve often heard of you and so must you have heard of me; and now we must make the hearing knowing, and become good friends as well as kinswomen, if you will let me stay as long as you can spare room for me at Drumsheugh.’

‘Stay as long as you like,’ stammered Peggy. ‘There’s no want of room. Ony o’ Drumsheugh’s frien’s maun aye be welcome here. Oh! surely you ken that, though I canna say what I should,’ beginning to twist her fingers.

‘I ken,’ said Primrose gently, ‘and you say all you should. You’re very good to me, cousin Peggy--you’ll let me call you that in stead of Mrs. Ramsay, which I’ve been accustomed to say to my aunt, and you’ll call me cousin Primrose. You are very good to permit me to stay here when I’ve taken you by surprise.’

‘_Me_ good! Permit _you_, Miss Ramsay! Oh! you’re laughing at me in your condescension,’ cried Peggy, aghast.

‘No, I’m not laughing, and there is no condescension. I’ll never laugh at you,’ answered Primrose a little gravely; and then she went on cheerfully, ‘When we come to know each other better, I’m sure we’ll be good friends, and you’ll not suspect me of laughing at you in that sense again.’

Peggy stood rebuked without being chidden, and somehow her crushed spirit rose a little under the rebuke. She began to look Primrose in the face with timid satisfaction, and to proceed to ask her to sit down and try to make her comfortable, as Peggy had been wont, in the few happy moments after her marriage, to busy herself modestly with Drumsheugh and Mrs. Ramsay.