CHAPTER IV.
A Family Consultation.
A FEW days after, various members of the family arrived at the Castle Farm, with the intention of deciding what was to be done. An arrangement had been partially made with a young farmer of the district, who was ready to enter upon the remainder of the lease, and whom the factor on the part of the Duke was ready to accept as replacing Mrs. Murray in the responsibilities of the tenancy. This, of course, everybody felt was the natural step to be taken, and it left the final question as to how the old lady herself was to be disposed of, clear and unembarrassed. Even Edgar himself was not sufficiently Quixotic to suppose that Mrs. Murray’s feelings and pride should be so far consulted as to keep up the farm for her amusement, while she was no longer able to manage its manifold concerns.
Mr. and Mrs. Campbell arrived first in their gig, which was seated for four persons, and which, indeed, Mr. Campbell called a phaeton. Their horse was a good steady, sober-minded brown horse, quite free from any imaginativeness or eccentricity, plump and sleek, and well-groomed; and the whole turnout had an appearance of comfort and well-being. They brought with them a young man whom Edgar had not yet seen, a Dr. Charles Murray, from the East-country, the son of Mrs. Murray’s eldest son, who had arrived that morning by the steamboat at Loch Arroch Head. From Greenock by the same conveyance—but not in Mr. Campbell’s gig—came James Murray, another of the old lady’s sons, who was “a provision merchant” in that town, dealing largely in hams and cheeses, and full of that reverential respect for money which is common with his kind. Lastly there arrived from Kildarton on the other side of Loch Long, a lady who had taken the opportunity, as she explained to Edgar, of indulging her young people with a picnic, which they were to hold in a little wooded dell, round the corner of the stubble field, facing Loch Long, while she came on to join the family party, and decide upon her mother’s destiny. This was Mrs. MacKell, Mrs. Murray’s youngest daughter, a good-looking, high-complexioned woman of forty-five, the wife of a Glasgow “merchant” (the phrase is wide, and allows of many gradations), who had been living in sea-side quarters, or, as her husband insisted on expressing it, “at the saut water,” in the pleasant sea-bathing village of Kildarton, opposite the mouth of Loch Arroch. The boat which deposited her at the little landing-place belonging to the Castle Farm, was a heavy boat of the district, filled with a bright-coloured and animated party, and provided with the baskets and hampers necessary for their party of pleasure. Mrs. MacKell stood on the bank, waving her hand to them as they hoisted the sail and floated back again round the yellow edge of the stubble field.
“Mind you keep your warm haps on, girls, and don’t wet your feet,” she called to them; “and oh, Andrew, my man, for mercy’s sake take care of that awful sail!”
This adjuration was replied to by a burst of laughter in many voices, and a “Never fear, mother,” from Andrew; but Mrs. MacKell shook her good-looking head as she accepted Edgar’s hand to ascend the slope. All the kindred regarded Edgar with a mixture of curiosity and awe, and it was, perhaps, a slight nervous shyness in respect to this stranger, so aristocratical-looking, as Mrs. MacKell expressed herself, which gave a little additional loudness and apparent gaiety to that excellent woman’s first address.
“I’m always afraid of those sails. They’re very uncanny sort of things when a person does not quite understand the nature of our lochs. I suppose, Mr. Edgar, you’re in that case?” said Mrs. MacKell, looking at him with an ingratiating smile.
He was her nephew, there could be no doubt of it, and she had a right to talk to him familiarly; but at the same time he was a fine gentleman and a stranger, and made an impression upon her mind which was but inadequately counter-balanced by any self-assurances that he was “just an orphan lad—no better—not to say a great deal worse off than our own bairns.” Such representations did not affect the question as they ought to have done, when this strange personage, “no better, not to say a great deal worse” than themselves, stood with his smile which made them slightly uncomfortable, before them. It was the most open and genial smile, and in former times Edgar had been supposed a great deal too much disposed to place himself on a level with all sorts of people; but now-a-days his look embarrassed his humble relations. There was a certain amusement in it, which bore no reference to them, which was entirely at himself, and the quaintly novel position in which he found himself, but which nevertheless affected them, nobody could have told why. He was not laughing at them, respectablest of people. They could not take offence, neither could they divine what he was laughing at; but the curious, whimsical, and often rueful amusement which mingled with many much less agreeable feelings, somehow made itself felt and produced an effect upon which he had never calculated. It was something they did not understand, and this consciousness partially irritated, partially awed these good people, who felt that the new man in their midst was a being beyond their comprehension. They respected his history and his previous position, though with a little of that characteristic contempt which mingles so strangely in Scotland with many old prejudices in favour of rank and family; they respected more honestly and entirely his little property, the scraps of his former high estate which made him still independent; but above all they now respected, though with some irritation, what seemed to them the unfathomableness of his character, the lurking smile in his eyes. It confirmed the superiority which imagination already acknowledged.
“I have not had much experience of the lochs,” said Edgar, following with his eyes the clumsy but gay boat, with its cargo of laughter, and frankly gay, if somewhat loud, merry-making.
Mrs. MacKell saw his look and was gratified.
“You’ll not know which are your cousins among so many,” she said; “and, indeed, the girls have been plaguing me to write over and ask you to come. They were all away back in Glasgow when my mother took ill, and just came down last week on my account. It’s late for sea-bathing quarters in Scotland; and, indeed, when they took it into their heads about this pic-nic, I just raged at them. A pic-nic in October, and on the loch! But when children set their hearts on a thing the mother’s aye made to give way; and they had to be kept quiet, you see, while my mother was ill, not knowing how it might end.”
“That is true,” said Edgar; “otherwise, so far as my poor grandmother is concerned, this cannot be called a very joyful occasion.”
“I don’t see that for my part,” cried Mrs. MacKell, feeling herself attacked, and responding with instant readiness. “Dear me! if I were in my mother’s position, to see all my children about me, all that remain, would aye be a joyful occasion, whatever was the cause; and what better could she do at her age than go up the loch to my sister Jean’s comfortable house, where she would be much made of, and have all her old friends about her? My mother has been a good mother. I have not a word to say against that; but she’s always been a proud woman, awfully proud, holding her head as high as the Duchess, and making everybody stand about. I’ll not say but what it has been very good for us, for we’ve never fallen among the common sort. But still, you know, unless where there’s siller that sort of thing cannot be kept up. Of course, I would like it better,” added Mrs. MacKell, “to have my mother near, where I could send the bairns—excuse me for using the words of the place.”
“Oh, I like the words,” said Edgar, with a laugh, which he could not quite restrain—better than the sentiments, he would have said.
“Where I could send any of my young folk that happened to be looking white, at any moment,” she went on; “far different from what I could do with Jean, who has the assurance to tell me she always invites her friends when she wants them, though her son has his dinner with us every Sunday of his life during the Session! Therefore it’s clear what my interest is. But you see, Mr. Edgar,” she continued, softening, “you have the ways of a rich man. You never think of the difficulties. Oh! Charles, is that you? I’m glad to see you looking so well; and how are things going in the East country? and how is your sister Marg’ret, and little Bell? If my young folk had known you were here, they would have wanted you away with them in the boat. But I must go ben and see my mother before all the folk come in. I suppose you are going to look over the farm, and the beasts, with the rest.”
The young doctor—upon whom as a man of his own age, and one more like the people he had been accustomed to than those he now found around him, Edgar had looked, with more interest than any of his other relations had called from him—came up to him now with a face overcast with care.
“May I speak to you about this painful subject,” he said, “before the others come in?”
“Why a painful subject?” asked Edgar, with a smile, which was half tremulous with feeling, and half indignant, too proud for sympathy.
“It may not be so to you,” said the young man. “She brought us up, every one of my family; but what can I do? I have a brother in Australia, too far off to help, and another a clerk in London. As for me, I have the charge of my eldest sister, who is a widow with a child. You don’t know what a hard fight it is for a young medical man struggling to make his way.”
“No, not yet,” said Edgar, with a smile.
“Not yet? How can you know? If I were to take my grandmother home with me, which I would do gladly, she would be far from everything that she knows and cares for—in a new place, among strangers. Her whole life would be broken up. And I could not take Jeanie,” the young man added, with a thrill of still greater pain in his voice. “There would be other dangers. What can we do? I cannot bear to think that she must leave this place. But I have so little power to help, and consequently so little voice in the matter.”
“I have not very much,” said Edgar; “but yet enough, I think, to decide this question. And so long as I have a shilling, she shall not be driven away from her home. On that I have made up my mind.”
His new cousin looked at him with admiration—then with a sigh:
“What a thing money is,” he said; “ever so little of it. You can take a high hand with them, having something; but I, to whom Robert Campbell and Mr. MacKell have both lent money to set me going—”
Edgar held out his hand to his companion.
“When this is settled I shall be in the same position,” he said; “worse, for you have a profession, and I have none. You must teach me how I can best work for daily bread.”
“You are joking,” said the young doctor, with a smile.
Like the others, he could not believe that Edgar, once so rich, could ever be entirely poor; and that he should denude himself altogether of his living for the sake of the old mother, whom they were all quite ready to help—in reason, was an idea impossible to be comprehended, and which nobody believed for a moment. He said nothing in reply, and the two stood together before the door waiting for the other men of the party, who were looking over “the beasts” and farm implements, and calculating how much they would bring.
James Murray, the provision merchant, was the typical Scotchman of fiction and drama—a dry, yellow man, with keen grey eyes, surrounded by many puckers, scrubby sandy hair, and a constant regard for his own interest. The result had been but indifferent, for he was the poorest of the family, always in difficulties, and making the sparest of livings by means of tremendous combinations of skill and thought sufficient to have made the most fabulous fortune—only fortune had never come his way. He had been poking the cows in the ribs, and inspecting the joints of every plough and harrow as if his life depended upon them. As he came forward to join the others, he put down in the note-book which he held in his hand, the different sums which he supposed they would bring. Altogether, it was a piece of business which pleased him. If he had ever had any sentimental feeling towards his old home, that was over many a long year ago; and that his mother, when she could no longer manage the farm, should give it up, and be happy and thankful to find a corner at her daughter’s fireside, was to him the most natural thing in life. The only thing that disturbed him, was the impossibility of making her seek a composition with her creditors, and thus saving something “for an emergency.”
“James has aye an eye to what may come after,” Mr. Campbell said, with his peculiar humour, and a laugh which made Edgar long to pitch him into the loch; “he’s thinking of the succession. Not that I’m opposed to compounding with the creditors in such a case. She’s well-known for an honest woman that’s paid her way, and held up her head with the best, and we all respect her, and many of us would have no objection to make a bit small sacrifice. I’m one myself, and I can speak. But your mother is a woman that has always had a great deal of her own way.”
“More than was good for her,” said James Murray, shaking his head. “She’s as obstinate as an auld mule when she takes a notion. She’s been mistress and mair these forty year, and like a women, she’ll hear no reason. Twelve or fifteen shillings in the pound is a very fine composition, and touches no man’s credit, besides leaving an old wife something in her pocket to win respect.”
“And to leave behind her,” said Campbell, laughing and slapping his brother-in-law on the back.
This was at the door of the farm-house, where they lingered a moment before going in. The loud laugh of the one and testy exclamation of the other, sounded in through the open windows of the parlour, where the mistress of the house sat with her daughters; probably the entire conversation had reached them in the same way. But of that no one took any thought. This meeting and family consultation was rather “a ploy” than otherwise to all the party. They liked the outing, the inspection, the sense of superiority involved. The sons and the daughters were intent upon making their mother hear reason and putting all nonsense out of her head. She had been foolish in these last years of her life. She had brought up Tom’s bairns, for instance, in a ridiculous way. It was all very well for Robert Campbell’s son, who was able to afford it, to be sent to College, but what right had Charlie Murray to be made a gentleman of at the expense of all the rest? To be sure his uncles and aunts were somewhat proud of him now that the process was completed, and liked to speak of “my nephew the doctor;” but still it was a thing that a grandmother, all whose descendants had an equal right to her favours, had no title to do.
“My bairns are just as near in blood, and have just as good a right to a share of what’s going; and when you think how many there are of them, and the fight we have had to give them all they require,” Mrs. MacKell said to Mrs. Campbell.
“Many or few,” said Mrs. Campbell to Mrs. MacKell, “we have all a right to our share. I’ve yet to learn that being one of ten bairns gives more claim than being an only child. Johnnie ought to be as much to his grandmother as any grand-bairn she has—as much as Charlie Murray that has cost her hundreds. But she never spent a pound note on my Johnnie all his life.”
“There have been plenty pound-notes spent on him,” said the younger sister, “but we need not quarrel, for neither yours nor mine will get anything from their grandmother now. But I hope the men will stand fast, and not yield to any fancies. My mother’s always been a good mother to us, but very injudicious with these children. There’s Jeanie, now, never taught to do a hand’s turn, but encouraged in all her fancies.”
“I would like to buy in the china,” said Mrs. Campbell. “Auld china is very much thought of now-a-days. I hear the Duchess drinks her tea out of nothing else, and the dafter-like the better. You’ll be surprised when you see how many odds and ends there are about the house, that would make a very good show if they were rightly set out.”
“My mother has some good things too, if all the corners were cleared, that are of no use to her, but that would come in very well for the girls,” said Mrs. MacKell; and with these kind and reverential thoughts they met their mother, who perhaps also—who knows?—had in her day been covetous of things that would come in for the girls. This was the easy and cheerful view which the family took of the circumstances altogether. Not one of them intended to be unkind. They were all quite determined that she should “want for nothing;” but still it was, on the whole, rather “a ploy” and pleasant expedition, this family assembly, which had been convened for the purpose of dethroning its head.